US Politics

North Carolina sheriff who quit after racist remarks gets re-elected within weeksJody Greene resigned on 24 October after local prosecutors filed petition to remove him A North Carolina sheriff who resigned in late October following revelations he made racist remarks about Black employees will get his job back after voters re-elected him on Tuesday.Jody Greene stepped down as sheriff of Columbus county on 24 October, after the local district attorney filed a petition to remove him over “highly inappropriate and racially charged statements” made about Black employees in 2019.But Greene moved forward with his re-election campaign. After polls closed, he had more than 10,000 votes while his opponent, Jason Soles, had fewer than 8,500, according to unofficial results.Greene is therefore gearing up to retake an office he first won in November 2018 despite a scandal other candidates may not have survived and which provided one of the more bizarre stories to come out of elections held across the US this week.The controversy erupted in earnest when the district attorney, Jon David, filed court documents in October revealing that his office had obtained an audio recording from the state investigations bureau of a phone call involving Greene. The audio had leaked online in late September.The Democrats’ midterms performance shows how Trump – and his imitators – can be beaten | Jonathan FreedlandRead morePublished by the local NBC news affiliate, WECT, those documents said that Greene was suspended at the time of the call amid an investigation into whether he lived in his jurisdiction as required.The sheriff was convinced he was in trouble because of “a leak in his office” and thought Black employees were plotting to undermine him.“I’m sick of these Black bastards – I’m gonna clean house and be done with it,” Greene said, according to a call transcript cited in the documents from David’s office. “They’re gone. I’m telling you.”Greene called those he suspected of getting him in trouble “stupid” and expressed a willingness to “fire every motherfucker out there” if necessary.Davis’s office said in court records at least one Black employee had been fired after Greene’s remarks were recorded. On 4 October, the district attorney filed a petition seeking to remove Greene from office. An amendment attached to that petition on 20 October said Greene had engaged in sex with a detective under his command, along with other instances of alleged corruption and misconduct.That amendment noted that Soles, the other candidate in Tuesday’s race and a captain on Greene’s staff in 2019, recorded the racist rant. He began recording the call after Greene mentioned hating “a Black Democrat”, the amendment said.Soles said in a statement under oath that he did not edit the recording. Greene resigned, apologizing for the remarks and his actions and describing “a humbling experience”.“I am sincerely sorry for the disrespectful and insensitive words that have offended my friends, colleagues and fellow citizens,” Greene said. “I ask for forgiveness.”Nonetheless, Greene maintained that the allegations were false, “politically motivated” and aimed at inciting “racial division”. He asked voters to re-elect him and promised to make the county – with a population of about 50,000 – “better and safer” through his office.Civic groups excoriated Greene. The North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association said he resigned from the organization over the remarks, which “shock the conscience”. The state chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP released a joint statement saying Columbus county deserved better, CBS News reported.After securing another term, Greene posted on Facebook that the campaign was “extremely stressful” but thanked voters for putting him back in office.“I am the sheriff for everyone no matter race, color, religion, sex orientation or national origin,” he said.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022North CarolinaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

The Democrats’ midterms performance shows how Trump – and his imitators – can be beatenJonathan FreedlandJoe Biden’s party abandoned timidity and neutered the Republican right. Labour should take heed Politics has brought so much angst in recent years that when hope comes along we should savour it. This week delivered a dollop of unexpectedly good news from the US, news that should encourage, and perhaps instruct, those who oppose the menace of nationalist populism the world over – even here in Britain.True, the struggle against that danger has enjoyed mixed fortunes this autumn. Jair Bolsonaro was ejected in Brazil, only for an Israeli election to seal the comeback of Benjamin Netanyahu two days later. But the message from Tuesday’s US midterms is clear: populists can be defeated.American voters had made that point two years ago, when they showed Donald Trump the door, but few thought they would do it again this time. The talk was of a Republican “red wave”, with both precedent and polls pointing to heavy losses for an incumbent Democratic party saddled with rising inflation and an unpopular president. This was not just a media invention: with only the odd exception, senior Democrats were braced for defeat. Instead, the party won several of the closest Senate races and kept losses in the House of Representatives so low that even if Republicans do take eventual control of that body – the votes are still being counted – it will not be with the emphatic majority they assumed.It turns out that, even when Trump himself is not on the ballot, sufficient numbers of Americans will reject Trumpist candidates who have plunged deep into unhinged conspiracy theory and contempt for democracy, and they will defend their rights. There are lessons to learn here, for Democrats looking to 2024 most obviously, but also for those beyond the US battling their own versions of the Trumpist peril.A first takeaway is that such an effort requires great discipline. The anti-Netanyahu forces in Israel lacked it: had several small opposition parties put aside their differences and formed alliances, they would have won enough seats to deprive the former PM of a governing majority. As it was, two of those parties narrowly failed to clear the electoral threshold to enter parliament, leaving Netanyahu smiling.The Democrats were much more focused, exhibiting “an incredible amount of message discipline”, as the party strategist David Shor put it to me, sticking to those issues where the American public agree with them and avoiding those where they are out of step. They refused to be drawn on to the terrain where Republicans wanted to fight – even leftwing candidates distanced themselves from the “defund the police” slogan – digging in instead on turf where Democrats enjoy public support, whether that be jobs, healthcare or abortion rights. The latter issue was especially galvanising, following the supreme court’s summer decision to overturn Roe v Wade and its constitutional protection of a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy.But Democrats also made a case that some feared would bring no electoral reward. They pressed the argument that Trumpist Republicans posed a threat to democracy itself, reminding voters that this was the first election since the attempted insurrection of 6 January 2021, an event that too many Republicans excused and for which all but a handful refused to hold the former president accountable. Above all, Democrats cast as dangerously extreme the majority of Republicans who perpetuate Trump’s big lie that the election of 2020 was stolen.Plenty of Democrats worried that was a mistake, fretting when Joe Biden made democracy the theme of his last major pre-election address. This, they warned, was too abstract an issue, of grave concern to liberal elites – to the university seminar rooms and opinion pages – but a luxury consideration for voters preoccupied with the cost of petrol. And yet the argument cut through. While those Republicans who had publicly resisted the big lie – Georgia’s governor, for example – won easily, Trumpist election-deniers fared especially badly, losing winnable contests in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Arizona. Moderate might be a dirty word to the Republican faithful, but extremist is a toxic label to the wider electorate. Strikingly, 56% of those American voters who describe themselves as moderate voted for Democrats.There is encouragement here for anti-populists the world over. Of course, each context is different and few nations will have witnessed proof of the lethal danger posed by nationalist populism as vividly undeniable as the attempted coup of 6 January. Nevertheless, the Democrats’ experience suggests one can be too wary of issues lazily dismissed as of concern solely to a liberal elite. In Britain, Labour has multiple reasons for steering clear of Brexit, but among the weakest is the notion that it’s of interest only to the “remoaner” chattering classes. Brexit is having an impact on people’s jobs, businesses, education, bills and basic freedom to move. In a way, it has more practical relevance to Britons’ daily lives than the question of democracy has to Americans’. And yet the opposition is shy of touching it. This week’s Democratic successes make a case for the abandonment of such timidity. The Democrats were brave, and it paid off.There’s more advice contained in the US results. For any party of progress serious about winning, the support of women matters enormously: exit polls confirmed that abortion rights trailed just a few points behind inflation as the issue of greatest concern to voters and, as one analyst noted: “Abortion voters supported Democrats by a larger margin than inflation voters supported Republicans.” Unsurprisingly, those “abortion voters” included more women than men.Young voters were crucial, too. While the over-45s favoured Republicans, the under-30s backed the Democrats by a staggering 28-point margin. Biden’s moves to shrink student debt deserve some credit for that. And, as always, minorities were an essential part of the Democratic coalition, though the drift rightward of Hispanic voters – most noticeably in Florida, where they helped Ron DeSantis win a landslide – is a warning to progressive parties everywhere that they cannot take the support of minority communities for granted. They have to earn it, demonstrating that they understand – and celebrate – the aspiration to move up and out as well as any conservative.So no shortage of lessons from America. Of course, the differences between there and everywhere else are obvious and nothing reads across precisely. Except for one thing. What the US election proved once more is that the conventional wisdom is often wrong, that fatalism is always wrong – and that, every now and then, politics can turn out right.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist. Listen to his Politics Weekly America podcast here
TopicsUS midterm elections 2022OpinionUS politicsRepublicansDemocratscommentReuse this content More

Donald Trump was not on the ballot for the 2022 US midterms. But the former president’s shadow still falls heavily across American politics and he has done all he can to keep it that way. His attempt to both set the political agenda for 2022 and to endorse his style of candidates appears to have had a profound impact on this year’s ballots and has implications for the next presidential election in 2024.

The former president is reported to be weighing up whether to launch his bid for the 2024 election. He previously said he would announce his decision on Tuesday November 15. But after the poor showing of the slate of candidates he had enthusiastically endorsed ahead of the midterms, many political analysts are speculating that he might now put his ambitions on hold.

Trump is taking a big share of the blame for the failure of the Republican Party to capitalise on the highest inflation figures in 40 years, America’s rising murder rate, and what Republicans’ perceive as Joe Biden’s underperformance as president.

Many commentators are asking whether the failure of the expected GOP “red wave” might also mark a passing of the high watermark for the political fortunes of the 45th president. Or, to put it another way, has America passed “peak Trump”?

Midterm elections are traditionally used to show disapproval of the incumbent president. Given that the Democrats held the House by just five votes and the Senate was evenly split, the Republicans were confident of a crushing victory.

Instead, what transpired was one of the best midterm election results for a sitting Democratic president in decades. This will inevitably give Republicans pause to think. The answer will not be difficult to deduce.

Devotion: Trump fans at a rally for Marco Rubio in Miami, Florida.
EPA-EFE/Cristobal Herrerea-Ulashkevich

While Trump inspires a cult-like adulation from around 15% of the population, his brand of “America first” nationalism has never commanded majority support. Indeed in the 2016 presidential election, the 2018 midterms and again in the 2020 election, the Democrats consistently won the popular vote – even though that popularity did not always translate into power.

But in the 2022 midterms, Trump’s negative impact on the result was clear. In the run-up to the vote on November 9, Trump endorsed a slate of candidates. These were chosen not on their political experience, but on their loyalty to him and his unfounded claim that the 2020 election was stolen. These candidates underperformed on a national basis, robbing the Republicans of potentially winnable seats in a number of swing states.

This happened in Pennsylvania where out-of-state TV doctor Mehmet Oz lost to the Democrats by 8%, and in Georgia where Hershel Walker also underperformed. The latter case is particularly illuminating. Walker, a former football star, managed just 48% of the vote against longtime incumbent Raphael Warnock and faces a runoff election in December. Meanwhile, the non-Trumpian mainstream Republican governor, Brian Kemp, was reelected by a margin of more than seven points.

What this suggests is a willingness among many voters to reject Trumpian extremism without necessarily abandoning the whole Republican ticket. This pattern was repeated nationally, as Trump-endorsed candidates underperformed compared to mainstream Republicans.

The most extreme election deniers did worst of all. Doug Mastriano – who reportedly spent thousands of dollars chartering buses to ferry people to Washington DC on January 6 2020 when the Capitol riot occurred – was beaten by 14 points in his bid for Pennsylvania governor. Daniel Cox – who promised he would audit the 2020 election if he were elected – was beaten by 24 points in the Maryland gubernatorial race.

Where Trump-endorsed candidates did win – such as JD Vance in Ohio – they did so by distancing themselves from their patron’s more extreme positions. It appears that many swing voters and moderate Republicans actually heeded Joe Biden’s call to reject candidates who posed a threat to the proper working of US democracy.

Next generation GOP: Florida governor Ron DeSantis is reportedly eyeing a tilt at the 2024 presidential election.
EPA-EFE/Cristobal Herrerea-Ulashkevich

The DeSantis factor

Another key takeaway from the midterms with implications for the Trump’s future has been the success of his former protege, now rival, Ron DeSantis. His reelection as governor by nearly 20 points in what is now Trump’s home state of Florida was a result that defied the national trend.

Significantly, DeSantis rejected Trump’s election denialism and abortion extremism, running instead on the economy, immigration and crime. He now has a clear power base from which to launch a bid for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2024 if he so chooses.

While his brand of white Christian nationalism embraces much of the cultural conservativism of the America first movement, DeSantis is careful to avoid its more extreme positions. Importantly, he also lacks his former mentor’s personal baggage and casual bigotry. Of his generation of republicans, DeSantis is the most dynamic and appears well placed to step up to the national level and present his version of populist conservatism in a less alienating and antagonising form than Trump.

Read more:
Ron DeSantis: the Florida governor who may steal the Republican nomination from under his mentor Donald Trump’s nose

Where now for the GOP?

The lessons of the midterms for the GOP are fairly clear to see, even if they are difficult to act upon. Although Trump remains extravagantly popular with his base, the 2022 result shows that even many Republicans would rather vote for alternative candidates than Trump and his soundalikes. And, with the emergence of DeSantis, the GOP has the chance to embrace a candidate with a proven electoral record.

The verdict of the American electorate from these elections is that the moment of “peak Trump” has indeed passed. It only remains for the Republican party to go through the painful process of removing Trump from his grip of the Grand Old Party. More

‘It’s powerful’: how John Fetterman’s hoodie won the popular vote in PennsylvaniaEven as detractors portrayed him as a ‘bum’, senator-elect’s clothing summed up beliefs, says sociologist By his own admission, Pennsylvania’s new senator-elect, John Fetterman, does not look like “a typical politician”.Just over 6ft 8in with a goatee, tattoos on his forearms and a strong tendency toward workwear (for his official portrait, he chose to sit in a creased, grey Dickies camp shirt in front of the US flag), Fetterman has been described as the state’s first “workwear senator” as well as “a dude in shorts”.Yet in spite of this – or perhaps because of it – he broke the Republican grip on Pennsylvania’s white working-class vote while wearing a black Carhartt hoodie, a garment “that isn’t fancy, is well made, and crucially will last – all qualities that a politician like Fetterman probably wants to convey in what he’s wearing”, says Erynn Masi de Casanova, professor of Sociology at the University of Cincinnati and author of Buttoned Up: Clothing, Conformity, and White-Collar Masculinity. “Put simply, this hoodie is an easy way to read what he seems to stand for”.Fetterman’s unreconstructed wardrobe – which also includes a lime green neck gaiter, indigo Levi’s 501s, oversize board shorts and, in a strange quirk, a pair of Maison Margiela side-zip boots that cost several hundred dollars – has become something of a talking point since the former mayor entered US politics.Hailed as a style icon by GQ in 2020 while still lieutenant governor, he responded on Twitter that he had “negative fashion sense”. Pressed for further comment, he wrote a blog on Medium in which he stated: “I do not look like a typical politician, nor do I look like a typical person” – alluding to his height – before explaining why he has tattoos: on his left arm is 15104, Braddock’s zip code, the mining town where he was previously mayor, and on the right are the dates of five murders committed in the town since his election.But it’s the hoodie that has dominated the narrative. Casanova says: “It’s strange that we continue to imbue an item that almost everyone has in their closet with so much meaning.” Still, context is everything. Rishi Sunak was mocked by most of the British media for wearing a grey Everlane hoodie (roughly the same price as Carhartt, though more gym-friendly) at his desk, while in 2019, the Québec Solidaire politician Catherine Dorion was so derided for wearing an orange hoodie in the legislative chamber that she had to leave the room. But since none of the above wore theirs to cast their vote, campaign or even to meet President Biden, in wearing one, Fetterman has “brought a certain visibility to himself”, says Casanova.The fact it’s from Carhartt only adds to its visibility. Originally based in Detroit, Carhartt began making workwear, often triple-stitched for durability, for workers in labour-intensive industries during the great depression. Today, the label’s core customers are split between hipsters and these blue-collar workers. Fetterman may have got a master’s degree at Harvard, but he comes from a mining town; in wearing a Carhartt hoodie, however authentic this choice may be – “and I think it really is what he wears rather than a costume”, says Casanova – he’s recognisable to many of the people who vote for him, and is capitalising on that. In the run-up to the midterms, his Republican opponent, Dr Mehmet Oz, described Fetterman as a “basement bum”. When Fetterman retaliated by mocking Oz’s “Gucci loafers” for being out of touch, the post went viral.Hoodies like Fetterman’s are 10-a-penny across the western world, yet the media climate still dictates that it is unusual for a politician to wear one. “Pennsylvania is its own unique thing with a very strong history of labour, which is more important than the costume,” says the US political commentator Luke O’Neil. Fetterman is not unaware that he is conferring the dignity of blue collar workwear on to the act of politics, yet as O’Neil says, he’s also “just some guy wearing what feels comfortable”.Hoodies are the final bastion in the gradual casualisation of political attire, which began when JFK eschewed a hat for his 1961 inaugural address and was last deployed when Barack Obama rolled up his sleeves to sit with diners on the campaign trail. In his Medium post, Fetterman alluded to the fact that he lacked “the political metaphorical sleeves to roll up – all I ever wear are short-sleeve work shirts because hard work is the only way to build our communities back up”.What happens to his wardrobe if Fetterman progresses remains to be seen. In the House of Representatives, men must wear a coat and tie at all times while Congress is in session. Fetterman owns a suit – most publicly worn when he was sworn in as lieutenant governor in 2019 – but insists that he mostly wears it at Halloween.What politicians wear has the power to invent and even sustain their identity, and Fetterman’s hoodie is a case in point. “If that means it’s pathologised for some nefarious reason by his critics then it’s all the more powerful”, says Casanova. “It’s clearly working for him, though, so he’ll probably be laughing all the way to the Senate.”TopicsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

AnalysisYoung voters hailed as key to Democratic successes in midtermsErum SalamThe youth vote was the highest in almost three decades, defying conventional wisdom about 18-29 demographic
US midterms 2022 – follow live
US midterms results tracker The 2022 midterm election delivered surprising results, with Democrats maintaining more House seats than projected and a Republican “red wave” failing to materialize. As the forces driving these come into focus, one group proved to be key: young voters.While final figures are still pouring in, it is estimated that 27% of young voters aged 18-29 cast a ballot in 2022, making this the midterm election with the second highest youth voter turnout in almost three decades, after 2018. In some key battleground states, turnout was even higher, at 31%, and support for Democratic candidates was roughly over 60%, driven in large part by the fight for abortion rights after the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade.Democrats breathe a sigh of relief but their troubles are far from overRead moreAn Edison Research National Election Pool exit poll showed that 18-29s were the only age group in which a strong majority supported Democrats. Support for Democrats was even higher among Black youth at 89% and Latino youth at 68%.It is a trend that continues from the 2018 and 2020 elections, where youth voter turnout – historically perceived as low – surged and proved to be a crucial voting bloc, particularly for Democrats. But some young voters struggled to cast their ballot – raising questions about the particular hurdles this group faces to have a voice in elections.“There’s very much a popular belief that young voters are apathetic, and actually the data shows that it’s quite the opposite. This is the most politically engaged cohort of young voters in American history – even higher than in the 1960s in the United States,” said Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, president of NextGen, a progressive youth advocacy non-profit and political action committee.“They’re voting more. They’re participating in protests. They are more avid readers of politics and social issues. So I think that that surprises a lot of people about young voters.”This sentiment couldn’t be more apparent than in Florida’s 10th district, where the US has found its first Gen-Z member of Congress in 25-year-old Maxwell Frost.“I am Congressman-Elect Maxwell Alejandro Frost and I will be the first member of Generation-Z in the United States Congress. WE MADE HISTORY!!! Don’t count young people out,” the young politician wrote on Twitter shortly after his win.Ramirez said that Democrats also have the youth to thank for key Senate race victories. “In Pennsylvania, we contacted 2.1 million young eligible voters, [which is] nine out of 10 young voters in that state. John Fetterman is the new senator of Pennsylvania because of young voters.”According to exit polls, 70% of young voters in the state turned out for Fetterman, a historically high percentage for Democrats in Pennsylvania.College voters are a key subset of that youth vote.On Tuesday, there was a barrage of images on social media of lengthy lines formed at university polling sites. At the University of Michigan, some students waited for six hours to vote, casting their ballot at 2am. Michigan allows for same-day voter registration, which is popular with young voters. THIS IS HUGE! The line of students at Texas State University voting this morning on Election Day is out the door and wrapped around the entire building!Don’t ever say young people don’t vote. pic.twitter.com/sLUkeS7Ax6— NextGen America (@NextGenAmerica) November 8, 2022In Texas, one of the most difficult states to cast a ballot, and where student IDs are not an acceptable form of identification, accounts emerged of students still waiting in line to vote after polls officially closed at 7pm Central time at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas State University in San Marcos.But while college students can be motivated to vote, they often face significant obstacles. In the small town of College Station, halfway between Houston and Austin, Texas A&M University students were denied an early voting polling site on campus altogether by Brazos county officials.Before the 2022 midterm elections, the officials decided to remove the on-campus Memorial Student Center early voting site used in the 2020 election, citing low voter turnout at that location. But the Texas Tribune reported that Texas A&M’s Memorial Student Center polling site had the second highest number of early voters in the 2018 and 2020 general elections in the county.Texas A&M student Kristina Samuel, 21, is the president of her school’s chapter of Move (Mobilize. Organize. Vote. Empower.), the non-partisan and non-profit organization aimed at increasing voter turnout among young Texans. She told the Guardian that having an early voting polling site on college campuses was “a no-brainer”.“We have been demanding a second on-campus polling location for years, so the fact that we got the only polling location taken away from us for early voting, especially as our student population has exponentially been growing and we have become an HSI (Hispanic-serving institution) this year has made no logical sense,” she said.Samuel and her organization consulted election lawyers and invoked the Texas election code in order to make their case to county commissioners for an on-campus early voting location. While their efforts have yet to pay off, her age cohort still showed up in great numbers.One reason youth voter turnout was surprising to many in this election is because traditional polling failed to accurately capture the demographic. Rather than investing in phone banking and television advertising, Ramirez said it was more effective to gauge youth political opinion on social media and dating apps like Bumble and Tinder, which her organization does.Before the next election, you might want to find a better way to poll anyone under the age of 30 since they would rather pick up a pinless grenade than a call from an unknown number.— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) November 9, 2022
“We didn’t pay for one TV ad to reach young people. We did have streaming ads, like on Hulu, but on traditional TV, we had zero ads. We’ve never done a TV ad, and we never will do a TV ad,” she said.Without the major turnout of younger voters, we would have seen a very different outcome in last night’s elections. But now I am asking the younger generations: continue to stay engaged in the struggle. We have an enormous amount of work ahead of us. pic.twitter.com/JS8ks6SwzH— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) November 9, 2022
As the power of the youth turnout this election season becomes increasingly clear, Democratic politicians offered their gratitude to the youth for showing up in such large numbers.“I especially want to thank the young people of this nation, whom I’m told, I haven’t seen the numbers, voted in historic numbers again, just as they did two years ago. They voted to continue addressing the climate crisis, gun violence, their personal rights and freedoms, and the student debt relief,” said President Joe Biden.Senator Bernie Sanders thanked young voters on Twitter and asked them to remain politically engaged.“Without the major turnout of younger voters, we would have seen a very different outcome in last night’s elections. But now I am asking the younger generations: continue to stay engaged in the struggle. We have an enormous amount of work ahead of us,” he said.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022US politicsRepublicansDemocratsanalysisReuse this content More

All eyes on Nevada and Arizona as Senate control hangs in balanceCounting continues in key Senate battlegrounds, while Republicans look on course for slim majority in House

US midterm elections results 2022 – live
The eyes of the political world remained focused on Arizona and Nevada on Friday, where hundreds of thousands of uncounted votes held the key to control of the US Senate, three days after Americans cast their final ballots in midterm elections.The delay in districts such as Arizona’s Maricopa county, which includes Phoenix, is attributed to the record number of ballots cast on Tuesday. Election officials had estimated they would have a tally by Friday but now say they will count through the weekend.In Nevada, election officials had estimated a finish by Friday but, again, the high number of ballots cast means counting will continue through next week. However, a winner could be called as soon as any candidate is judged to have passed a majority threshold.Why is the midterm vote count taking so long in some US states?Read moreIf Democrats or Republicans can capture a majority by sweeping the contests in both states, it will settle control of the Senate. A split, however, would transform a 6 December runoff Senate election in Georgia between incumbent Democratic senator Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker into a proxy battle for the chamber, which among other powers holds sway over Joe Biden’s judicial appointments.Meanwhile, Republicans were slowly inching closer to wresting control of the House of Representatives from Biden’s Democrats, which would in effect give them veto power over his legislative agenda, allow them to launch investigations into his administration and have greater control over the budget.Biden conceded on Thursday that Democrats face long odds to keep control of the House.“It’s still alive. It’s still alive. But it’s like drawing an inside straight,” Biden said, using a poker term for an unpromising situation.Biden said he had spoken to the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, a day earlier, after an upbeat press conference at the White House.“I said: ‘If you win the majority, congratulations,’” Biden recalled, in a fine distinction after McCarthy told Fox News that the president had congratulated him on winning a majority.Republicans had secured at least 211 of the 218 House seats they need for a majority, Edison Research projected late on Thursday, while Democrats had won 197. That left 27 races yet to be determined, including a number of close contests.The Republican House leader, Kevin McCarthy, has already announced his intention to run for speaker if Republicans win, an outcome he described as inevitable on Wednesday.But his path could be blocked by a handful of conservative Republicans known as the Freedom Caucus. McCarthy needs 218 votes, so fewer than a dozen caucus members have power to block his path.US midterm elections 2022: live resultsRead more“No one currently has 218” votes, Chip Roy of Texas told NBC News as he emerged from a private Freedom Caucus meeting.Tuesday’s results fell far short of the sweeping “red wave” that Republicans had expected, despite Biden’s anaemic approval ratings and deep voter frustration over inflation.Democrats portrayed Republicans as extremist, pointing to the supreme court’s decision to eliminate a nationwide right to abortion and the hundreds of Republican nominees who promoted former president Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent.Some of Trump’s most high-profile endorsed candidates lost pivotal races on Tuesday, marring his status as Republican kingmaker and leading several Republicans to blame his divisive brand for the party’s disappointing performance.The outcome may increase the chances that the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, who routed his Democratic challenger on Tuesday, opts to run for the 2024 presidential nomination. While Trump has not officially launched a third White House campaign, the former president has strongly suggested he will do so and has said he will make a “special announcement” at his Florida club on Tuesday.Trump lambasted DeSantis in a statement on Thursday, taking credit for the governor’s political rise, while attacking critics on his social media site, Truth Social.Even a narrow Republican House majority would be able to demand concessions in exchange for votes on key issue such as raising the nation’s borrowing limit. But with few votes to spare, McCarthy might struggle to hold his caucus together – particularly the hard-right faction that is largely aligned with Trump and has little interest in compromise.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022US politicsRepublicansDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

We were told abortion wasn’t an important election issue. How wrong that wasMoira DoneganPro-choice anger propelled Democratic candidates, delivered decisive victories in four state referenda on abortion, and blocked the brunt of what was supposed to be a wipeout We were told that abortion would not be a major issue in the midterm elections. Over the past weeks, pundits and political strategists alike suggested that the outrage over the Dobbs decision had been momentary, capricious; that by election day, women would forget. They insisted that the surge in new voter registrations among women was a fluke, or irrelevant.American voters just sent a crystal-clear message: they believe in abortion rights | Jill FilipovicRead moreAhead of the election, it became conventional wisdom among a kind of self-serious, mostly male political commentator to insist that not only were the Democrats doomed, they had doomed themselves, specifically, by talking about abortion too much. The party had dragged itself down with a social issue that was ultimately not very important, we were told. The Democrats were going to lose, and it was going to be because they had spent too much time catering to the flighty and unserious demands of feminists.Instead, abortion rights proved a hugely motivating force for voters in Tuesday’s midterms. A still-potent anger at the Dobbs decision drove women and young people to the polls, propelled the most vocally pro-choice Democratic candidates to victory, delivered decisive wins for abortion-rights advocates in every state referendum on the issue, and helped to dramatically improve the Democrats’ performance in what was supposed to be a “bloodbath” election favoring Republicans.We now head into 2023 with Democrats holding onto a chance to keep the Senate; if they lose the House, they will only lose it by a handful of seats. There was no bloodbath; there was barely a paper cut. Abortion rights, and the women voters who wanted to defend them, are a big part of why.None of this was what was supposed to happen. To hear the Republicans tell it, they didn’t think that the Dobbs decision would cost them at all in this year’s midterms. As recently as last week, party strategists and rightwing pundits were projecting wild confidence, assuring writers like the New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells that the post-Dobbs moment of anger and energy that animated Democratic voters had passed – and that it had not dimmed Republican prospects.“In the end, Republicans didn’t find a way through the political fact that many of the voters they wanted to win were against them on abortion so much as wait it out,” Wallace-Wells wrote last Friday, channeling the shrugging attitude toward the abortion issue that had been conveyed to him by Republican insiders. “They simply absorbed the political hit and moved on.”Even the polling, which throughout the summer and early fall suggested that abortion remained a motivating issue for voters, was explained away, dismissed as a mere “blue mirage”. One Republican strategist hypothesized that Democrats, consumed with emotionalism, were answering their telephones more often, in the hope of being polled. “Answering a political poll itself became a kind of expression of political identity.”Others, like the Washington Examiner’s David Keene, claimed that the large numbers of women voters claiming that abortion would affect their vote were in fact women who were anti-abortion, who would enthusiastically vote to support abortion bans. In retrospect, of course, this seems like risible wishful thinking by Republicans, the kind of thing one can only believe if you live in a deep Republican partisan bubble, and don’t often talk to women. Or maybe it was the kind of bluster that’s meant to intimidate political opponents into thinking that the Republicans were more confident ahead of Tuesday’s elections than they really were.But if Republicans were just bluffing when they said that they didn’t think abortion rights would impact the midterms, many prominent Democrats seem to have believed them. In the weeks ahead of the vote, a series of highly visible party insiders and off-the record insider sources were preemptively blaming the Democrats’ anticipated loss on their supposed overfocus on abortion.Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders wrote a column entitled “Democrats shouldn’t focus only on abortion in the midterms. That’s a mistake”. Sanders’ piece denounced the party’s supposed overfocus on abortion as both politically unwise and morally treacherous. “While the abortion issue must remain on the front burner, it would be political malpractice for Democrats to ignore the state of the economy.”This sentiment was not confined to Sanders and his ilk on the left. On the other side of the party’s political spectrum, the centrist Democratic strategist and PR executive Hilary Rosen appeared on television to lambast the party for paying too much attention to so-called social issues. “I think we’re going to have a bad night,” Rosen said on CNN. “When voters tell you over and over and over again that they care mostly about the economy, listen to them.”In predicting a so-called “red tsunami,” in late October Josh Kraushaar, of Axios, appealed to the data. “Biden delivered a speech Tuesday pledging to codify Roe as his first act if Democrats elect more senators and keep the House,” he wrote. “But there’s worry in Democratic circles that abortion-centric messaging is keeping candidates from talking about the economy. A new Monmouth poll found 63% of respondents wish Biden would give more attention to ‘issues that are important to your family’ – including 36% of Democrats.”It seems almost insultingly remedial to have to explain why this framing – the notion that somehow the midterms could either be about the economy or they could be about abortion – is so wrongheaded. Because, of course, abortion access is central to the economic prospects of working people. But to acknowledge this, you have to acknowledge something that still seems incomprehensible and out of reach for many of our most esteemed shapers of political opinion: that when we think and speak of economic and political subjects, we are speaking of women.It is women whose prospects shape the economy, women who are workers and consumers; it is women who dream to advance economically, to retire or finish school or buy a house; it is women whose economic prospects, along with their health, dignity and freedom, have been curtailed by Dobbs.The stigma surrounding abortion helps to marginalize the issue in the American political imagination; the silence surrounding it conceals just how common abortion is, and how central abortion access is to women’s lives. One in four American women will have an abortion by age 45; many, many more of them know what it is to fear the upheaval of an unplanned pregnancy, to pee on a stick in the loneliness of a bathroom stall as your dreams hang in the balance.To say that this experience of hope, aspiration, anticipation, fear is somehow not as serious as the dreams and aspirations of men – to say that it is somehow not an “issue that is important to your family” – is at best to misunderstand the problem and at worst to suggest that women’s lives are not of political concern at all. If the midterm results are any indication, American women voters disagree.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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The ‘armed and gay’ Senate hopeful who helped force Georgia’s runoffLibertarian Chase Oliver, 37, managed 81,000 votes despite raising just $8,000

US midterm elections results 2022 – live
The morning after the midterms, Chase Oliver was back at work. “That’s what most other Georgians have to do after an election,” he tells the Guardian. “I have a job and have to pay rent and the bills.”Oliver, 37, has two jobs, actually – one as a sales account executive for a financial services company and another as an HR rep for a securities firm. And as he toggled between email replies and Zoom interviews from his north-east Atlanta home, with three cats and a dog, Delilah, underfoot, you’d never suspect this natty, young Georgian had thrown a spanner into the cogs of American power. “You are possibly the most hated man in America right now,” read one post to his Facebook page.Oliver was the third candidate in Georgia’s US Senate race: a pro-gun, anti-cop, pro-choice Libertarian who proudly announces himself as the state’s first LGBTQ+ candidate – “armed and gay”, he boasts. And on Tuesday night, this surprise spoiler scored an historic upset of sorts, siphoning enough support away from the Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock and his Republican challenger Herschel Walker to force the election to a 6 December runoff – Georgia’s second in as many election cycles. Until then, there’s no telling whether the Democrats will retain control of the Senate.Exactly who went for Oliver remains disputed: he reckons his typical voter was a left-leaning independent who might otherwise have voted for Warnock. But one pollster predicted Oliver’s success was more likely about pulling away “soft Republican” votes from rightwing voters who couldn’t face voting for Walker.Even more impressive than the 81,000 votes Oliver tallied on election night was the $7,790 he raised campaigning to win them. Of the record $8.9bn spent nationally on federal campaigns this election cycle, Georgia Senate candidates raised $136m, one of the most expensive contests in the country.Oliver’s was a true grassroots campaign. He hosted a watch party for the only Walker-Warnock debate and walked in Pride parades waving a rainbow-colored Don’t Tread On Me flag now perched outside his garage. On the front lawn are campaign signs for his fellow Georgia Libertarian challengers. When I compliment his modern ranch-style home from the comfort of a screened-in back porch, he’s quick to note that he pays rent to a live-in owner and mostly keeps to the basement – campaign HQ, officially. Inside, more Oliver lawn signs and posters share wall space with portraits of members of Star Trek’s Starfleet.Despite his obvious need, Oliver refused to indulge into the usual groveling for campaign cash. “I’m not someone who likes to get on the phone and beg people for money,” says Oliver, who instead relied on the kindness of friends, family and fellow Libertarians. The bulk of that fundraising went toward yard signs, canvassing materials and gas for his beat-up Toyota Corolla. “It’s not the prettiest in the world,” he says of the car – which, among other things, is missing a cover for the rear bumper. “But it gets great mileage.”On election night, Oliver watched from home with friends, picking over chicken wings when he wasn’t exchanging texts with his campaign team. Beforehand, he had been polling at about 5%; anything above 2% figured to spark a runoff, given how close the race was between Warnock and Walker already. When Oliver settled just above 2% and stayed there and neither frontrunner retained more than a 50% + 1 vote share, the minimum standard for victory, Oliver celebrated the coming runoff – which he says he caused partly to prove the need for ranked-choice voting across the country. “That’s the real lesson I want people to learn,” he says. “Whether you voted for Raphael Warnock or Herschel Walker or me, we wouldn’t have to wait weeks later to see who’s going to Washington DC if we passed something common sense like ranked-choice voting.”Oliver makes no effort to hide his healthy contempt for the current two-party system. But he wasn’t always so disillusioned. As an out teenager in a state where laws against sodomy were aggressively enforced until the state supreme court invalidated them in 2003, Oliver launched his high school’s gay-straight alliance. Oliver remembers screening Brokeback Mountain when it opened in 2005 and being so moved that he dragged his straight friends to the theater to see it the very next week. He thought, “This is what’s gonna get all my friends to understand the struggle,” he says. “But they did not have the same experience. They were like, ‘It was a good movie, but you kinda oversold it.’”Why is the midterm vote count taking so long in some US states?Read moreHe gravitated toward the Democratic party because of Barack Obama, inspired by promises to bring home the troops, close Guantánamo and draw down the US’s drone-strike program. But as Obama betrayed those promises, Oliver decamped for the Libertarians – a 50-year-old party that’s more culturally liberal than Democrats and fiscally conservative than Republicans and the third-largest political party by voter registration. Oliver’s platform runs from immigration reform to world peace. But it’s government dysfunction that really animates him. “There’s no real legislating going on,” he says. “What we’re seeing now is leadership drafting a bill behind closed doors with giant corporate interests.“It doesn’t matter who wins, Raphael Warnock or Herschel Walker; they’re going to be a cog in that system.”Oliver struggled for face time alongside the Senate frontrunners. When Walker flashed a fake police badge during his debate against Warnock last month, Oliver joined the meme parade, promising to bring his Starfleet pin to a subsequent debate against Warnock. (“Apparently, badges are required for debates now,” he tweeted.) But when Oliver pushed the senator on the Democrats’ flawed criminal justice policies, Warnock mostly ignored him.Although Oliver has received some threats, he tells friends not to worry about security. (“I conceal carry, so I’ll be taking care of myself as always,” he says.) To those who might bemoan this nerdy young white guy in the first Georgia Senate race to feature two Black candidates, Oliver invites would-be critics to check his record. “People who know me know that I’ve always worked with a diverse coalition of activists to get things done,” he says. “I think no matter what the skin color of the Republican or Democratic candidates, they would have been somebody I had severe policy disagreements with.”Still, many Georgians are likely to resent Oliver anyway for further drawing out what’s seemed like an endless campaign cycle – not least the exasperated voters who supported Oliver. While Oliver sympathizes with voter frustrations (and is exhausted with the campaign crush himself), if at the very least it brings about the end of runoff elections, history might say it was worth it. “I wanted to be an honest broker,” Oliver says. “I’m hoping that whoever wins this runoff reaches across the aisle a bit more and actually does some real legislating.”
This article was amended on 11 November 2022. An earlier version misstated Raphael Warnock’s record on LGBTQ+ rights.
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