US midterm elections 2022: Trump backlash grows as top Virginia Republican says ‘I could not support him’ – live | US midterm elections 2022

Ed Pilkington and Sam Levine report:

Several of the most consequential races are happening in the border state of Arizona. A US Senate contest between the Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly and Republican challenger Blake Masters could determine which party controls the Senate.

There are also consequential state races, including for governor and secretary of state, in which prominent election deniers endorsed by Donald Trump have a shot at winning. So far only 70% of the Arizona vote has been counted.

To understand why that is, you have to zoom in to Maricopa county, which covers the state capital, Phoenix. It contains 60% of all votes in Arizona and is the second largest voting jurisdiction in the nation.

The number of people who vote early has increased dramatically since the pandemic. This year Maricopa county also saw a surge in the number of early ballots that were dropped off on election day – they are known as “late earlies” – rising to 290,000, the largest number in the state’s history and 100,000 more than in 2020.

Each early ballot has to be verified to check that the voter’s signature matches the signature in the voter rolls, and after that is done it is sent to a bipartisan panel for approval and processing. That all takes time, as we are witnessing.

Many people have drawn a comparison of Arizona’s vote count with that of Florida, which called its results within hours of polls closing on Tuesday. That state’s system allows election officials to begin counting mail-in ballots as soon as they are received; mail-in ballots have to be requested and must be received by an election supervisor no later than 7pm on election day.

But the main reason why Ron DeSantis won his re-election race so quickly on Tuesday was because it was a blowout, with the incumbent Republican governor garnering 59% of the vote while his challenger, Charlie Crist, received only 40%.

Had the candidates we are watching in Arizona or elsewhere had such a convincing lead, we would probably not still be waiting for their races to be called. Nonetheless, there are questions that Arizona is going to have to face in future elections.

Stephen Richer, who is the recorder of Maricopa county, said that after the dust settles “we will likely want to have a policy conversation about which we value more: convenience of dropping off early ballots on election day or higher percentage of returns with 24 hours of election night”.

Republicans are inching towards a House majority, but several key races, especially in the west, remain undecided.

Many of these close races are in California, where elections often take days or weeks to tabulate. In Orange county, the Democratic star Katie Porter is very narrowly leading Republican Scott Baugh in her newly formed swing district. Meanwhile, the Republican incumbent Michelle Steel, who ran an intensely negative campaign falsely painting her Taiwanese American opponent as having ties to Chinese communism, is leading in her race. And the Democrat Adam Gray is barely trailing the Republican John Duarte in the Central Valley.

in Colorado, the far-right firebrand Lauren Boebert remains in an unexpectedly tight virtual tie with her opponent, the Democrat Adam Frisch.

In Nevada, the Democratic representative Susie Lee is leading in a tight race against the Republican lawyer April Becker, who challenged the 2020 presidential election results. And the incumbent Democrat Dina Titus is pulling ahead of her Republican challenger in a redrawn district.

It may not be until Saturday that the outcomes of Nevada’s razor-thin Senate and governor races are known, The Nevada Independent reports.

That’s based on comments made at a press conference by Joe Gloria, registrar of Nevada’s most-populous county Clark, where Las Vegas is located. The outcome of the two races is expected to hinge on votes from its residents, who tend to lean Democratic:

Virginia’s Republican lieutenant-governor Winsome Sears said she could not support Donald Trump if he again ran for the White House, telling Fox Business Network in an interview that the former president has become a “liability” for the GOP:

The comments are significant considering Sears did something last year that Trump hasn’t done in more than six: win an election. Voters in the Democratic-leaning state elected Sears as the running mate of Glenn Youngkin in his gubernatorial campaign, and she made history as the first woman and first person of color to serve as Virginia’s lieutenant governor.

Her comments also underscore the tension among Republicans over Trump’s influence on the party, particularly since many candidates he backed did not fair well in Tuesday’s midterm elections.

Montana has become the latest state where voters said no to further abortion restrictions by rejecting a law that was meant to stop the killing outside the womb of babies who survive a failed abortion – which is already illegal.

The so-called “born alive” law would have allowed medical providers to face criminal charges if they don’t take “all medically appropriate and reasonable actions to preserve the life” of infants, according to the AP.

The defeat puts Montana among the ranks of Republican-leaning states where voters have rejected attempts to further tighten down on abortion access following the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade in June.

Here’s more on the failed law from the AP:

Health care professionals and other opponents argued the proposal could rob parents of precious time with infants born with incurable medical issues if doctors are forced to attempt treatment.

“Today’s win sends a clear message to state leadership: Montanans demand our right to make private health care decisions for ourselves and our families with the help of our trusted medical teams — and without interference from politicians,” said a statement from Hillary-Anne Crosby, a spokesperson for an organization called Compassion for Montana Families that opposed the measure.

The outcome comes after a series of wins for abortion rights supporters in states around the country where abortion was directly on the ballot during the midterm elections. Voters enshrined abortion protections into state constitutions in Michigan, California and Vermont. They also voted down an anti-abortion constitutional amendment in conservative Kentucky, just as voters did in Kansas in August.

Supporters said the proposed Montana law was meant to prevent the killing of infants outside the womb in rare occurrence of a failed abortion, something that is already is illegal. Penalties for violating the proposed law would have included up to $50,000 in fines and up to 20 years in prison.

At least half of U.S. states have similar post-abortion born-alive laws in place, according to Americans United for Life, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that opposes abortion, aid in dying and infant stem cell research.

“This initiative would have criminalized doctors, nurses and other health care workers for providing compassionate care for infants, and, in doing so, overridden the decision-making of Montana parents,” said a statement from Lauren Wilson of the Montana Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not happy about how Democrats performed in her state, New York, in the midterms – a series of House losses helping (probably) hand the chamber to Republicans, though Kathy Hochul, the governor, did fend off an unexpectedly strong challenge from her Trumpist opponent, Lee Zeldin.

The New York City congresswoman popularly known as AOC told the Intercept: “New York, I think, is the glaring aberration in what we see in this map … what happened in New York really bucks a lot of the trends in what we saw nationwide.

“… I think, in New York, the way that those campaigns were run were different than the way a lot of winning campaigns across the country were run. And I think the role of the state party had very strong national implications. If Democrats do not hang on to the House, I think that responsibility falls squarely in New York state.”

Identifying key election themes in New York, Ocasio-Cortez said: “I think policing was a big one, I think the choice among certain Democrats to … amplify Republican narratives on crime and policing, running ads on it … validating these narratives actually ended up hurting them much more than a different approach. I think that what we saw in other races was that they were able to really effectively center either their narratives and the narratives that they wanted to run with, whether it was abortion rights, whether it was democracy, whether it was … other key and top priorities.

“I think Democrats in New York, they did a couple of things. They ran ads around that were explicitly very anti-defund [the police], which only served to reinvoke the frame and only served to really reinforce what Republicans were saying. If we’re going to talk about public safety, you don’t talk about it in the frame of invoking defund or anti-defund, you really talk about it in the frame of what we’ve done on gun violence, what we’ve done to pass the first gun reform bill in 30 years. Our alternatives are actually effective, electorally, without having to lean into Republican narratives.

“… And I think another prime mistake is that in New York state, [ex-governor Andrew] Cuomo may be gone, but … much of his infrastructure and much of the political machinery that he put in place is still there. And this is a machinery that is disorganised, it is sycophantic. It relies on lobbyists and big money. And it really undercuts the ability for there to be affirming grassroots and state-level organising across the state.

“And so … you’re leaving a void for Republicans to walk into … it’s a testament to the corruption that has been allowed to continue in the New York state Democratic party.”

Martin Pengelly

Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri who may or may not run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 but definitely did run from Capitol rioters on 6 January 2021, even after raising a fist to the mob, thinks Republicans did not do as well as they might’ve done on Tuesday night because they didn’t run on his populist, not to say Trumpist, principles.

He tweets, in a message at least partially counter to the emerging consensus that Republicans suffered (if probably winning the House and maybe winning the Senate can be called suffering) because voters wanted to rebuke their Trumpist drift:

A refresher on how Hawley ran, as shown by the House January 6 committee, is here.

Video of Josh Hawley running, meanwhile, is here: