Who won the Nevada Senate race? Midterm election results

LAS VEGAS — Control of the U.S. Senate could fall to Nevada, where the slow count of votes entered final action on Saturday in a bitter race between Democratic Sen. challenge Republican Adam Laxalt.

Saturday is the last day that mail-in ballots can arrive and be counted under the new state voting law. Elections officials are scrambling to process tens of thousands of ballots backlog to determine the winner of the race.

The Nevada race became even more important after Democratic Senator Mark Kelly was declared the winner of his re-election campaign in Arizona on Friday night, giving his party 49 seats. in room. Republicans also have 49.

If Cortez Masto wins, Democrats will maintain their control of the Senate with an inconclusive vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. If Laxalt wins, the final vote in the Georgia Senate next month will decide which side has the upper hand in the Senate with a single vote.

Cortez Masto is only a few hundred votes behind Laxalt, with most of the uncounted votes remaining in the heavily Democratic Clark County, including Las Vegas. Democrats are confident that those votes will put their candidate in the lead.

Laxalt has said he hopes to maintain his edge and be declared the winner. But on Saturday, he acknowledged in a tweet that the calculation had changed because Cortez Masto had outperformed Republican expectations in the Clark County ballots tallied over the past few days.

“This has narrowed our chances of winning,” he tweeted, acknowledging the race was moving to Clark’s final votes.

“If they are GOP zone or slightly leaning towards DEM we could still win,” Laxalt tweeted. “If they continue to tend to be DEM heavy then she will overtake us.”

If the race is still too close to call after Saturday, a few thousand more votes could be added to the total as early as next week. Mail-in ballots with clerical errors may be “corrected” by voters through the end of Monday, after which they are added to the total. And a few thousand provisional ballots remain, votes that election officials must double-check will be legally counted by Tuesday before they can be counted.

“We are doing everything in our power to move the ballots forward as quickly as we can,” Joe Gloria, a Clark County registrar, said Friday.

An estimated 23,000 ballots are still being counted in the county. Gloria said there are also 9,600 “cured” ballots and 5,555 provisional ballots. Clark County accounts for three-quarters of Nevada’s population.

In another key race, Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak lost his re-election bid to his Republican rival, Sheriff Joe Lombardo, on Friday night.

Nevada, a tightly divided revolving state, is one of the most racially diverse in the nation, a working-class state whose residents have been particularly hard hit by inflation and other economic uncertainties.

About three-quarters of Nevada voters say the country is on the wrong track, and about five in 10 call the economy the most important issue facing the country, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of 2,100 voters. of the state.

Voters view the economy negatively, with VoteCast finding nearly eight in 10 saying economic conditions are not very good or poor. Only about 2 out of 10 people are called excellent or good economy. And about a third of voters said their families were falling behind financially.

But that doesn’t necessarily translate to anger toward President Joe Biden or his party. About half see inflation as the most important issue facing the United States, but they are evenly divided on whether they attribute the higher prices to Biden’s policies or factors beyond their control. his control.

Nevada is also a state known to live and to live, and Cortez Masto and other Democrats have made the protection of abortion rights a focus of their campaigns. According to VoteCast, 7 out of 10 people want the procedure to be kept legal in all or most cases.

Still, Republicans relentlessly lashed out at the economic argument, saying it was time for a leadership change. They also sought to capitalize on lingering frustration over the pandemic-induced closures that devastated Las Vegas’ tourist-centric economy in 2020.

On Thursday morning, the Associated Press announced Republican Stavros Anthony as the winner of the gubernatorial race, while Republican Andy Mathews was elected state controller.

The state’s lone Republican congressman, Mark Amodei, easily won re-election in his mostly rural district in northern Nevada. Three members of the House of Representatives from the state’s Las Vegas-area Democrats were also re-elected.