The temperature of the end of the electoral campaign in the United States is felt by any viewer in California. The commercial breaks of fashion series, baseball World Series games or American football games are full of candidates exchanging accusations of being corrupt or too radical to enter Congress. The programming has increased in the days leading up to Tuesday’s elections.
The battle for Congress is as close as the fight for the White House. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives will be up for grabs this Tuesday. And 34 senators of the 100 in the upper house seek to keep their seats in Washington. Republicans have control of the House and Democrats have a narrow majority in the Senate. Polls indicate that the two parties have the possibility of exchanging chambers. The Republicans can win the Senate and the Democrats the House of Representatives. But anything can happen. Polls show that the two parties are fighting side by side, just as happens in the presidential elections between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
In the Lower House there are 22 races in the air. Ten are currently in Democratic hands and 12 are controlled by Republicans. Control of the next House of Representatives is at stake in a handful of districts in California, the most populous state in the country. Five Republicans there defend their permanence in Washington. In three districts, lawmakers are trailing in the polls by as much as five percentage points.
With these odds in his favor, Congressman Pete Aguilar, the president of the caucusHouse Democrat, intensified his campaign in California. The legislator held nine rallies this weekend to try to tip the balance in favor of President Joe Biden’s party.
The Cook Political Report, a reputable election analysis center, on Friday revised its forecast in six House races nationwide. This indicates that Democratic candidates are better positioned to win Republican seats in two districts in New York and one more in Nebraska. In addition, three other congressmen from Biden and Harris’ party in Oregon, Minnesota and New Hampshire have improved their chances of being re-elected.
Multi-million dollar contests
The organization Open Secrets, which keeps track of private donations to political campaigns, estimates that $1 billion has been spent in the most competitive districts heading to the House of Representatives. The fight for the Senate has cost even more money, where the closest races have generated an expenditure of 2.5 billion dollars among the candidates. This sets up the 2024 election cycle to become the most expensive only behind 2020, when all legislative campaigns reported spending around $11 billion. This year’s total for the 469 positions at stake amounts to $10 billion.
The elections to the Upper House in the States of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Montana, Texas and Michigan are some of the most followed. Republicans have a good chance of wresting control of the Senate from Democrats. Republicans defend 11 positions, while their rivals do so in 23 states.
Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia who caused many headaches in the Biden Administration for his closeness to Republicans, is retiring from the Senate. It seems almost certain that the conservatives are going to take that seat, which would leave control of the Senate at 50-50 for each party.
The balance may tip in Montana, where Democratic Senator John Tester is seeking re-election for a fifth consecutive term in a solid Republican bastion where Trump can comfortably beat Harris, with a difference of 18%. The polls currently favor the candidate who has challenged Tester, Republican Tim Sheehy, a businessman who is making his political debut and who has a past within the elite group of the Navy, the SEALs.
According to the Associated Press, who collects the Open Secrets data, this is one of the most expensive races of this cycle. Both candidates have spent 260 million dollars in a State with barely one million inhabitants.
The biggest wallet, however, is in Ohio, a state that is not on the radar of the presidential race, since it is played in seven pivotal territories. Another Democratic senator, Sherrod Brown, who has been a legislator for three terms, is risking political survival. His opponent is Bernie Moreno, an immigrant born in Colombia who arrived in the United States when he was four years old. Moreno, a successful automobile dealership businessman, aspires to become the first Latino to represent the Midwest State in the Senate. Between Brown and Moreno, who participated without luck in the 2022 Republican primaries in which JD Vance triumphed, they have spent about $405 million.
The Republicans, for their part, defend their main electoral stronghold, Texas, tooth and nail. In the State of 30 million inhabitants, the controversial ultra-conservative senator Ted Cruz is risking his position in a close election against Colin Allred, a congressman who has been growing in the polls in recent months and who now threatens to give the surpriseto the Republican, who has been in the Senate for 11 years.
Allred, an African American, was a football player and reinvented himself as a civil rights lawyer. Democrats believe in her chances, prompting Harris to campaign in Texas in late October. At the event, just 11 days before the elections, there was Beyoncé and Allred himself, who has marked women’s rights as his priority. This is not the first time that Democrats have entertained the possibility of expelling Cruz from the Senate. In 2018, they lost by 2%, about 200,000 votes. This Tuesday Texas will have the opportunity to send the first Democratic senator to Washington in 36 years.
