Democrats inched toward keeping control of the Senate on Friday as they widened their advantage in Arizona and appeared poised to grab the lead in Nevada.
Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., expanded his already significant lead over Republican Blake Masters to about 115,000 votes, or more than 5%, according to CNN, as counting continued.
In neighboring Nevada, Sen. Catherine Cortez-Masto, D-Nev., dramatically closed the gap with Republican Adam Laxalt, who was clinging to a 9,000-vote lead with tens of thousands of Democratic-leaning ballots left to count.
If Democrats win both Arizona and Nevada, they would have 50 seats and keep control of the Senate even before the Dec. 6 runoff election in battleground Georgia.
Kelly maintained his lead significantly when Phoenix’s Maricopa County added about 80,000 newly counted mail-in ballots that arrived in the final days of the heated campaign. Those ballots continued to lean strongly Democratic.
He also added to his lead with smaller additional vote counts in Pima County, which includes Tucson. Other Republican-leaning counties also added to their counts, but Kelly generally overperformed expectations.
There are still hundreds of thousands of ballots outstanding across Arizona, but the window for Republicans to mount a comeback appears to be closing fast.
Republicans are clinging to the hope that about 275,000 mail-in ballots in Maricopa County that were dropped off on Election Day would lean strongly toward them. That category of ballots skewed about 15% to former President Donald Trump in 2020, but Democrats won them in 2018.
In some small Arizona counties that appear to be completely done with their counts, Kelly was running more than 5% points ahead of President Joe Biden’s share of the vote, suggesting he will win the state by a similar significant margin.
Nevada’s Cortez-Masto was also gaining ground fast as more ballots were counted in Democratic-leaning Clark County, including Las Vegas and its suburbs and Reno’s Washoe County.
She was winning about 60% of the outstanding ballots from those counties, and narrowed the gap from 23,000 to 9,000 in counts late Thursday.
There are still an estimated 95,000 ballots uncounted in Nevada, giving Cortez-Masto a clear path to take the lead, likely by Friday evening or Saturday.
———
