There are just over two weeks left for the mid-term elections that on November 8 will decide who controls the two Houses of the United States Congress for the next two years, until the 2024 elections, and the prospects for the Democratic Party, now in command of both organs, are not good. The polls predict his defeat in the House of Representatives, which is completely renewed and where the Republicans can easily win five more seats than the 213 they obtained in 2020 and, in this way, gain the majority of 218 they need to retake hemicycle control. The crucial battle is therefore fought in the Senate, where 35 seats out of a total of 100 change hands. If races with clear favorites are discounted, eight are the contested competitions that will determine if the Republicans add the 51 seats they need to defeat the current and minimal Democratic majority of 50 plus the casting vote for the presidency.
In the 2020 elections, the southern state recorded the closest results in the country, both in the presidential elections and in the two Senate seats in contention, which the Democrats won in the second round the following January 2021. Now, the Democratic senator and Reverend Raphael Warnock defends his seat in a virtual tie with Trump Republican Herschel Walker, a former football superstar. The news that Walker paid for an abortion for an ex-girlfriend despite his radical rejection of the voluntary interruption of pregnancy – information that he denies – has not made him lose support in the party or among voters. In the no less interesting dispute for the position of governor of Georgia, the current occupant of it, the Republican Brian Kemp, is playing it against the Democratic leader Stacey Abrams. If she were to win, she would become the first black female governor in US history. But they don't have it easy, because Kemp, who rejected Trump's lie about "fraud" in the 2020 presidential elections, leads him by six points in the polls.
Another of the most disputed and followed elections in the entire nation is the one that pits the Republican doctor and television figure Mehmet Oz, also backed by Trump, against the popular Democrat and lieutenant governor John Fetterman, known for his informal tracksuit attire along rapper and his defense of the legalization of marijuana. The progressive candidate, whose narrow demographic advantage over Oz prevents him from declaring victory, suffered a stroke in May whose sequelae in speech led conservatives to ruthlessly question his capacity for office, a capacity that Fetterman's doctors have just reaffirmed. . Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro is also slightly ahead of ultra and super Trumpist Doug Mastriano.
The election to the Senate seat at stake in the Midwestern state where Biden won by less than a point in 2020 is seen as one of the Democrats' best chances to wrest a Senate seat from Republicans -- the one held and seeks to keep Trumpist Ron Johnson. Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, trailing slightly in the polls, has highlighted Johnson's connections to the Trump-led coup attempt culminating in the storming of Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021.
The former attorney general of Nevada, the Republican Adam Laxalt, is trying to unseat Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, who is only a few tenths ahead, in a paradigmatic contest of the national debate on two of the issues that most concern the citizens: inflation, in which Laxalt has found a very profitable weak point for the Democrats, and the right to abortion, recently annulled in general by the Supreme Court and whose defense has been the basis of Cortez's campaign.
The right to abortion is also very present in the elections in Arizona, where the Republican investor Blake Masters tries to unseat the Democratic senator Mark Kelly and thus recover the state as the conservative bastion that it was before victories like Kelly's own or that of Biden by three tenths would make it undefined territory. Immigration and weapons are other key issues in the race.
A slight but significant turn in the polls in favor of Republican investor J.D. Vance and to the detriment of Democratic congressman Tim Ryan makes the dispute over the senator's seat in Ohio that conservative Robert Portman will leave especially exciting. The Republican candidate has gone from being critical of Trump to a staunch supporter of the former president, who outscored Biden by more than 8 points in 2020.
Another close race is the one faced by Republican Congressman Ted Budd in his attempt to replace conservative Senator Richard Burr, upon his retirement, and thus keep for his own a seat that Democrat Cheri Beasley, former president of the state Supreme Court, has seen their reach in the polls. Budd is another Republican challenger who has played the inflation card the most, and has tried to portray former Judge Beasley as too tolerant of crime. The congressman voted to block the certification of the 2020 elections, which explains the support that Trump gave him.
Senator Marco Rubio has reason to be confident of overcoming the Democratic challenger who wants to take the seat from him, Congresswoman and former Orlando Police Chief Val Demings. But Florida is once again a high-interest testing ground for the strength of Republican dominance. And not only because of Rubio's not so comfortable five-point lead, but because of the test that these elections represent for Governor Ron DeSantis, the Republican best placed to challenge Trump for the 2024 presidential candidacy. The challenge for DeSantis is not it is to win his competitor, the Democrat Charlie Christ, which is taken for granted; the challenge is to beat him by a landslide to show that Florida, with him, is a purely Republican state. In 2020, Trump won there by 3.4 points; DeSantis, who is often described as "a Trump with a brain," hopes to beat Christ by more than eight.
