With all the polls that the Republicans have already won the game for the House, the battle for the Senate in these midterm 2022 elections in the USA will instead be played to the last on a razor’s edge. With 35 of the 100 seats up for grabs – in the United States the entire House is renewed every two years and a third of the Senate – the Republicans would just need to win even one seat, obviously keeping their own, to snatch from the Democrats the majority they now have, in a 50 to 50 tie, thanks only to the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris, President of the Senate. In this context, there are eight duels that could decide the fate of the battle for the Senate.
GEORGIA
It is the state where Republicans are most seeking revenge, after the decisive victory of Joe Biden in 2020 – which Donald Trump tried to overthrow to the last – followed by the resounding victories of two Democratic senators, in the traditional Gop stronghold: the increase in African American voters is changing the electoral dynamics that have secured the dem a majority in the Senate. Now one of these two senators, the Baptist pastor Raphael Warnock, must defend his seat and, against the first African American senator of the southern state, the Republicans have lined up Hershel Walker, a former African American football star recruited for politics by his friend Donald Trump.
The Republican candidate’s campaign was littered with scandals, including allegations by a girlfriend, mother of one of his children, who gave the press the copy of the check that Walker, now professing an anti-abortion faith, gave her to abort. However, the two candidates remain engaged in a head to head, and Georgia’s electoral law provides that if neither of them gets 50% on Tuesday, they will have to go to the ballot on December 6.
PENNSYLVANIA
In the state of the former Rust Belt, photo-finish elections are now the norm: the last two presidential elections were decided with a difference of just one percent, and even the duel for the Senate this year is a bitter head to head. head between two candidates who are attracting media attention, also for their personalities.
Until before the summer, the predictions were for the two-meter-tall Democrat John Fetterman, a 53-year-old Harvard graduate who became mayor of a small town, Braddock, who tattooed the dates of all the murders he committed while driving on his arm. small town. But the progressive Democrat’s campaign, who always appears in public in shorts and a sweatshirt, came to a halt when Fetterman suffered a stroke in May.
Reestablished and back on the pitch, albeit with limitations, Fetterman has become the target of attacks from Republicans who question whether he is still able to do his job. In particular from his opponent, Mehmet Oz, a well-known cardiologist who turned into a television star known as’ Dr Oz “also thanks to the Oprah Winfrey show, who however sided with the Democrat in the last days of the campaign. ‘last fierce debate between the two contenders, the Republican is given, for the first time, the advantage.
NEVADA
Defending the seat here is the Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, who in 2016 became the first Latina elected to the Senate in the state, who is considered one of the most at risk ‘incumbents’, with the specter of being rejected by the same Hispanic electorate as she did six years ago win the “senadora”. The fear of the dem is that in this electoral round, not only in Nevada, the distancing of the Hispanic electorate, the traditional base of the dem, is accentuated, also because of the more conservative positions of the strongly Catholic community on abortion.
But it is above all the economic crisis that gives Republicans hope that voters in Nevada – where the pandemic has severely damaged the economy that revolves around the Las Vegas and Reno tourism business – to punish President Joe Biden’s party, voting for Adam Laxalt, 44-year-old son and grandson of former Nevada senators, who is one of the candidates supported by Donald Trump and who supports baseless allegations of electoral fraud in the 2020 election.
OHIO
In a state that has voted solidly Republican in the last rounds of elections, Republican Senator Rob Portaman’s decision not to run again has opened the duel between the candidate chosen by the Democrats, Tim Ryan for the 10th term and presidential candidate in 2020, and that of the Republicans , JD Vance, a 38-year-old venture capitalist who became famous for his film, “Hillbilly Elegy”.
Once sided with the anti-Trump Republicans, the so-called “Never Trumpers”, now Vance is an enthusiastic supporter of the former president who, in his usual frank style, said of him: “Jd licks my feet, wants my support. at all costs”. Freshman of politics, Vance has made several missteps, but he can enjoy financial support from several financial groups, brandishing Ryan with the accusation of being a fake moderate, while in reality he would support the more extremist agenda of dem, certainly unwelcome in the ‘ Conservative Ohio.
NEW HAMPSHIRE
In recent days of the election campaign, the Republican National Committee is investing heavily in the duel for the Senate in New Hampshire where, surprisingly, Don Bolduc appears engaged in a head-to-head with Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan. Considered too far right, and conspiracy theorist and ultra Trumpian, to be successful in the state where Joe Biden won by 7 points two years ago, the 61-year-old general at rest, with 10 missions in Afghanistan, is managing to create great difficulties. to the 64-year-old Democrat, targeted by voters’ anger at inflation, rising prices and gasoline.
NORTH CAROLINA
In North Carolina, too, it’s an iron Trumpian running for the Senate seat: Ted Budd, an armory owner, an MP who was one of 147 Republicans in Congress to vote against Joe Biden’s 2020 victory certification. the Democrats have sided with him Cheri Beasley, an African-American jurist who was head of the state Supreme Court.
The two have been stuck in a head-to-head for weeks, with the Democrat complaining of not receiving enough financial support from the party that perhaps doesn’t believe in the possibility of winning in the state that last elected a senator in 2008, the year of Barack Obama’s historic avalanche victory.
ARIZONA
It is the state where Trump’s theories of stolen elections have taken hold, where all candidates who deny the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory have won the Republican primary, including Blake Masters, a 36-year-old candidate for the Senate. Defining himself as a “conservative of America first”, with a nationalist agenda, Masters opposes aid to Ukraine, Big Tech – despite being the right-hand man of billionaire Peter Andreas Thiel, cofounder of PayPal – and proposes the creation of a Federal Reserve of Bitcoin.
Defending the Democratic seat is former astronaut Mark Kelly, husband of former MP Gabby Giffords, who was seriously injured in 2011 in an attack against her in which there were several victims. The Democrat is troubled by the peak of migrants’ entry into this border state, with Master accusing Kelly of supporting an “open borders” policy.
WISCONSIN
Democrats hoped they could have an easy game in Wisconsin – won by Joe Biden in 2020 – to snatch the seat of Ron Johnson, a second-term senator who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory, downplayed the scale of the assault. to Congress, supported a series of conspiracy theories and even that gargling was enough against the coronavirus. But Republicans have mounted a campaign against the far-left positions of Democratic candidate Mandela Barnes, accusing the 35-year-old African-American deputy governor of past ties to the movement to define the police and abolish the agency that detains immigrants. Result Johnson is now leading the polls.