Michigan votes to protect abortion rights; Fetterman wins Pa. race for Senate

Democrats breathed a sigh of relief after holding two seats they were fearing they would lose in Rhode Island and Virginia.

The return to Congress of Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) and slight leads in similar districts had many strategists admitting they were feeling much better than Tuesday morning, when they expected a blowout by the GOP.

Abraham Hamadeh, Arizona’s Republican nominee for attorney general, was greeted by cheering crowds in the crucial battlefield state as he clung on to hope of a win early Wednesday. “I’m so honored to be your Republican nominee. In just a few more days I’ll be honored to be your attorney general,” he told a crowd in Scottsdale. “We didn’t go through all this hard work to only get here, right? We came to finish what we started,” he said to jubilant cheers.

Initial results put his rival, Democratic nominee Kris Mayes, ahead at 50.9 percent to Hamadeh’s 49.1 percent, so far. Calling himself a “happy warrior,” Hamadeh promised that he and Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for governor, would “fix this mess,” adding that “the biggest threat to democracy is incompetent elected officials.”

ANCHORAGE — Preliminary results in Alaska’s U.S. Senate race show incumbent Lisa Murkowski (R) narrowly trailing her Trump-endorsed GOP challenger, Kelly Tshibaka, but the state’s new system of ranked-choice voting could still give Murkowski the edge in the final count.

Murkowski trailed Tshibaka — previously a member of Alaska GOP Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s cabinet — by 1.6 percentage points, or 3,200 votes, early Wednesday. But dozens of voting places in remote parts of the state, where Murkowski has strong support, still have not reported results.

Unpopular presidents are historically a dead weight on their party’s candidates, but some Democratic Senators are defying political gravity to win or lead key elections.

In New Hampshire, Sen. Maggie Hassan won reelection by a roughly 10-percentage-point margin in the current vote count even though voters disapproved of President Biden’s job performance by a 15-point margin in network exit polling (57 percent disapproved while 42 percent approved).

In Georgia, exit polling found 41 percent of voters approved of Biden and 58 percent disapproved. But Democratic Sen. Raphael G. Warnock is winning 49.4 percent support with an estimated 98 percent of votes counted, giving him a 0.9-point narrow lead over Republican Herschel Walker. The race remains too close to call, and it will head to a recount if no candidate reaches 50 percent.

NEW ORLEANS — Louisiana experienced some hiccups during Election Day. The secretary of state’s voter portal, mobile app and election hotline all failed, while a bomb threat at a high school polling location in Kenner, La., forced officials to close the site and reassign its voters. And across the state, several polling sites were relocated, some as recently as in the last few days.

Daniel Carpenter, a spokesperson for the Louisiana Democratic Party, pointed to the hours-long failure of the state’s voter portal — which voters rely on to know where to vote and what to expect on their ballots — as an especially consequential problem. “I’m sure there are some people that probably set aside that time to vote and then realized they couldn’t figure out where to go,” he said. Carpenter also said that while law enforcement officials determined the Kenner bomb threat was not election-related, it affected voters nonetheless.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Sarah Palin said she’s waiting to cast judgment on the legitimacy of the U.S. House race in Alaska, where the Republican is one of four candidates on the ballot.

The former governor has been endorsed by former president Donald Trump, who has pressed baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.

At an impromptu news conference Tuesday, Palin said she has “all the faith in the world” in Alaska’s election workers. But, she added, “We’ll see if Alaska falls in line with so many of the other states where, collectively, residents and states are having questions about how the vote count is going.”

NASHVILLE — Several hundred voters in Tennessee were given the wrong ballots during Nashville’s early-voting period — leading to confusion and consternation and voters being asked to cast new ballots Tuesday.

The confusion began after Republican lawmakers carved a predominantly left-leaning Nashville district into three districts in an effort to flip a Democratic seat. The American Civil Liberties Union and the League of Women Voters filed a lawsuit on behalf of voters who claim they were given the incorrect ballot while voting early in Davidson County. They all agreed on a fix: Give the 438 voters an opportunity to fill out a provisional ballot.

LAS VEGAS — “The reason why we’re here now is because we don’t know anything yet. So I apologize to you for that,” Nevada’s gubernatorial candidate, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, told supporters late Tuesday.

“I anticipate we’re going to be successful in the next couple of days,” the Republican said. “But unfortunately, we need some patience. We need some patience because we don’t know the answers yet. And we will know in the next couple of days. That’s what they’re telling us, so I need everybody to be patient.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is signaling that the dire predictions about Democrats losing dozens of seats to Republicans has, so far, failed to materialize.

“While many races remain too close to call,” she said in a statement, “it is clear that House Democratic Members and candidates are strongly outperforming expectations across the country.”

She added, “as states continue to tabulate the final results, every vote must be counted as cast,” and “many thanks to our grass roots volunteers for enabling every voter to have their say in our Democracy.”