US Politics

Democrat Cisco Aguilar defeats election denier in Nevada secretary of state raceVictory over Republican Jim Marchant for state’s top elections post is significant win against efforts to sow doubt in US elections Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, was elected Nevada’s top election official, beating Jim Marchant, a Republican who is linked to the QAnon sought to spread misinformation about the results of the 2020 race.His victory is a significant win against efforts to sow doubt in US elections, a growing force in the Republican party.The Nevada secretary of state race was one of the most competitive in the country and closely watched because of Marchant’s extreme views. It was also one of several contests in which Republican candidates who questioned the election results were running to be the top election official in their state.Marchant, a former state lawmaker, said during the campaign that if he and other like-minded secretary of states were elected, Donald Trump would be re-elected in 2024. He has also said that Nevada elections are run by a “cabal”, and that Nevadans haven’t elected a president in over a decade.He also has pushed Nevada counties to adopt risky and costly hand counts of ballots and leads the America First Secretary of State coalition, a group of secretary of state candidates running for key election positions who pledged to overturn the 2020 race.Aguilar had never run for elected office, but cast himself as a defender of Nevada’s democracy. His campaign emphasized the extremist threat Marchant posed. He far outraised Marchant and was much more present on the campaign trail.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022NevadaUS politicsDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

Democrats’ triumph may be miraculous but US is still split down the middleMichael CohenThe midterms are a win for democracy but many Republicans await a third Trump bid Midterm elections in the United States are where the hopes and dreams of governing parties go to die. Since 1932, the party in power has lost on average 28 seats in the House of Representatives and four seats in the Senate. In 2018, two years after taking the White House and both Houses of Congress, Republicans lost 40 House seats and control of the chamber. In 2010, Democrats lost 63 seats. In 1994, it was 54 and eight Senate seats. Every two years, after electing a new president, voters, generally speaking, go to the polls with buyer’s remorse.But not this year. In a truly stunning outcome, Democrats reversed the historical trend lines and, at least for the time being, protected American democracy from the worst excesses of the Donald Trump-led Republican party.While all the votes still need to be tabulated, it appears that Democrats will keep control of the Senate and have an outside chance of maintaining their narrow majority in the House of Representatives. At the beginning of the year such a scenario was virtually unimaginable. Democrats were facing not only historical headwinds but also rising inflation, a teetering economy and an unpopular incumbent president. Traditionally, these are the kinds of political dynamics that portend a Republican-wave victory in November.But then in June the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, removed a 50-year constitutional guarantee protecting reproductive health rights and virtually overnight turned American women into second-class citizens. Over the summer, congressional Democrats achieved a host of notable legislative successes and President Biden announced billions in student loan forgiveness, fulfilling a promise he’d made during the 2020 presidential campaign.By the autumn, the political winds shifted in the Democrats’ direction – and no issue loomed larger than abortion. In August, a referendum in ruby-red Kansas, which would have made it easier for Republicans in the state legislature to outlaw the procedure, lost by a whopping 18 points.Democratic campaign advisers took their cues from Kansas and made abortion the centrepiece of the autumn campaign. And in the states where Republicans’ victories could have led to potentially greater abortion restrictions, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, Democrats won decisive victories. In suburban districts, the new linchpin of the Democratic coalition, white female college graduates, outraged by the supreme court decision, propelled House Democratic candidates to victory in toss-up races.Republicans compounded the problem by nominating a host of Trump-endorsed first-time Senate and gubernatorial candidates. The closer a Republican was to Trump, the worse they did on Tuesday.Indeed, for months, political commentators had portrayed the 2022 election as potentially the end of democracy in the US. In state after state, election deniers, parroting Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, appeared poised to take office. Yet across the board they lost. On an even more positive note, while Trump still refuses to accept that he lost the presidency to Joe Biden, his enablers and sycophants in the GOP (“grand old party”) refused to follow the same script. Virtually every Republican who lost their election – including the election deniers – has conceded defeat, in the best sign for the strength of American democracy in quite some time.How the fall of Roe shattered Republicans’ midterm dreamsRead moreThat’s the good news, but like everything these days in American politics it’s virtually impossible for us to have nice things. While Trump is arguably the biggest loser of the 2022 campaign, his stranglehold over the Republican party is not ending just yet. This week, he will announce his third bid for the White House and, while plenty of Republican leaders wish he would go away, a great many rank-and-file Republicans don’t feel the same.It’s easy to criticise Trump for his lousy record of endorsements, but it’s not as if he held a gun to the collective head of Republicans and forced them to vote for his preferred candidates. These are still the types of politicians that Republican voters want and there is little reason to expect that they are prepared to jettison Trump.What makes matters even worse for Republicans is that no matter how the presidential nomination contest turns out, it’s a no-win situation. Democrats have won the past three US elections, in large measure by running against Trump. If he is again the Republican nominee there is no reason to expect that 2024 would play out any differently.What if Trump loses? That might actually be a worse outcome because if there’s one thing we know about the former president, it’s that he is a thin-skinned narcissist who doesn’t care about anybody but himself. If he loses the GOP presidential bid, say to the Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who just won a landslide re-election victory, one can expect that he will not respond well. There will not be a moment at the Republican national convention with Trump and DeSantis, their hands clasped together in party unity. Instead, Trump will handle himself probably no differently from the way he did after losing to Biden – again claiming fraud and denigrating DeSantis to his supporters. Indeed, Trump would probably prefer Biden wins re-election than watch DeSantis accomplish a feat that he could not.But beyond all that, the final numbers in the House and Senate tell a crucial story. Democrats will probably either maintain their 50-50 edge in the Senate or add one seat (the US vice-president, Kamala Harris, is the tie-breaking vote in the Senate). In the House, the most likely result is an incredibly narrow Republican advantage – somewhere between one and three seats. Governorships could be split evenly 25-25.America is almost perfectly divided between Democrats and Republicans and neither party can cobble together an effective majority. The 2022 midterms are, on the surface, a win for Democrats, but from a deeper perspective they have simply ratified the status quo of the US as a divided and divisive country.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022OpinionUS politicsDemocratsRepublicansJoe BidenDonald TrumpcommentReuse this content More

Analysis‘It’s time to move on’: have the US midterms finally loosened Trump’s grip on the Republican party?Chris McGreal in Columbus, Ohio and David Smith in WashingtonAfter the party came up short in another election, Ron DeSantis may be poised to become its new leader Sitting at the head table in a white and gold ballroom, beneath glistening chandeliers and an ornately corniced ceiling, Donald Trump looked sullen as midterm election results flashed up on a giant TV screen.Across Florida, 200 miles from his opulent Mar-a-Lago estate, the mood was quite different. In Tampa, Governor Ron DeSantis was celebrating his landslide re-election by repurposing lines from Winston Churchill.“We fight the woke in the legislature,” DeSantis declared as his photogenic young family looked on against a stars and stripes backdrop. “We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”‘Ron DeSanctimonious’: angry Trump lashes out at Republican rival Read moreAs the jubilant crowd chanted “two more years!”, suggesting that DeSantis, not Trump, should run for US president in 2024, was this the moment that power slipped inexorably from one to the other – that the Republican crown passed from old king to young pretender?Some in the party are ready to declare it so. David Urban, a longtime Trump ally, told the Washington Post: “It is clear the center of gravity of the Republican party is in the state of Florida, and I don’t mean Mar-a-Lago.”If such a shift has taken place, it did so gradually, then suddenly. Since he descended an escalator at his New York headquarters in June 2015, Trump has dominated and defined the Republican party, crushing rivals in the Republican primary then eking out a victory over Hillary Clinton to seize the White House.But the party of Trump suffered drubbings at the ballot box in 2018 and 2020. And despite forecasts of a “red wave” in 2022, it fell short again. From Michigan to Pennsylvania, novice candidates endorsed by the former president proved they were unready for prime time and too extreme for a wary and weary electorate.Finally, some Republicans admitted what everyone else could see: Trump is an albatross around the party’s neck. Virginia’s lieutenant governor, Winsome Earle-Sears, once a vocal supporter, told the Fox Business channel: “The voters have spoken and they have said that they want a different leader. And a true leader understands when they have become a liability. A true leader understands that it’s time to step off the stage. It is time to move on.”Rupert Murdoch already has, it seems. “Trumpty Dumpty”, boomed the front page of his tabloid the New York Post. “Trump is the Republican party’s biggest loser” was the verdict of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. A column on the Fox News website proclaimed: “Ron DeSantis is the new Republican party leader. Republicans are ready to move on without Donald Trump.”Indeed, if Trump was the big loser of the night, DeSantis was the big winner. His victory by nearly 20 percentage points was a personal vindication that appeared to put Florida, once the quintessential swing state, beyond Democrats’ reach for a generation.His stunning wins in big, majority Latino counties, including Miami-Dade and Osceola, set him up to make the case that, as a presidential candidate, he could repeat the formula in states such as as Arizona, Nevada and Texas. “We have rewritten the political map,” he told supporters.A DeSantis 2024 campaign would also promise generational change. At 44, the former navy lawyer and congressman would be similar in age to John F Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama when they ran for the White House, a sharp contrast from 76-year-old Trump or Joe Biden, who is turning 80 this month.Crucially, DeSantis could sell himself as Trump 2.0, an upgrade committed to the same “America first” policy agenda, media sparring and liberal-baiting (he recently flew Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard) but without the liability of multiple federal, state and congressional investigations.He could also break from Trump over the coronavirus pandemic, contending that he kept Florida open while the then president was urging lockdowns. Tim Miller, former communications director for Jeb Bush 2016, said: “He would try to paint Trump as somebody that lost, is a loser and is costing the party. He’d probably criticise Trump for not being stronger on Covid and say he should have fired [Dr Anthony] Fauci.”DeSantis is especially popular with conservatives for taking the lead on “culture war” issues related to race and gender. Last year he got into a spat with the Walt Disney Company over his support of the controversial law, nicknamed “don’t say gay” by opponents, prohibiting the teaching of gender identity concepts to young children.But if you come at the king, you best not miss. Trump has spent months preparing to strangle the DeSantis campaign at birth. At a campaign rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, last weekend, he casually rolled out a nickname, “Ron DeSanctimonious”, hoping to brand his opponent as he has so many before.On Tuesday, menacingly, he told Fox News: “I think if he runs, he could hurt himself very badly. I really believe he could hurt himself badly. I would tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering – I know more about him than anybody – other than, perhaps, his wife.”And on Thursday, with DeSantis buzz reaching a crescendo, Trump lashed out in a lengthy and angry statement berating Fox News and other Murdoch-controlled media for going “all in for Governor Ron DeSanctimonious DeSantis”, whom he called “an average REPUBLICAN Governor with great Public Relations”, as he again took credit for DeSantis’s 2018 win.“Well, in terms of loyalty and class, that’s really not the right answer,” he wrote, comparing the race to his winning 2016 campaign. “We’re in exactly the same position now. They will keep coming after us, MAGA, but ultimately, we will win. Put America First and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”Soon after, he invited reporters to a “Special Announcement” at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday night, presumably confirming that he is mounting a third consecutive bid for the White House. Some allies were quick to offer pre-endorsements, with Elise Stefanik, the Republican chair in the House of Representatives, declaring herself on team Trump.JD Vance, who won a Senate senate race in Ohio with Trump’s backing, did likewise. And at a rally for Vance in Dayton the night before the elections, many supporters sporting Make America Great Again hats and T-shirts were hoping for Trump to announce his candidacy there and then.But even within a crowd of enthusiastic fans there were those who had doubts. Mandy Young said: “I think Trump was a great president but I don’t think he can win again. He is too divisive. The independents who voted for him before won’t vote for him again because of all the investigations.“Also, I don’t like the way he called DeSantis ‘DeSanctimonious’. I think DeSantis would be a great president. It makes me think Trump doesn’t care about the Republican party winning, only himself. He should step back. He would still have a lot of influence as a respected godfather giving advice.”On election day, Jeffrey Weisman, a consistent Republican supporter because he says the party is better for the economy and his jewellery store business, voted at the biggest Greek Orthodox church in Columbus, Ohio.Weisman supported Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections but would prefer the former president stayed out of the next one. “I like DeSantis. Having Trump going out there as well I think will hurt DeSantis’s chances. So for that reason, I do not want Trump to run,” he said.The strengths and weaknesses of Trump’s influence were on display in Ohio’s election for US senator. The former president’s endorsement of Vance pulled the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy and venture capitalist from the back of the field in the Republican primaries and won him the nomination. But Trump’s backing then dragged down support for Vance in Tuesday’s general election, even if he won.Mark R Weaver, a Republican strategist in Columbus, who has worked on several hundred state and national campaigns, said that has implications for any challenge from DeSantis both in Ohio and across the country.“Trump’s ability to improve a candidate’s chances is weakening. He’s no longer able to guarantee or even predict someone he endorses is going to win. Whatever charm he had has worn off, certainly in the general elections. In the primaries, he can still be a big factor. In Ohio he was.”Weaver said that while Trump would still win a Republican contest for the presidential nomination against DeSantis if it were held today, that may not be true by the time the primaries actually begin in early 2024.He said: “I have noticed a slow descent of Donald Trump’s popularity amongst Republicans. I’ve noticed a rapid ascent of Ron DeSantis’s popularity.“If those two trajectories continue, Trump slowly getting weaker and people looking for better options, and DeSantis quickly getting stronger and having more people support him, the trajectory lines could cross right about March of 2024. That sounds like a crazy statement right now but if those trajectories cross, Ron DeSantis can beat Trump in the primaries in 2024.”Trump’s political obituary has been written by Republican elites countless times before only to prove wishful thinking. An Access Hollywood tape in which he boasted about groping women’s private parts couldn’t do it. His half-hearted condemnation of a white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, couldn’t do it. His proposal that injecting bleach might cure coronavirus couldn’t do it. Even his incitement of a coup attempt at the US Capitol couldn’t do it. Can DeSantis do it by appealing to the bottom line: electability?Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “I’ve always said that the Republican party would not fully respond to offloading Trump until they lost enough elections. Political actors are single seekers in re-election, and once their power is threatened, that is usually where a course correction happens.“But they’ve gotten themselves into quite a quagmire with Donald Trump because he still has a solid 30%, at least, base of support, and that is large enough to still create headaches for the party if they try to offload him.”Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, added: “They also do not have a formidable enough heir apparent. It is not Ron DeSantis. Ron DeSantis is a paper tiger who was created and propped up by Donald Trump. He does not have the political talent, the charisma or the toughness to take on the onslaught coming his way from Trumpworld. It’s already beginning.”Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, agreed. “Trump would eat him alive,” he said. “Right now Trump is still the dominant player in the Republican party. Most of the base is still with him. DeSantis is utterly untested. He’s weird. He has zero charisma. He’s thin skinned. He can’t think on his feet. He’s never been tested and he’s easily offended. Trump will do and say anything.”Walsh, who challenged Trump in the 2020 Republican primary, added: “Trump’s the king. If you try to slay the king and you don’t, your career is over. That’s a huge, huge risk a 44-year-old guy like DeSantis would be taking.”They are not alone in arguing that, while DeSantis is like Trump without the chaos, he is also Trump without the charisma. The former president’s rallies are rollicking, knockabout affairs that give his fans community, entertainment and laughs. DeSantis is said to be unskilled in retail politics and somewhat humourless.Jennifer Mercieca, a professor in the communication and journalism department at Texas A&M University, said: “Donald Trump is an authoritarian PT Barnum. He’s able to keep our attention and curiosity. He’s got great comedic timing. He has a good sense of drama and Ron DeSantis doesn’t have that kind of easily translatable appeal for media audiences. His affect is flat. He’s not as entertaining.“The thing about Donald Trump is that he’s really entertaining. He’s good at keeping our attention and primarily he does that through outrage and things that are very negative for politics and political problem solving. But in terms of a matchup between those two, I would put money on Trump.”Trump has shown himself perfectly capable of going scorched earth and burning the whole party down. A ferociously nasty bareknuckle primary fight between him and DeSantis will have Democrats reaching for the popcorn. At a valedictory press conference at the White House, Biden seemed amused at the prospect. “It’ll be fun watching them take on each other,” he said.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022Donald TrumpRon DeSantisRepublicansFloridaUS elections 2024US politicsanalysisReuse this content More

‘A sacred space’: Sebastian Junger and Seth Moulton on Vets Town Hall The bestselling author wants to help Americans understand those in the military. On Veterans Day, the Democratic congressman hosted a hometown eventOn Friday, Veterans Day, the Democratic congressman Seth Moulton hosted a town hall in Marblehead, his home town in Massachusetts. He first staged such an event in 2015, working with Sebastian Junger, author of bestsellers including The Perfect Storm, War and Tribe, which considers how veterans might be better understood and helped after coming home from war.‘I almost died last summer’: Sebastian Junger on life, death and his new book FreedomRead moreOn the page, Junger considers how Indigenous peoples treated warriors who returned from “intimate and bloody warfare”. Before the Marblehead event, he said: “I’d read about the gourd dance, this process that some of the Southern Great Plains tribes had. I’m sure all of them had some variant on allowing for warriors to recount what they did.”What Moulton did is this. After graduating Harvard in 2001, he joined the US Marines. In the wars after 9/11, he completed four tours in Iraq, taking part in the invasion in 2003 and the Battle of Najaf the following year. Moulton did not buy George W Bush’s case for war. As he said in Marblehead, even in action he thought the invasion “probably shouldn’t have happened”. But he was determined to lead his troops through it.In 2014, he won a seat in the US House. Speaking before the event on Friday, he described how he had “read Sebastian’s book, and said, ‘This is an amazing idea. We should actually do this.’ So I reached out to him and said, ‘Hey, I just got elected to Congress. I’m a marines vet. And I want to start this tradition. So he and I started putting together what would have to happen.”The project grew. It now has a name, Vets Town Hall, a new organisational structure as a non-profit and established rules. Politics are left at the door. Any veteran can speak. There are no questions. Attendees simply listen.Junger reported from Bosnia during the Balkan wars and later made Restrepo, a searing documentary about American soldiers in Afghanistan, and its sequel, Korengal. His co-director, the British photojournalist Tim Hetherington, was killed in Syria in 2011. In his book War and elsewhere, Junger has described being shot at and surviving a roadside bomb. But as he says, when he and Moulton staged their first Vets Town Hall, he had no role to play but to listen.There was, Junger said, “this extraordinary moment where an old lady stood up and said that she fought in Vietnam as a man and came home and got a sex change. Marblehead – it’s one of the more conservative enclaves in Massachusetts. Certainly traditional. And I watched that sort of blow people’s hair back. It was great. It was quite extraordinary.”Marblehead counts itself the home of the US navy. On Friday, busts of François Joseph Paul de Grasse, admiral of the French fleet off Yorktown in the revolutionary war, and Charles Snellen, a gunner’s mate on the USS Monitor, the first civil war ironclad, looked over the town hall speakers.A Marine veteran described a moment in 1967 when he and a North Vietnamese soldier both decided not to fire, then a visit to Vietnam, years later, and a salute to his unknown foe.A former soldier described his service in Afghanistan and what happened on 15 August 2008, when 1Lt Donald Carwile and Pfc Paul Conlon Jr, of the 101st airborne division, were killed by a roadside bomb.A retired naval commander described the wrench of deployments far from his wife and children. Other speakers, men and women, described work on the home front, supporting veterans or advocating for them.Before the event, as Moulton spoke outside Abbot Hall, a man with a prosthetic leg made his way into the venue. He later rose to speak about his struggles since leaving the marines, an edge of anger in his voice.“I took care of myself,” he said, “because I’m a veteran.”In this “dire time of polarisation”, Junger said, Vets Town Hall might provide “kind of a sacred space. I’m an atheist, but I use the word sacred all the time. It’s a sacred space in the sense that ordinary life is suspended and here we are in this place, and we’re honoring something, and we’re healing something, we’re doing something together. And it doesn’t matter if you were for or against the war, or you’re Republican or Democrat, Black or white, rich or poor. None of that matters.”He added: “Anytime you are in a space where you have to be respectful, and you hear things that are anathema to your ideology, it forces you to reconsider. To conservative America, America is always right. The virtuous nation. And the veterans are the heroes in the conservative ideology, almost beyond reproach. And then here, you have a veteran who’s just in a rage about a war we fought. Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam. Whatever it is, that’s healthy for a conservative psyche, to have to navigate through that.Geoff Dyer on war reportageRead more“But likewise, I’m a liberal, but it’s very healthy for liberals to share space with a veteran who’s saying, ‘You know what, I’m not a victim of all this. Going off to war was the best thing that ever could have happened to me. I was a troubled young man, and it was exactly what I needed. And I chose it freely. It wasn’t because I needed money. This was an amazing thing for me, and I miss it a lot.’ That’s great for liberals to hear.”Moulton was less keen to discuss political divisions, saying he thought the town halls might instead help bridge a social chasm between the general public and the “very small percentage of Americans who have served”. He did say the “no politics” ground rule established seven years ago “feels like it’s even more important now, with how divisive politics has become, especially in the last five years”.When Moulton ran for Congress – six years before campaigning, briefly, for president – it took an investigative reporter to find out he had been decorated, in part for “fearlessly expos[ing] himself to enemy fire”.Speaking to the Boston Globe, Moulton described “a healthy disrespect among veterans who served on the frontlines for people who walk around telling war stories” and said he was “uncomfortable calling attention to his own awards out of respect to ‘many others who did heroic things and received no awards at all’”.Through Vets Town Hall, he seeks to provide a forum. He said: “I have told stories at this town hall that I’ve never told before because I think this is the one place where it is appropriate. And I learned from Sebastian the value of telling some stories from war that helped explain both the experience overseas and how it influences our lives back home. And that’s what we really need to share with non-veterans, to help bridge that divide.”Junger described a story Moulton has told. It is about Najaf, where, in a hellish fight in a cemetery, Marines faced the Mahdi army, a militia loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr, a powerful Shia cleric.“He told a story about taking a break, because he’d been up for 48 hours straight. And it was a hot day. And he personally was just really starting to get wobbly. And they took a five-minute break. And because they stopped, the 19-year-old sitting next to him got a bullet in the forehead. And that’s the ghost he lives with.“You know, that’s combat. These random things. ‘If we hadn’t stopped’ or ‘If we had stopped’, or ‘If I hadn’t tied my shoe …’ If you’re a lieutenant or a captain or whatever, you take on responsibility for all the random shit that happens. It’s all your fucking fault. It’s not, of course, but psychologically that’s what it feels like. And it’s really, really hard.“Hearing Seth say that story? I was choking back tears. Everyone was choking back tears. It was absolutely brutal. You might ask him, if he doesn’t bring it up.”In Marblehead, Moulton did not bring up Najaf. Instead, he described a moment outside Baghdad, “dug into the mud” and freezing cold, when intelligence indicated that he and his marines were about to meet a column of Iraqi tanks without protection from their own.Tribe by Sebastian Junger review – why we need the solidarity felt during wartimeRead more“I remember thinking to myself, ‘What the hell am I doing here? I’m about to die, in the mud, in a town nobody’s ever heard of, in a country on the other side of the globe, in a war that probably shouldn’t have happened.’ I knew my buddies back home were probably on a good night in a Boston bar. ‘Why am I here?’ But that thought lasted for about 10 seconds, because I remembered why I signed up.“I didn’t want someone else to fight my place. I didn’t want to be in the Boston bar. And after that, I felt a little bit more warm. A little bit more comfortable. A little bit happier, perhaps, because I was exactly where I wanted to be.”TopicsUS militarySebastian JungerUS politicsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesUS national securityfeaturesReuse this content More

Who were the big winners and losers of the US midterm elections?Biden and DeSantis are on the up, but Donald Trump and some of the Republicans’ more unhinged candidates flopped After months of campaigning and billions of dollars spent on advertising, the message from America’s midterm elections could essentially be boiled down to: “Not as bad as Democrats feared.”There were big wins for Republicans in Florida, and the party still seems likely to take the House, but elsewhere candidates endorsed by former president Donald Trump flopped, and there were key victories for supporters of reproductive rights.As Trump licks his wounds after being compared to an egg on legs by a Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper, and as Democrats celebrate avoiding a predicted “red wave”, here’s a look at who did well, and who suffered.WINNERSJoe Biden, US presidentMuch of the talk ahead of last Tuesday’s elections was about how Biden might tank the Democratic party’s candidates. Republicans across the country ran ads tying their opponents to Biden, banking that the unloved president would turn off voters. It didn’t work, as Democrats performed much better than expected across the board. Biden remains very unpopular – his approval rating dropped to 39% in a Reuters poll this week – but that doesn’t seem to be hindering his party. The results prompted Biden, who turns 80 later this month, to repeat his recent assertions that he will run for a second term as president in two years’ time.Ron DeSantis, Republican Florida governorIt’s not just that the Florida governor won re-election, in what is supposed to be a swing state, by almost 20 points. In the process, DeSantis, 44, has also found himself anointed by the rightwing media as the future of the Republican party – in the case of the New York Post, quite literally: “DeFuture”, blasted the front page of the tabloid on Wednesday morning. DeSantis, an anti-immigrant, anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ rights Republican, is seen as a more palatable, less hysterical version of Donald Trump. He has been cagey about whether he will run for president in 2024, but if DeSantis does want to launch a campaign, then this was a pretty good way to start.John Fetterman, Democrat Senate candidateThree years ago John Fetterman was mayor of Braddock, a town of fewer than 2,000 people. On Tuesday he was elected to the US Senate, and will represent 13 million Pennsylvanians. It has been a remarkable rise, made all the more astonishing by the fact Fetterman had a stroke days before the Democratic primary in May. The 6ft 8in, tattooed, permanently hoodie-clad senator-elect is still recovering – he relied on closed captioning to process questions in a debate in October – but overcame a stiff challenge from Trump-backed Mehmet Oz to win relatively easily on Tuesday. Fetterman, who has previously said he owns only one suit, is going to have to do some clothes shopping.Reproductive rightsAway from the noise and intrigue about Republican and Democratic candidates and races, Michigan voters approved a ballot measure to secure a constitutional right to abortion, blocking the imposition of a 1931 abortion ban in the state. In Kentucky, voters rejected a measure which would have denied constitutional protections for abortion. North Carolina Republicans failed to secure a majority which would have enabled them to ram through restrictive abortion bans, and it was a similar story in Wisconsin, where the re-elected Democratic governor, Tony Evers, will have the power to veto abortion laws proposed by the state legislature.LOSERSDonald TrumpThe one-term, twice-impeached president had a shocker of an evening, as one after another, many of his endorsed candidates flopped in key races across the country. The fact that many of the Republicans Trump had backed lost isn’t the only thing that will sting. Several of Trump’s people underperformed in states – including New Hampshire and Georgia – where Republicans who had not been anointed by Trump triumphed. To top it all off, Rupert Murdoch seems to have turned on Trump. On Thursday the New York Post, a Murdoch-owned tabloid, mocked up an image of Trump as Humpty Dumpty. “Don (who couldn’t build a wall) had a great fall – can all the GOP’s men put the party back together again?” read the accompanying text.Republicans – outside Florida and New YorkWith an unpopular Democratic president, soaring inflation, high gas prices and widespread doom and gloom about the economy, this was supposed to be the night that Republicans swept through Congress in a “red wave”. They didn’t. By Friday, with votes still being tallied in some states, the Republican party was still short of a majority in the House and the Senate, as Democrats out-performed expectations across the country. There were some exceptions. In Florida both DeSantis and Marco Rubio, the state’s incumbent senator, cruised to victory, and Republicans flourished in state-level races too. It was, the Tampa Bay Times declared, “an electoral catastrophe for Democrats”.(Some of) the unhinged candidatesIn Pennsylvania Doug Mastriano, a Christian nationalist state senator who paid for buses to take people to what became the January 6 insurrection and tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was swept away in the governor’s race. Matthew DePerno, a fellow election conspiracy theorist who had branded Democrats “radical, cultural Marxists” lost his bid to be Michigan’s attorney general, and his ideological counterpart Kristina Karamo failed to become secretary of state. Tina Forte, a Republican who attended the January 6 rally and has dabbled in QAnon conspiracy theories, was crushed in her attempt to defeat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman, in New York.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022Donald TrumpUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsAbortionJoe BidenfeaturesReuse this content More

New generation of candidates stakes claim to Democratic party’s future The leadership Washington may be geriatric but key victories for younger suggest see a generational change is under wayWe are in the early hours of Wednesday morning, 6 November 2024, and after a nail-biting night two men are preparing to give their respective victory and concession speeches in the US presidential election. One of the men is days away from his 82nd birthday, the other is 78.The prospect of a possible rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in two years’ time is instilling trepidation in both main parties. It is not just the political perils that go with either individual, it’s also the simple matter of their age.Young voters hailed as key to Democratic successes in midtermsRead moreWhat happened to the America of the new world, the young country?But in the wake of this week’s midterm elections there is a stirring in the air. The Democratic party may remain heavily dominated by the old guard – the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, is 82 and the top senator, Chuck Schumer, is 69 – yet there are strong signs of fresh beginnings.From the first openly lesbian governors in the US and first Black governor of Maryland, to the first Gen Z member of Congress, as well as battle-hardened young politicians in critical swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, a new slate of Democratic leaders is coming into view after Tuesday’s elections. They may be too new to reshape the 2024 presidential race, but they carry much promise for the years to come.“There’s a generational change happening of the kind you see every few decades,” said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist who has worked on state and congressional campaigns. “A younger generation is emerging with different ideas who aren’t necessarily wedded to the old way of doing things.”It is perhaps no coincidence that several of the names garnering attention are to be found in battleground states where their political skills and resilience have been put to the test. In Michigan, which has become a frontline state in the struggle between liberal versus Maga politics, Gretchen Whitmer handily won a double-digit re-election in her gubernatorial race against Tudor Dixon, an election denier.Whitmer, 51, proved herself not only adept at fending off election subversion misinformation in a midwestern state, but she also withstood the pressures of the kidnap plot against her which led to last month’s convictions of three anti-government plotters. “After two terms as governor, Whitmer is going to be well placed for a move on to the national stage,” Trippi said.Another breeding ground for the new Democratic leaders is Pennsylvania, which has also been on the frontlines of the Maga wars. John Fetterman, 53, was widely written off by conservative pundits after his televised debate in the race for a US Senate seat with his Trump-endorsed opponent, Mehmet Oz, who had ridiculed him for his speech impediment caused by a stroke in May that almost killed him.Fetterman survived all that opprobrium to frame a classic Pennsylvania story: his rise from small-town mayor to US senator-elect. He still has a mountain to climb in his physical recovery, but he is clearly now a fixture in national politics.Pennsylvania has spawned other fresh Democratic faces to watch: Josh Shapiro, 49, has become the commonwealth’s governor-elect, managing to mobilise voters by warning of the threat to democracy posed by his election-denying opponent.Then there is Summer Lee, 34, the first Black woman to be sent to Congress from the state. “We fought, we built coalitions, we brought people together,” she said at her victory party.The new generation contains a striking proportion of prominent African American politicians. Record numbers of Black women and men stood for elected office in 2022, and the impact is starting to show.The Collective Pac, which aims to increase Black representation in elected positions, endorsed 252 Black candidates across the country this cycle. It pumped more than $1m into supporting those campaigns, with 117 so far winning.“We are seeing a new wave of everyday folks who are bringing their lived experiences to the table and becoming decision-makers in their communities by being in public office. That’s here to stay,” said Stephanie Brown James, The Collective’s co-founder and senior adviser.For James, one of the standout qualities of the next generation of Black leaders is that several of them are first-time candidates with no prior political experience. That goes for Wes Moore, 43, now about to become Maryland’s first African American governor, a Rhodes scholar whose career has ranged from investment banker and TV producer to head of the anti-poverty non-profit the Robin Hood Foundation.“Wes Moore, Summer Lee – they have real-world experiences that are greatly going to contribute to the dialogue around what policies are necessary to help move people forward,” James said.Some of the most eagerly followed Black politicians fell at the ballot box this week, including Stacey Abrams, 48, in Georgia’s gubernatorial race and Mandela Barnes, 35, running for a US Senate seat in Wisconsin. Neither should be written off, however, given the excitement they brought to their contests and the extent to which they have transformed their states by increasing Democratic turnout.Across the country, other stars are rising. Gavin Newsom found re-election as California’s governor a breeze on Tuesday night, which bodes well as and when he decides to indulge any national ambitions.Maura Healey in Massachusetts and Tina Kotek in Oregon will share the distinction of becoming the first openly lesbian governors of their states.Newsom, Healey and Kotek are all in their 50s. But they had better watch their backs – a much younger cohort is on the move.Maxwell Frost, an Afro-Cuban progressive from Florida, was elected the first Gen Z member of Congress on Tuesday night.He is 25. Electoral law prohibits anyone running for president until they are 35 – which falls rather neatly for Frost who will turn 35 in the presidential election year of 2032.TopicsDemocratsUS politicsUS midterm elections 2022featuresReuse this content More

Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez wins key House seat in Washington stateGluesenkamp Perez’s win over Trump-backed far-right candidate Joe Kent helps buoy party hopes of keeping a majority in the House

US midterm election results – live
Democrats have won a second key House race in Washington state – an open seat in a conservative region that long evaded the party.Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, an auto-shop owner who describes herself as an independent-minded Democrat, pulled off a victory against Joe Kent, a far-right “America First” ex-Green Beret who was endorsed by former president Donald Trump, in south-west Washington’s third congressional district on Saturday.Combined with Rep Kim Schrier’s reelection to what Democrats feared was a vulnerable seat, Gluesenkamp Perez’s victory helped buoy party hopes of keeping a majority in the House.Democrats retain control of Senate after crucial victory in NevadaRead more“I am humbled and honored by the vote of confidence the people of South-west Washington have put in me and my campaign,“ Gluesenkamp Perez said in a statement.The third district, which narrowly voted for Trump in 2020, had been represented for more than a decade by Republican Rep Jaime Herrera Beutler. But she failed to make it through the state’s top-two primary after angering conservatives with her vote to impeach Trump after the attack on the US Capitol by his supporters.Schrier survived a challenge from Republican Matt Larkin to win a third term in the eighth district, which stretches from Seattle’s wealthy eastern ex-urbs across the Cascade Mountains to the orchard country of central Washington. Schrier, a pediatrician, in 2018 became the first Democrat to win the seat since its creation in the early 1980s.“I don’t know which party will control Congress, but it’s races like mine – the ones that are sitting on a razor’s edge – that flip one way or another,” Schrier told the Associated Press. “If more of them flip in this direction, that may mean we have the majority and set the agenda.”By flipping the third district, which Democrats had not held since former rep Brian Baird retired in 2010, the party will now have eight of Washington’s 10 congressional seats. Herrera Beutler won 22% of the vote in the primary, and how her voters split between Gluesenkamp Perez and Kent may have been the deciding factor in the race.Gluesenkamp Perez, who co-owns an auto shop with her husband just across the Columbia River in Portland, Oregon, said that as a small business owner who lives in a rural part of the district, she was more in line with voters than Kent, who repeatedly had to explain his connections to rightwing extremists.Survivor winner Nick Wilson secures seat in Kentucky legislatureRead moreGluesenkamp Perez supports abortion access and policies to counter climate change, but also described herself as a gun owner who opposes an assault rifle ban, though she does support raising the age of purchase for such guns to 21. She wouldn’t be a “typical Democrat” in Congress, she said.Kent, a former Green Beret who is a regular on conservative cable and podcasts, has called for the impeachment of president Joe Biden and an investigation into the 2020 election. He’s also railed against Covid-19 shutdowns and vaccine mandates and has called to defund the FBI after the search on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home for classified documents.In the eighth district, Schrier stressed results she has achieved, including helping to secure money for road projects, rural broadband access and police body cameras. She also emphasized that as the only female doctor in Congress who supports abortion rights, she’s a bulwark against any Republican efforts to restrict abortion nationally after the US supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade. She called Larkin’s opposition to abortion rights disqualifying.Larkin is a lawyer and former Washington attorney general candidate who works for his family’s company, which makes parts for water pipes. Unlike more extreme Republican candidates, Larkin says Biden was legitimately elected, though he also notes that many people disagree and are frustrated about it. TopicsUS midterm elections 2022Washington stateHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsDemocratsRepublicansDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

Catherine Cortez Masto wins Nevada Senate race to hold Democrat seatThe race was among the tightest in the country and saw record spending with the incumbent senator nearly beaten

US midterm election results – live
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.Democrats retain control of Senate after crucial victory in NevadaRead moreCortez Masto, America’s first Latina senator, beat out Adam Laxalt, a former Nevada attorney general who aided in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to the Associated Press.The race was among the tightest in the country and saw record spending with $158m on TV ads, $15m raised for Laxalt and $52m for Cortez Masto. The contest was crucial for Democrats to maintain control of the Senate, along with races in Pennsylvania and Arizona Democrat wins.Nevada’s vote count took several days partly because of the mail voting system created by the state Legislature in 2020 that requires counties to accept ballots postmarked by election day if they arrive up to four days later. Laxalt had an early lead that dwindled after late-counted ballots came in from the state’s population centers in Las Vegas and Reno. High-profile Democrats had joined efforts to re-elect Cortez Masto in recent days, with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama making appearances with the senator. Cortez Masto also had the backing of 14 members of Laxalt’s family, who said she “possesses a set of qualities that clearly speak of what we like to call ‘Nevada grit’”.Democrats had dialed up efforts to reach voters with the state party contacting thousands of voters, and the local culinary union – which backed Democratic candidates – knocking on 1m doors in the state of 3 million people.Associated Press contributed to this reportTopicsUS midterm elections 2022US SenateNevadaUS politicsDemocratsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More