On Thursday, Republicans came close to having a slim majority in the House of Representatives while the battle for the Senate hinges on races in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia.
Democrats outperformed in several competitive House districts, meaning the makeup of the next Congress may not be clear until next week.
Two days after Americans went to the polls, Republicans are 12 seats short of the 218 needed to win the House.
The battle for the Senate could become clearer when Arizona and Nevada finish counting their votes. Right now, the Republicans have 49 seats and the Democrats 48. Either the Democrats or the Republicans could take control of the Senate if they win two of the three pending races.
But there is a strong possibility that, for the second time in two years, the majority of the Senate will be decided in a second round in Georgia on December 6. Neither Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock nor Republican candidate Herschel Walker got the 50% of the votes needed to win the race.
In Arizona, Democratic Senator Mark Kelly has a five-point lead over Republican Blake Masters, but the race could go either way with more than 600,000 votes still to be counted, according to the Secretary of State’s office, though Kelly has reached 100,000 votes.
In Arizona, more than half of the pending votes, or about 340,000, come from Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix. Early votes were coming in for Kelly, while votes cast on Election Day were closer.
There are also about 17,000 pending ballots, about 7% of those cast in person on Election Day, that were set aside due to a printing problem Tuesday at about a quarter of the county’s vote tabulation centers.
A judge rejected a request by Republicans to keep the polls open saying he saw no evidence that people were not allowed to vote, and officials said those votes would be counted during the week.
In the Nevada Senate race, Republican Adam Laxalt is narrowly ahead of incumbent Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto. But election officials in Clark County, the seat of Las Vegas and home to three-quarters of the state’s population, must wait for postmarked mail-in ballots until Tuesday, meaning the final result will not be announced. until next week.
Officials have until Nov. 17 to finish the count and file a report with the Nevada secretary of state’s office, in accordance with state law.
