Democrats Inch Ahead in Yet-to-Be-Called US Senate Races

(Left) Republican Senate candidate Sam Brown in Reno, Nev., on June 14, 2022. (Right) Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) in Dry Lake Valley, Nev., on June 28, 2021. Josh Edelson; Gabe Ginsberg/Getty Images

Two Democrats and one Republican have small leads in the only U.S. Senate races that have not yet been called.

Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) is inching ahead of Republican challenger Sam Brown. As of early Nov. 7, Rosen had 47.6 percent of the vote, compared to 46.7 percent for Brown.

Ten percent of precincts have still not reported results.

“We feel good about the results we’re seeing, but there are still thousands of votes to be counted. Our democracy takes time, and I’m confident that we will win as more votes come in,” Rosen said on the social media platform X.

“We'll see what the final results are,” Brown said in a video statement. “But this has been quite a journey. Just filled with so much love, appreciation, joy.”

In Nevada, ballots that arrive by mail can be counted if they arrive up to three days after Election Day.

“We have had teams here overnight, pretty much 24-hour operation to get all the mail ballots processed,” Clark County Registrar of Voters Lorena Portillo told reporters in an update on Wednesday.

Reb. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) holds the lead over Republican Kari Lake in the race to succeed Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), a former Democrat. Lake ran for governor in 2022 and lost.

Gallego has received 1.23 million votes to Lake’s 1.18 million votes with 69 percent of precincts reporting. The latest batch of ballots from Maricopa County broke slightly in favor of Gallego.

Officials in the state’s most populous county said some 550,000 ballots still need to be processed.

“This race is going to go down to the wire!” Lake wrote in a Nov. 6 social media post. She encouraged people to volunteer to cure ballots.

“We are closely watching as results come in, and we’re feeling very optimistic,” Gallego said in a Nov. 6 post.

In Pennsylvania, Republican Dave McCormick held a slight lead with 48.9 percent of the vote. He’s challenging Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), who has received 48.5 percent of the vote with 2 percent of precincts not yet reporting.

Casey’s campaign said in a statement early Wednesday that it is confident the incumbent will prevail once all the votes are counted.

Mark Harris, an adviser to McCormick, said on X that the race “is over” after most ballots from Philadelphia came in and McCormick still maintained a lead.

President-elect Donald Trump has been declared the winner of Pennsylvania.

Automatic recounts will happen in Arizona and Pennsylvania if the final margins are less than or equal to 0.5 percent of the number of votes cast for both candidates. Nevada has no automatic recounts, but a candidate can request a recount with no required margin.

Republicans have already wrested control of the Senate from Democrats after flipping seats in Montana, Ohio, and West Virginia while losing no seats.