Politics

WASHINGTON (AP) — With control of Congress pending, officials in Nevada’s closely watched races for Senate and House, as well as governor, continued to tally votes on Thursday.

The vote counting is taking days, but that’s not abnormal for Nevada, where a chunk of votes have previously not been tallied until after election night. In the two most populous counties, officials warned up front that it would take days to process the outstanding ballots.

NEVADA’S WAY

A few things have slowed Nevada’s vote counting in recent elections.

First, Nevada has also had problems with long lines of voters at poll close, although Nevadans have traditionally opted to vote early. The state won’t release vote counts until all voters who were in line at poll close have cast their vote.

Second, in 2020, Nevada greatly expanded absentee voting, sending a ballot to every registered voter. The state passed legislation to do that in future elections as well.

Also that year, nearly 15% of Nevada’s vote was not reported until after election night — and it took three days for the state to report 100% of the vote.

This year, voting officials in the two most populous counties, encompassing the population centers of Las Vegas and Reno, warned it would take days to process the outstanding ballots.

County election clerks will count mail ballots received until Nov. 12 as long as they were postmarked by Election Day, and

Officials have until Nov. 17 to finish the counting and submit a report to the Nevada secretary of state’s office, according to state law.

The state has no mandatory recount law,

WHAT HASN’T BEEN CALLED

— A Senate contest between Democratic incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican former state Attorney General Adam Laxalt.

Laxalt and Cortez Masto have been locked in a tight race for weeks, both hitting hard on national party talking points: Laxalt blaming inflation and illegal immigration on Democratic policies, and Cortez Masto promising to block GOP-led attempts at a nationwide abortion ban and to fight for a pathway to permanent citizenship for undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children.

— A governor’s race between Democratic incumbent Steve Sisolak and GOP Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo.

The campaign was costly and contentious, with airwaves and the internet awash in recent weeks with ads sponsored by the candidates, their parties and political action committees aiming to amplify their differences. Both candidates predicted the race’s outcome wouldn’t be known for several days — with each man predicting he would win.

— Three House races where Democratic incumbents faced stiff challenges.

In two swing districts stretching out of Las Vegas through suburbs into rural areas, second-term Rep. Susie Lee faces Republican April Becker, and third-term Rep. Steven Horsford is up against Republican Samuel Peters.

As a result of redistricting, six-term Rep. Dina Titus is on the hot seat in the Democrat’s traditional stronghold encompassing the Las Vegas Strip after party strategists sacrificed some turf in exchange for gains elsewhere. Mark Robertson, a retired Army colonel, is trying to become the first Republican to win that 1st District seat since 1998.

WHAT WE KNOW

—With an estimated roughly 80% of the votes counted, Republicans are leading their Democratic opponents by single-digit percentage points.

—A significant number of mail ballots remain to be counted. Election officials will count ballots received until Saturday as long as they were postmarked by Election Day.

—Officials have said there are tens of thousands of ballots that remain to be counted in Las Vegas’ Clark County.

—Democrats and Republicans are urging their supporters to be patient while officials continue to count votes.

—Nevada wasn’t called in 2020′s presidential election until the Saturday after Election Day — the same day Pennsylvania (and therefore the presidency) was called for Joe Biden.

WHAT WE STILL DON’T KNOW

—Beyond the glaring questions— who won the Senate and governor’s races? — it’s also unclear how many more votes from drop boxes remain to be counted.

—The outstanding vote totals in Reno’s Washoe County also are not clear.

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Mike Catalini can be reached at https://twitter.com/mikecatalini

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Check out https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections to learn more about the issues and factors at play in the 2022 midterm elections. Follow AP’s coverage of the 2022 midterm elections at: https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections

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WASHINGTON (AP) — This week’s ballot had an unspoken candidate — American democracy. Two years of relentless attacks on democratic traditions by former President Donald Trump and his allies left the country’s future in doubt, and voters responded.

Many of the candidates who supported the lie that Trump won the 2020 election lost races that could have put them in position to influence future elections. But the conditions that threatened democracy’s demise remain, and Americans view them from very different perspectives, depending on their politics.

In New Hampshire, voters reelected Republican Gov. Chris Sununu to a fourth term but rejected three congressional candidates who were either endorsed by Trump or aligned themselves with the former president. Instead, voters sent Democratic incumbents back to Washington.

Bill Greiner, a restaurant owner and community bank founder, said the Trump candidates won their Republican primaries by “owning the crazy lane” and then provided an easy playbook for Democrats in the general election.

Greiner, a Republican, said in past years he has fallen in line behind GOP nominees when his preferred candidates lost primaries, but he couldn’t vote for candidates who continued to deny the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.

“The election was not stolen, and anyone who leads with and finishes with being an election denier is not going to do well,” he said. “I think that point was proven with exclamation marks.”

In the run-up to the midterm election, President Joe Biden put the spotlight on threats to American democracy, although critics suggested it was a ploy to take attention off his poor approval ratings and voter concerns about the economy.

On Thursday, Biden said the nation’s core principles had endured: “There were a lot of concerns about whether democracy would meet the test. And it did!”

Election Day showed Biden was not alone in his anxiety: 44% of voters said the future of democracy was their primary consideration, according to AP VoteCast, an extensive survey of more than 94,000 voters nationwide. That included about 56% of Democrats and 34% of Republicans.

But among Republicans, those who identify as being part of Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement were more likely than others to say the future of democracy was the top factor when voting, 37% to 28%.

The concerns over democracy were shared by members of both major parties, but for different reasons: Only about a third of Republicans believe Biden was legitimately elected, according to the AP VoteCast survey, showing how widely Trump’s continued false claims about the election have permeated his party.

Democrats, meanwhile, believed the spread of election lies and the number of Republican candidates repeating them were an assault on the foundation of democracy.

Several of the most vocal candidates who denied the results of the 2020 presidential election ended up losing races for statewide office that play some role in overseeing elections.

Trump and his supporters targeted races for Secretary of State, the office that oversees voting in most states, after being unable to overturn 2020 election results at the state level.

The AP VoteCast survey also showed the effect the false claims have had on how Americans view the security of elections. It found that MAGA Republicans were more likely to lack confidence in the midterm vote — about half of MAGA Republicans overall were not confident the vote would be counted accurately, but just 3 in 10 of their non-MAGA counterparts had those concerns.

There was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election or any credible evidence that it was tainted, as confirmed by federal and state election officials, exhaustive reviews in battleground states and Trump’s own attorney general.

The former president’s allegations of fraud were also roundly rejected by dozens of courts, including by judges he appointed.

Still, the conspiracy theories run deep. They offered fertile ground for sowing mistrust when fairly routine problems arose Tuesday in Detroit and Maricopa County, Arizona. The trouble was easily solved, but not before it sparked recriminations on social media, including posts by Trump.

Arizona’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, Kari Lake, raised the possibility of nefarious activity and has said if she wins, she would call a special session to make massive changes to Arizona election laws.

Questions about elections were directly on the ballot in several states.

In Nebraska, voters approved a voter ID proposal that was born in the aftermath of the 2020 election and the false claims of fraud. Michigan voters approved a wide-ranging initiative backed by voting-rights advocates. Among other things, it would expand early voting options, require state-funded return postage and offer drop boxes for absentee ballots. The measure also specified that the Board of State Canvassers has only a “clerical, nondiscretionary” duty to certify election results.

Long-term victory should not be declared, said Ron Daniels, president of the Institute of the Black World 21st Century: “The white nationalist, white supremacist, MAGA movement has been checked but not defeated.”

He said Black voters, especially, were aware of what was at stake. The election deniers who would potentially nullify votes were part of a long history of efforts to deny people, especially people of color, representation.

The results were “dangerously close,” Daniels said. “We have to wait to see the ultimate outcome.”

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who won reelection against a candidate who has repeated Trump’s 2020 falsehoods, said she was heartened to see concessions from candidates who had previously refused to acknowledge that Biden’s win was legitimate or who repeated Trump’s election lies.

Among them was Minnesota Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Jensen, who lost to the incumbent Democratic governor.

“Tim Walz is the governor for four more years,” he told supporters. “Republicans, quite frankly, we didn’t have a red wave. It was a blue wave. And we need to stop, we need to recalibrate. We need to ask ourselves: ‘OK, what can we learn from this? What can we do better?’”

Jenna Ellis, senior legal adviser for Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, said on her podcast: “There isn’t this kind of concern that we had in 2020. We can’t just say, ‘Oh my gosh, everything is stolen.’ That’s ridiculous for this election.”

The fact that some of the strongest supporters of Trump’s claims conceded could help “reestablish some of the norms of the democratic process that were trashed during Trump,” Dartmouth historian Matthew Delmont said.

The question now is whether democracy is safe, or just safe today, he said.

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Associated Press writer Holly Ramer in Concord, New Hampshire, contributed to this report.

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Follow AP’s coverage of the elections at: https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections. And check out https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections to learn more about the issues and factors at play in the 2022 midterm elections.

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SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — Neither South Dakota’s “Curse of Karl” nor the invocations of former President Donald Trump weighed on Republican Sen. John Thune this week as he breezed to a historic fourth term that could see him ascend to lead the GOP’s Senate caucus.

Only one other South Dakota senator has won four terms: Sen. Karl Mundt, whose time in Congress from the 1930s to the 1970s inspired a joke in state political circles known as the “Curse of Karl.” Three other senators — Democrats George McGovern and Tom Daschle, as well as Republican Larry Pressler — tried to convince South Dakotans to grant them four Senate terms. They all failed, with Daschle losing to Thune in 2004.

Thune, 61, admitted to some “bare knuckles campaigns where you’re just tearing the bark off each other” over the years. But this year’s campaign was a quiet one in which his Democratic challenger came nowhere near his $17 million in campaign funds. Thune hardly acknowledged opponent Brian Bengs, an Air Force veteran and university professor, and instead ran ads that featured his granddaughter and panned President Joe Biden’s economic policies.

“Congratulations for breaking the curse,” read the cake at Thune’s Tuesday victory party.

But a potential post atop the Senate GOP leadership awaits. Thune, currently the No. 2 Senate Republican, expressed support for the current leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Thune also didn’t shy away from discussing his own leadership aspects when it comes time to pick a new leader, saying he knows how to both lay out a “clearly defined vision” for the caucus and marshal support for it.

Karl Rove, an influential Republican strategist, praised Thune at a fundraiser for law enforcement in Sioux Falls this week, telling the crowd that “South Dakota is hitting way above its weight with him in the United States Senate.”

“I do think that there is an expectation in our country that checks and balances is a good thing,” Thune said of the push for the GOP to control Congress. “And if you have a divided government, sometimes that can present an opportunity to do some really consequential things.”

Thune, who did not receive Trump’s endorsement, said it was proof his party needed to look past the former president: “You can’t have a party that’s built around one person’s personality. You got to have a party that’s built on something that’s more durable.”

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NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. (AP) — With the nation awaiting results of tightly contested U.S. Senate, House and governor’s races in Nevada, the elections chief in Las Vegas defended the pace of vote-counting in the state’s most populous county Thursday.

“I can tell you with a great deal of confidence that everything we are doing here in Clark County is moving those ballots as quickly as we can,” Clark County Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria told reporters at the regional election center in North Las Vegas. “But I have to caution you in saying we don’t want to move too fast. We want to make sure we’re accurate, validating the signatures and the identity of these folks.”

Clark County, with 1.3 million registered voters, is the only county in Nevada that leans Democratic. It has more than 50,000 outstanding ballots, Gloria said Thursday, but he refused to give a breakdown of how many were received in ballot drop-boxes compared with those received in the mail. That distinction is important to campaigns as they assess whether their candidates can expect to make up ground. In the second-most populous county, Washoe, at least 40,000 ballots remain to be counted.

U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, was trailing in her effort to fend off a challenge from Republican Adam Laxalt. Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak was also in a tight race for reelection against Las Vegas-area Sheriff Joe Lombardo, who was also leading Thursday. Three House seats are in limbo.

Rep. Susie Lee, a Democrat who represents a portion of southern Nevada from Las Vegas to the Arizona border, said she was spending the time riding her mountain bike. Elections returns showed she had a narrow lead over Republican challenger April Becker.

“We absolutely knew all along it would be a tight race. All my races have been very, very close. The last time we waited days and days too,” Lee told The Associated Press on Thursday.

Nevada voters adopted what is widely considered the most comprehensive state version of the Equal Rights Amendment in the nation, putting protections in the state Constitution for people who have historically been marginalized.

Gloria said about 200 workers are processing ballots in Clark County and would work through at least Saturday — “Sunday we will be in here if we still have to.”

He said his office has “been as transparent as we possibly can” be in letting the public view ballot-counting, giving tours to the media and having counters operate in front of glass panels.

“People are able to stand there and see every single step of the process,” he said. “We’ve got staff there that’s also available to answer any questions that they may have moving from step A all the way to step Z.”

Gloria also said there are security measures in place to protect workers, but he declined to detail them.

Ballots are still arriving by mail, and county election clerks statewide will count mail ballots that are received until Saturday as long as they were postmarked by Election Day, according to state law. Officials have until Nov. 17 to finish the count and submit a report to the Nevada secretary of state’s office.

Voters have until the close of business Monday to “cure” any ballots in which the signature on the ballot envelope doesn’t appear to match the voter’s signature on file. Another 5,555 provisional ballots will also be reviewed starting next week.

In heavily Republican, rural Nye County, workers on Thursday resumed their plan to count every paper ballot by hand, using a new method in which ballot control teams receive, distribute and verify batches of ballots and separate tally teams count the results in silence. The hand-count is a secondary method to Dominion Voting Systems tabulators, which recorded 18,089 votes.

The secretary of state’s office had ordered Nye County interim clerk Mark Kampf to halt the hand-count ahead of Election Day, citing fears that early results could be released.

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Associated Press editor Juliet Williams and writer Scott Sonner in Las Vegas and Report for America/Associated Press writer Gabe Stern in Reno also contributed to this story.

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DENVER (AP) — Republican U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert’s race remained extremely tight on Thursday and could be headed for a recount in the GOP firebrand’s bid for reelection against Democrat Adam Frisch, a former city councilmember from the upscale ski town of Aspen, Colorado.

The tightness of the race has garnered national attention as Republicans inch closer to the 218 seats that would give them control of the U.S. House. Boebert was seen as a lock in the state’s sprawling, conservative-leaning 3rd Congressional District. But she trailed on election night and only took a roughly 1,200-vote lead after two days of additional counting with thousands of ballots left to be tabulated. The margin gave her a 0.4 percentage point lead, within the 0.5-point margin that triggers an automatic recount.

Boebert, a staunch Trump loyalist, fashions herself as a fighter in a broader cultural crusade for the soul of the nation and earned a spot on the so-called “MAGA Squad” alongside Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Even as a freshman representative, Boebert’s brash style gained her national TV appearances, widespread notoriety and a loyal following.

During President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address in March, Boebert interrupted a somber moment about Biden’s son to blame the president for 13 service members who were killed during the U.S. withdrawal in Afghanistan.

Frisch was expected to face long odds after redistricting made the already conservative district, which elected former President Donald Trump by a 15 point margin in 2016, more Republican. But the Democratic challenger, who downplayed his political party and pitched a pro-business and pro-energy platform, remained adamant that Republican voters were tired of what he called Boebert’s “angertainment” and bet on a portion of GOP voters jumping ship.

To Frisch, the slim margin in the election speaks to his ability to build a broad bi-partisan coalition by touting himself as a moderate.

If Boebert loses, it would be another hit to the disappointing results for the GOP on Tuesday night after the anticipated red wave never made the shore.

But Boebert and her supporters weren’t considering that option on Thursday.

“We’re confident Lauren Boebert will win re-election,” said Courtney Parella, spokeswoman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, whose mission is to elect Republicans to the House of Representatives.

Thursday morning, Boebert tweeted “Winning!”

Shortly after, Frisch wrote in a statement: “The closeness of this race is a testament to the fact that the people of western and southern Colorado are growing tired of the angertainment industry that Boebert is a part of and want a representative who will fight for bipartisan solutions.”

During the campaign, Boebert and Frisch clashed less on policy issues and more on character. The incumbent claimed Frisch was a closeted leftist who would discard his conservative platform once in congress, while the challenger fashioned himself as a competent and tempered alternative.

Both Frisch’s and Boebert’s campaigns said they are closely watching the race in anticipation of further ballot drops from counties still counting votes and that neither have reached out to attorneys.

In closely watched Pueblo County, exhausted elections workers on Thursday were processing roughly 3,200 mail-in ballots and 1,800 in-person last-day ballots, said Gilbert Ortiz, the county clerk and recorder.

In Colorado, county elections boards have until Nov. 30 to certify their election results and submit those to the secretary of state’s office, which has a Dec. 5 deadline to issue its own certification or order mandatory recounts. Any recounts requested by a candidate, or other parties, must be paid for by that candidate or other party and must be completed by Dec. 15.

Elections officials urged the public to be patient, saying vote-counting was proceeding according to established procedure with no reported irregularities.

The sprawling district covers much of western and southern Colorado, including ranches, ski resorts and national forest land as well as the cities of Pueblo and Grand Junction. Grand Junction is in Mesa County, where county clerk Tina Peters has been charged with allegedly allowing outsiders to break into her election system. She has been barred from overseeing elections there.

In Pueblo County, the count would take all day, Ortiz said. And under state law, officials have nine days after Election Day, or until Nov. 17, to receive overseas and military ballots, as well as to “cure,” or verify, ballots in hand that have voter signatures that cannot be immediately verified, he said. Some of Pueblo County’s bipartisan citizen elections judges, who open and verify ballots and feed them into the machines, have left for other commitments or exhaustion, meaning there are fewer people on hand to process ballots, Ortiz said.

“We just want to make sure that our numbers are accurate, and we are not willing to sacrifice accuracy for speed,” Ortiz said. “At this point, we just want to finish today.”

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This story corrects Tina Peters’ last name.

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Associated Press writers James Anderson and Colleen Slevin contributed to this report.

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Jesse Bedayn is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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SEATTLE (AP) — Democratic U.S. Rep Kim Schrier has won a third term in Washington’s 8th U.S. House district, fending off a challenge from Republicans who targeted the seat as part of their efforts to flip the chamber.

Schrier, a pediatrician, is the only Democrat to have held the seat since the district was created in the early 1980s. She defeated Matt Larkin, a lawyer, abortion rights opponent and former Washington attorney general candidate who painted her as too far left.

Schrier stressed the results she’s achieved in office. Those results include road money for the agricultural town of Wenatchee, which will help bring the region’s apples, pears and cherries to market, and getting the city of Roslyn, best known as the setting for the TV show “Northern Exposure,” support for projects to reduce the risk of wildfire.

Washington’s 8th Congressional District stretches across the Cascade Mountains, encompassing wealthy Seattle exurbs populated by tech workers and central Washington farmland.

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Republicans made a striking decision earlier this year to nominate candidates for top statewide posts in swing states who backed overturning President Donald Trump’s loss in 2020. Most of those candidates lost in the midterm election.

Doug Mastriano, who commissioned buses to take Pennsylvanians to the Jan. 6, 2021, protests in Washington failed in his bid to become that state’s governor. Kristina Karamo, a community college instructor who spread misinformation about voting on Twitter even on Election Day, was crushed by Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state.

Mathew DePerno, an attorney who filed a lawsuit spreading Trump’s election lies in Michigan in 2020, lost his bid to be that state’s attorney general. Audrey Trujillo, a political novice who cheered Trump’s defiance of the vote in 2020, was defeated for New Mexico secretary of state.

Two such races remained too close to call on Wednesday — Arizona and Nevada. And in more conservative states, from Indiana to Kansas, election conspiracy theorists still won key positions.

Many observers argued that the 2022 midterm election has shown that imperiling democracy is not politically successful.

“It turns out that trying to overturn an election is not wildly popular with the American people,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster.

That even extends to Arizona, Ayres added, where a prominent former television newscaster-turned-election-conspiracy-theorist, Kari Lake, remains in a right race for governor against Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, whose campaign has been widely panned.

“The fact that it is close with a very polished, very good Republican candidate and a very weak, very unpolished Democratic candidate tells you how much of a weight election denial is on a Republican candidate,” Ayres said.

Lies and conspiracy theories about elections burrowed deeply into the 2022 Republican field, with nearly one-third of the party’s 85 candidates for governor, secretary of state and attorney general embracing Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss.

About half of those won — almost all of them incumbents, except for candidates such as Kris Kobach, a member of Trump’s 2016 voter fraud commission who won the race for attorney general in Kansas, and Chuck Gray, a Wyoming state representative who ran unopposed for secretary of state in that heavily Republican state.

More significant are the outcomes in the six states that clinched Joe Biden’s win in 2020 and where Trump and his allies disputed his loss.

In most of those states, as in most of the country, the secretary of state is the top election official while the governor and attorney general often play key roles in voting rules and certifying election results.

In Georgia, Trump unsuccessfully backed a slate of election conspiracy theorists in the GOP primary in May, seeking revenge against incumbent Republicans who rebuffed his requests to overturn his loss.

On Tuesday, Trump lost bids to install supporters in three more of those pivotal states. In Pennsylvania, Mastriano would have had the power to appoint a secretary of state to oversee voting, but he was routed in the governors race by Democratic Attorney General Josh Shapiro. In Wisconsin, Trump’s pick for governor, Tim Michels, lost to Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, dooming Republican dreams of disbanding or significantly overhauling the state’s bipartisan election commission.

In Michigan, Karamo and DePerno had been key players in spreading misinformation about Trump’s loss in 2020. Along with Tudor Dixon, the party’s nominee for governor who repeated Trump’s election lies, they provided a drag on the GOP ticket that contributed to Democrats capturing full control of the statehouse for the first time in decades.

In two other competitive states — Minnesota and New Mexico — GOP candidates for secretary of state who echoed Trump’s election lies lost badly, performing worse than the top of their respective tickets.

“There are more of us pro-democracy Americans who are not Democrats — who look at the Republican Party and say ‘That is not for me’ — and that was borne out last night,” said Jeff Timmers, a former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party.

Nevada and Arizona will continue to test that idea as ballots are tallied in their close races for top statewide posts.

Nevada is where former state lawmaker Jim Marchant organized a coalition of election conspiracy theorists to run for voting posts nationwide as he himself ran for his state’s secretary of state position.

Democracy advocates were optimistic on Wednesday, especially as some Republicans conceded their losses without alleging mass fraud.

“We’re seeing a bit of a scramble for the right message” among election deniers online, said Emma Steiner, who monitors disinformation for Common Cause.

She said concessions from candidates including Dixon in Michigan and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania make “it a little more difficult for election deniers to continue.”

But even as advocates celebrated, they kept a wary eye on Arizona and Nevada and acknowledged that Trump has inflicted grave damage on the trust in democracy that helps bind the country together.

“Without a doubt, election denial is alive and well, and this is a continuing threat,” said Joanna Lydgate of States United, which has sought to publicize the danger of election conspiracy theorists. But she took solace in Tuesday’s results.

“It was a really good night for democracy,” Lydgate said.

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Associated Press writer Geoff Mulvihill in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, contributed to this report.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the 2022 midterm elections at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections. And check out https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections to learn more about the issues and factors at play in the midterms.

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ATLANTA (AP) — First, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp shrugged off being targeted by former President Donald Trump.

Then the Republican incumbent wore down Democratic superstar Stacey Abrams for a second time, culminating in a decisive Tuesday election victory.

Now, as he celebrates his reelection, Kemp is arguing that his no-drama conservative approach is the way forward for the GOP.

“This election proves that when Republicans stay focused on real world solutions that put hard-working people first, we can win now, but also in the future, y’all.” Kemp told supporters as he declared victory Tuesday.

Kemp largely played the foil to Abrams in 2018, making attention-grabbing ads where he pointed a gun at a teen and promised to use his truck to round up immigrants living in the country illegally to position himself as a conservative in a Republican primary.

As a public speaker, he drawls out short speeches punctuated with University of Georgia football catchphrases.

One of those slogans — “Keep choppin’” — dates to the Bulldogs’ 2018 team when Kemp first ran for governor. And it summarizes Kemp’s dogged approach.

Kemp focuses on what he can control. He never rose to the bait of attacking Trump in public even when Trump was savaging him every day for refusing to overturn the 2020 elections. He may not soar to rhetorical heights, but he rarely makes a stumble that he’s forced to defend. And he used his incumbency to maximize his advantage: The former secretary of state reaped benefits from voters concluding he has demonstrated independence and steadiness.

Seung Lee, a software tester, is one example of a voter who could have gone Democratic — he voted for incumbent U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock over Republican challenger Herschel Walker. But the resident of the Atlanta suburb of Decatur chose Kemp, citing a level of comfort and satisfaction with the incumbent.

“We’re already familiar with how things are when Kemp is in office and I don’t really like Abrams,” Lee said.

Voters like that helped Kemp win more than 53% of ballots, beating Abrams by 300,000 votes out of 4 million. That may not sound like a landslide in other states where Democrats or Republicans breeze to victory. But Kemp’s win was more than five times as big as in 2018. And it may be close to the ceiling for a GOP candidate in narrowly divided Georgia, where partisans tend to be dug in, said Alec Poitevint, a Kemp supporter and former state Republican Party chairman.

“Of the votes that were available — that had an opportunity to vote for Brian Kemp — he got nearly all of them,” Poitevint said.

It’s quite a turnaround from early 2021, when county Republican parties passed resolutions censuring Kemp for being insufficiently supportive of Trump. Kemp was booed by some at the state Republican convention that year. But that opprobrium boosted Kemp’s image among moderate Republicans and independents who didn’t like Trump and who detested the former president’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

“He proved that he was not only a traditional conservative, but he was also his own man,” said Eric Tanenblatt, a lobbyist who was chief of staff to Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue and later national finance co-chair for Republican Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. “He swore allegiance to the Constitution and not to a single political figure, and I think people respected that. He stood up for the rule of law when it counted most.”

The governor’s fortunes began to revive among Republican partisans when he signed a new voting law that came under sharp Democratic attack. After the public reaction led Major League Baseball to pull the All-Star Game from the Atlanta Braves’ stadium, Kemp went on the offensive, defending the law and its Republican supporters. The governor also won a gamble when he removed restrictions from Georgia businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, despite a hail of criticism.

“He kept the state afloat during the COVID craziness,” said Herb McCaulla, the owner of a memorabilia business who voted for Kemp. “We’re not hurting like some other states that shut things down.”

Kemp’s contention that this move supercharged Georgia’s state economy was the cornerstone of a reelection campaign that mostly highlighted his record, making only a handful of new pledges for a second term.

“When you’re an incumbent, the election is a referendum on you,” Tanenblatt said,

Kemp also effectively used his power. He signed a raft of conservative bills that helped finish off a Trump-endorsed challenge from former Sen. David Perdue. Kemp embarrassed Perdue, winning by a wide margin. At the same time, Kemp was doling out federal COVID-19 relief money and surplus state funds — spending nearly $1 billion to suspend the state gas tax since March, another $1 billion to give income tax rebates, and more than $800 million giving $350 payments to recipients of food stamps, Medicaid and other public benefits.

Kemp’s spending, including pay raises for teachers and state employees, left Democrats fuming, because Kemp spoke out against the Democratic-backed bill in Congress that sent much of the money to Georgia.

“It’s always tough to go against an incumbent,” said Democratic state Rep. Al Williams of Midway, who is close to Abrams. “It’s doubly tough when the incumbent has control of an endless supply of federal money.”

Kemp said this was his response to inflation, what he sometimes called the “Biden-Abrams” agenda, linking Abrams to the unpopularity of President Joe Biden. That was a big part of the “headwinds” of which Abrams campaign manager Lauren Groh-Wargo repeatedly warned.

Nearly half of Georgia voters said the economy is the most pressing issue facing the country, according to AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of 3,200 voters in the state. Roughly a third of Georgians said their family is falling behind financially. A majority of those voters cast ballots for Kemp and Walker.

Rising costs were named a top concern among the state’s voters, with roughly 9 in 10 saying the inflated price of groceries, gas and other goods is an important factor in how they cast ballots.

Even though Abrams again outraised Kemp, with her total nearing $100 million compared with about $70 million for Kemp, she was unable to overcome the advantages Kemp built up. Kemp’s favorability ratings consistently topped those of Abrams in polls, reflecting in part years of attacks on Abrams by Republicans. Kemp fed that dislike, calling her “celebrity Stacey” and highlighting her national ambitions. The biggest applause line in his stump speech was delivered to whoops on Tuesday.

“Stacey Abrams is not going to be our governor or your next president,” Kemp said.

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Learn more about the issues and factors at play in the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections. And follow the AP’s election coverage of the 2022 elections at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections.

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BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — Republican Ryan Zinke prevailed over his Democratic challenger in the race for a newly-drawn Montana U.S. House district on Tuesday, overcoming early stumbles including a razor-thin victory in the primary.

Zinke served previously in the House from 2015 to 2017 before leaving to join former President Donald Trump’s cabinet as Interior secretary. He resigned after less than two years at the agency amid numerous ethics investigations, including two in which federal officials concluded that Zinke lied to them.

Democratic challenger Monica Tranel, an environmental and consumer rights attorney from Missoula, tried to capitalize on the scandals by characterizing him as a “snake” who quit Trump’s cabinet in disgrace.

Zinke denied any wrongdoing. On the stump he touted his efforts under Trump to increase domestic energy production by easing restrictions on the oil and gas industry.

Republicans have not lost a U.S. House race in Montana since 1994. Incumbent U.S. Rep. Matt Rosendale also win in this midterm election. Over the past decade, voters have vanquished every Democrat holding statewide office except U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, who is up for re-election in 2024.

Zinke raised and spent about $6 million during the campaign — more than twice as much as Tranel, according to campaign filings through Oct. 19.

Zinke had won two statewide elections to the U.S. House before joining Trump’s cabinet, where he eased restrictions on oil and gas drilling before resigning amid numerous ethics investigations.

During his campaign this year, the former U.S. Navy SEAL tried to portray himself as moderate by saying he does not support a no-exceptions ban on abortion. But, he also parroted GOP attacks on the Biden administration over inflation and border security.

Tranel is a consumer rights and environmental attorney from Missoula who ran unsuccessfully for Public Service Commission in 2020. She’s campaigned on pledges to promote renewable energy development, expand affordable housing and end tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — The effort to legalize sports betting in California ran headlong into a typical challenge for competing ballot measures as each was battered in a torrent of negative advertising that doomed both to spectacular failure in the most expensive ballot race in U.S. history.

Anytime voters face two measures at odds with each other, they tend to reject both, said professor David McCuan, chairman of the political science department at Sonoma State University.

“Whenever we have dueling ballot measures, and the competitors have an arsenal of dollars … the competitors will go nuclear. And in a nuclear war everybody loses,” McCuan said. “The most powerful money in California politics is on the ‘No’ side of ballot measures.”

The result was a pasting at the polls for both.

With 5.3 million votes counted Wednesday, more than 80% of voters rejected an effort by the gaming industry that would have allowed online and phone wagers on sports. A measure supported by Native American tribes that would have let gamblers place sports bets at tribal casinos and four horse tracks was opposed by 70% of voters.

But the result of Tuesday’s election is not a doomsday scenario for sports betting in California. With what could be a billion dollar market in the nation’s most populous state, there’s simply too much at stake for supporters to give up.

More than 30 other states now allow sports betting, but Californians are limited to playing slot machines, poker and other games at Native American casinos, and wagering at horse tracks, card rooms and the state lottery.

Supporters of both measures wouldn’t discuss specifics but said they were reevaluating how to move forward to bring sports gambling to the Golden State.

Jacob Mejia, vice president of public affairs for Pechanga, which has one of the biggest casinos, said it’s too soon to say whether tribal gaming interests would try to work with the Legislature or go directly to the voters again.

“First, we all need to respect the will of the voters and the message they sent last night,” Mejia said.

The campaign in support of online wagering issued a statement saying it remained committed to expanding sports betting in California.

“This campaign has underscored our resolve to see California follow more than half the country in legalizing safe and responsible online sports betting,” the Yes on 27 campaign said. “Californians deserve the benefits of a safe, responsible, regulated, and taxed online sports betting market, and we are resolved to bringing it to fruition here.”

Returning to the Legislature for a solution would require powerful tribes to sit down with their smaller peers, off-track betting operations, as well as foes who operate card rooms and those who want to expand betting to mobile devices, McCuan said.

“The tribes have so much money and so many resources that they believe they could take their toys and go home,” McCuan said. “That has presented some problems to find a legislative solution.”

The origin of what became such a negative campaign with voters inundated with television ads during sporting events, on social media and in campaign mailers, began after several legislative efforts to allow sports betting failed in Sacramento.

California tribes planned to launch a ballot campaign in 2020 but had to shelve that plan when the pandemic prevented collecting signatures needed to get it on the ballot.

Their measure — Proposition 26 — qualified for the ballot this year, but they quickly shifted priorities to defeat Proposition 27 — the competing measure put forward by online gambling proponents.

“Tribes viewed this as the biggest threat to their self sufficiency in a generation,” Mejia said. “These out of state operators tried to masquerade Prop. 27 as a tribally supported solution for homelessness, when in fact, it was neither.”

Attack ads said Proposition 27 would turn every cell phone, laptop and tablet into a gambling device. They said it couldn’t be adequately monitored to keep children from betting and raised fears of creating a generation of gambling addicts.

Opponents of Proposition 26, led primarily by card rooms that stood to lose out on any kind of sports betting, said the measure would increase the power of wealthy tribes and grant them a virtual monopoly on gambling in the state. The measure would also have allowed casinos to offer roulette and craps.

Both measures promised to bring benefits to the state through tax revenues. Proposition 27 supporters touted funds that would go to help the homeless, the mentally ill and and poorer tribes left out of the casino bonanza. Proposition 26 backers said a 10% tax would fund enforcement of gambling laws and support programs to help gambling addicts.

Of the roughly $460 million raised for and against both measures, about $170 million was in support of the online sports gambling initiative backed by DraftKings, BetMGM, FanDuel — the latter is the official odds provider for The Associated Press — as well as other national sports betting operators and a few tribes.

A coalition of tribes behind the No on 27 committee raised $116 million toward its defeat. Of the $128 million raised by the Yes on 26, No on 27 committee of tribal groups, Mejia said its spending was primarily to defeat the online measure and the group didn’t run a single TV ad in support of its own initiative.

Two groups funded mostly by card rooms raised $44 million to attack Proposition 26.

The massive fundraising more than doubled the previous record in 2020 that helped Uber, Lyft and other app-based ride and delivery services to prevent drivers from becoming employees eligible for benefits and job protection.

With a blowout on political advertising, voters often end up being turned off, McCuan said.

“What California voters object to is the vulgarity of having campaign ads thrown in their face at every turn,” he said. “It has that backlash effect.”

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Follow AP’s coverage of the elections at: https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections

Check out https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections to learn more about the issues and factors at play in the 2022 midterm elections.

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