Could the GOP Still Reach 52 in the Senate?

The Republican wave may not have materialized as imagined last night, but the tide may yet come in for the GOP. And the books are very much still open on the Senate, despite the disappointing results last night.

It took a lot longer for the media to call the Senate race in Wisconsin, where 100% of precincts had reported for hours, but they finally declared Ron Johnson the winner. It’s the third narrow victory for Johnson, who managed to eke out the win over Mandela Barnes even as Democrat governor Tony Evers scratched out a re-election victory:

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson won a third term in Wisconsin, defeating Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes in one of the most expensive Senate races in the country. https://t.co/uRHxQlglA6 pic.twitter.com/DxueoHOhpv

— POLITICO (@politico) November 9, 2022

The call came about an hour after Johnson went public with complaints over the delay, with Jason Calvi corroborating that the election reporting had been all but complete for hours:

Senator Ron Johnson: “The corporate media is refusing to call a race that is over. The votes are in. In all Democrat strongholds, municipalities are reporting 100% of wards are in and counted.” pic.twitter.com/swwzMF0R4G

— Jason Calvi (@JasonCalvi) November 9, 2022

The New York Times is reporting only 91% of Milwaukee County is in, with a total of 347,579 votes.

IN FACT, Milwaukee County itself says 100% of the 530 wards are in, with a total of 350,905 votes. https://t.co/uhnabFvdan

— Jason Calvi (@JasonCalvi) November 9, 2022

With that call in place, Republicans now have 49 Senate seats confirmed in the next Congress, while Democrats have 48. Three races remain, all of which are held by Democrats in this Congress — Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona. None of those three have a winner called yet, and Georgia’s Senate race has been called for a runoff between Herschel Walker and incumbent Raphael Warnock.

And that means the GOP could get to 52 Senate seats after the December 6th — which was my pre-midterm prediction, in fact. But Republicans will have to run the table to do it. Can they?

Let’s look at the outstanding races first. Here are the up-to-the-minute results in Arizona, which don’t look very promising:

Blake Masters trails by five points with 74% of the vote in as of noon ET, when I wrote this post. That’s not a great position, especially for a challenger against an incumbent, but it depends on which votes are left to count. Masters insists that the remaining ballots lean Republican and that he’s “confident” of victory. Kari Lake is also insisting that the remaining ballots will put her over the top in the gubernatorial race, but Lake is only trailing by a point against a non-incumbent. That seems more reasonable, assuming that the outstanding ballots lean GOP. That seems like a strange assumption to make — I’d have guessed that non-Election Day ballots would lean the other way — but it’s possible.

Here’s where Nevada stands with Adam Laxalt’s challenge to incumbent Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto:

This is the flip side of the Arizona argument. Doable, definitely. Laxalt’s up by almost two points with 87% of the vote counted, and he’s likely been helped by Joe Lombardo’s stronger performance in the gubernatorial challenge to Steve Sisolak. And bear in mind that a win here guarantees at least a continuation of the split Senate, with the 2024 Senate cycle a lot less friendly to Democrats than this cycle was.

What about Georgia? Frankly, it’s surprising that it’s as close as it is. Brian Kemp’s decisive victory should have been enough to pull Walker across the line, and might have been if Kemp’s was the only voice in contest other than Walker’s. The next four weeks will be heated in the Peach State, with both sides dumping tens of millions of dollars into the runoff no matter what happens in Nevada or Arizona.

If Republicans want to win the runoff, they need to keep it simple. Use Kemp and Ron DeSantis to rally voters, especially the latter, who has proven his ability to convert voters to the GOP. Donald Trump likely won’t stay out of Georgia, especially if he declares his intent to run in the 2024 presidential race this week. However, Kemp and DeSantis could flood the zone in order to guard against any blowback and minimize Trump’s ability to provoke Democrat turnout. The GOP will have to make sure that the runoff is much more a referendum on Joe Biden than Trump.

If the GOP can pull out wins in both Nevada and Arizona, the runoff might become slightly less acute, although still of critical importance. But I suspect that we’ll see those split and the GOP leading 50/49, which will make the runoff the biggest single story of the midterms. At the very least, though, Senate control is still within reach for Republicans, if they can manage to avoid defeating themselves.