Intrigue remains in the US midterm elections

The results of the midterm elections to the US Congress have been summed up in most states, but the main intrigue - whether the Republicans will be able to take away the Senate from the Democrats - remains unresolved. In fact, the fate of the Senate depends on the counting of votes in two states, and the intrigue may drag on until early December - if everything is decided in Georgia, where the Senate seat will be played in the second round of elections. So far, the Democratic Party, which performed much better than expected, has a good chance of retaining control of the upper house.

• The fact that the Democratic Party is performing much better than forecasts, and the Republicans are not able to achieve a decisive victory, it became clear already by Wednesday - on the first day after the November 8 elections. During the midterm elections, which take place every two years after the presidential one, the party of the incumbent head of state almost inevitably loses seats in Congress. Since 1950, the Presidential Party has managed to increase its representation in the US Parliament in the midterm elections only twice.
• The current result of the Democrats in the midterms is the best for the presidential party since 2002 and the fifth in all the last 72 years, follows from the Bloomberg infographic (it assumes that the leaders in the remaining races will not change). As we expected , the Republican voters' distrust of candidates who supported Trump's rebellion against the 2020 electoral system, as well as the more active voters' positive response to the Democrats' position on the issue of the right to abortion, played into the hands of the Democratic Party, the newspaper writes.
• However, barring a miracle, the Republicans will, as predicted, take control of the lower house of Congress. The "Red" party has already officially won the fight for 208 seats and is in the lead in 12 more constituencies. If nothing changes, then 220 seats will give the party exactly the same majority in the 435-seat House of Representatives that the Democrats had in the first two years of Joe Biden's presidency.
• In the struggle for control of the Senate, things are much more complicated. Recall that in order to ensure control over the 100-seat upper house of Congress, the Republicans need to get 51 seats. With a 50-50 split, the Democrats will retain the House - the 101st casting vote belongs to Vice President Kamala Harris, who chairs the Senate.
• To date, the Republicans have officially secured 49 seats (including the seat from Alaska, where the count continues - due to the specifics of the state's electoral system there, the struggle is between two Republicans), the Democrats - 48. Apart from Alaska, only three states have not announced winners - Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. They will be decisive. Republicans need to take two of the three states to win.
• In Arizona, the intrigues are the least - after counting 70% of the vote with a margin of more than 5 percentage points, is in the lead Democrat Mark Kelly , and the latest incoming results only increase his lead. Recall that the votes received by mail are considered the last, and there are more Democrats among the voters who submit them - Republicans do not trust mail voting.
• Much more intense intrigue is in Nevada. There, the incumbent Democratic Senator Caterina Cortez-Masto, after counting 90% of the votes, loses less than a percentage point to Trumpist Republican Adam Laxalt and continues to close the gap. Laxalt's lead has shrunk to less than 10,000 votes, and if the votes for Cortés-Masto continue to roll in, she'll come out ahead by the end of the count. The Washington Post in its forecast gives the Democrat a slight advantage. The same assumption is cautiously expressed by analysts from the FiveThirtyEight electoral statistics service. If Cortez-Masto wins, the Democratic Party will retain control of the Senate and the voting results in the last state, Georgia, will no longer be decisive.
• But if the fate of the Senate is decided in Georgia, observers will be in for a particularly twisted intrigue. In this state, there will be a second round, which has already been scheduled for December 6 - according to the laws of Georgia, at least 50% of the votes are needed to win, which none of the party candidates won (2% of the votes were taken from them by a libertarian candidate). If the fate of control over the Senate did not depend on the results of the second round, the Democrat Rafael Warnock, who won the first round, would have been the favorite. His rival, former football player Hershel Walker, turned out to be a weak candidate, whose election campaign was overshadowed by scandals - Walker actively campaigned for a complete federal ban on abortion, but before the election, two women said at once that at one time the football player pressured them to have an abortion and paid for the operation. Walker's chances of success in a runoff would not be as great, but if party control of the Senate hinges on the outcome of the vote, it could mobilize Republican voters to vote for a candidate many people don't like.

What do I get from this?

The intrigue in the American elections remains until the last moment. Already obviously worse than expected, the result of the Republicans upset the markets traditionally rooting for them, but the economy is more important - on the first good news of the year from the fronts of the fight against inflation, the S&P 500 index rose by 5.5% on Thursday. The Bell told about the course of this rally in the morning newsletter .