Tag: 2022 US election coverage

Winning the House majority, even with a smaller margin than they’d hoped, will give Republicans some newfound power to set the agenda when they take over the chamber in January.

House Republicans will have subpoena power in the majority and control over powerful committees — and they plan to make investigations into the Biden administration a top priority.

On the legislative front, there will be some must-pass policy issues — like funding the government — that will test the ability of Republicans and Democrats to work together.

Here’s a look at some of their plans:

Investigations: House Republicans are eyeing potential probes into everything from the chaotic pullout from Afghanistan, border policies being overseen by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, business dealings involving President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and the bureaucratic decision-making behind Covid-related school closures and vaccine mandates.

House Republicans may also use their majority to push a counter-narrative around the Jan. 6, 2021, attack in an attempt to shift blame away from former President Donald Trump after a violent mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol.

Even before the party clinched the House majority, some of the investigative groundwork laid out by Republican officials had started to come to fruition. A federal judge in Louisiana on Monday, for instance, ordered an FBI cybersecurity official to be deposed in a lawsuit alleging that the FBI coerced social media companies to block stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 election.

The FBI deposition is one of several sought by the state Republican officials in a lawsuit accusing Biden officials of effectively enforcing government censorship by pushing social media companies to, among other things, police speech about the origins of the virus that causes Covid-19, the efficacy of face masks and health care measures intended to curb the spread of the virus, as well as claims about election integrity and the security of voting by mail.

It’s not yet clear how far House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy is willing to go when it comes to January 6 and the 2020 presidential election. And some Republicans argue that the party would be better served by moving past 2020.

GOP legislative agenda amid narrow majority: The president can exercise veto power over legislation, but House Republicans will still be able to push some messaging bills that highlight their agenda.

In an exclusive, wide-ranging interview with CNN, two days before the midterm elections, McCarthy outlined his plans for power, which includes tackling inflation, rising crime and border security — three issues that have become central to Republicans’ closing pitch to voters.

McCarthy also left the door open to launching eventual impeachment proceedings, which some of his members have already begun to call for.

During a private intraparty meeting on Monday ahead of leadership elections, McCarthy promised he would strip power from Democrats, vowing to kick Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar off the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and California Reps. Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff off the House Intelligence Committee, according to a source in the room.

But Republicans’ slim majority will stand in the way of most – if not all — of their priorities in the chamber.

McCarthy’s allies have recently attempted to convince moderate Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas to switch parties in hopes of padding their slim margins, according to two sources familiar with the conversation. Cuellar flatly rejected the idea.

Midterms are supposed to be the time for the opposition party to shine.

That should especially be the case when there is once-in-a-generation inflation and when the vast majority of Americans think the country is on the wrong track.

Instead, President Joe Biden and the Democrats are in position to have one of the four best midterms for the party controlling the White House in the last century.

So what just happened?

The GOP’s “candidate problem”

Analysts, myself included, noted that Republicans seemed to have a candidate likability problem. Pre-election polling showed Republicans in all the key races had negative net favorability ratings. Democrats were broadly better liked than their opponents.

Many of those Republicans were endorsed by former President Donald Trump and had falsely claimed — at least at one point — that they believed he won the 2020 election.

The exit polls bear out Republicans’ “candidate problem.” In every Senate race (save Georgia) that Inside Elections rated as a toss-up or only tilting toward a party before the election, more voters said the Republican candidate’s views were too extreme than said the same for the Democrat.

We see this in gubernatorial elections, as well. Republicans nominated 2020 election deniers for governor in a number of blue or swing states. None of them has been projected a winner, and only Republican Kari Lake of Arizona has any chance of winning.

Two presidents on the trail

On the national level, there are two presidents in the spotlight: the current one (Biden) and the former (Trump). Both men sported negative net favorable ratings, per the exit polls.

The fact that you have a current president and a former president who are both unpopular isn’t unusual.

What is unusual is that of the 18% who viewed neither Biden nor Trump favorably in the exit polls, 40% of them voted for Democrats. The backlash against one president this year may have been canceled out by the backlash against the other.

“Abortion first” voters

Arguably, what truly made this midterm unique was abortion. Despite high inflation, only 31% of voters in the exit poll said it was the most important issue to their vote. A nearly identical percentage (27%) said abortion, and these voters overwhelmingly chose Democratic candidates for Congress.

This matches the dynamic we saw in the special House elections following the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June. Democrats started doing considerably better than before the Supreme Court ruling.

Read more here.

Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly will win a full six-year term, CNN projects, defeating Republican Blake Masters, a venture capitalist who was backed by former President Donald Trump and had repeated some of his falsehoods about the 2020 election.  

The win by Kelly, who was elected in 2020 to fill the term of the late GOP Sen. John McCain, is a critical victory that edges Democrats one step closer to their goal of maintaining control of the US Senate – which would be a stunning feat given the low approval ratings of President Joe Biden and the unfavorable economic climate that seemed to be driving momentum toward the GOP.  

With Kelly’s win in Arizona, Democrats will hold 49 seats and Republicans will hold 49. With the Arizona seat in their column, Democrats would need to notch just one more seat to hold the majority in the upper chamber, following their pickup in Pennsylvania where Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democrat, defeated Trump-backed Mehmet Oz in the contest to replace retiring Republican Sen. Pat Toomey. (The Senate is currently divided 50-50, but Vice President Kamala Harris casts the tie breaking vote).  

Both parties are still eyeing an incredibly close race in Nevada where Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto is trying to fend off a challenge from Republican Adam Laxalt, the state’s former attorney general. Democrats are also defending a seat in Georgia, where Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker are headed to a December 6 runoff, CNN projects.  

Control of the US House still hangs in the balance, but it is clear that even if Republicans win a majority, it will be a far more slender advantage than GOP leaders had hoped.  

Kelly entered the 2022 cycle well positioned to withstand the headwinds facing Democrats — even in a purple state like Arizona that Joe Biden narrowly won — because of his formidable fundraising and unique personal brand as a retired astronaut, a Navy veteran and the husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords.   

As the votes were counted in Arizona, Masters’ campaign team had hoped that an unusually large tranche of mail-in ballots that were dropped off at polling locations on Election Day would favor Republicans. Those ballots in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous, took longer to count than those cast in person on Tuesday because officials had to verify signatures on the ballot envelopes.  

In a call with reporters on Friday afternoon, Masters campaign advisers argued that Masters had a path to victory. “We always knew it was going to be a close race,” one campaign officials said. “Smart observers looking at this race know it is entirely too close to call. It’s probably going to come down to 10,000 votes either way. And we feel good, we have a path.”  

But ultimately as the tallies continued, Kelly opened a lead that Masters could not overcome.  

Earlier in the race, Masters, a first-time candidate, was able to navigate the GOP primary gauntlet with significant financial backing from conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel, his former boss. He appealed to Republicans by promising to prioritize immigration issues, but also by echoing Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. In one campaign video released last year, he said he believed Trump won.  

Masters then appeared to modulate his tone about the 2020 election results as well as the conservative stances he had sought out during the primary on abortion – in what initially seemed like an effort to appeal to broader swath of the Arizona electorate. (Though Republicans comprise a plurality in Arizona, independents make up about a third of the electorate and often sway close elections).   

After his primary victory in August, Masters scrubbed his website of language that included the false claim that the election was stolen. Under questioning from the moderator during a debate with Kelly, Masters conceded that he had not seen evidence of fraud in the 2020 vote counting or election results in a way that would have changed the outcome. In that debate and on the trail, Kelly had argued that the “wheels” could “come off our democracy” if election deniers like Masters were elected.   

But Masters seemed to reverse course after receiving a phone call from Trump urging him to “go stronger” on election denialism, a conversation that was captured in a Fox documentary. In the final week of the campaign, Masters told CNN’s Kyung Lah he didn’t believe moderates were bothered by his comments about the 2020 election, insisting that voters were far more focused on their concerns about inflation, crime and the border.   

Throughout the campaign, Kelly portrayed Masters as an extremist, who would jeopardize abortion rights, as well as Social Security and Medicare. In a state where lawmakers passed a new ban on abortion at 15 weeks earlier this year – and where there are legal efforts underway to ban abortion in almost all cases – Kelly’s campaign kept a relentless focus on Masters’ anti-abortion stances.   

Masters had said he would support a national ban on abortion after 15 weeks, a proposal that was advanced by South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. That bill includes exceptions for rape, incest and to protect the life of the mother. 

CNN analysts break down the latest numbers:

Democrat Wes Moore will be elected governor of Maryland, CNN projects, becoming the first Black person to lead the state. 

He will defeat Republican state Delegate Dan Cox, an election denier backed by former President Donald Trump who ran on a hardline conservative platform. Retiring GOP Gov. Larry Hogan, a moderate, did not endorse Cox, who had defeated Hogan’s chosen successor in the Republican primary in July. 

Moore will be just the third Black American to be elected governor in US history, after Virginia’s Douglas Wilder, who was elected to a term in 1989, and Massachusetts’ Deval Patrick, who was first elected in 2006 and served two terms. Two others, New York’s David Paterson, who served from 2008 to 2010, and Louisiana’s Pinckney Pinchback, who served for a little over a year between 1872 and 1873, were elevated to the governorship after their predecessors resigned or were driven out. Pinchback was a Republican, but the other three Black governors were Democrats. 

Moore, a Rhodes scholar and former White House fellow, is also the former CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation, New York City’s largest anti-poverty nonprofit. He gained national recognition after authoring the 2010 book “The Other Wes Moore,” an inspirational story of two boys with the same name and ties to Baltimore.  

The first-time candidate is also a veteran, having served as a captain and paratrooper with the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, where he led soldiers in combat in Afghanistan.   

Moore had the backing of establishment Democrats, including House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, and the support of Oprah Winfrey before winning the crowded Democratic primary in July.   

Moore, who was considered an overwhelming favorite to win in the deep-blue state, participated in only one debate with Cox, hosted by Maryland Public Television on October 12, in which the two sparred over policies and took jabs at one another.   

Moore called Cox an “extremist election denier,” citing a tweet from the Republican nominee in which he touted sponsoring buses for Trump’s January 6, 2021, rally following his loss in the 2020 presidential election. Cox tweeted that he was doing so to “#StoptheSteal.” 

Cox accused Moore of wanting to “defund the police,” to which the Democratic nominee responded, “That’s not true.”  

Moore’s running mate, former state Del. Aruna Miller, who immigrated with her family from India as a child, will also make history with her election as Maryland’s first Asian American lieutenant governor. Governor and lieutenant governor nominees are elected on the same ticket in the Old Line State.   

CNN’s Melissa Holzberg DePalo, Eric Bradner and Zachary B. Wolf contributed to this report.