Senate control hinges on unresolved election contests in Nevada, Arizona

Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney’s (D-N.Y.) election night was a decidedly mixed bag. He lost his own campaign for a sixth term in the House to well-funded Republican Michael Lawler but had a better-than-expected evening in his role as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

As The Washington Post’s Paul Kane wrote:

The five-term incumbent from New York’s Hudson Valley, suffered one of the worst political defeats in America on Tuesday, ending, for now, an ambitious career that once seemed headed for statewide office or high-ranking posts in Congress.

“I don’t like to lose, but my opponent won this race. He won it fair and square, and that means something. So I’m going to step aside, and I had a good run,” Maloney said Wednesday morning.

But when asked for his thoughts on whispers from the caucus’s left flank that leadership is an issue for the Democratic Party, the Hudson Valley politician didn’t hold back.

“But let’s be clear,” Maloney said during an interview published Thursday by the New York Times. “[Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] had almost nothing to do with what turned out to be an historic defense of our majority. Didn’t pay a dollar of dues. Didn’t do anything for our frontline candidates except give them money when they didn’t want it from her.”

PHILADELPHIA — No such thing as second acts? Mehmet Oz has pulled off several: After starting out as a cardiothoracic surgeon, he enjoyed success as a teacher, inventor, author, television celebrity, questionable-product pitchman — and, most recently, as the Donald Trump-backed victor in a Republican primary for an open U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania.

And then he lost. Only by four percentage points, but a loss nonetheless.

It was a rare and very public failure for a man whose life has been marked by success in many arenas. Oz had left a lucrative television career, renowned medical practice and his North Jersey manse, and invested $27 million of his own wealth in the campaign, only to be relentlessly mocked online as an interloper with a dubious recipe for crudites — and, in Pennsylvania, for using that word.

Democrat Tina Kotek was leading Republican Christine Drazan by 57,000 votes late Thursday with 80 percent of the votes counted in the race for Oregon governor, which has not been called by The Post.

Drazan, with 43.5 percent to Kotek’s 47 percent, has not conceded. Local news outlets in Oregon called the race for Kotek on Wednesday. The drawn-out vote count owes to the close, three-way contest among Kotek, Drazan and unaffiliated candidate Betsy Johnson (who was trailing the major-party candidates with 8.7 percent of the vote), and Oregon’s new system that allows mail ballots postmarked on Election Day to be counted. Votes remain uncounted in several counties, including Multnomah, where Kotek is favored, and Clackamas, Drazan’s home base. House races in the 5th and 6th Congressional Districts also have not been called.

Potential control of the Senate could be slipping away from Republicans, as results from the 2022 election continue to roll in. What about the House?

The assumption has long been that the chamber would go red. But this election has certainly tested plenty of assumptions.

Democrats have been projected as the winners in 188 House districts, while 208 have gone to the Republicans. The magic number for a majority is 218, so Republicans are obviously much closer.

But those raw numbers are misleading: Most of the yet-to-be-decided districts are out West — read: Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington — where the vote counting is slower, and most lean blue. There are seven clearly blue-leaning districts in California alone that don’t have enough votes in to be called but are very unlikely to flip.

From the outside, this year’s elections looked like a virtual Republican lock. Republicans went to the polls Tuesday needing to gain just five House seats and a single Senate seat to take control, amid soaring inflation and broad dissatisfaction with the nation’s direction.

But behind the scenes, nothing came easy to Republicans this cycle, as their historic tail winds collided with the fractious reality of a political party in the midst of a generational molting. GOP leaders spent much of the past year fighting each other or plotting against their own primary voters. They were hobbled by unprepared first-time candidates, fundraising shortfalls and former president Donald Trump, whose self-concern required constant attention — right up to the eve of the election, when he forced party bosses to beg him once again to delay a presidential campaign announcement.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), an outspoken member of the House’s Freedom Caucus, is locked in an extraordinarily tight contest to win a second term. As the GOP attempts to wrest control of Congress from the Democrats, Adam Frisch could push the freshman congresswoman to an automatic recount — a decidedly unexpected turn of events in the reliably red 3rd Congressional District.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) wants the GOP to focus on the future, in what could be seen as a subtle dig against former president Donald Trump ahead of his expected announcement next week of a 2024 run. Grassley wrote on Twitter, “Quit talking abt 2020,” and echoed Abraham Lincoln’s advice that “the true cure” for one election “is in the next election.”

When Isaac Franklin died in 1846, he owned a swath of plantations in central Louisiana — and at least 600 enslaved people. As king of the domestic enslaved person trade, he got rich trafficking people before marrying late and retiring to the life of a “gentleman planter.” His wife, Adelicia, nearly 30 years his junior, inherited everything upon his death.

More than 170 years later, the historic mansions are gone and the properties merged, but much has remained the same. Cotton is still grown and picked by mostly Black hands, even though mechanical pickers have existed for decades. Overseers, all White and referred to as “freemen,” still keep watch on horseback. If the laborers refuse to work, they are punished. Well-behaved laborers work in the homes of the overseers, cooking and cleaning. They sleep in small dorms and are paid 2 to 20 cents an hour, which they can only spend on-site. Most of them will die there and will be buried in a cemetery on the north side of the property.

Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, who led the group Black Americans to Re-elect President Trump in 2020, said on Thursday that Trump should not make another run for president.

“The voters have spoken,” Earle-Sears said Thursday during an appearance on Fox Business, “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.

“And the voters have given us that very clear message,” she said.