Catherine Cortez Masto projected to defeat Adam Laxalt and win reelection

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.”

As Laxalt noted, most of the votes which were left to be counted were in Nevada’s largest county, Democratic-leaning Clark County, where Las Vegas is located. Officials had indicated Friday morning that roughly 50,000 votes were left to be counted, and released results from more than 15,000 of them on Friday night. Results from about 22,000 Clark County votes were released Saturday night. 

Democratic-leaning Washoe County, the second largest county, where Reno is located, was on pace to finish counting Saturday night.

Beyond those votes, there were other Clark County ballots being processed. About 9,000 ballots that were in some way incomplete may be cured by voters until Monday night. There are also around 5,000 provisional ballots that cannot be counted until the secretary of state’s office cross-checks them with lists of provisional votes from other counties to ensure there are no duplicate votes.

Cortez Masto, 58, was considered to be the most vulnerable Democratic senator fighting for reelection. Two Senate races remain to be decided. Georgia’s Senate race is going to a runoff in early December. Alaska’s Senate race also remains a toss-up, but the top two candidates are both Republicans. 

Cortez Masto became the nation’s first Latina senator when she won the race in 2016 to succeed the late Sen. Harry Reid when he retired at the end of his term.