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  • Republican wins in Ohio and West Virginia hand party Senate control | US elections 2024

    Republicans have seized majority control of the Senate.

    The Trump-backed auto magnate Bernie Moreno has ousted three-term Democratic senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Republican Ted Cruz has defeated Democratic challenger Colin Allred in Texas, according to the Associated Press.

    With the re-election of Republican Deb Fisher in Nebraska, Republicans now have at least 51 seats in the Senate, as well as the chance to pick up a few remaining wins in battleground states, according to the Associated Press.

    Democrats have held the Senate majority for the past four years. Republican control of the Senate gives the party crucial power in confirming the next president’s cabinet members and future supreme court justices, providing a check on Kamala Harris if she is elected, or boosting Donald Trump’s power.

    Earlier, Trump loyalist Jim Justice won the US Senate seat in West Virginia previously held by Joe Manchin, giving Republicans two additional seats, according to the Associated Press.

    Several hotly contested Senate seats remain to be called, including a race between Democratic incumbent Jon Tester and Republican challenger Tim Sheehy in Montana.

    Ahead of election night, the most vulnerable incumbent Democrat was widely deemed to be the three-term Montana senator Jon Tester, who – if polls are accurate – faces likely defeat at the hands of a Republican challenger, Tim Sheehy, an ex-navy Seal endorsed by Trump.

    A win for Sheehy, whose campaign has faced allegations that he made racist comments about the state’s Indigenous community, would tip the Senate further into Republican hands.

    The race between Sherrod and Moreno was the most expensive in Senate history, with about $500m has been ploughed into ad spending.

    Thirty-four seats in the US Senate – one-third of the 100-member chamber – were up for grabs on Tuesday in contests that could influence the makeup of the new administration, impact the balance on the supreme court and shape policy on areas ranging from foreign affairs to abortion.

    Democrats made some historic wins in safe districts: Andy Kim of New Jersey will become the first Korean American elected to the US Senate, while Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware will be the first two Black women to serve in the Senate at the same time.

    In other early races to be called, the independent Bernie Sanders won re-election in Vermont, and the Republican congressman Jim Banks of Indiana won his first Senate challenge comfortably.

    The victory for Sanders, who caucuses with Democrats, was called by the AP with less than 10% of the vote in. It will be the 83-year-old’s fourth Senate term.

    Democrats were trying to cling to a one-seat majority with the knowledge that the odds appeared stacked against them, given Manchin’s retirement and the fall of his seat to a Republican.

    Elsewhere, the party faced uphill struggles, with incumbents trying to hold 23 seats, often in states that have become increasingly pro-GOP as Trump has strengthened his grip over the party.

    By contrast, only 11 Republican senatorswere up for re-election, all in solidly GOP states, thus giving the Democrats much less scope for making gains.

    Facing off against a Trump-backed candidate in an increasingly Republican state, Brown had tried to emphasise shared policy goals with Trump – including supporting anti-fentanyl legislation – in a one-time battleground state that the Republican presidential nomineeheld on comfortably.

    Key races that remain up in the air are those in the Democrats’ three blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, the closeness of which mirror the knife-edge presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

    In Pennsylvania, the Democratic incumbent Bob Casey – a senator for 18 years – is seeking a fourth term against a challenge from the Republican Dave McCormick. McCormick, who has funded his own campaign, has sought to tie Casey to the same policies that Trump has attacked Harris for, namely immigration and a past support for a fracking ban.

    The race has been designated a toss-up by the Cook Political Report, as has that in Wisconsin between another incumbent Democrat, the two-term senator Tammy Baldwin, and her GOP challenger, Eric Hovde, a wealthy banker and property developer who is another campaign self-funder.

    Democrats are also on the defensive in Michigan where Elissa Slotkin, a member of the House of Representatives, is running to fill the seat left vacant by the retirement of a fellow Democrat, Debbie Stabenow. Her Republican opponent is Mike Rogers, a former GOP House member and ex-FBI agent, who was once a critic of Trump but has now received his endorsement.

    Another Democratic soft spot is Nevada, where the party’s sitting senator, Jacky Rosen, is in a tight race with Sam Brown, a decorated army veteran who was badly wounded in Afghanistan. Brown has tried to fend off Rosen’s attacks on his abortion stance by saying he would not support a nationwide ban and acknowledging that his wife once underwent the procedure.

    In Arizona, Ruben Gallego, a US Marine Corps veteran, is trying to keep a seat in the Democratic camp following the retirement of the independent senator, Kyrsten Sinema, who voted with the party in the chamber. Up against him is Kari Lake, a Trump ally who baselessly claimed that her failed 2022 bid for the state’s governorship had been derailed by Democratic cheating.

    Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

    Chris Stein contributed reporting

  • Why AP called the Ohio Senate race for Bernie Moreno

    Why AP called the Ohio Senate race for Bernie Moreno

    WASHINGTON (AP) — Three-term Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown didn’t do as well in Ohio’s population-dense metro regions as he had in the past, and that performance — in areas he needed to overcome the state’s increasingly conservative bent — helped propel former car salesman Bernie Moreno to victory.

    Moreno won after securing a 4 percentage-point lead in the Senate race, ousting Brown, who was the last in his party elected statewide in what was once a premier electoral battleground.

    Moreno was narrowly leading in the Cincinnati-Dayton area when the race was called, while Brown needed a better performance in the Cleveland and Columbus regions, even though he led in those areas.

    Brown would have needed to notch 71.9% of the remaining ballots left to be counted when The Associated Press called the race for Moreno at 11:28 p.m. — a threshold he wasn’t clearing in any of the counties in the state.

    CANDIDATES: Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, Bernie Moreno

    WINNER: Moreno

    POLL CLOSING TIME: 7:30 p.m. ET

    ABOUT THE RACE:

    The phrase “as Ohio goes, so goes the nation” was once a widely accepted bit of conventional wisdom that underscored the true swing nature of a perennial presidential battleground state. No longer.

    Over the past decade, the Midwestern state, once a reliable barometer of how the country at large would vote, has become a Republican stronghold. Brown was the lone exception. With a gravelly voice and a populist outlook, Brown somehow hung on and is the sole Democrat to still hold statewide elected office.

    Now, however, he lost the political fight of his life against the wealthy, Trump-backed Moreno. The race was the most expensive Senate race this election cycle, with a tab that surpassed $400 million — with much of it coming from Republican-aligned groups that supported Moreno.

    Brown appeared to understand the gravity. In July, he called on then-presumptive presidential nominee Joe Biden to drop out of the race a month after his shaky debate performance against Trump. He endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace Biden on the ticket but skipped the Democratic National Convention in August. Moreno accused Brown of distancing himself from Harris, which the senator’s campaign dismissed.

    But Moreno was not without his own liabilities. He was criticized by fellow Republicans, including former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, for making tone-deaf comments about abortion — suggesting that it was “crazy” for women past the age of 50 to care about the issue because “I don’t think that’s an issue for you.’”

    WHY AP CALLED THE RACE: The AP declared Moreno the winner with a nearly 5-point lead over Brown with over 90% of the estimated vote in. He was narrowly leading in the population-dense Cincinnati-Dayton area, which Brown won in 2018. Meanwhile, Brown’s margins in Democratic strongholds in Cleveland and Columbus weren’t as large as they were in 2018. Moreno also led in areas that were most closely divided in the 2020 presidential race.

    ___

    Learn more about how and why the AP declares winners in U.S. elections at Explaining Election 2024, a series from The Associated Press aimed at helping make sense of the American democracy. The AP receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

  • Ohio sheriff’s lieutenant apologizes after saying he won’t help Democratic voters | Ohio

    An Ohio sheriff’s lieutenant has apologized – and been merely reprimanded – after authoring social media posts boasting about how he would refuse to assist people who voted for Democrats during Tuesday’s elections and would require proof of a person’s voting choice before providing aid.

    John Rodgers, a veteran lieutenant with the Clark county sheriff’s office, reportedly posted on Facebook that he would consider a person’s voting record when responding to calls for service in his jurisdiction, which includes the city of Springfield that has recently been at the center of conservative conspiracy theories, according to the Ohio news outlet WHIO.

    In a series of posts, Rodgers reportedly wrote: “I am sorry. If you support the Democrat Party I will not help you.”

    In another post, he reportedly said: “The problem is that I know which of you supports the Democratic Party, and I will not help you survive the end of days.”

    And in another, WHIO reported, Rodgers indicated people would need to “provide proof of who you voted for” if they asked him for help.

    After the posts caught public attention, the sheriff’s office said in a statement to WHIO that the comments were “highly inappropriate”. The agency also said the posts “in no means reflect the Clark county sheriff’s Office delivery of service to ALL our community and does not reflect the mission and values of the sheriff’s office”.

    “The community has a right to be upset over the actions of Lt Rodgers and he, as well as the sheriff’s office in general, will have to work even harder to replenish the trust of members of our community,” the statement added.

    An internal investigative file pertaining to Rodgers’ posts obtained by WHIO also said that Rodgers claimed that he had been prescribed sleep aids by his doctor, which he alleged had been causing some of his communications to be “out of character”. Rodgers reportedly insisted that was a “documented side-effect”.

    “I do not remember writing these posts or deleting any posts,” Rodgers reportedly wrote in the inter-office communication with supervisors.

    According to WHIO, the sheriff’s office said that Rodgers had received a written reprimand for violating the department’s social media policy and would remain on duty.

    Clark county in Ohio has been a focal point over during Donald Trump’s campaign for a second presidency after he and others began repeating lies on social media that members of the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, were eating domestic pets and wildlife.

    Since Trump promoted the false and derogatory claims at his debate with his White House election opponent, Kamala Harris, in September, several hospitals, local government buildings and schools have been sent into lockdown, causing evacuations and temporary closures, due to bomb threats in the community.

    In a statement to the Springfield News-Sun, the sheriff’s office chief deputy, Mike Young, addressed the situation involving Rodgers and connected it to ongoing tensions in Springfield and Clark county over the lies about Haitian immigrants there.

    “We’ve been in this battle over the last few months, with the attacks on the Haitian community and other immigrants, and we protect people’s rights and we don’t support the conduct to the contrary,” Young said. “I can’t go back in time and take that post away. The lieutenant made the post, and he has received consequences for that.”

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    In a letter to the News-Sun on Sunday, Rodgers himself said he apologized again for his posts.

    “I know I cannot apologize enough, and my apologies may seem empty, but I will continue to apologize as long as necessary,” Rodgers wrote.

    “I know in this day and age society has a perception of law enforcement that may not always be positive, and I have now added to that perception,” Rodgers added. “I accept responsibility for the messages, and I deeply regret making them.”

    Rodgers said that as soon as he became aware of his posts on Tuesday, he deactivated his Facebook account, stopped taking his sleeping medication, and contacted his doctor to discuss alternative medication.

    He also said to the News-Sun that he contacted the Clark county commission, community partners, and the NAACP to have “face-to-face conversations” to explain himself, “take ownership of the posts” and offer his apologies to them – though he acknowledged knowing “it will be difficult for the public to trust me”.

    Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage