Politics

All the country’s top conservative governors were easily reelected in midterm elections that overall did not go as well as Republicans hoped.

Governors Kristi Noem of South Dakota, Ron DeSantis of Florida, Jared Polis of Colorado, Brad Little of Idaho, Bill Lee of Tennessee, Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, Brian Kemp of Georgia, and Greg Abbott of Texas were all ranked in the top 10 of conservative governors in a Laffer-ALEC analysis last year and coasted to reelection on Tuesday.

The Laffer-ALEC 2021 report, which was conducted by well-known conservatives such as ALEC’s Dr. Arthur B. Laffer and The Heritage Foundation’s Stephen Moore, ranked all 50 governors on their economic, fiscal, and executive policy, with conservative policy positions earning higher marks.

Ten governors earned a five-star ranking in the report, with eight facing reelection on Tuesday. That list included South Dakota’s Noem, who came in ranked number one. The Republican governor was easily reelected Tuesday, winning by 26.8 percentage points.

GOVERNORS OPPOSED TO DRACONIAN LOCKDOWNS INCREASED MARGINS OF VICTORY IN 2022

• High-profile witnesses to testify
• Closing in on the Trump White House
• ‘Gaming the system’

 

 

• Fulton County prosecutors are investigating interference in the 2020 election in Georgia.
• Prosecutors have been tracking findings unveiled in the House Jan. 6 committee’s public hearings.
• DA Fani Willis indicated a decision on charges could come as early as the end of the year.

Across nine public hearings, the special House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attacks offered damning accounts of Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election.

From repeated attempts to pressure the Justice Department to amplify false claims of election fraud to summoning the mob that stormed the Capitol, the former president’s often-desperate attempts to cling to power are behind the most striking images to emerge from the extraordinary congressional investigation.

Perhaps no episode cut to the core of Trump’s alleged mission like the campaign to upend the election in Georgia where Trump, himself, pressed election officials in a recorded telephone call to “find” the votes to deny Joe Biden’s victory.

“The president had a particular obsession with Georgia,” House committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., declared earlier this year.

Following a tight race, incumbent Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto has defeated Republican challenger Adam Laxalt to win reelection, CBS News projects. The projected win means that Democrats will retain control of the Senate, regardless of the outcome of the Georgia runoff between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker in December.

As of Saturday night, Cortez Mastro was leading Laxalt by just under 5,000 votes, with 96% of the results in, a margin of 0.5 percentage points.   

Laxalt had been clinging to a small lead of under 1,000 votes going into Saturday. He had released a statement on Saturday morning which suggested he has some expectation she would surpass him.

“Here is where we are — we are up only 862 votes. Multiple days in a row, the mostly mail in ballots counted continue to break in higher DEM margins than we calculated. This has narrowed our victory window. The race will come down to 20-30K Election Day Clark drop off ballots,” Laxalt said.

“If they are GOP precincts or slightly DEM leaning then we can still win,” he continued. “If they continue to trend heavy DEM then she will overtake us.”

But control of the Senate appeared to be a seesaw battle. Those same political headwinds burdened Democratic candidates for the Senate, but weak Republican challengers, many of them endorsed or handpicked by Mr. Trump, gave Democrats a fighting chance in swing states like Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

In the heated aftermath of the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade, which ended constitutional protections for abortion, Democrats thought they could bolster their 50-vote control by two or three seats. Then the pendulum seemed to swing late in the campaigns, and Republicans convinced themselves that the anger over abortion was waning. Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the leader of Senate Republicans’ political arm, said in late October that he saw a path to a 55-seat Republican majority, predicting that even Democratic states like Washington and Colorado were in play.

In the end, the field proved to be much smaller. Democrats were able to capture just one Republican seat, that of the retiring Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, which was won by the state’s lieutenant governor, John Fetterman. But, so far, Republicans have defeated no Democratic incumbents in Senate races. And only one Democratic incumbent, Mr. Warnock in Georgia, is left to possible defeat.

Republicans were coming close to winning control of the U.S. House of Representatives, as results from the midterm elections continued to get tabulated.

The GOP was projected to have scored 209 House seats by the Associated Press as of Thursday afternoon. That’s not far from the 218 needed for a majority in that 435-member chamber of Congress and well above Democrats’ total of 189.

Meanwhile, control of the U.S. Senate could remain undetermined until a Dec. 6 runoff for Georgia’s Senate race.

Republicans were projected to have 49 seats in that 100-member chamber by the Associated Press as of Thursday afternoon vs. 48 for Democrats. Arizona’s contest was not yet called by the AP, but Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly had the lead, and Nevada’s race also wasn’t called but Republican challenger Adam Laxalt was ahead.

Related: Adam Laxalt tells MarketWatch he wants to extend Trump’s tax cuts and ‘end the absurd levels of government spending’

The AP said it will only declare a winner in a House and Senate race when it’s determined there is no scenario that would allow a trailing candidate to close the gap. The news agency also noted that officials in Arizona and Nevada continue to tally votes, including mail-in ballots.

• The segregationist historical past of behind Georgia’s runoffs
• What are the consequences of the runoffs right this moment?

 

The Georgia Senate race has led to a runoff—set to happen Dec. 6— between Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker, however traditionally runoffs within the state had been created to suppress the Black vote.

Georgia is certainly one of solely two states, together with Louisiana, that requires a runoff in all common elections if no candidate achieves no less than 50% of the vote; and specialists say Georgia’s historical past reveals how an electoral system that calls for the bulk’s assist might be manipulated to exclude the minority vote.

Practically 60 years because the runoff system was carried out, critics argue that prolonging the election to a second day nonetheless allows boundaries in opposition to minorities and different susceptible voters—even when the 2 candidates are Black.

“Runoffs additionally drawback individuals with boundaries to transportation and who work jobs that don’t enable for straightforward time without work—to the extent that due to historical past and structural racism, this group contains extra racial minorities,” Dr. Mitchell Brown, a political science professor at Auburn College who focuses on elections and marginalized communities, tells TIME.

• 2022 Midterm Elections



 

A senior source close to former President Donald Trump told CBS News that the former president has been privately infuriated over the results of the midterm elections, despite his posts on social media touting them as a win and a “great evening.”

According to the source, the former president has been “blaming everyone except himself” over the results, including his aides and Fox News host Sean Hannity. The person said Tuesday night’s better-than-expected results for Democrats were mainly due to the elections becoming “a referendum” on Trump, his candidate picks, and his continued focus on relitigating the 2020 election.

As of Wednesday, CBS News estimated the Senate is a toss-up, with four contests yet to be called. Two of those contests were toss-ups, and one of those, Georgia, will go to a runoff in December. The race in Arizona, meanwhile, is leaning Democratic. Alaska used ranked-choice voting and results could take a while, although the two leading candidates are Republicans. 

 

CBS News characterizes the House as leaning Republican. As of Wednesday evening, projections showed Republicans winning at least 210 seats and Democrats had won at least 200 seats. At least 218 seats are needed for control. So if the GOP does get a majority, it will be a slim one. 

Comment

Former president Donald Trump’s standing as the dominant figure in the Republican Party was challenged Tuesday night by a string of election results that even some of his advisers viewed as wounding to his political future.

Trump is taking blame from Republicans for disappointing performances by many of the candidates he backed, at the same time that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis won a landslide reelection, instantly elevating his profile as a serious 2024 presidential contender.

In a sign of Trump’s diminished and newly uncertain footing, some longtime allies are now encouraging Trump to delay a presidential announcement he had planned for next week as a victory lap for a red wave that didn’t materialize.

If Georgia voters were hoping to avoid talking politics at Thanksgiving, the state’s tightly contested Senate race has other plans.

Neither Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock nor Republican challenger Herschel Walker surpassed the 50% threshold needed to win the race outright Tuesday evening, CNN projects, forcing a runoff election set for December 6.

But what exactly does that mean? And how will the runoff election work?

Here’s what you need to know.

A runoff is an additional election used to determine the winner of a certain race when neither candidate earns the required threshold for victory – in this case, 50%.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman has hired controversial Hillary Clinton lawyer Marc Elias to spearhead his federal lawsuit contending that mail-in ballots with an incorrect or missing date should be counted.

The lawsuit filed Monday challenges the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that such ballots cannot be included in the vote count because state law requires voters to write the date on the outer envelope. Fetterman, who is running against Republican nominee Mehmet Oz, argues that not counting the votes violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars election officials from denying someone the right to vote based on an error on the ballot that is “not material” to determining whether the individual is qualified to vote.

However, constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley – noting former Virginia Democratic governor and Clinton acolyte Terry McAuliffe’s use of Elias one year ago in the race against Glenn Youngkin backfired – points out that the legislature “clearly concluded that such dates are material to the security of the vote-by-mail system.”

Turley recalled that reporters alleged Elias falsely claimed that the Hillary Clinton campaign did not fund the bogus Steele Dossier, which was used to launch the Obama Justice Department’s evidence-free Trump-Russia collusion case. Elias was sanctioned by the courts, and the Clinton campaign was sanctioned by the FEC for hiding the funding of the dossier through his prior firm, Perkins Coie.

“Elias has also been criticized for challenging elections when he and other Democratic lawyers denounced Republican challenges as a threat to democracy,” Turley wrote on his website.