North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr held onto his Senate seat after coming under a serious challenge from Democrat Deborah Ross, holding an important seat for the GOP as they try to keep Democrats from taking over the Senate majority.
Burr, the Senate’s top Republican on intelligence matters, including cybersecurity, has comfortably held his seat for two terms — but Democrats hoped to oust him in a wave of swing-state victories to take back the Senate majority from the GOP.
Their road to doing so has narrowed.
Democrats scored their first official pickup from the GOP when Illinois Democrat Rep. Tammy Duckworth beat out incumbent Republican Sen. Mark Kirk for his Senate seat.
But so far, that is the only race where Democrats have gained a seat in the fewer than dozen competitive contests that could determine which party controls the Senate, and by extension, the balance of power in Congress. Democrats need to pick up a total of four seats if Hillary Clinton wins the White House, and five seats if Donald Trump wins.
Duckworth was a safe pickup bet against Kirk, who had been flagging in the polls against the combat veteran and two-term congresswoman from Chicago.
But Democrats had a setback earlier Tuesday night, when Republican Rep. Todd Young beat out Democrat and former senator Evan Bayh in the Indiana Senate race, delivering them a disappointing defeat in their bid to take over the Senate majority.
Bayh, who served two terms in the Senate and hails from one of Indiana’s most powerful political families, was recruited as one of the Democrats’ stronger candidates, but ultimately fell short against Young, a three-term congressman from the southern part of the state.
In Florida, Republican Marco Rubio, who ran an unsuccessful presidential campaign earlier this year, was reelected to his Senate seat Tuesday night, keeping it in the GOP’s column as he overcame a challenge from Democrat Rep. Patrick Murphy.
But in the House, Florida Democrat Stephanie Murphy staged an upset against one of the GOP’s veteran members, Republican John Mica, who has held his seat since 1993. Mica’s race in part was fueled by redistricting that led to a defeat for the normally safe incumbent, who ultimately lost by nearly three points.
Democrats also picked up a House seat in Florida from Republican Rep. David Jolly, who lost his reelection battle to former Florida governor Charlie Crist. Crist, who was a Republican and an Independent while governor, joined the Democratic Party in 2012. But Democrats lost the House being vacated by Rep. Patrick Murphy, who lost to Rubio in the Senate race, when Florida Republican Brian Mast beat out Democrat Randy Perkins.
In Virginia, Republicans also overcame a Democratic effort to oust Rep. Barbara Comstock, who easily rode to a nine-point victory over Democratic challenger LuAnn Bennett.
Republicans are favored to retain their majority in the House, but it will almost certainly shrink.
Meanwhile the parties held onto their seats in several other high-profile Senate races. Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, who just a few months ago was on the shortlist of incumbents most in danger of losing their seats, was reelected to a second term in one of the earliest races to be called Tuesday night. And in Iowa, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley was projected to win a seventh term over Democrat Patty Judge, despite earlier fears that his tenure was in jeopardy.
In Maryland, Democrat Chris Van Hollen was elected to his first term as a U.S. senator in the seat being vacated by Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D.
Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer, N.Y., who is expected to replace Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid as the Senate’s top Democrat next year, won a fourth term, while the Senate’s No. 3 Republican, John Thune, S.D., was reelected to his third.
In Georgia, Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson was reelected to a third term in a race against Democratic challenger Jim Barksdale. While Isakson was not in grave danger of losing his seat, it was not clear that he would clear an an-important 50 percent threshold to avoid a runoff until the last days of the election.
Elsewhere in the Senate, Vermont’s Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy was reelected to his eighth term and Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby to his sixth. Republicans Tim Scott of South Carolina and James Lankford of Oklahoma were reelected to their first full terms in the Senate, while Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal and Republicans Rand Paul, Ky., Mike Lee, Utah, Jerry Moran, Kan., John Boozman, Ark., and John Hoeven, N.D., each won a second Senate term.
In the House, Republicans are favored to retain their majority, but it will almost certainly shrink.
Among the other states that will determine control of the Senate are New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, where Republican incumbents are on the ropes in blue states that President Obama won in 2012. Some bellwether House districts are Illinois’s 10th, where Rep. Bob Dold, R, is fighting the Trump headwinds; New Jersey’s 5th District, where Rep. Scott Garrett, R, is in trouble; and Iowa’s 1st District, where Rep. Rod Blum, R, is fighting for his political life.
The purple states and districts in play are dotted across the national map, so if the GOP is able to capitalize on a late-breaking burst of momentum, the composition of Congress might not be clear until the final polls have closed. But if the Democrats, led by Clinton, have an especially good night, the future of Capitol Hill could be determined fairly early in the night.
With Republican dissatisfaction with Trump running high, many GOP incumbents are hoping a significant slice of the electorate will split their tickets, choosing Clinton at the top and them for Senate.
In Florida, Rubio stood by his less-than-enthusiastic Trump endorsement, while in Arizona, Sen. John McCain has already said he would not vote for the GOP nominee. McCain’s wife Cindy even went to vote Tuesday in a white pantsuit – the voting booth uniform of choice for many Clinton supporters, who chose the color in deference to the suffragettes of the last century and the cut in homage to the Democratic nominee’s signature style. McCain, who voted with his wife, wore white pants.
Elsewhere, however, GOP candidates were extremely careful about keeping their votes close to the chest – particularly in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania and New Hampshire could be early indicators of how congressional tides may turn nationwide, as incumbent Republican Sens. Pat Toomey, Pa., and Kelly Ayotte, N.H., are neck-and-neck with their Democratic challengers, Katie McGinty and Granite State Gov. Maggie Hassan, respectively.
Both states could be a test of whether Republican incumbents will be able to keep going if Trump loses steam. Ayotte already repudiated her party’s nominee following the release of lewd comments he made on a 2005 videotape, while Toomey, who long refused to say who he would vote for, cast his vote for Donald Trump Tuesday night, according to the Allentown Morning Call.
Toomey had invited a backlash Tuesday when he indicated he wouldn’t be casting a ballot until 6:45 p.m., just over an hour before the Pennsylvania polls close. It was an unorthodox move, as politicians in close races usually vote early and encourage voters to do the same. McGinty’s campaign was quick to lambaste Toomey over the delay, calling him a “spineless, self-interested politician.”
“Pat Toomey is intentionally waiting until millions of his constituents have already voted today before making clear to them who he supports to be our next commander in chief,” McGinty spokesman Josh Levitt said in a written statement. “That is spineless and the exact opposite of leadership.”
Still, control of the Senate isn’t actually likely to be determined until polls close in North Carolina and Missouri, and then Wisconsin.
Wisconsin’s Sen. Ron Johnson, R, recently gained ground against former Democratic senator Russ Feingold, who is favored to win. Meanwhile Missouri’s Roy Blunt – a member of Senate GOP leadership – and North Carolina’s Richard Burr, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, are finding themselves in toss-up contests after neither of them ran standout campaigns.
In a last attempt to turn out all corners of the GOP base, Blunt, whose race against Jason Kander, D, is slightly closer than Burr’s race against Deborah Ross, D, flooded social media on Tuesday with get-out-the-vote appeals from disparate corners of the Republican Party, including Libertarian-leaning Sen. Rand Paul, Ky., and conservative one-time GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas.
But if Missouri, Wisconsin and North Carolina are close, the Senate majority might not be determined until polls close in Nevada, where Rep. Joe Heck, R, and former state attorney general Catherine Cortez Masto, D, are battling to replace outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D.
The Heck-Cortez Masto race is exceptionally close, and may come down to how well the formidable ground operation Reid built is able to turn out key Democratic constituencies, such as Latino voters and women. On Tuesday, the Heck campaign’s Twitter feed featured several posts aiming to tamp down negative advertisements painting the candidate as unfavorable on women’s issues, and encourage more female voters to cast their ballots for Heck.
Meanwhile, House leaders will be watching races in a few dozen states to see if Democrats are able to stage upsets, or if the GOP manages to hold onto the bulk of its House majority. Democrats need 30 seats to retake control of the lower chamber.
Though House Democrats claimed just a month ago that the majority was within their grasp, that is increasingly unlikely as no national wave seems to be developing in either party’s direction. Democratic strategists now predict that the party will pick up about a dozen seats – a drop House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, Calif., blamed Tuesday on FBI Director James Comey’s decision late last month to tell Congress about possible new information pertaining to the Clinton email probe.
Many Democrats have charged that Comey’s decision was politically motivated, and Pelosi said Tuesday that it had a “definite impact” on Democrats’ efforts to seize more congressional seats.
But it is possible that Democrats might knock out one of the GOP’s chief attack dogs against the Obama administration, as well as one of its most senior Republicans in Florida races that could measure the force of demographic changes in newly fashioned districts, as well as how minority voting blocs are burgeoning.
In California, former House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa – who was banging the Republicans’ Benghazi drum before there was a Benghazi committee – could be the GOP’s most high-profile House loss of the night if he is bested by Democrat Doug Applegate, a former Marine colonel whose camp has ridiculed Issa’s recent attempts to recast himself as a friend of the Obama administration.
Other competitive House races are all over the country, from Illinois to New Hampshire to Nevada.
In the suburbs of Chicago, Dold is defending his congressional seat against the Democrat who used to occupy it, former congressman Brad Schneider. It’s unclear how that one might turn out.
Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, the likely outcome of a similar matchup between incumbent Republican Frank Guinta and his predecessor, former Democratic congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter, is anybody’s guess – the polling hasn’t consistently favored one over the other.
Two races in Nevada could turn on whether Democrats have successfully stoked the Latino vote, as Republican Rep. Cresent Hardy faces state senator and Reid protege Ruben Kihuen. One district over, Republican Danny Tarkanian and Democrat Jacky Rosen battle it out over the seat Heck vacated to make a run at the Senate.
In Minnesota’s 2nd District, Democrats backing Angela Craig have tried to link Republican talk radio host Jason Lewis to Trump over his comments about “not-thinking” women and “cultural suicide” by the “white population.” One of them will replace outgoing Rep. John Kline, R.
(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Karoun Demirjian
