Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly won re-election, leaving Democrats one seat away from capturing the upper house in the midterm elections and dealing another blow to the far-right faction of former President Donald Trump’s Republican Party. With Mr. Kelly’s victory over Blake Masters on Friday after three days of ballot counting, Democrats must hold either Nevada, where the parties remain deadlocked in the vote count, or Georgia, which has a runoff election on next month, to keep. control of the Senate. Mr. Kelly’s victory continues his party’s comeback in the midterms. While Republicans and some pollsters had predicted a “red wave” before the vote, Democrats have so far held their opponents to only modest gains, mostly by defeating a number of high-profile Trump candidates. A key state that helped give Joe Biden the presidency in 2020, Arizona has been a prime target of Mr Trump’s false claims of voter fraud. Both Mr. Masters and Cary Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in the state, support the former president’s conspiracy theories. Embattled in legal proceedings, Trump may see defensive value in pursuit of presidency In a post on the Truth Social website that contained an unfortunate typo, Mr. Trump falsely claimed that the Arizona Senate election was also rigged. “The Electron was stolen from Blake Masters,” he wrote. “Have elections again!” The White House said Mr. Biden, who is traveling abroad for a series of summits this week, called Mr. Kelly to congratulate him early Saturday. Mr. Biden must retain control of the Senate to retain his ability to appoint federal judges. Mr. Masters, a businessman backed by billionaire Peter Thiel, supports reducing legal immigration and subscribes to the white nationalist “great replacement” theory, which unfoundedly claims that Democrats are trying to “replace” native-born Americans. He also advocates ending US aid to Ukraine and once floated the outlandish idea that the FBI was somehow responsible for the January 6, 2021 riot on Capitol Hill. Former astronaut Mr. Kelly first won the seat in a 2020 midterm election to complete the term of John McCain, who died of brain cancer. He is married to Gabby Giffords, the former congresswoman who became a gun control activist after surviving a mass shooting. The governor’s race remains undecided. Ms Lake is almost level on the vote count with Katie Hobbs, with hundreds of thousands of ballots still to be counted. In the vote for secretary of state, Democrat Adrian Fontes, Phoenix elections official, defeated Mark Finchem. A state lawmaker who fought to overturn the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Finchem was on Capitol Hill on January 6 and is a former member of the Oath Keepers, an anti-government militia. Control of swing state governments is a critical goal of election deniers. Mr. Trump’s efforts in 2020 to overturn the election result were in part because state officials refused to help him. In Tuesday’s midterm elections, election naysayers were defeated in gubernatorial races in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, other states that will be key to the 2024 election. Mr. Kelly’s victory gives Democrats 49 seats in the 100-seat Senate. With Vice President Kamala Harris voting to break ties, the party needs 50 seats to take control. Republicans, meanwhile, would need to win both Nevada and Georgia to get a 51-seat majority. In Nevada, Republican former attorney general Adam Laxalt is virtually tied in the vote count with incumbent Democratic Sen. Kathryn Cortez Masto. About five percent of the ballots have yet to be recorded. In Georgia, incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock edged challenger Herschel Walker, but fell short of 50 percent of the vote. Under that state’s rules, the pair must face off again on Dec. 6. The lengthy vote-counting process in Arizona and Nevada has come under fire from both sides of the aisle this week, particularly as other crowded swing states with tight races, such as Pennsylvania, mostly finished counting ballots on election night. Ironically, however, Ms Lake and other election naysayers have advocated moving the US to a system of counting all ballots by hand. Such a development would make counting votes take even longer than the current system, where most localities use sorting machines to speed up counting. Unlike in Canada, where elections usually involve a single race, elections in the US involve voting in many federal, state and local offices at once, with ballots sometimes spanning multiple pages. Mr. Kelly ran as a moderate senator, distancing himself from the unpopular Mr. Biden. But it has been a reliable vote on the White House agenda for the past two years. By contrast, his fellow Arizona Democrat, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, helped chip away at some of Mr. Biden’s agenda by insisting on concessions.
