More than 144 hours after it started, we are wrapping up our election-night live blog. But never fear! Our coverage will continue on a new live blog dedicated to tracking unresolved races. Here’s what happened in the 2022 midterms — and what is still to come.
Democrats managed to hold onto control of the Senate by winning at least 50 seats, with the possibility of hitting 51 if Raphael Warnock wins the Georgia runoff on Dec. 6. The three other highly endangered Democratic incumbents going into the cycle — Arizona’s Mark Kelly, Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto and New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan — all won. Democrat John Fetterman even managed to flip Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat from red to blue. Other than Georgia, there is only one seat left unresolved in the chamber: Alaska’s, where ranked-choice voting will determine whether Lisa Murkowski or Kelly Tshibaka will head to Washington.
At this moment, we still don’t have an official projection in the House, but it seems likely that Republicans will win it by the barest margin — maybe with as few as 218 seats. That would be a big deal for the federal government, as Democrats would no longer have full control and Republicans would be able to launch countless investigations into Democratic conduct. But it would also be a major underperformance for the opposition party in a midterm year with an unpopular president.
Finally, Democrats had an unambiguously good election on the state level. They gained at least one governor on net, picking up Maryland and Massachusetts but losing Nevada. (The gubernatorial race in Arizona is still unresolved, but Katie Hobbs currently leads Kari Lake, so this could be yet another Democratic flip.) They also won all six secretary of state elections where a Republican who denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election was seeking to be the top election official in a 2024 swing state. Democrats also took full control of both the Michigan and Minnesota state governments by flipping their state legislatures. And they still have a chance to flip the New Hampshire and Pennsylvania statehouses, too.