Vote counts continue in Arizona and Nevada as control of Congress remains unresolved

According to the latest CBS News estimates, with 79% of the vote in, Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake trailed Democrat Katie Hobbs by just under 27,000 votes late Thursday night. Hobbs was leading by a margin of 50.7% to 49.3%.  

Lake accused state election officials of "slow-rolling" the vote count.  The chairman of the board of supervisors in Maricopa County, the state's largest, pushed back against that accusation on Thursday.

"We're absolutely not slow-rolling it, and if their team had been paying attention before the election, they would have heard us talk about this over and over again, that we would not have results on election night, or even the next day," Maricopa County Board of Supervisors chairman Bill Gates said. "That it was going to take several days. And quite frankly it is offensive for Kari Lake to say these people behind me are slow-rolling this when they are working 14 to 18 hours."

Control over the Senate remains in play, with key races in Arizona and Nevada still undecided, while Georgia's Senate race is headed to a run-off in December. CBS News congressional correspondent Scott MacFarlane discusses where the vote count stands.  

Clark County Registrar Joe Gloria said Thursday afternoon that there are over 50,000 mail-in ballots from the county that need to be counted and estimated that the majority of it will be tabulated by Saturday evening.  

 The county received 626 ballots through the mail on Thursday, compared to the more than 12,000 that arrived on Wednesday, and Gloria said that number will continue to dwindle in the coming days. Saturday is the last day that ballots postmarked on Election Day can arrive and be counted.   

 Gloria said the ballots are being counted as fast as possible and in accordance with state law. Over 200 workers are counting the ballots and will be working through the weekend, Gloria said, adding that the county has stepped up security at the election office.  

 In addition to the more than 50,000 mail-in ballots that need to be counted in Clark County, Gloria said there are more than 5,000 provisional ballots that need to be verified and more than 7,000 ballots that need to be cured.  

The cured ballots are ones that the county could not verify the signature of the voter. Those individuals have been notified and are allowed to cure their ballots until Monday evening, Gloria said. The provisional ballots cannot be processed until the Secretary of State has compiled a report with all 17 counties to prevent duplicate votes from being counted.   

With 84% of the vote counted statewide, Republican Adam Laxalt is ahead of Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto 49.40% to 47.61%. But Cortez Masto is ahead by 33,179 votes in Clark County, the most populous in the state, and by 356 votes in Washoe County, home to Reno. Laxalt leads all the rural counties.   

Clark County will report more results this evening, and more than 90% of ballots will be counted by Saturday night, Gloria said.  

Elections officials in Arizona's Maricopa county, the state's largest county that encompasses Phoenix, said Thursday that they expected to release more ballots on Thursday night – but it likely be close to the 62,000 released on Wednesday night. Although they had initially anticipated having 95-99% of ballots counted by Friday, but Bill Gates, the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, said Thursday that won't be possible under the current pace. 

According to Bill Gates, there were 292,000 early ballots that were dropped off on Election Day. They have gotten through signature verification of 250,000 of them as of Thursday afternoon, but they still have another 42,000 to go through. They have gotten through 8,000 provisional ballots, Gates said.

Gates said they were working 14-18 hours a day, but the historic turnout and the state laws prevented them from being counted any faster. 

Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake on Thursday accused Maricopa County officials of "slow rolling" the results to make it look like Democrats are winning. On Fox News on Wednesday, Lake said the state had "shoddy elections that are run by imbeciles" and vowed to call a special session of the Arizona Legislature to address it.

Gates on Thursday said "we are not picking or choosing which ballots are being used, which ballots are being tabulated. Gates said they use a first in, first out vote counting system –  meaning the early votes are counted first.

"We're absolutely not slow-rolling it and if their team had been paying attention before the election, they would have heard us talk about this over and over again, that we would not have results on Election night or even the next day," Gates said. "That it was going to take several days. And quite frankly it is offensive for Kari Lake to say these people behind me are slow rolling this when they are working 14-18 hours."

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris stopped by a Democratic National Committee event at the Howard Theater in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. Mr. Biden said "regardless of what the final tally showed, I'm prepared to work with Republicans."

"People sent a message that they want us to work together," Mr. Biden said. "I've always done that. I know I got criticized for it when I ran, I said I was running for three reasons, one to restore the soul of America, two to build the US economy from the middle out and the bottom up. And thirdly, to unite the country."

But Mr. Biden told the crowd that the message also showed that "Republicans need to work with me." He said he would fight Republicans if they tried to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, "I will not let that happen."

"The overwhelming response we were getting, and the fact that even those folks who may not like me and may not like somebody but they agree with our agenda," Mr. Biden said. "They thought we were, what we're doing with — by the way, all the Democrats ran on the same agenda without being told."

Rep. Lauren Boebert, one of the Republican party's biggest right-wing stars, is locked in a tight reelection battle with Adam Frisch, a Democrat from Aspen running as a "conservative businessman," in Colorado's 3rd Congressional District.  

With 96% of the vote tallied, CBS News characterized the race as a toss-up, as Boebert held a slim lead Thursday afternoon. At one point on Wednesday, Frisch had led by just over 60 votes. 

July polling from Keating Research, a Democratic firm, showed Boebert with a 49%-42% advantage, with 9% of likely voters undecided. 

A poll from that same firm released on Election Day showed that unaffiliated voters' support for Frisch had increased from an 8-point margin to a 25-point margin, according to Colorado Politics. 

National election forecasters had considered the seat safely Republican. FiveThirtyEight's modeling as of Nov. 1 gave Boebert a 97% chance of winning, while Frisch had just a 3% chance.  

As of Thursday afternoon, CBS News estimates that control for the House of Representatives leans in favor of Republicans. CBS News estimated that the GOP will win at least 213 seats, compared to 206 for the Democrats, with 16 races still considered toss-ups. The close margin in the House means that every uncalled race matters in the battle to get to a majority of 218 seats. 

Read more here. 

Warnock launched his campaign for the Dec. 6 runoff at an event in Atlanta on Thursday, saying he and his supporters have "some unfinished business" to attend to. 

"I came to ask you one question — are you ready to do this one more time?" Warnock asked the crowd. "I did warn y'all we might be spending Thanksgiving together, and here we are."

Warnock won election after emerging victorious from a runoff in 2021 in his first run for the Senate. He said his race against Walker is "about competence and character," and said his opponent "has no vision for our state or our country."

Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah said the midterm results present his party with a "fork in the road," invoking Robert Frost to chart a path forward for the GOP if it takes control of the House or the Senate. Romney was not up for reelection Tuesday night. 

"Two roads diverge before this potential GOP majority," Romney wrote in a piece for the Wall Street Journal published Thursday afternoon. "The one 'less traveled by' would be to pass bills that would make things better for the American people. The more tempting and historically more frequented road would be to pursue pointless investigations, messaging bills, threats and government shutdowns."

With inflation being a top voter concern, Romney said Congress can help address high prices by increasing legal immigration, expanding work visas, securing the border, reducing tariffs and reining in spending, among other things. Romney said excessive spending has been the "Republican Party's bugaboo" for years. He singled out "automatic, 'nondiscretionary' spending" on entitlements like Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid, as well as interest on the national debt. 

"If Congress wants to slow inflation, both parties will need to work together to find solutions to the entitlement crisis. It isn't rocket science," he said.  

Romney concluded that the Congress "must address doubts sown by both parties about the integrity of our elections."

"It comes mostly from the GOP, but Democrats aren't without sin," he wrote. "Of course there will be isolated irregularities in any election, but there has been no evidence of organized fraud or voter suppression that would have changed the outcome of a recent state or federal race."

The world, Romney wrote, is watching. 

"While authoritarians in Russia and China are advertising an alternative to government of, by and for the people, spouting evidence-free claims of election fraud is stupidly self-defeating and despicable," he wrote. 

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), the campaign arm of Senate Democrats, said it is spending $7 million to bolster field operations in Georgia ahead of the runoff election between Warnock and Walker next month.

"The investment will fund direct voter contact programs to reach Georgians across the state, building and expanding on the Warnock campaign's robust field organizing effort which helped Reverend Warnock earn over 35,000 more votes than Walker on Tuesday," the committee said in a statement. 

Democratic Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, the committee's chairman, said the DSCC is "proud to partner with the Warnock campaign to build off their strong field programs and launch an unprecedented organizing effort in the runoff that will ensure we reach every voter we need to win on December 6th."

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said she doesn't have anything to share about whether the president will head to Georgia to support Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in his runoff race against Herschel Walker. And she said she isn't aware of any such requests from Warnock at this time. 

But Jean-Pierre said Mr. Biden is ready to do whatever Warnock needs. 

"Clearly, the president will do whatever Sen. Warnock needs to do to help him win," she said during Thursday's press briefing. 

Democrats saw successes in legislative chambers across several battleground states in the midterm elections Tuesday, flipping a few of them to Democratic control while stopping Republicans from winning supermajorities in others.

In Wisconsin, Republicans needed to net five seats in the Assembly and just one in the Senate to reach a two-thirds supermajority — a major development that would have expanded the power of Republicans in the Legislature to override vetoes by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who was reelected Tuesday. While Republicans flipped the seat they needed for a supermajority in the state Senate, Democrats held on in the Assembly and prevented a supermajority there. Republicans need a two-thirds majority in both chambers to be able to override Evers' vetoes.

Evers, a lifelong educator who upset Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2018, often refers to himself as the "goalie" against the Republican-controlled Legislature. He has vetoed a record 126 bills, stopping the Legislature from expanding gun rights, limiting abortions, blocking schools from anti-racism instruction and banning COVID-19 vaccine mandates. 

He has also blocked more than a dozen voting laws from Wisconsin Republicans: one measure  would have made it more difficult to obtain mail ballots; another would have prohibited election officials from correcting information on absentee ballots; and one would have reduced the power of the state's bipartisan elections commission. 

"Key Democratic victories today in Wisconsin may have prevented the MAGA GOP from completely overriding the state's election system," said Jessica Post, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the campaign arm for Democratic state legislative candidates. 

Read more here from Aaron Navarro and Sarah Ewall-Wice.

The House Democratic Caucus will hold elections for party leadership positions on Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, according to a letter obtained by CBS News from Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the caucus' chairman. Jeffries told his Democratic colleagues that voting will be done by secret ballot using an app.

The House Democratic leadership currently includes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Majority Whip James Clyburn, Assistant Speaker Katherine Clark and Jeffries.

Pelosi has not said whether she will seek another term as Democratic leader, and control of the House remains unclear, essentially leaving the leadership contests frozen in place. Before Tuesday's midterm elections, Pelosi told CNN that the recent brutal attack against her husband in their San Francisco home would influence her decision about her political future, should Democrats lose their House majority.

Wes Moore made history this week when he was elected Maryland's first Black governor — and says the exciting thing about his victory was that "the state spoke with a unified voice."

"The thing that was really exciting, once the numbers started coming in, was how we won: that we were winning in urban areas, rural areas, suburban areas," Moore told CBS News' Gayle King. "We just won across the state. Democrats. Independents. And we took a huge swath of Republicans."

"And so it was exciting that the state spoke with a unified voice, that we were tired of being at each other's throats," he said.

Moore defeated Republican candidate Dan Cox on Tuesday with 59.6% of the vote. He campaigned on issues like creating equal opportunity and ending child poverty, and gave a victory speech about maintaining hope in the face of cynicism.

He is just the third Black governor elected in U.S. history, and said the moment he found out he won was "remarkable."

As of Thursday morning afternoon, Senate races in four states remained unresolved, according to CBS News estimates: Alaska, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada.

The results in Alaska won't impact control of the Senate, since both leading candidates are Republicans. Arizona is leaning Democratic, while Georgia and Nevada are considered toss-ups, according to CBS News estimates. The race in Georgia is heading to a runoff on Dec. 6, since neither candidate is above the 50% threshold needed to win outright.

The race for the House leans in Republicans' favor, according to CBS News estimates, which show the GOP ultimately controlling at least 210 seats, compared to 200 for the Democrats. 

Of the races in which CBS News has projected a winner or a candidate has conceded, 15 seats have switched from Democrat to Republican, while seven have switched from Republican to Democrat. Republicans flipped four seats in New York alone.

Read more here.

With the midterm elections over, all eyes in the political world are turning toward 2024 and who may be potentially running for president. CBS News chief election and campaign correspondent Robert Costa joins "CBS News Mornings" with analysis:

The president praised Democrats' stronger-than-expected performance in the midterm elections as control of the House and the Senate is still pending. CBS News senior White House and political correspondent Ed O'Keefe reports:

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