That’s it from me today!
Thank you for reading on several midterm election races happening across the country. Here’s a summary of everything that happened:
For Democrats, Tuesday’s midterm election races could mean losing control of Congress. Several closely watched Senate races could determine the outcome of which party will control Congress for the rest of Joe Biden’s first term in office.
John Kerry, the US climate envoy, has vowed that Joe Biden’s administration will press ahead on climate action regardless of the outcome of today’s midterm elections, which are expected to go badly for Democrats. Kerry delivered that promise while speaking at the Cop27 climate talks in Egypt.
The Guardian caught up with a number of voters across several key states, including Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Many spoke about a number of issues that were motivating them to cast a ballot today, including the state of democracy and abortion access in the US.
The first set of exit polling from CNN spells dismal results for Democrats, as a majority of the US electorate is angry and dissatisfied with the state of the country.
GOP lawsuits challenging voter rules have caused hold ups in some districts, including Philadelphia, as election judges are now required to go through an extra checking process to monitor for double voting, a process that could take three days. Another lawsuit caused mail-in ballots in Philadelphia that have inaccurate or missing dates to be rejected, causing thousands to show up and recast their ballots.
The Florida state department sent a letter to the US Department of Justice saying that federal election monitors won’t be permitted inside the state’s polling places. The letter comes as several key races are happening in Florida, including the election for Florida governor.
Donald Trump cast a ballot at a polling place in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump gave some brief comments to media waiting outside the polling place, and confirmed that he voted for incumbent governor Ron DeSantis.
You can follow this blog, which will update as polling places across the country begin to close.
If you’re in line to vote, stay there!
Have a great night and happy election day, everyone!
Climate action will press ahead even if Dems lost Congress, says US climate envoy
John Kerry, the US climate envoy, has vowed that Joe Biden’s administration will press ahead on climate action regardless of the outcome of today’s midterm elections, which are expected to go badly for Democrats.
Kerry, speaking at the Cop27 climate talks in Egypt, said that he hoped there would be a Congress would act on the climate crisis but “even if we don’t, folks, president Biden is more determined than ever to continue what we are doing.”
“Most of what we are doing cannot be changed by anyone else coming along,” Kerry added, noting that cities and states across America banded together to commit to the Paris climate agreement when Donald Trump removed the US from the pact when president.
US officials in Egypt hope that the inflation reduction act bill passed in August, which contains more than $370bn in climate spending and called “one of the single most important pieces of legislation over the past 50 years or so” by Kerry in his speech, will drive deep cuts in emissions regardless of the midterms.
But Kerry conceded it was possible that Republicans could “launch an assault” on Biden’s climate agenda if they win at least one house of Congress in the elections. The GOP has decried what it calls Biden’s “radical green agenda” and could stall or hamper the rollout of measures aimed at boosting renewable energy deployment. Biden arrives at Cop27 on Friday, potentially in a downcast mood following the outcome of the elections.
The Guardian’s Abené Clayton, reporting on the California gubernatorial race from Los Angeles
It may have been one of the least anxiety-inducing midterm races in the nation. California governor Gavin Newsom is expected to cruise to re-election and easily beat Republican state senator Brian Dahle to serve his second term at the helm of the US’ most populous state.
Last year, Newsom survived a recall attempt driven by critics of his handling of the pandemic. This year, with re-election in deep blue California all but secure, he took his message to the national stage, spending millions of dollars on ads addressing issues like gun control and abortion rights in states including Mississippi and Texas.
Newsom’s national effort has sparked speculation among political analysts and officials he’s considering a run for president -- a rumor Newsom has consistently denied.
But as my colleague Maanvi Singh wrote a few weeks ago: “Denial is the tradition of pretty much every politician who has flirted with chief executive ambitions.”
More reporting on voting in Michigan, from the Guardian’s Sam Levine
Taylor Morgan, 26, cast her vote Tuesday just a few blocks from the main campus of the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. A driving force getting her to the polls is Proposal 3, an effort to enshrine abortion protections in the Michigan constitution.
“Reproductive rights and reproductive freedom are super important to me as a Black woman in Michigan,” she said just before she cast her ballot. “I just want to make sure that those rights are maintained. I feel like if that’s not something that you believe in or support, you have that right. But you don’t have the right to tell the people what they can do with their bodies.”
Taylor Morgan, a 26-year old medical student at the University of Michigan, said she was motivated to come out and vote today in support of Proposal 3. “Reproductive rights and reproductive freedom are super important to me as a Black woman in Michigan,” she said pic.twitter.com/Z6TdYUvvKU
— Sam Levine (@srl) November 8, 2022
Morgan said she’s concerned about efforts to overturn the election, but hopes that the margin will be so wide, any efforts will quickly fall apart.
“My hope is that a lot of people turn out so everything is indisputable,” said Morgan, a medical student.
Abby Anderson, a senior at the University of Michigan studying performance art management, said she also was motivated by the abortion proposal.
“I’m very pro-choice. It’s a cause that I care a lot about. Particular since I’m not from Michigan, and I could have chosen to vote in the state that I’m from, but I felt that my vote had more of an impact here because it’s more of a swing,” she said.
There’s some concern about potentially low turnout from young voters, but both Morgan and Anderson said they thought young people would vote in high numbers. Some of her professor had even said it’s OK if students couldn’t make it to class on Tuesday because they needed to vote, Anderson said.
“I’m young and a lot of my friends, they’re very adamant about coming out to vote,” she said.
“It seems like a lot of people are lining up to go to the on campus polling places. I feel like young people are starting to realize what they stand for and what they don’t stand for. So you’re gonna see a lot of young people coming out in droves to make their voices heard. At least that’s what it looks like to me,” Morgan said.
CNN's first exit polls show a majority of Americans are angry with state of country
CNN has published its first set of exit polls.
The poll readings spell fairly dismal news for Democrats ahead of midterm election results, with polls showing that the majority of the American electorate are angry with the state of the country under Biden’s presidency.
Breaking: CNN US Midterm Election exit poll makes grim reading for Joe Biden.
— Jamie Johnson (@JamieoJohnson) November 8, 2022
• 73% of voters are dissatisfied or angry about the way things are going
• 46% say Biden’s policies are hurting the country
• 54% disapprove of Biden as President
• 32% used vote to oppose Biden pic.twitter.com/Wz0lYUds0P
Updated
While all eyes are on New York’s gubernatorial race, the outcome of New York’s 21st Congressional District contest might speak to the staying power of MAGA-style politics—or whether voters have grown weary of Trump’s inflammatory politics. Republican incumbent Elise Stefanik is running against Democrat Matt Castelli, a former CIA officer who served on the national security council.
Stefanik became the No. 3 House Republican after Liz Cheney was kicked out of the role of conference chair amid the Wyoming congresswoman’s ongoing criticism of Trump. While Stefanik was a moderate when she entered the House in 2015, the congress member has increasingly moved right.
Some consider Stefanik to be a potential 2024 vice-presidential candidate. Not everyone in Stefanik’s district is enthused by her political ascent—including her statements relating to baseless claims that there were sweeping “irregularities” in the previous national election, per CNN.
Jennifer Mann, a Castelli campaign volunteer and chair of the Brunswick, New York Democratic Committee, decried Stefanik’s statements about the 2020 election. “She does not support democracy. She voted against supporting the results of the election even though she knew— she had information—there was no fraud. I find that terrifying.”
Mann, who cast her ballot early, said that many in the district are worried about affordable healthcare and prescription drugs; Stefanik, she said, “voted against their interests every single time.” Like many other voters, Mann voiced frustration over polarization, saying: “I’m tired of the parisian politics.”
As for the governor’s race, Mann said: “Hochul is not my ideal candidate, I’m not going to lie. She is at least somebody who will support the democratic process.”
“She will make sure that women’s rights are guaranteed for us—not having the government take it from us,” Mann said. Stefanik was among the some 80 Republicans supporting national legislation that would prohibit most abortions after 15 weeks. “That’s another thing I really dislike about Stefanik: She wants to take away states’ rights by sponsoring this nationwide abortion ban.”
In New York, the Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, and Republican challenger Lee Zeldin are making their last-minute pitches to voters in the gubernatorial race. While the Cook Political Report predicts that the governor’s race will “likely” be for Democrats, her lead over Zeldin has slimmed dramatically—from a double-digit margin to just four points over the course of several weeks, according to CNBC.
“This city is back and I want to lead this state into the next four years and possibly beyond with a sense of optimism we have not had here in a long time,” Hochul said during a campaign stop on Manhattan’s Upper East Side Tuesday, according to the New York Post. “That will start first thing tomorrow morning.”
Zeldin, who like most Republicans across the US has made crime a key tenet of his platform, tried to hammer Hochul on public safety during a campaign stop at the Nassau County, Long Island Republican headquarters. “If you go and ask a lot of Democrats who are inside of New York City who are fed up, they don’t want to be told that the crime in the subway is just a perception. They should just look away, there’s nothing to see here,” the Post quoted Zeldin as saying.
Democrats outside of New York have taken notice of Zeldin’s rise in the polls and appear to be considering him a serious threat. President Joe Biden appeared alongside Hochul on Sunday to encourage voters to cast their ballots in what has become an unexpectedly tight race. “New York, you have two days to make sure the rest of New York knows the good that they have in Kathy Hochul,” Biden said, according to Politico. “Two days until the most important election in our lifetime.”
Updated
Philadelphia voters have encountered some issues while trying to cast their votes, both mail in ballots and in-person votes on Tuesday.
Thousands of mail-in ballots were recast in the Brotherly Love city following a ruling on a GOP lawsuit that invalidated mail-in ballots that had missing or inaccurate dates.
The decision, made last Tuesday, launched a mass volunteer effort in the city on Monday night to alert those impacted about their ballots.
On Tuesday, election officials were also mandated to check for double voting, thanks to a separate GOP lawsuit. The checking process could take several days and slow down the vote count process.
From the Washington Post:
The process, known as “poll book reconciliation,” is a way to prevent double voting that Philadelphia implemented in 2020 amid a dramatic expansion of mail ballots in the state. It requires that election workers interrupt ballot counting to scan poll books so that the lists of voters who returned mail ballots can be compared to those who voted in-person. The process generally takes three days, court records show.
Updated
Here’s some helpful context for Tuesday’s midterm elections and what it could mean for Democrats’ control of Congress, from the Guardian’s Chris McGreal and Joan E Greve
The Biden administration was braced for a bad night on Tuesday as the US midterm election results threatened to rob the Democrats of control of Congress, just as former president Donald Trump appears ready to announce another run for the White House.
But the Democrats were holding out hope that they might just retain control of the US Senate if a handful of closely fought races fell their way.
The final results, which will determine control of Congress for the remainder of Biden’s first term as president and further constrain his legislative agenda, could take days or even weeks in some closely fought Senate races. Delayed results are likely to fuel legal challenges and conspiracy theories about vote-rigging, particularly if the remaining seats determine control of the Senate.
The ground was already being laid in Pennsylvania, where a close US Senate race is being fought between Mehmet Oz, a Trump-backed Republican, and Democrat John Fetterman, who has been battling to assure voters he is fit for office after a stroke. Earlier on election day on Tuesday, the agency overseeing the voting in Philadelphia said it will delay counting thousands of paper ballots because of a Republican lawsuit that said the process was open to duplicate voting.
Dozens of Republican candidates for the Senate, the House of Representatives and other major offices have refused to confirm that they will accept the result if they lose amid a swirl of false claims of fraud, stemming from Trump’s assertion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him and kept alive by the Republican party leadership.
Read the full article here.
More reporting on Californians voting on Proposition 30, from the Guardian’s Maanvi Singh
Californians are voting today on a ballot measure that would tax the state’s richest residents in an effort to get more electric vehicles on the road.
The measure, Proposition 30, would hike taxes by 1.75% on those earning $2m or more annually to raise between $3bn and $5bn annually to subsidize households, businesses and schools; buy zero-emission cars, trucks and buses; fund infrastructure to charge electric vehicles; and bolster wildfire prevention efforts.
Proponents of the measure, including the coalition of environmental and labor groups that developed it, say the tax would provide urgently needed funds to hasten the transition to zero-emission vehicles, and reduce the disproportionate burden of pollution on low-income, minority communities across the state.
Detractors, including the California governor, Gavin Newsom, claim the proposal is a corporate carve-out for Lyft, the ride-hailing company that has backed the measure and helped fund its campaign.
Read more about Proposition 30 and the fraught battle over it here:
Updated
The latest on Los Angeles’ mayoral race, from the Guardian’s Lois Beckett
By the time Los Angeles residents headed to polls on Tuesday, mayoral hopeful and billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso had poured more than $100m of his own fortune into his campaign to become the city’s next leader.
Caruso, who’s battling Congresswoman Karen Bass in a closely contested race, has backed his own campaign with $101m as of late last week, campaign ethics filing show, outspending his opponent by more than 10 to one.
The developer, who is running a pro-police, tough-on-crime campaign, came in second to Bass, a former community organizer and leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, in the city’s June primary.
But Bass’ strong lead over Caruso in recent weeks evaporated, according to a recent poll of likely voters, with her 45% to 41% lead over Caruso within the poll’s margin of error.
Caruso, who has an estimated net worth of $5.3bn, is nearing a mayoral campaign record set by billionaire Mike Bloomberg, who spent $109m of his own money to win his third term as mayor of New York City in 2009.
Total political spending of more than $120m on a mayoral race is a striking sum, especially for a contest in which the key issue is LA’s homelessness. There are at least 41,000 unhoused people in Los Angeles county, many of them unsheltered, and living, in tents, cars, RVs and makeshift structures.
Bass has repeatedly attacked Caruso’s campaign spending, saying that if she had $90m or $100m to spend, she would spend it on affordable housing.
Rick Caruso has spent $90 million lying about himself and lying about me.
— Karen Bass (@KarenBassLA) November 1, 2022
I was just asked if I had $90 million, what I would do with it.
The answer is simple: I would build housing for thousands of people who sleep on our streets every night. Right away. Without hesitation.
Updated
Concerns over the spread of misinformation and disinformation on social media platforms are a recurring theme of each election but with the recent mass layoffs at Twitter following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform civil liberties groups are particularly on high alert.
The company laid off a reported 50% of the workforce or an estimated 3,700 workers last week just days before the midterms. Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, Yoel Roth said that layoffs affected 15% of the company’s trust and safety team which is charged with moderating content including combating misinformation. That has the leaders of civil liberties groups such as Color of Change, Free Press and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who met with Musk to discuss how Twitter will deal with hate speech, convinced that the company will not be sufficiently staffed to handle attempts to mislead voters today.
“Retaining and enforcing election-integrity measures requires an investment in the human expert staff, factcheckers, and moderators, who are being shown the door today,” said Jessica J González, co-CEO of Free Press.
While it’s still early in the day, months-old viral videos and tweets falsely claiming Republicans were being barred from the polls have already been recirculated today, according to the Washington Post.
Pennsylvania is at the heart of the battle for control of Congress and key governorships across the country. To get a sense of Democrats’ political fortunes in this consequential battleground, I spoke to Ed Rendell, a former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania.
Rendell is bullish on the governor’s race, where Democrat Josh Shapiro has maintained a consistent lead over his Republican opponent, the election-denying conservative Doug Mastriano. But he has jitters about the Senate race between John Fetterman, the Democrat, and Mehmet Oz, the Republican, which is rated a toss up.
Key to the race, he says, is Black voter turnout in cities like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. If Democrats fail to mobilize this crucial constituency, it will be hard, if not impossible, for them to eke out a win in a close contest.
Rendell is hopeful Obama’s visit to the state on Saturday will have a “dramatic impact” on turnout, especially among Black voters, by reminding voters of the stakes and making the affirmative case for electing Democrats.
And he does not believe, as some in his party do, that Biden’s campaign appearance in Philadelphia on Saturday, alongside Obama, Fetterman and Shapiro, will hurt the Democratic ticket,
In fact, he said it’s possible that the enduring affection for Biden in places like Scranton, where the president was born, may help boost support for Democrats in that industrial corner of the state.
“If you don’t like Joe Biden and you want to send him a message ... you vote against him, but not because he appears with Fetterman,” Rendell said. “That doesn’t change anybody’s mind.”
Updated
The Guardian’s Abené Clayton, reporting on voting conditions from Los Angeles
A winter storm has brought days of rain, snow and flood warnings to southern and northern California, and while it may have ended California’s fire season it also has led midterm election hopefuls to implore voters to defy the conditions to cast their ballots.
There are more questions than clear answers around the impact that weather has on voter turnout and ultimately the results of an election, but candidates aren’t leaving anything up to chance or people’s instincts to stay dry, warm and off of wet roads.
“Since we don’t like rain, I have to make sure that people vote. We can’t lose this election because of the rain. That would be crazy,” Karen Bass, the progressive candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, said during a pre-election day Instagram live interview with the actor Rosario Dawson.
On the other side of the state, Brooke Jenkins, San Francisco’s interim district attorney who is running to retain her seat, is calling on people to come out to the polls, “rain or shine”.
Happy Election Day!
— Brooke Jenkins 謝安宜 (@BrookeJenkinsSF) November 8, 2022
Rain or shine, we are working across San Francisco today to get out the vote!
Polls close at 8PM. Please go vote and take a friend or family member (or two or three) to the polls with you!
You can find your polling place here: https://t.co/UeOxfVuedn pic.twitter.com/ExE3C2FHyF
Matt Gunderson, a Southern California state senate candidate whose campaign promises include repealing laws that downgrades crimes from felonies to misdemeanors.
Rain or shine it’s Election Day!
— Matt Gunderson (@GundersonForCA) November 8, 2022
This morning my family got up bright and early to make it to the polls before an afternoon of final campaigning.
Doing your civic duty is so much fun when you get to do it with the ones you love.
Happy Election Day!#gowithgunderson pic.twitter.com/WdRBgBmcjL
Updated
Donald Trump, who lost Arizona in 2020, has weighed in on the tabulation machine issues in Maricopa county.
Trump posted on Truth Social, saying the machine problems were mostly affecting conservative or Republican areas. It’s not clear exactly which sites have been experiencing the tabulation problems, but voters around the county have reported them.
“Can this possibly be true when a vast majority of Republicans waited for today to Vote? Here we go again? The people will not stand for it!!!” Trump wrote.
Trump is already starting his messaging that the election is fraud via Truth Social. pic.twitter.com/4m8MGavEO5
— Ines Pohl (@inespohl) November 8, 2022
Earlier on Tuesday, election officials in Maricopa County reported that about 20% of polling places in the county were experiencing problems.
Updated
The Guardian’s Erum Salam reports on the voting situation in Texas
Things are heating up in Texas, one of the most difficult states to cast a vote. Reports have emerged of voters being turned away from eight polling sites in Bell county, an area north-east of Austin, after check-in machines malfunctioned because of an issue relating to the time change.
#BREAKING Voters being turned away at 8 polling sites in Bell County. Elections office says the equipment isn’t working - because of the time change.
— Joey Horta (@JoeyHorta) November 8, 2022
Bell county election officials requested an additional hour for voting from the Texas secretary of state due to the issues.
At a time when doubt is being unnecessarily cast on the integrity of the American electoral process, Bell county does not inspire confidence in those already skeptical, but county officials told the Guardian that the issue with the machines only affected voters’ ability to check in, not their ability to vote.
Bell county’s public information officer, James Stafford, said: “For some reason, computers at those eight locations did not automatically update to the new time. As a result, the central computer, recognizing a discrepancy, would not allow those devices to come online, and we were unable to open those sites to voters.
The critical issue that we want to communicate is that we have not had any issues related to ballots or tabulation machines. The issue was limited to those check-in devices. I also would say that, seeing the work and the passion of both our elections and technology services staff as they worked diligently to get the issue resolved as quickly as possible.”
Confidence in the electoral process is integral to the preservation of democracy and boosting that confidence has been the primary objective of some. The US Department of Justice announced yesterday it will send federal monitors to polling sites across the country, including three counties in Texas, to ensure smooth sailing on election day.
During early voting, the Beaumont chapter of the NAACP alleged Black voters were being harassed and intimidated by election workers in Jefferson county. Jessica Daye, a local voter, alleged she witnessed other Black voters being shadowed by election workers who demanded they say their addresses out loud, despite already being checked in to vote.
On Monday, Daye, the NAACP and The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law filed a lawsuit and a federal judge issued an order prohibiting the discriminatory behavior.
On the morning of election day, the Election Protection coalition – the nation’s oldest and largest non-partisan voter protection coalition – held a virtual press conference “outlining resources and guidance available to voters in need of information or facing intimidation at the polls”.
On the call were leaders from the Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Texas Civil Rights Project, and top of the agenda was addressing any voting incidents at polling sites or ballot drop boxes in key states across the country.
Lawyers’ Committee For Civil Rights Under Law called the incident in Beaumont “a gross instance of invasion of privacy and voter intimidation”.
In the call, the Texas Civil Rights Project said it received more reports of machine malfunctions, voter intimidation, polling sites opening late, poll workers dressed in partisan attire in a few places, and issues with mail ballots that were either not received or rejected.
Voting in Texas ends at 7pm central.
Updated
As millions across the country voted on Tuesday, Joe Biden tweeted an encouragement for people to participate in elections.
At the core of our democracy is a basic principle: the right to vote.
— President Biden (@POTUS) November 8, 2022
With it, anything is possible.
Vote today.
Behind the scenes, Biden also spoke with a number of key leaders in the Democratic party.
From the White house press office:
This afternoon, the President spoke individually by phone with Democratic Governors Association Chair Roy Cooper, DCCC Chair Sean Patrick Maloney, DSCC Chair Gary Peters, and DNC Senior Advisor Cedric Richmond. He also spoke jointly to DNC Chair Jaime Harrison and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Carlisa Johnson reports on Joy to the Polls, an arts-based voting initiative in Georgia
In Georgia, young voters make up 17% of the state’s voting population. However, young voter turnout remained lower than in previous elections at the end of early voting. Now, the final get out the vote efforts are happening to capture young voters.
Throughout the state, voting rights organizers are taking to the streets to help voters get to the polls, cast their votes and have their voices heard. Today, Joy to the Polls, an arts-based initiative, is making eight stops throughout the metro area to encourage voters to head to the polls and celebrate the joy of voting.
“We all know that the system is broken and things need to be changed,” said Kaelyn Kastle one of the hosts for the event. “Young people have to understand that their vote does matter because we’ve seen how close elections can be.” pic.twitter.com/FfctRbMfQ7
— Carlisa Johnson (@CarlisaNJohnson) November 8, 2022
At its third stop of the day, Joy to the Polls featured a performance by recording artist Tate “Baby Tate” Farris in East Atlanta. Farris, a Georgia native, said she came out to remind young people to vote. “Young people have power. This is the opportunity to take that power that [they] have and use it by being active in the election process.”
This initiative, which originated in 2020, creates party-like atmospheres at polling places throughout the state, hoping to ease the stress of the voting process. Kaelyn Kastle, co-host of the East Atlanta stop, believes events like Joy to the Polls are critical in places like Georgia, where elections are won by thin margins. “We all know that the system is broken, and things need to be changed,” said Kastle. “Young people have to understand that their vote does matter because we’ve seen how close elections in Georgia can be.”
In East Atlanta, recording artist @imbabytate is taking the mobile stage as part of @JoyToThePolls a GOTV effort using the power of music to celebrate the importance of voting. pic.twitter.com/r7xwlPC9K0
— Carlisa Johnson (@CarlisaNJohnson) November 8, 2022
Updated
The Guardian’s Andrew Lawrence reports from Decatur, Georgia
Long voter queues were hard to come by, a sign that can be taken one of two ways: either most residents are already part of the giant early turnout, or simply got turned around. “Because the polling places are different from the early voting locations, that’s caused some confusion,” says Karen “Mix” Mixon, vice-chair of the DeKalb County Democratic Committee.
On a cloudless 75F day, Mixon stood outside an early voting location in the South Dekalb Mall to redirect voters toward their assigned polling place. With SB 202, the aggressive voter suppression law President Biden dubbed “Jim Crow 2.0”, finally baring its teeth on election day, Mixon notes mobilizer groups have to be extra careful about extending help this election cycle. “The law is you have to be 150ft from the building where people are voting, or 25 feet from voters who are standing in line to wait to vote,” Mixon says. “We ordered tape measures that are 150ft long and spray chalk, and we mark that off so that we are following the law.”
With mobilizing groups forbidden from approaching voters to make sure they’re at the right place (much less offer them water), volunteers can basically only wave and smile and yell and hope lost voters approach them. Mixon made herself easy enough to find outside the mall with a sign urging passers by to remind friends to vote.
Updated
The Guardian’s Andrew Lawrence reports from Atlanta
Mike South cast his ballot at Grace International Church with the economy top of mind. “My retirement has shrunk by 50%,” he said. To say he worked hard for it barely tells the story.
After launching a decade long career at Nasa as computers expert following the Challenger explosion, South, 64, pivoted to directing and acting in adult movies before cementing his legend as an industry gossip columnist. In 2013, CNBC pronounced him one of porn’s 10 most powerful people.
Porn drove his political engagement. “There was a time when free speech would’ve been an issue, especially in Atlanta,” he says. “Most of the people in my business are hardcore Democrats, but I kinda stand out because I’m more libertarian – which I would expect them to be.”
South says he voted for libertarian candidates whenever possible, including in the senate race between Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock. (“The truth is I don’t like either one of them,” he quipped, as his support dog Lola heeled.) Third-party voters could have a significant impact on that race, which is trending closer toward another senate runoff. A new Warnock ad tips voters to the possibility of having to return to the polls again over the holiday season.
After being barraged with campaign ads for the past seven years, in the country, South winces at the thought of yet another trip to the polls. “I’m over it.”
Updated
Election officials in Georgia’s largest county removed two workers from a polling site on the morning of Tuesday’s midterm races after their colleagues shared social media posts of the pair at the US Capitol attack on 6 January 2021.
Fulton county elections officials told media outlets that they fired the workers – a mother and her son – about 15 minutes before the polls opened Tuesday morning. They had been assigned to a polling site at a library in the community of Johns Creek.
The mother and son fell under scrutiny after the woman made a comment that caught the attention of a colleague while they were at an event for poll workers, Fulton county’s interim elections director, Nadine Williams, told the local news station WSB-TV. Colleagues of the woman also found social media posts by her which were reported to the county, WSB-TV added.
Williams would not elaborate on the nature of the posts. But the Washington Post reported that it was provided with copies of the social media screeds in question, and they showed the woman’s family forming part of the mob of Donald Trump supporters who staged the Capitol attack.
According to the newspaper, one of the posts read: “I stood up for what’s right today in Washington DC. This election was a sham. [Trump vice-president] Mike Pence is a traitor. I was tear gassed FOUR times. I have pepper spray in my throat. I stormed the Capitol building. And my children have had the best learning experience of their lives.”
Trump supporters attacked the Capitol in a failed attempt to prevent the congressional certification of the former Republican president’s defeat to his Democratic rival Joe Biden in the 2020 election. One of the mob’s stated aims was to hang Pence after it falsely accused him of failing to avail himself of the ability to single-handedly prevent Biden’s certification.
Officials have linked nine deaths to the insurrection, including suicides by law enforcement officers traumatized after successfully defending the building from the pro-Trump mob. Hundreds of participants have been charged criminally in connection with the attack, and many have either pleaded guilty or otherwise have been convicted over their roles.
During the 2020 presidential race, Fulton county experienced long lines at the polls, administrative mistakes and death threats against election workers. The Washington Post reported that the turmoil during the election two years earlier prompted Fulton county to prepare for Tuesday’s midterms – which many regard as a referendum on American democracy – by assigning police to more than half of its 300 or so polling places, with other officers patrolling between sites.
Georgia is holding some of Tuesday’s most-closely watched elections, including the race between incumbent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker that could determine which political party controls the US Senate.
A rematch from the 2018 electoral showdown between incumbent Republican governor Brian Kemp and Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams is also being watched nationwide on Tuesday.
Updated
When Jeff Zapor showed up at his polling place in South Lyon, in the Detroit suburbs, on Tuesday, the most pressing race on his mind was the contest for secretary of state, the elected official who oversees voting and elections in Michigan.
That in itself is extraordinary. Long overlooked downballot races, there has been an enormous amount of attention on secretary of state races since the 2020 election, when their role in overseeing vote counting came into focus as Donald Trump tried to overturn the election. Michigan is one of several states where the Republican nominee for secretary of state questioned and tried to overturned the results of the 2020 race.
Standing outside his polling place, an elementary school, Michigan, Zapor said he voted for Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, who is running for a second term. She leads her opponent Kristina Karamo, a community college professor, in the polls.
“I think election deniers on the ballot is a very dangerous thing,” Zapor, a 46-year-old mental health counselor said. “When you’re running on a platform of complete abject falsehoods, to me, that shows a complete lack of character. And you’re running for the exact wrong reason.”
Zapor added that he was concerned that there could be a repeat of efforts to overturn the election, like there were in 2020.
“I think it’s a certainty. I’m very concerned. Both in Michigan and in the nation, in 2024, I guess even in this election, will continue to be divisive and to see violence would not surprise me. I really hope I’m wrong, but that’s what I think,” he said.
South Lyon is a competitive area in Oakland county, a battleground in Michigan.
Another voter, who would only give his middle name, Alex, said he was also deeply concerned about election denialism.
“I’m concerned in general that the truth in general has eluded us and many will continue to leverage what happened in 2020 and for false information in general,” he said.
Another voter, who would only give his first name, Tom, said he voted for Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, because she was the “lesser of two evils.” He said he also voted for Benson, who sees the state’s motor vehicle offices in addition to elections, because he recently had a quick appointment renewing his driver’s license.
“She did what she said he was going to do,” he said.
In Michigan, students are coming out for Slotkin in Lansing, whether they like her or not.
“I don’t like much about Slotkin, but everyone else was worse,” said Kathryne Ford, 26, a biochemistry PHD candidate at Michigan State University outside of the Don Johnson Fieldhouse this morning. Ford called Slotkin a “cop”, with reference to her career as a CIA analyst, but lists abortion restrictions as her top concern this election cycle. “Abortion is a human right. The government should not be able to control what happens to your own body,” she said.
Camille Mikolas, 25, wore braids and a big smile as she went to cast her vote for Slotkin. “I don’t want to have a baby!” she laughed. Talking about her support for the referendum looking to enshrine abortion rights in Michigan’s state constitution, she added “Conservatives are pretty good at saying my body my choice when it comes to vaccines or whatever, but not when it comes to this. And I don’t think that’s fair.” Mikolas said she’ll be voting Democrat down the ticket today.
But the issue runs both ways for other voters. “I like Elissa,” said Belinda Fitzpatrick, 59, a swing voter. “But I voted against her. My biggest issue is the abortion thing. People are just using it like contraception,” said Fitzpatrick, who said she will also be voting against the proposal to enshrine abortion rights. Fitzpatrick will vote Republican down the ticket, as Michiganders also choose their governor and attorney general today. “I think it’s time for Republicans to have the power back,” she said.
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Trump briefly stopped to speak with reporters outside the polling place, confirming that he did vote for incumbent Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican.
Former President Donald Trump confirmed that he voted for Ron DeSantis’ reelection after he and Melania exit a polling station in Palm Beach.
— Gabby Orr (@GabbyOrr_) November 8, 2022
“Yes I did.” pic.twitter.com/ci05YZ9bLS
Trump casts vote in Florida
Donald Trump has cast his vote during today’s midterm election, with photos captured of him and Melania Trump outside a Florida polling place.
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Over in Kentucky, Ona Marshall, who is a co-owner of one of the last two abortion clinics left in Kentucky, said the line was overflowing at the polling location where she went to vote today in Louisville, around 11am.
“Not even in a presidential year have we seen that number of people, and this is mid-morning,” she said.
Of course, there’s no way of knowing whether those voters were out in favor of or against Amendment 2, the ballot proposal looking to restrict abortion in Kentucky. But Marshall said she is hopeful.
“Whatever happens, for our country and democracy, it’s extremely important that we have a higher turnout at the polls for every election, so to see it in a midterm election is definitely hopeful,” she said.
Maggie Acosta, an organizer door-knocking for Democratic candidates with the hospitality union Unite Here, noted she has heard from many fellow Arizonans who are outraged over the supreme court’s recent decision to overturn Roe v Wade.
“Instead of going forward, I’m being pushed back,” Acosta said. “So it’s time that we stand up and fight for what we deserve.”
The results of today’s election could have sweeping implications for abortion access in Arizona, which has a pre-Roe abortion ban still on the books. If Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs cannot win today, Republican lawmakers may move to enforce that law, which has become the subject of court battles.
Vice-President Kamala Harris touched on those stakes yesterday, when she participated in a virtual reception with Unite Here organizers. Acosta had the chance to pose a question to Harris, and she asked the vice-president for her message to young women who are devastated by the end of Roe.
“Know your power,” Harris replied. “So many of our movements that have been about progress have been led by young leaders, and we need them now. We need them to lead.”
Carlisa Johnson reports for the Guardian in Georgia:
Georgia voters will decide between Democrat Stacey Abrams and the incumbent Republican governor, Brian Kemp. This race has received immense national attention as it set the stage for the rematch of Abrams and Kemp this election season. However, the gubernatorial race isn’t the only race receiving national attention. Georgia’s Senate race could determine which party holds power next year in the nation’s capital. Current Senator Raphael Warnock is facing off against controversial Republican candidate Herschel Walker.
Coleman Williams, a voter in Avondale Estates, Georgia, said he feels the weight of this election as a Georgia voter. “I’ve watched the debates, and there’s just so much at stake for everyone,” said Williams. “I’m feeling nervous but hopeful because Georgia knows that we have to get out there, and we clearly have.”
Coleman Williams, a Dekalb County resident, says he’s voting because he feels the weight of this election.“I’ve watched the debates and there’s just so much at stake for everyone. I’m feeling nervous but hopeful because Georgia knows that we have to get out there and we have.” pic.twitter.com/cTPP6gyoFq
— Carlisa Johnson (@CarlisaNJohnson) November 8, 2022
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Maggie Acosta has been knocking on the doors of her Arizona neighbors for months, trying to convince them to support Democrats in the midterm elections.
Acosta, a member of the hospitality union Unite Here, has participated in campaign work since 2017, and she said the stakes feel particularly high this time around.
“This is very important – not only for me, but for my future, my kids, my grandchild,” Acosta said.
This election cycle, Unite Here’s organizers have been on the ground in four battleground states – Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Collectively, the union’s members have knocked on 2.7 million doors, including 750,000 in Acosta’s home state of Arizona.
Unite Here’s work builds on their momentum from 2020, when the union knocked on 3 million doors after developing a contactless canvassing plan to keep organizers safe from coronavirus.
Acosta, a cancer survivor, had her concerns about door-knocking in 2020, but she chose to do so in part because of her outrage over Republicans’ handling of the pandemic. Now she has returned to her post, in the hopes of electing Senator Mark Kelly and gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs, both of whom are locked in closely contested races.
“No house is going to be left unknocked,” Acosta said. “I feel like being out there and talking to people face to face is the only way that we’re going to make a difference.”
Typically, a party’s soul searching begins after the polls close and the results are in. But not this year.
Democrats, anticipating heavy losses after a seesaw election season, were already pointing fingers.
It began weeks ago. In an op-ed for the Guardian, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, the party’s progressive standard-bearer, blamed Democrats for failing to deliver a strong economic message that addresses the pocketbook concerns of most Americans.
“In my view,” he wrote, “it would be political malpractice for Democrats to ignore the state of the economy and allow Republican lies and distortions to go unanswered.”
Meanwhile, many top Democrats say their party mishandled the issue of crime and public safety.
Stanley Greenberg, a veteran Democratic pollster, argued in the American Prospect that the party had badly mishandled the issue of crime and public safety, writing that the 2022 midterms would be remembered “as a toxic campaign, but an effective one in labeling Democrats as ‘pro-crime.’”
But others say Democrats’ challengers are much deeper. A policy memo released on the eve of the election, the centrist Democratic think-tank Third Way concluded that the party’s brand had become toxic to swing voters. “Despite a roster of GOP candidates who are extreme by any standard, voters see Democrats as just as extreme, as well as far less concerned about the issues that most worry them,” it stated.
Progressives wholeheartedly disagree. A pre-election memo from the Working Families Party national director, Maurice Mitchell, credits progressives for pushing Biden to deliver on key parts of his economic agenda.
“Democrats’ passing big and popular legislation and Republican extremism have kept many races much closer than the normal midterm patterns would dictate,” Mitchell wrote. But he warned: “If Democrats face significant losses, those failures of governance and the Democrats who blocked a pro-working-class agenda will bear much of the blame.”
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It’s just after 12pm here in New York, which means that voting is well under way in most places across the country. Here’s a look at what’s happening at polling locations across the US.
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In Columbus, Ohio, Jeffrey Weisman voted for the bestselling author and Republican candidate for the US Senate, JD Vance. But not with great enthusiasm.
“I vote Republican pretty much all the way and that is my main reason why,” he said.
Vance has a slim lead over his Democratic rival, Tim Ryan, in a state that has come to give large majorities to Republican candidates. The tight race in part reflects the strength of Ryan’s campaign for a seat that may decide whether Democrats retain control of the Senate. But it’s also a reflection of voter doubts about Vance’s sincerity after he dramatically shifted from slagging off Trump as a “fraud” and a “moral disaster” to becoming a fervent supporter in order to win his endorsement in the Republican primaries.
Weisman, who owns a retail jewellery store, said it didn’t matter that Vance was endorsed by former president Donald Trump.
“I like the Republicans’ stuff when it comes more to the economy. I’m a business owner and I feel that things are not going in the right direction with the Democrats in charge. I’m hoping that maybe the Republicans in charge will get things going a little better economy wise,” he said.
Weisman twice voted for Trump in the presidential elections. But with the former president apparently on the brink of announcing another run for the White House, Weisman would prefer he stayed out.
“It’s a tough one. I like his politics. His mouth scares a lot of people. So I personally do not think he can win because of the mouth, the controversialness of him. And so I think that would be a tough road for him,” he said.
In Columbus, Ohio, jewellery store owner Jeffrey Weisman voted Republican in the #midterms. But he's not looking forward to Trump attempting a comeback: "It's a tough one. I like his politics. His mouth scares a lot of people. So I personally do not think he can win." pic.twitter.com/hAi0Gdl1rK
— Chris McGreal (@ChrisMcGreal) November 8, 2022
Dani Anguiano is reporting for the Guardian in Las Vegas:
The fate of the Senate could lie in the hands of voters in Nevada where incumbent Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto is locked in a close race with Adam Laxalt, the Republican former state attorney general who aided in efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state.
The contest between Cortez Masto, the first Latina senator and successor to the late Democratic leader Harry Reid, and Laxalt has been neck and neck. Laxalt has received the endorsement of Donald Trump, the NRA and Ron DeSantis, while Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and 14 members of Laxalt’s family have backed Cortez Masto. The race, said to be among the closest of this year’s contests, is crucial for Democrats to maintain control of the Senate.
Laxalt has sought to appeal to voters by focusing on the economy, which more than one in four voters have said is the most important issue facing the state, and tying Cortez Masto to Joe Biden, who has low approval rates in Nevada. Democrats rallying for the senator have critisized Laxalt for his opposition to reproductive freedom and argued he is in the pocket of big oil as the state sees record high gas prices.
“So you see, gas prices going up, grocery prices going up – that takes a bite out of your paycheck. It’s no joke. It hurts. The question, though, you should be asking is – who’s going to actually try to do something about it?” Obama said at an event for Cortez Masto. “She hasn’t forgotten where she came from. Which is why she’s gone after big oil for high gas prices, why she takes on pharmaceutical companies to lower prescription drug costs.”
Cortez Masto has the backing of the local Culinary Workers Union, which is running a campaign to knock on one million doors by election day. Canvassers with the union say the voters they talk to are concerned about growing housing costs and inflation.
“Everyone is working side hustles to be able to live a normal life,” said Arlett Tovar, a canvasser with the union. “Vegas used to be such a great affordable place to live and it’s not anymore.”
Updated
Sam Levine is reporting for the Guardian in Detroit, Michigan:
I’m here at Greater Grace temple, a polling site in north-west Detroit. About 400-500 people have voted here so far, the polling site manager told me. Many voters have already cast their ballots by mail, the manager said.
There were some glitches with the e-poll books used to check in voters this morning, but those have been fixed. Among other issues, the system was showing that some voters had already cast a mail-in ballot. She also said there haven’t been any incidents involving intimidation or poll watchers, which has been a big concern in Michigan.
Xhosoli Nmumhad, 35, said she’s only voted twice before, once in 2008 and then again in 2012 for Barack Obama. But she said she kept seeing political commercials on television and was motivated to vote on Tuesday to support a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would dramatically expand voting rights in Michigan. “I believe everyone should be able to vote,” she said.
Ruth Draines, 72, another voter here, said she always voted in elections. This cycle, she said she was motivated by another proposal on the ballot that would amend the state constitution to protect access to abortion.
“I don’t like the fact that they want to take away a woman’s right. Because some women get raped and they don’t want to be reminded of that,” she said. So basically that’s one of the big motivator.”
Draines said she wasn’t particularly concerned this cycle about efforts to overturn the election.
“I think that’s all just hype,” she said.
She added that she thinks Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat on the ballot for re-election today, has been doing a “pretty good job”.
“I just hopes she keeps up the good work,” she said.
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Residents of a New Orleans suburb who were casting ballots for the midterm elections Tuesday were navigating more than their fair share of hurdles to exercise their right to vote.
A bomb threat to a school in Kenner, Louisiana, which was a polling site for a couple of precincts in the city of about 65,000 people, on Tuesday morning forced vote workers to relocate the site, John Tobler – a spokesperson for the state’s top elections official – told the Guardian.
The threat to the Kenner Discovery school displaced the polling site set up there to the campus of Audubon elementary about a mile and a half away, Tobler said.
‼️ Kenner Discovery School received a bomb threat earlier this morning. Kenner Police are on scene investigating and trying to determine if this will be related to a bomb threat the school received on Thursday, November 3, 2022. ‼️ pic.twitter.com/A1q9ZxzbAS
— Kenner PD (@KennerPolice) November 8, 2022
Kenner’s police chief, Keith Conley, confirmed to the Guardian that officers were investigating a bomb threat to Kenner Discovery, which was closed for class to allow to the school to serve as a polling site. But officials said there was no indication the threat, which affected more than 2,500 voters across two precincts, was politically motivated.
Louisiana’s top elections official, the secretary of state R Kyle Ardoin, said the early findings of an investigation into the threat suggested the motive was unrelated to politics.
Conley added that it was the second similar threat to Kenner Discovery in the last five days. Local reports said the earlier threat on 3 November – which came in when there were no election-related activities at the school – demanded payment in the form of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
Though it has a significant population of Black and Latino residents, Kenner’s white majority tends to overwhelmingly side with Republican political candidates. Much of the city – including the Kenner Discovery polling site – sits in the congressional district of the Republican House whip, Steve Scalise, who is projected to cruise to re-election in Tuesday’s midterms.
Officials nationwide have been concerned about political violence in general in recent years after cases such as the US Capitol insurrection on 6 January 2021 and the attack that left House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, critically injured on 28 October.
Tuesday’s threat at Kenner Discovery came after Ardoin’s office announced that a mobile app, an online portal and a telephone hotline containing polling place and ballot information for Louisiana voters were all “experiencing technical difficulties” within hours of the polls opening Tuesday.
Ardoin, a Republican, later said the technical issues had been resolved.
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Carlisa Johnson reports for the Guardian in Georgia:
In Georgia, election day has started without issue. Voters are experiencing limited wait times across the state as they vote in person. Many attribute this to the record-breaking early voting the state saw last month. Still, Georgia’s polling locations are seeing a steady stream of concerned voters making their voices heard in this critical election.
Georgia’s secretary of state reports that Georgians are accessing their voter information in record numbers. This morning, voters accessed their “My Voter Page” – which confirms a voter’s registration and polling location – on the Secretary of State website at a rate of 19,215 users a minute.
SB202, Georgia’s new election law, eliminated access to provisional ballots for voters who go to the wrong polling location on election day. Voting advocates throughout the state are working diligently to remind voters of this change and the importance of confirming their polling locations.
Mariah Headman is a Dekalb county resident and a Georgia teacher. While she has voted absentee in the past, voting in person on election day was more convenient for her this year. She says she is voting with her students in mind. “For me, voting means the difference between well-funded public schools or underfunded ones,” said Headman. “This election is huge, and Georgia has to pull through.”
Mariah Headman is one of Georgia’s dedicated teachers. She says she is voting in-person this morning for her students. “This election is huge and Georgia is pulling through. For me, voting means the difference between well funded public schools or underfunded ones,” said Headman. pic.twitter.com/1qZ6gPoPCK
— Carlisa Johnson (@CarlisaNJohnson) November 8, 2022
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Outside a voting station at the largest Greek Orthodox church in Ohio, Ashley Sica said her vote for the Democrat Tim Ryan in the election for the US Senate was decided by the US supreme court ruling striking down abortion as a constitutional right.
“I voted based off of my values, and maybe not necessarily what I would do, but just thinking globally of choices that other people should be able to have. I don’t think that government officials should be in charge what people do with their own bodies,” she said.
Sica, a nurse, said that the removal of the right to abortion motivated a lot of women to vote in the midterms who might not usually turn out.
Sica said she was also frightened by the Republicans’ blocking of tighter gun control laws even after a series of school massacres.
“My children’s daycare is just a mile from here. There was an issue with someone shooting a gun around their daycare. So that’s another thing that kind of brought me out to vote for stricter laws in regards to guns. Having kids that are of school age now really brings that kind of thing into focus, thinking about their safety and the safety of others,” she said.
In Columbus, Ohio - Ashley Sica, a nurse, said her vote for the Democrat in the state's US Senate race was decided by the US supreme court ruling striking down abortion as a constitutional right: "Government officials shouldn't be in charge of what people do with their bodies". pic.twitter.com/a3EumS3Y29
— Chris McGreal (@ChrisMcGreal) November 8, 2022
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The US Senate election in Pennsylvania is expected to be one of the closest in the country, as John Fetterman, the state’s Democratic lieutenant governor, takes on Mehmet Oz, a Republican celebrity doctor.
Fetterman held a commanding lead in the polls for months, but in the days ahead of the vote Mehmet Oz has closed the gap, and the race appears to be a toss-up. Fetterman had a stroke in May, and continues to have issues with speaking and processing the spoken word – something that was laid bare in a difficult debate performance two weeks ago. Fetterman and his team have insisted he is fit and able to work, but his health and recovery has been cruelly mocked by Oz’s campaign.
“I liked Fetterman, except for the man had a stroke,” said Steve Schwartz, who had just cast his vote for Oz in Beaver county, 30 miles north-west of Pittsburgh.
“I don’t even know if he can drive to work yet. You don’t wanna hire him and then he’s going to be on disability for a little bit. I don’t think his health allows him to do what he’s doing right now.”
Schwartz, who also voted for the Republican candidates for governor and the US House, said he would have “seriously considered” Fetterman, were it not for the stroke.
Beaver county, named after the Beaver River, which is named after either the Lenape chief King Beaver or the animal the beaver, voted for Trump in 2020 and 2016, but Trump’s margin of victory was smaller here than in other counties.
Mike Moore, a 41-year-old loan closer, said he had voted for Fetterman for Senate.
“I like the way he is, I’ve met him a couple of times, he seems like a real genuine guy. I kind of don’t like Dr. Oz, because he doesn’t live in Pennsylvania – and that’s kind of like: ‘How can he represent me?’” Moore said, referencing Oz’s long-term residency in New Jersey. Oz lived in a mansion in New Jersey for decades, but has said he moved to Pennsylvania in late 2020.
The most important issue for Moore, he said, was “bipartisanship”, something that seems unlikely to spring from this midterm cycle.
“This country is so polarized now, it’s a shame. You know, we got to work together. We got to be Americans.”
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This midterm election is already the most expensive in history, and depending on how today goes, it could get even more pricey.
Spending on this election season has exceeded $16.7bn across federal and local candidates – over $2bn more than the 2018 midterms. Federal candidates have spent over $8.9bn while state candidates, party committees and ballot measure committees have spent $7.8bn, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks campaign spending.
The arrival of election day doesn’t mean the spending will stop, especially if runoff elections have to take place. The race for a Georgia Senate seat between incumbent Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker – a race that has been riddled with controversy – could lead to a runoff in December if neither candidate gets over 50% of the vote. Both parties have already spent over $241m on the race – what the Wall Street Journal calculated is $30.83 for each of the state’s 7.8 million registered voters.
Happy Election Day from Georgia, where the big question is whether voters get one more day of these types of ads or one more month of them. pic.twitter.com/RuJRcqgq8g
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) November 8, 2022
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In Ohio, one of the most important races for Republican leaders is to take full control of the state supreme court. Control because candidates for the bench run not on their judicial qualifications but on party tickets with an implicit commitment to make decisions in line with their political values.
Republicans have technically controlled the court since 1986, holding four of the seven seats. But one of the judges, the outgoing chief justice, Maureen O’Connor, is widely regarded by the party leadership as having gone rogue by siding with Democrats in some politically sensitive cases including over gerrymandering. And now the highly contentious issues of abortion is likely to be on the agenda following the US supreme court decision overturning Roe v Wade.
The three conservative candidates, already on the court and seeking reelection, in recent days joined a Republican bus campaign tour alongside the party’s contenders for the US Senate and state governor. No separation of powers there.
At a stop in Columbus, one of the judges, Pat Fischer, told a rally that it was important to keep the court out of the hands of “activist judges that are Democrats”. Not activist judges as such, just ones who are Democrats.
“It’s critical that the three of us win this race and we go back to having a conservative Ohio supreme court,” he told the rally.
The new state supreme court is expected to decide whether to let stand the state’s ban on abortion beyond six weeks of pregnancy, brought in after Roe v Wade was overturned. A lower court blocked the measure last month. Although the three Republican contenders for the court all say they will apply the law and not political judgements, each has already made clear their opposition to abortion.
Another of the Republican judges, Sharon Kennedy, is running to become chief justice. She has indicated that she would not enforce previous court rulings to stop Ohio’s Republican legislature from gerrymandering elections.
Florida: federal election monitors won't be permitted in polling places
The Florida state department sent a letter to the US Department of Justice saying that federal election monitors won’t be permitted inside the state’s polling places.
Florida Department of State to DOJ:
— Jason Delgado (@byJasonDelgado) November 8, 2022
“federal election ‘monitors’ are not permitted inside polling places as it would be counterproductive and could potentially undermine confidence in the election.” pic.twitter.com/I3TdaozUxG
Florida’s state department said that the monitors “would be counterproductive and could potentially undermine confidence in the election”.
The justice department regularly sends monitors to states on Election Day in an attempt to curb voter intimidation at polling places. Yesterday, the department said it would send out workers to 64 jurisdictions across 24 states. In 2020, the department sent out workers to 44 jurisdictions. The states include key swing districts in Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
“Monitors will include personnel from the Civil Rights Division and from US attorneys’ offices,” the department said in a statement.
Florida’s state department said the DOJ did not “detail the need for federal monitors” in the state.
“None of the counties are currently subject to any election-related federal consent decrees. None of the counties have been accused of violating the rights of language or racial minorities or of the elderly or disabled,” the letter said.
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While Louisiana isn’t expected to see many surprises during today’s midterm elections, voters there were among those enduring technical difficulties to cast their ballots.
The secretary of state, R Kyle Ardoin, Louisiana’s top election official, said a mobile app, an online portal and a telephone hotline containing polling place and ballot information were all “experiencing technical difficulties” within hours of the polls opening Tuesday. Ardoin, a Republican, by midday said the technical problems had been resolved.
Before the issues were taken care of, Ardoin had directed residents to call the registrar of voters office in their parish – which is the term Louisiana uses for county – or to email his office at elections@sos.la.gov to ask any necessary questions.
Ardoin’s announcement came after officials in Virginia reported technical difficulties with equipment that verifies’ voter information and poll staff in Texas said they were having problems with check-in machines.
The Republican party’s whip in the US House of Representatives, Steve Scalise, is among those up for re-election in Louisiana on Tuesday. So is Republican US Senator John N Kennedy. Both are expected to cruise to re-election.
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Outside the Eastern high school athletic club in Lansing, Michigan on a small patch of neatly trimmed grass, Elissa Slotkin – a congresswoman running in the most expensive house race in the country, spoke to reporters. She cast her vote alongside a steady stream of voters around 9am.
Slotkin seemed disturbed but prepared for attempts already being made to undermine election results in Michigan – on Monday, a judge dismissed an attempt by Republicans to toss out votes in Detroit as lacking a “shred of evidence”.
“This is what happens when a leadership climate is set in our country, trying to undercut democracy when one side loses. It’s unclear what my opponent will do if he loses. The good news is, we’ve seen this movie before – in 2020 – we were prepared,” said Slotkin.
She said it was undeniable that inflation has been on everybody’s mind in Michigan, but added that ballot initiative to protect abortion in Michigan is a “countervailing wind”.
“I was at the Michigan State rally last night with campus organizers, and Roe v Wade is really motivating students,” she said.
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A few polling places have reported technical issues this morning. The Virginia elections department confirmed that there were issues with polling books, which verifies voters’ information. The department said the issue has been resolved, though one poll worker told Kelly Avellino of local news station NBC12 that they were still have issues with their poll books.
A rep from the VA Dept. of Elections did confirm that there have been issues with polling books this morning (computers which verify voters when they come in), not the actual voting machines that accept the ballots.
— Kelly Avellino NBC12 (@KellyAvellino) November 8, 2022
In Temple, Texas, some elections staff noticed technical issues with their check-in machines.
“At this time, it is possible that some sites will experience delays this morning, but election officials are confident that the problem has been isolated and should be resolved quickly,” James Stafford, a local official, said in a news release.
Elections departments are under heavy pressure to ensure smooth sailing at the polls today as some conservatives have essentially said they will fight election results if they lose, taking a page from Donald Trump’s 2020 playbook. Reports of voter and election workers intimidation have also been seen recently, like people video-taping ballot drop-off boxes and tabulation offices in Arizona.
An estimated 8.3 million young Americans are eligible to vote for the first time this election. The question remains how many of them – and other young voters – will turn out to the polls.
When it comes to younger voters, the stakes are higher for Democrats than Republicans: 57% of young Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 favor a Democrat-controlled Congress over Republican control. But younger voters also tend to vote less than older voters (though more voted in 2020 than ever before).
Early data has shown that young voters have been turning out in smaller fractions compared to the 2020 election. But young voters are less likely to vote early or by mail, so it’s too early to tell exactly what their turnout will be today.
Still, amid the uncertainty, some young voters have already visited the polls today. One mom in Georgia, Christy Houchins, an immigrant from Laos who became a citizen, brought her daughter to the polls today, according to Greg Bluestein of the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Your @ajc reporters are all over Georgia talking to voters. Christy Houchins, an immigrant from Laos who is now a citizen, brought her 18-year-old daughter to vote. “If we want change, we have to use our voice,” she told @taylor_rcroft. #gapol #gasen pic.twitter.com/6ieK1utfcn
— Greg Bluestein (@bluestein) November 8, 2022
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This is Lauren Aratani taking over for Martin Belam.
More polls have opened up around the country, and many voters have already casted their ballots this morning. Here are some pictures that have been taken at polling places around the country as election day gets rolling.
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In the past, midterm elections have been kind of predictable. The president is slightly unpopular, his party loses some seats and most voters disappear for two years until they turn up in greater numbers for the main show.
This year might not buck any of those long-term trends. The Democratic president Joe Biden has watched his popularity slump from 53% to 42% over the past year. Polls suggest that Republicans will win the House of Representatives and might even win the Senate too (though if they do, it’s likely to be by a narrower margin). And even though turnout is looking set to be historically high by midterm standards, it’s unlikely to beat the numbers in 2020. So, it’s all pretty much electoral business as usual, right?
Not quite. Here are some of the factors that could shape the votes that come in over the next few days – and, as a result, shape the country over the next few years.
Redistricting
Under Trump, gerrymandering and other anti-democratic measures scaled up. There have been concerns about the way that kind of partisan redistricting might play out in this year’s elections – where the electoral district is purple, this is likely to work in Republicans’ favor including parts of Texas and Florida.
But, as the New York Times pointed out in September, this might not wind up being such a huge advantage for Republicans. While it’s true that the map does work in their favor, the edge isn’t insurmountable for Democrats (and it certainly isn’t irreversible either).
Restrictions
In the space of just six months, 22 new laws were passed in 2021 that restricted people’s access to vote in 14 states. Research from the Brennan centre has indicated that voter suppression is at its worst level in over a decade. Whether those laws make it hard to count mail-in ballots or make it difficult to vote in person, their overall effect tends to disenfranchise those who are already disempowered by other systems in the country – whether it’s people with disabilities or people of color who are more likely to be affected by voter ID laws. It’s also worth pointing out that laws like these are uncommon in most other countries that call themselves democracies.
Republicans have led these efforts in the hopes that voter access laws will work in their favor.
Abortion and the economy
Sure, there are the same ideological arguments about immigration and the economy that show up in any election but this year feels different. There is a general atmosphere of distrust fueled by attacks on election officials and lies about “stolen” ballots that has led some to feel that they are voting about democracy itself. And, since the supreme court’s 1973 Roe v Wade decision was overturned in June, this year’s vote has for many felt like a vote about abortion access. Even the economy has taken on a greater urgency than in recent midterms with rising consumer prices squeezing many US household budgets.
Lastly, polling is still deeply problematic so all predictions about the House and the Senate should be treated with caution until the votes are counted. A Wall Street Journal survey that found white suburban women are switching parties was based on just 297 respondents (which, shockingly, is actually a pretty good response rate for such a specific slice of the country). That kind of research is not only imprecise but it has the potential to be undemocratic when headlines tell voters what the future looks like before they have even had their say.
Read more of Mona Chalabi’s analysis here:
Officials in Philadelphia have said that counting votes will take longer than expected after a last minute u-turn to reinstate what is known as poll book reconciliation. The process, described as “time consuming and labor-intensive” by the Philadelphia Inquirer, is used to flag mail ballots submitted by voters who also voted in person.
City officials had agreed last week not to use it, but following a flurry of Republican lawsuits at an emergency meeting this morning just as polls opened, they reversed the decision. It could have an impact on how quickly the Pennsylvania senate race can be called.
Jason Lange is in Washington for Reuters and he has a warning – be ready for a long night and maybe days of waiting before it is clear whether Republicans or President Joe Biden’s Democrats will control Congress.
He reports that with dozens of races expected to be close and key states like Pennsylvania already warning it could take days to count every ballot, experts say there’s a good chance America goes to bed on election night without knowing who won.
“When it comes to knowing the results, we should move away from talking about election day and think instead about election week,” said Nathan Gonzales, who publishes the nonpartisan newsletter Inside Elections.
Because Democrats vote by mail more often than Republicans, states that let officials get an early jump on counting mail ballots could report big Democratic leads early on that evaporate as vote counters work through piles of Republican-leaning ballots that were cast on election day.
In these “blue mirage” states - which include Florida and North Carolina - election officials are allowed to remove mail ballots from their envelopes before election day and load them in vote counting machines, allowing for speedy counting.
States including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin don’t allow officials to open the envelopes until election day, leading to a possible “red mirage” in which Republican-leaning election day ballots are reported earlier, with many Democratic-leaning mail ballots counted later.
Experts like Joe Lenski, co-founder of Edison Research, which will be tracking hundreds of races on Tuesday and supplying Reuters and other media organizations with results, will keep an eye on the mix of different types of ballots each state is counting throughout the night.
“Blue mirage, red mirage, whatever. You just have to look at what types of votes are getting reported to know where you are in that state,” said Lenski.
A number of candidates will make history if they prevail in their races today. In particular, the departure of 46 members from the House of Representatives has created an opening for a new class of young and diverse candidates to seek federal office.
Two House candidates, Democrat Maxwell Frost of Florida and Republican Karoline Leavitt of New Hampshire, would become the first Gen Z members of Congress if they win their elections. Leavitt would also set a record as the youngest woman ever elected to Congress if she can defeat Democrat Chris Pappas in their hotly contested race, which is considered a toss-up by the Cook Political Report.
In Vermont, Democrat Becca Balint is favored to win her House race, which would make her the first woman and the first openly LGBTQ+ politician to represent the state in Congress. If Balint wins, all 50 US states will have sent at least one woman to Congress, as Vermont became the sole outlier on that metric in 2018.
Some House races will even make history regardless of which party’s candidate prevails. In New York’s third congressional district, either Democrat Robert Zimmerman or Republican George Devolder-Santos will become the first openly gay person to represent Long Island in the House.
As Republicans look to take back the House, their playbook has relied upon nominating a diverse slate of candidates in battleground districts that will probably determine control of the lower chamber. The strategy builds upon the party’s momentum from 2020, when Republicans flipped 14 House districts where they nominated a woman or a person of color.
Overall, Republicans have nominated 67 candidates of color in House races, according to the National Republican Congressional Committee. Those candidates could allow the party to dramatically expand its ranks of members of color, given that just 19 non-white Republicans serve in the House now. With Republicans heavily favored to take back the House, many of those candidates of color could join the new session of Congress in January.
Read more of Joan E Greve’s report here: Midterm elections – the candidates who will make history if they win
Here are some of the earliest images we’ve been sent over the newswires of people voting in-person as polling gets underway in today’s crucial midterm elections in the US.
Paul J Webber and Acacia Coronado have been in Austin, Texas for Associated Press, and report on a trio of US House races in South Texas which carry high stakes. For decades Republicans rarely bothered to compete along the US-Mexico border, but have made the heavily Hispanic region a priority in their pursuit of retaking control of Congress.
The unusually competitive atmosphere in South Texas, including for Democratic US Rep Henry Cuellar, underlines the shifting political winds in an important stronghold for Democrats — and the ramifications beyond this election.
For Republicans, victories by any of three Latina candidates running for House seats in the region — Rep Mayra Flores, Monica De La Cruz and Cassy Garcia — would deepen inroads the Republican party is making nationally with Hispanic voters, and demoralise Democrats in a place that has long been their turf.
In a sign of Republican optimism, Gov Greg Abbott was hosting his Election Night party in the border city of McAllen, reflecting Republican eagerness to show conservatives are expanding their territory.
The Republicans unleashed an aggressive play for South Texas after counties up and down the border swung toward former president Donald Trump in 2020, stunning Democrats who viewed the region safe and creating a new battleground overnight. Millions of dollars have since poured into the region, and all three Republican House candidates out-raised their Democratic opponents this summer.
Underscoring the intensity of the races heading into Tuesday, former president Bill Clinton swung through South Texas on Monday to campaign for the Democratic party. Big-name Republicans have also swooped into the region, including House minority leader Kevin McCarthy over the weekend.
The most widely seen competitive race was in the 15th Congressional District, where De La Cruz and Democrat Michelle Vallejo were competing to represent one of the two new US House districts that Texas was awarded last year following the release of new census figures.
Neither candidate was running to the middle with their policy platforms. De La Cruz has defended abortion restrictions, promised tougher border security measures and drew praise from Trump during a recent rally in Texas. Vallejo has courted liberal voters in a progressive campaign that has called for a $15 an hour minimum wage and challenged conventional wisdom that Democrats along the border are more moderate.
Andrew Gawthorpe is a historian of the United States at Leiden University and host of the podcast America Explained, and he writes for the Guardian today to argue that the future of American democracy is at stake in the midterm elections:
Never before in American history has there been an organized movement which was only one vote away from having the motivation and opportunity to make that election America’s last. Never that is, until now. Today’s anti-democratic movement is propelled not by genuine controversy or scandal, but rather by their commitment to ending competitive elections in the United States. There is no other way to interpret their belief that only one side, the Republicans, can legitimately be considered to win, and the plans that they hold to make this belief a reality.
The problems can be expected to start this November, when Republican candidates who lose will question the validity of the results and try to stir unrest. State officials who do win will begin to act on their plans to sabotage future polls by centralizing power in their own offices, de-registering millions of voters, and moving to error-prone hand-counting systems. Then, if voter suppression doesn’t prevent a Democratic win in 2024, they’ll just suppress the evidence instead and announce that they are sending Republican electors to the electoral college. Meanwhile, the majority of Republican House candidates in 2022 are election-deniers, and a Republican-controlled Congress might attempt to sabotage the certification of the presidential vote on 6 January 2025.
Each of these potential points of failure threatens the integrity of the 2024 presidential election. The breadth and depth of the anti-democratic movement also means that they are likely to pose other problems which are difficult to anticipate. Whatever means they find of sabotaging the vote, it would be foolish to rely on the conservative-dominated supreme court to stop them, particularly if the country has been plunged into civil unrest and violence.
Read more here: Andrew Gawthorpe – The future of American democracy is at stake in the midterm elections
If you would like something to listen to about the US midterm elections, then Today in Focus is for you. Today’s edition is called US midterms: is it still the economy, stupid? and it features the Guardian’s Washington correspondent Lauren Gambino talking to Michael Safi.
She tells him that the Democratic party has learned the hard way to keep its election campaigns laser-focused on the economy. “It’s the economy, stupid,” a slogan used in Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, has resonated down the ages. But Democrats have spent much of the past few months campaigning on women’s rights after the seismic supreme court decision removing the constitutional right to abortion. And Joe Biden used his final major speech of the campaign to warn voters of the threat to democracy itself.
Democrats go into these elections lagging in the polls, she says, and it’s left some hardened campaigners, such as Bernie Sanders, wondering if the party has neglected its most famous mantra.
You can listen to it here:
Joe Biden had a late night last night, after appearing at a rally in Maryland, where he said “Our lifetimes are going to be shaped by what happens the next year to three years. It’s going to shape what the next couple decades look like.”
Joan E Greve was in Bowie, Maryland for the Guardian, and reported that Biden repeated his promise to shore up abortion rights if Democrats expand their congressional majorities. The president and his wife, Dr Jill Biden, arrived back at the White House at around 1.20am.
The Philadelphia Inquirer this morning has been touting a series of quotes from voters in the area which highlight the different priorities of Republican and Democratic party voters. Here are four quotes that they picked for their newsletter today:
“It feels like a critical time. We’ve got to pick a path, and the path that we’re on is not right,” Nate DeFazio, a small business owner worried about inflation, said outside of a Mehmet Oz rally.
“If we do not maintain a majority in the Senate, Roe falling will be just the beginning,” Ronna Dewey, 54, said at a John Fetterman rally.
“It’s really important to me to be able to graduate high school and enter adulthood in a state of having all my rights intact and not feeling like, ‘Oh, I wish I’d graduated 10 years ago,’” said Jordan Bailkin, a Democratic high school senior who is voting for the first time.
“Personal freedom and the freedom to dissent – I feel that both of those things are under attack,” Jason Dekker, a conservative from York County said.
Overnight Stephen Collinson at CNN offered this analysis of how – and why – he expects things to pan out in favor of the Republicans in the next few days. He writes:
It’s too early for postmortems. Forty million Americans have already voted. And the uncertainty baked into modern polling means no one can be sure a red wave is coming. Democrats could still cling onto the Senate even if the House falls.
But the way each side is talking on election eve, and the swathe of blue territory – from New York to Washington state – that Democrats are defending offer a clear picture of Republican momentum.
A nation split down the middle politically, which is united only by a sense of dissatisfaction with its trajectory, is getting into a habit of repeatedly using elections to punish the party with the most power.
That means Democrats are most exposed this time.
If the president’s party takes a drubbing, there will be much Democratic finger-pointing over Biden’s messaging strategy on inflation – a pernicious force that has punched holes in millions of family budgets.
Just as in last year’s losing off-year gubernatorial race in Virginia, Democrats are closing the campaign warning about democracy and Trump’s influence while Republicans believe they are addressing the issue voters care about most.
When will we know who won US midterm races — and what to expect on election day
We probably won’t know the winners on election night
In many races, we’re not going to know who won on election night. After the polls close, candidate vote totals are likely to shift as local officials continue to count ballots.
Once the polls close, election workers tabulate the votes in each precinct and transmit them to the county’s central election office. Each county reports their results to the state.
Vote totals are likely to shift throughout the evening as well as in the days that follow election day as votes continue to be counted. That shift isn’t unusual and can be explained by two dynamics, said Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at MIT who specializes in election administration.
First, he said, the places that report their votes first tend to be smaller, Republican jurisdictions. Second, many places report their in-person election day vote first and their mail-in absentee vote later. Those votes tend to skew towards Democrats.
Because these totals can change, there should be deep skepticism of attempts to claim victory before votes are counted.
Projections about which candidates will win are separate from official results
As officials report election results, news organizations, including the Associated Press and major television networks, scrutinize data to try to make projections about which candidate will win. This process is independent of the official election efforts to count votes.
In some races, experts are able to quickly make a projection about who is going to win a race. If a candidate from one party has consistently won a race, for example, and the voting patterns on election night appear to immediately be in line with previous elections, news organizations may feel confident in making a projection with only a fraction of the vote counted.
But in competitive races where there’s a slim margin between the candidates, and a lot of the vote hasn’t been reported yet, experts are much more cautious and will not make a prediction.
As the vote count continues, forecasters compare the margin separating the candidate with where in the state there are still votes outstanding. Once they feel confident that there’s no path to victory for one candidate, they will declare a winner.
Some will claim that they see election errors (and most will turn out to be false)
Every election day, there are voters who claim to see something amiss at the polls or during the vote counting process. In 2020, many of those claims were loudly amplified by Donald Trump and continue to live on today, even though they’ve been debunked over and over again.
In 2022, we’re likely to hear similar claims. Each one of those should be taken with a “giant grain of salt”, David Becker, the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said. “I would look at any claim from anyone saying that, regardless of party of election, highly skeptically.
“These things are largely driven by losing candidates or candidates that expect to lose,” he added. The claims, he said, are “almost always proven to be false. Or easily explainable.”
In 2020, for example, there were claims from observers about ballots being wheeled into a central counting facility in Detroit late during election night. Those ballots had already been verified by the local election office and there was nothing wrong with their late arrival time. The claim was nonetheless touted by those who sought to sow doubt about the election results.
You can read more from Sam Levine’s explainer here: When will we know who won US midterm races — and what to expect on election day
If you missed it last night, here is the clip of former US president Donald Trump, speaking at a rally in Ohio, saying he will be making a “big announcement” on 15 November, hinting that he will mount a 2024 presidential run.
“I’m going to be making a very big announcement on Tuesday, 15 November at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida,” Trump told supporters at the rally for Republican Senate candidate JD Vance. Trump declined to elaborate, saying he did not want to “detract from tomorrow’s very important, even critical election”.
Polls open for midterms voting
Polls have opened in some parts of the US for the 2022 midterm elections, so called because they fall halfway through a president’s – in this case, Joe Biden’s – presidency and so are often seen as a referendum on the incumbent.
Many voters have already cast their ballots, with more than 41 million people taking part in early voting.
At stake are all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 35 seats in the 100-member Senate, 36 state governorships, along with numerous other races for local officials and mayors.
Republicans need to gain five seats to win a majority in the House and only one to take the Senate. Typically, an incumbent president’s party expects to lose House seats in the midterms, but this year’s races are being closely watched for any gains for election-denying candidates: Republicans who still believe the lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election, some of whom actively worked to overturn the result that put Biden in the White House.
In 36 states, other issues are on the ballot, including laws on abortion in California, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana and Vermont.
We will have all the news and results on our live blog, so stay tuned.
Nimo Omer spoke to David Smith, the Guardian’s Washington DC bureau chief, about why these midterms matter so much and what the results could mean for America:
There are a number of contests that everyone is keeping a very close eye on. Perhaps the biggest is Georgia: “The rule used to be whichever way Florida goes, so goes the nation,” says David, but “Georgia has, in many ways, replaced Florida as the pivotal state in the nation.”
Georgia’s senate race is extremely important. Raphael Warnock’s win in 2021 was key to the Democrats securing control of the senate. Now Warnock faces off against Herschel Walker, a former football player who “has no discernible political experience or qualifications”, David says. Walker has been embroiled in controversy for a year as stories of his affairs, extramarital children and allegations of domestic violence came to light. Most recently, a former girlfriend asserted that he paid for for her to have an abortion, despite Walker running on a hardline anti-abortion platform.
And Georgia is also where Democratic favourite (and Star Trek’s president of a United Earth), Stacey Abrams, will again try to wrestle the governership from Brian Kemp. A victory for Abrams would ensure voting and abortion rights are bolstered in the state.
Other races to watch out for are Ohio, where author of Hillbilly Elegy, Trump critic turned sycophant JD Vance is running: “If Democrats win in a state that has really been trending Republican in recent years, there’ll be a lot of blame on Vance and perhaps Donald Trump for backing him,” David says.
Pennsylvania, home of Joe Biden, is another crucial state with TV personality Dr Mehmet Oz running against the 6’8” tattooed lieutenant governor, John Fetterman, in the senate race. Oz secured a Trump endorsement, as did Doug Mastriano, who is running for governor of the same state. Mastriano was part of the effort to overturn the 2020 elections and appeared outside the US Capitol during January 6 riots. He could be a key part of a Trump presidential run in 2024.
“It feels as if there are two separate campaigns and conversations happening, that are operating on different planets,” David says. “In the past, at least, there was a shared set of issues, and both parties would be looking to be the best on inflation or healthcare.”
Republicans have focused on inflation, specifically petrol prices, and the cost of living crisis. They have also made characteristic campaign points about crime and other culture war topics such as immigration. Conversely, Democrats have been focused on reproductive rights following the supreme court decision to overturn Roe v Wade, as well as the threats to democracy, voting rights and the climate crisis. “A lot of opinion polls are suggesting that Republicans’ issues are likely to win the day, because so often, people vote according to their pocketbook and the economy,” says David.
Read more of Nimo Omer’s conversation with David Smith in today’s First Edition: Tuesday briefing – What you need to know ahead of US midterms
Hello and welcome to our coverage of the US midterm elections. As my colleague Nimo Omer wrote in today’s First Edition newsletter, ballots will be cast for senators, representatives and local officials in one of the most important contests in recent years. She added that it has become tiresome to describe every American election as uniquely significant, but there is a lot at stake with these midterms as the chasm between Democrats and Republicans grows ever wider, and the supreme court decision to no longer protect abortion rights hangs in the air.
The result of the election also has global implications, as concerns are expressed that a Republican win might dampen US enthusiasm for pouring financial and military aid into Ukraine’s war for survival against the latest Russia invasion of its territory. And the outcome will set the stage for the presidential election battle to come during the next two years – a race which looks likely now to feature a certain Donald J Trump.
We will have non-stop rolling live coverage of the election over the next couple of days, so I hope you will join us.
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