The midterm elections in the United States are not the end of the world or the Biden era, as the Democrats feared. It must be said in the present tense because the recount that began on Tuesday night continued yesterday and everything indicated that it would lead to a second round for the Senate seat in contention in Georgia that could determine who controls the Upper House.
Republicans moved closer to winning back the House of Representatives, but by a smaller margin than they expected. In short, and this can be said in the past, the conservative tide announced by Donald Trump and his company did not take place; the red tide, as it is said here since that is the color of the Republicans.
Trump's repeated warning that "very, very, very likely" he will announce his candidacy for the 2024 elections next week had turned these legislative elections into a kind of first round of those upcoming presidential elections. And in this sense, the elections did not raise great waves of satisfaction in favor of the Republican leader. From the outset, his most solid potential rival for a Republican primary for that candidacy, the governor of Florida and also ultra-conservative Ron DeSantis, swept his reelection in office by winning by almost twenty points (59.4% to 40%) to his Democratic opponent, Michael Crist. The echo of the insulting contempt that Trump had directed at the governor days before by calling him "Ron de Sanctimonious", that is, Ron the sanctimonious or meapilas, was still heard.
The former president also suffered a few significant defeats when some of the candidates he had most enthusiastically supported lost the elections. These were the cases of the candidates for governor of Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, and of Michigan, Tudor Dixon, as well as those who opted for the Senate for Pennsylvania itself, Mehmet Oz, and for New Hampshire, Don Bolduc. Of the latter, Trump affirmed yesterday that his defeat was due to his change of position regarding the alleged "fraud" in the 2020 presidential elections, which Bolduc supported for some time but later ended up rejecting.
The victory of hitherto Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman against the television show Doctor Oz in Pennsylvania was especially satisfying for the Democrats and painful for Trump and his party.
The slowness in the counting of votes, due in large part to technical problems and difficulties in tabulating the ballots sent by mail or deposited in the early voting mailboxes, prevented yesterday from accurately projecting the final results of the elections, both in the Chamber of Representatives such as in the Senate and in some government positions.
In Maricopa County, the most populous in Arizona and which in 2020 was already the subject of controversy within the framework of Trump's great lie, a breakdown in the tabulator printing system led the process supervisors to guarantee a extra recount of all ballots. This happened after Trump and the candidate for governor, Kari Lake, once again planted suspicions of attempted fraud by the Democrats. The recount process affects some 17,000 votes and may delay the proclamation of key results in the governorship or governors, as well as in the Senate and the Lower House.
Meanwhile, control of the upper house could be decided once again in Georgia, weeks after election day. The tight race between Democratic pastor and senator Raphael Warnock against former football star and Republican challenger Herschel Walker will almost certainly force a Dec. 6 runoff.
It is the same thing that happened in the presidential and legislative elections of November 3, 2020. The two Democratic candidates for the Senate from Georgia, Warnock himself and Jon Ossoff, determined the conquest of the Senate by their party, but only in a runoff held on January 5, 2021. By November, Warnock had won over Kelly Loeffler but fell short of one-half plus one of the votes. And Ossoff had lost to David Perdue but neither of them reached 50% either. It so happened that both Loeffler and Perdue had the backing of Trump, like now Herschel Walker.
Georgia also gave Biden the key to his victory over Trump in 2020. The difference was just 12,000 votes, which the Republican took advantage of to feed the electoral fraud hoax and ask the Secretary of State and head of electoral supervision in the territory, Brad Raffensperger, to "find" the 11,780 votes he needed to win. The conversation was recorded and is the subject of a criminal investigation by the attorney general of that state, Fani Willis.
With 99% of the votes counted, Warnock had a narrow lead yesterday over Walker. The Democrat exceeded 49% of the votes, but it was almost impossible for him to reach the 50% that he would need to prevail in the first round. A third candidate, Libertarian Chase Oliver, snatched Warnock by about 2% of the vote.
The fight for the southern state's seat in the upper house will be decisive as long as Republican Adam Laxalt maintains his current lead over Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, and wins it. Because otherwise, and on the condition that Democrat Mark Kelly fulfilled the projections and finally prevailed in Arizona over Republican Blake Masters, Biden's party would no longer need that second round in Georgia. Well, with that now unforeseen but not unlikely victory in Nevada, plus that of Arizona, the Democrats would already reach 50 seats which, added to the quality vote of Kamala Harris for the tiebreakers, would allow them to maintain their current tight dominance in the Upper House. .
The outcome of the elections that will decide Biden's room for maneuver in the second half of his term was still uncertain last night. It was only clear that the possible Republican victory would be narrower than expected, and in no way humiliating for the president of the United States.
