Category Archives: US Senate

Democrats celebrate retaining control of Senate as Republicans take stock

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House control still undecided as Republicans lead and attention pivots to Florida, where Trump is expected to announce 2024 run

As the balance of power in the US House of Representatives remained unresolved on Sunday, Democrats are celebrating the projection that they won control of the Senate, marking a significant victory for Joe Biden as Republicans backed by his presidential predecessor Donald Trump underperformed in key battleground states.

While senior Democrats remained guarded Sunday about the chances of keeping control of both chambers of Congress, House speaker Nancy Pelosi hailed the party’s performance in the midterms following months of projections indicating heavy losses.

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Catherine Cortez Masto wins Nevada Senate race to hold Democrat seat

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The race was among the tightest in the country and saw record spending with the incumbent senator nearly beaten

Senator Catherine Cortez Masto managed to hang on to her seat in a close race that nearly saw her beaten by her Republican adversary, with the result leaving control of the US Senate in the hands of Democrats.

After Democratic senator Mark Kelly’s victory in Arizona on Friday, the party now holds a 50-49 edge in the Senate. The Democratic party will retain control of the chamber, no matter how next month’s Georgia runoff plays out, by virtue of vice-president Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote.

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Democrats retain control of Senate after crucial victory in Nevada

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Win takes Democrats to key number of 50 seats in Senate, in blow to Republicans who hoped for ‘red wave’

Democrats have kept control of the Senate after the crucial race in Nevada was announced in their favor, cementing a midterms election performance for the party that widely beat expectations.

Democratic US senator Catherine Cortez Masto has now beaten Republican challenger Adam Laxalt, a former state attorney general who was endorsed by former president Donald Trump, according to the Associated Press.

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US midterm elections 2022: focus on Nevada after Democrat Mark Kelly wins key Senate seat – live

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Power of Senate chamber remains at 49-49 as eyes on race between Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto and Adam Laxalt

Mark Kelly, whose win in his Senate race in Arizona moved Democrats to within one seat of retaining control of the chamber, has slammed election deniers and praised his late predecessor, Republican John McCain, in a victory speech in Phoenix.

Kelly was speaking to jubilant supporters on Saturday morning, with his wife Gabby Giffords, a former Democratic congresswoman who was shot and badly injured in an attempted assassination 11 years ago, at his side.

After a long election it can be tempting to remain focused on the things that divide us, but we’ve seen the consequences that come when leaders refuse to accept the truth and focus more on conspiracies of the past than solving the challenges that we face today.

And for the past two years, as we face these challenges, not a day has gone by where I have not remembered that I am sitting in the Senate seat [of] Senator John McCain.

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US midterm elections results 2022: live

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Full live results of the Congressional midterms, seat by seat, as electors across the US vote to decide whether the Republicans or Democrats will control the House of Representatives and Senate

US midterm elections 2022 – latest live news updates

All 435 seats in the lower chamber of the federal congress, the House of Representatives, are re-elected every two years. (There are no term limits, and incumbents are often returned, so there is substantial continuity in the membership). House seats are broadly proportional to population, so California has lots of seats but Montana only a few.

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US midterm elections 2022: Trump backlash grows as top Virginia Republican says ‘I could not support him’ – as it happened

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This live blog is now closed. You can find all our US midterms coverage here

Sheera Frenkel and Steven Lee Myers report for the New York Times that researchers who study election disinformation said most efforts to stoke doubt about the results of the midterms had failed to spread widely. They write:

The major social media platforms all struggled to combat misinformation and disinformation online as the results were tabulated, but researchers who study the problem said efforts to stoke doubt about the outcome of the American democratic process had — at least so far — failed to take root. Some saw it as a hopeful sign of the political system’s resilience, though few declared victory in the fight against misinformation.

According to a New York Times analysis, more than half of 370 candidates who in some way had cast doubt on President Biden’s victory had won their races as of midday on Wednesday. They included 170 members of the House, where Republicans appeared to be closing in on reclaiming a majority. Although the party fell short of the “red wave” that many had anticipated, its successes may have tempered some of the conspiracy theories that emerged early Tuesday.

“There is a lot of anger and noise on the mainstream platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but the most aggressive statements on the day of the midterms, including calls to violence, are found on the alt platforms including Gab, Parler and Telegram,” said Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, which tracked election disinformation online as part of the Elections Integrity Partnership. Users in some cases called for storming polling stations or using violence, though no significant attacks unfolded on election day.

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Midterm elections 2022: Democrats beating expectations as John Fetterman wins crucial US Senate race – live

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Latest updates and results as millions across the US cast votes in what is largely seen as a referendum on Biden’s presidency

The Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, Kari Lake, told reporters earlier she will be their “worst fricking nightmare for eight years” if she defeats the Democrat Katie Hobbs.

Lake has been talked up as a running mate for Donald Trump in his widely expected run for the Republican presidential nomination.

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Fetterman defeats Oz in Pennsylvania Senate race, giving Democrats a boost

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Victory overturns a Republican-held Senate seat and increases his party’s chances of retaining control of chamber

The Democratic party received a huge boost in Pennsylvania in the early hours of Wednesday morning, when John Fetterman won the state’s US Senate race to increase his party’s chances of retaining control of the chamber.

Fetterman was declared the winner over Mehmet Oz, the Republican celebrity doctor, six hours after the polls closed, overturning a Republican-held Senate seat to bolster Democrats’ chances of retaining the chamber.

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Midterm elections 2022: US voters head to polls as Republicans fight to take Senate control – live

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Millions across the country vote while Florida state department tells DoJ that federal election monitors won’t be permitted

Andrew Gawthorpe is a historian of the United States at Leiden University and host of the podcast America Explained, and he writes for the Guardian today to argue that the future of American democracy is at stake in the midterm elections:

Never before in American history has there been an organized movement which was only one vote away from having the motivation and opportunity to make that election America’s last. Never that is, until now. Today’s anti-democratic movement is propelled not by genuine controversy or scandal, but rather by their commitment to ending competitive elections in the United States. There is no other way to interpret their belief that only one side, the Republicans, can legitimately be considered to win, and the plans that they hold to make this belief a reality.

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Democrat John Fetterman gets boost from Oprah Winfrey in key Senate race – live

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In less than an hour, Twitter employees expect official notification of whether or not they will keep their jobs under Elon Musk’s ownership.

A bloodbath is expected, and Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco has been closed today while the news is delivered and employees digest their fates, or, as Musk may prefer, let the news “sink in”.

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Chuck Schumer insists Democrats can hold or expand Senate majority – as it happened

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In Pennsylvania, Chris McGreal reports that a major pro-Israel group is facing criticism for backing Republicans who denied the 2020 election, but not a Democratic candidate who would make history if elected:

More than 240 Jewish American voters in Pittsburgh have signed a letter denouncing the US’s largest pro-Israel group for backing extremist Republican election candidates while spending millions of dollars to oppose a Democrat who would be Pennsylvania’s first Black female member of Congress.

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Biden addresses nation on threats to democracy ahead of midterms – live

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The president speaks against election deniers running for office, saying they are leading a path to ‘chaos in America’

Donald Trump’s lawyers tailored their petition specifically to supreme court justice Clarence Thomas for reasons both practical and symbolic, Politico reports.

Thomas is well known for his conservative jurisprudence, but Politico notes he is also the justice responsible for handling emergency filings out of Georgia – which means he would get the Trump legal team’s petition about its election conduct, Politico says.

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US school criticizes Republican Senate candidate for repeating false litter box claim

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Don Bolduc, who is running in New Hampshire against Democrat Maggie Hassan, spreads anti-trans rightwing trope

A New Hampshire school has rebuked the Republican US Senate candidate Don Bolduc for claiming schoolchildren were identifying as “furries and fuzzies” in classrooms, using litter trays and licking themselves and each other.

“I wish I was making it up,” Bolduc, a retired special forces general, said last week.

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‘Somebody’s going to die’: Democrats warn of political violence after Paul Pelosi attack

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Dire warnings after hammer assault on speaker’s husband and amid concern that security does not adequately reflect threats

Democratic politicians have ramped up their warnings about the threat of political violence in America after a man bludgeoned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 82-year-old husband with a hammer in their California home on Friday.

The dire warnings come amid longstanding concern that security services provided do not adequately reflect ongoing threats, especially as midterm elections loom. The Associated Press reported on Sunday that Paul Pelosi’s assailant had been carrying zip ties when he broke in.

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Senator Tom Cotton brags about ignoring Trump impeachment evidence

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New book by Arkansas senator, a Republican presidential hopeful, also suggests president did not understand military procedures

In January 2020, the rightwing Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton said he would vote to acquit Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial because despite senators having “heard from 17 witnesses … and received more than 28,000 pages of documents”, Democrats had not presented their case correctly.

According to Cotton, the senators who sat through so much evidence would “perform the role intended for us by the founders, of providing the ‘cool and deliberate sense of the community’, as it says in Federalist 63”.

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Second woman says Herschel Walker pressured her to have abortion

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Lawyer Gloria Allred introduces woman as Jane Doe who alleges anti-abortion candidate drove her to a clinic in the 1990s

Another woman has claimed that Herschel Walker pressured her into having an abortion and drove her to a clinic to obtain one.

On Wednesday, lawyer Gloria Allred – who has represented numerous alleged victims of sexual misconduct and assault – introduced to reporters a woman who alleges Walker, the anti-abortion Republican candidate for Senate in Georgia, took her to an abortion clinic to have an abortion in the 1990s.

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Fetterman’s performance in high-stakes Pennsylvania debate splits Democrats – live

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Joe Biden is the oldest president ever inaugurated, and will turn 80 this year – but still plans to run for re-election, according to a reporter who recently interviewed the president, Martin Pengelly reports:

Joe Biden is “totally running” for a second term, the MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart has said, just days after interviewing the US president.

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Trump aides reportedly face pressure to testify in Mar-a-Lago case – live

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Prosecutors urging two aides for more information about how documents were handled at the resort

Good morning, US politics blog readers. The steady drip of details about the investigation into government secrets found at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort continues, with the New York Times reporting yesterday that prosecutors are pressuring two aides to the former president for more information about how documents were handled at the south Florida property. There’s no saying yet what the revelation means, but it makes clear how many avenues investigators are pursuing as they look for answers about sensitive documents Trump took with him when he left the White House.

Here’s what’s happening in politics today:

Joe Biden will speak about America’s fight against Covid-19 at 2.05pm eastern time.

There’s a slew of debates between candidates standing in the 8 November midterm elections, including Pennsylvania’s Senate candidates Mehmet Oz, a Republican, and John Fetterman, a Democrat, who face off at 8pm eastern time.

Progressive Democrats appear to be walking back a letter sent to Biden yesterday urging more diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine.

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Two Chinese spies charged with trying to obstruct US Huawei investigation, Garland says – as it happened

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Republican senator Ted Cruz was a vociferous objector to the 2020 election, but ended up hiding in a supply closet when insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on January 6, as Ramon Antonio Vargas reports:

As a mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol during the January 6 attack in a desperate attempt to keep him in the Oval Office, Ted Cruz hid in a closet next to a stack of chairs, but he never thought twice about continuing to sow doubt about the former president’s electoral defeat, the Republican senator from Texas has revealed.

Tight Senate margins and a Democratic president would make it impossible for GOP leaders to deliver on the party’s most hardline fiscal wishes, at least with President Joe Biden still in office. The disappointment would surely prompt blowback from right-leaning Republicans already known as the sharpest thorns in the party’s side.

“Spare me if you’re a Republican who puts on your frigging campaign website, ‘Trust me, I will vote for a balanced budget amendment, and I believe we should balance the budget like every family in America.’ No shit,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a member of the pro-Trump Freedom Caucus, said in an interview.

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Steve Bannon vows ‘very vigorous appeal’ to four-month prison sentence – as it happened

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Steve Bannon has just spoken with reporters outside the courthouse in Washington DC, telling them he “respects” the judge’s sentence, and veering off quickly into an attack on Joe Biden’s administration.

In a brief, and chaotic appearance at the microphone, Bannon said of judge Carl Nichol’s four-month sentence:

The sentence he came down with today is his decision. I fully respect it, I’ve been totally respectful this entire process on the legal side.

I testified before the Mueller commission for more hours. I testified in front of [congressman Adam] Schiff in the House intelligence committee more than any other person in the Trump administration. I testified in front of the senate intelligence [committee], I think more than anybody, about the issues related to Russiagate, to all of that. The same process every time.

I had lawyers that were engaged, they worked through the issues of privilege. At that time, I went and testified. And this thing about I’m above the law is an absolute and total lie.

Today was my judgment day by the judge. And we’ll have a very vigorous appeals process. I’ve got a great legal team, and there’ll be multiple areas of appeal.

But as that sign says right there, vote. On November 8, there’s gonna have [sic] judgment on the illegitimate Biden regime and, quite frankly, Nancy Pelosi and the entire [January 6] committee. And we know which way that’s going.

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