First two Senate races called as experts predict long night of counting ahead

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Two Senate races were called by the Associated Press at 7pm eastern Tuesday evening: Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has won reelection while Peter Welch, a Democrat, has won the race to succeed Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont.

Neither race was expected to be contested and are just two out of the 34 races in the upper chamber to be called tonight. Only a handful of those are actually expected to be nail-biters, but those few could easily delay a decisive victory for control of the Senate for hours, if not days.

Mr Scott is the US Senate’s lone Black Republican member, and has faced both praise and later criticism from his colleagues on the Democratic side for his involvement in negotiations over a bill to reform policing in America that eventually stalled. He previously won reelection in 2016 by a margin of 23 percentage points, and was leading his latest challenger by the same margin when the race was called.

South Carolina was last the site of a high-profile Senate battle in 2020, when Democrats spent millions on a very unsuccessful bid to unseat Mr Scott’s ally, Lindsey Graham, only to later install the losing candidate as chair of the Democratic National Committee. Mr Graham washed his opponent, Jaime Harrison, by ten percentage points despite the Democrat raising the largest single-quarter fundraising total of any candidate in the history of the US Senate.

In Vermont, Mr Welch was running for a seat easily defended by Democrats. Mr Leahy last won reelection in 2016 with 61 per cent of the vote; a Republican challenger, Scott Milne, received just 33 per cent. At the time the race was called, Mr Welch, a member of the US House, was echoing a similar margin of victory. Mr Welch will join the state’s now-senior senator, Bernie Sanders, in the Democratic caucus (despite Mr Sanders’s continued existence as one of the Senate’s two independent members). Mr Sanders and Mr Welch are likely to be close allies in the upper chamber, given the latter’s support for the Green New Deal proposal championed by progressive allies Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey.

Vermont’s Senate race, called immediately as polls closed, stands in contrast to the battle that is playing out in neighboring New Hampshire, where centrist Democrat Maggie Hassan is fighting her own battle for reelection; her race is not yet called, but she leads her challenger Don Bolduc by a significant margin.