WHEN YOU MODEL YOURSELF ON DONALD:

A little before 9:30 p.m. Eastern time, NBC called Nevada's tight Senate race for the incumbent: Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto. Cortez Masto defeated Adam Laxalt, a former attorney general for the state, whom former president Trump had endorsed.  

This means that the Democrats keep control of the Senate. 

Democrats will have 50 votes in the new Congress just as they did in the current one, enabling Vice President Kamala Harris to break ties in their favor. 

Harris may not need to break ties, though, if the last Senate seat goes to the Democrats. That last seat is the one outstanding seat from Georgia. In the election there, Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock garnered about 35,000 more votes than Trump-endorsed Republican Herschel Walker, but neither man won 50% of the vote. Under Georgia law, this forces a runoff, which will be held on December 6.

Gluesenkamp Perez's victory sends a Democrat to Congress in a district that has voted Republican for more than a decade, and means eight of Washington's 10 House members will now be Democrats, along with the state's two U.S. senators.

It also bolsters Democrats' chances of possibly hanging onto their House majority, with several races too close to call in states including California, Oregon and Arizona. Republicans remain favored to gain the edge to flip House control.

Kent had appeared confident of victory after the August primary, declaring the district to be "deep red MAGA country." [...]

Kent's loss was another stinging defeat for a Trump-endorsed candidate in the midterm elections and provided Democrats with a surprise House seat pickup in a year in which the party was mostly playing defense.

Before the election, the political news site FiveThirtyEight gave Kent a 98% chance of winning, but there had been little polling in the race.

Kent did not concede Saturday, tweeting "this is not over." He said supporters are working on "curing" 6,000 rejected ballots to get them counted. That represents the total number of ballots not counted because of signature or other problems, and those likely include Democratic voters in addition to Republicans.

Kent had become a star in conservative media, appearing frequently on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show, and almost daily at times on the podcast of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. [...]

The path to Gluesenkamp Perez's improbable win started when six-term Republican U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler last year voted to impeach Trump over his role in stoking the violent Jan. 6 , 2021 attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters seeking to halt certification of Joe Biden's win.

Trump took revenge by endorsing Kent, who succeeded in ousting Herrera Beutler in the August primary, but went on to lose what had been considered a safe Republican seat.

Last month, I published an investigation showing that Nevada Republican secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant was deceiving voters by wildly misrepresenting his business history. After the story came out, Marchant told fellow election denier Steve Bannon, "Mother Jones did some sort of colonoscopy on me and they came up with everything." He contested nothing.

"Everything," in this case, included a former employee who said he "would not want Jim to be secretary of a preschool," overwhelming evidence that Marchant's most prominent company quickly imploded, and previously unpublished divorce records that revealed that his career ended in financial ruin. Marchant was betting that it wouldn't matter--having a R next to his name would be enough in 2022. He was wrong.

Marchant narrowly lost his race for secretary of state to Democrat Cisco Aguilar, a lawyer and former aide to the late Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid. Marchant was one of the most extreme candidates running for statewide office this year. He claimed that all Nevada elections since 2006 had been rigged and that the winners had been "installed by the deep-state cabal." Nevertheless, he nearly found himself in charge of all elections in the state. (Marchant didn't answer when I called him on Friday evening to see if he was conceding.)

The origin story for Marchant's campaign would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. In 2020, Marchant lost his race for Congress by more than 16,000 votes. Instead of accepting defeat, he claimed that he and Donald Trump had been victims of voter fraud. The day after the election, he checked himself into the Venetian so that he could work with Trump's team to try to overturn the results of both contests.

His lawsuit to try to force Clark County, which is home to Las Vegas, to hold a new election was quickly thrown out. But while on the Strip, he's said he received a visit from Wayne Willott, a fringe QAnon influencer who goes by the alias Juan O. Savin. Willott told Marchant to run for secretary of state in 2022 so that he could control Nevada elections. He also pushed Marchant to build a coalition of like-minded candidates in other states. Marchant followed Willott's advice.

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