Nebraska Senator Deb Fischer Hands Republicans Control of the Senate

Republican Senator Deb Fischer won her re-election Tuesday night, dashing Democratic votes that independent Dan Osborn would successfully oust her from office. 

Fischer won against the former leader 51.5-48.5 percent, with 72 percent reporting, according to the Associated Press.

Osborn, who led 500 workers at his Kellogg’s plant through a three-month strike to end a two-tiered benefits system and stop plant closings, led an impressive campaign against Fsicher, who has held the Senate seat since 2013. The Democratic Party did not field a candidate in the race, but given Osborn’s political views, his win was expected to be a serious setback for the GOP.

With Fischer’s victory, Republicans have secured control of the Senate. They currently have 51 seats to Democrats’ 42 seats, with seven seats still remaining to be called.

Osborn refused to seek an endorsement from any political party including the Democrats, citing his desire not to be beholden to the money or special interests behind them. “I want to be clear that I’m an independent,” Osborn told the Nebraska Examiner in May. “I want to stay true to who I am.”

Still, his pro-labor stances were expected to have him caucusing with the Democrats similar to Independent Senator Bernie Sanders.

“I hadn’t been a very political person until corporate greed came knocking on my door a few years ago, when I was president of my local union, and we went out on strike, at a time where the company was making record profits,” Osborn told Semafor in September.

With Fischer’s victory, Democrats’ hopes to retake the Senate comes to a sad end.

Missouri overturned a total abortion ban Tuesday, with the majority of the state voting to enshrine abortion protections in the state constitution.

Roughly 53.2 percent of the state voted in favor of Amendment 3, achieving the simple majority necessary to protect reproductive freedom in Missouri, including an individual’s decision to have an abortion up to the point of viability.

Fetal viability typically occurs during the second trimester, between 23 and 24 weeks of pregnancy, but the ballot measure has a different definition for the developmental stage. Instead, it describes fetal viability as “the point in pregnancy when, in the good faith judgment of a treating health care professional” there is a “significant likelihood of the fetus’s sustained survival outside the uterus without the application of extraordinary medical measures.”

The measure, called the Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative, solidifies that the government has no role in a person’s “fundamental right to reproductive freedom,” including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, birth control, abortion care, miscarriage care, and respectful birthing conditions. It undoes the Show-Me State’s total abortion ban, which took effect one hour after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

“The right to reproductive freedom shall not be denied, interfered with, delayed, or otherwise restricted unless the Government demonstrates that such action is justified by a compelling governmental interest achieved by the least restrictive means,” the ballot measure read in part. “Any denial, interference, delay, or restriction of the right to reproductive freedom shall be presumed invalid.”

Governmental interest was specified as compelling only if it had the limited effect of “improving or maintaining the health of a person seeking care” and was consistent with “widely accepted” evidence-based medicine and does not “infringe on that person’s autonomous decision-making.”

Missouri is one of 10 states that have placed abortion on the ballot this year—the most to appear in a single year in U.S. history.

Democratic state Senator John Mannion has defeated Republican Representative Brandon Williams, marking an important victory for New York Democrats in the states 22nd congressional district.

Mannion earned 53.9 percent of the vote with 84 percent reporting.

For months ahead of the election, Williams was the only House Republican whose seat “leaned Democrat,” according to Cook Political Report, making it an essential marker for Democrats as they attempted to retake the House. Williams narrowly won the seat by fewer than 3,000 votes during the 2022 midterm elections, when Republicans flipped four seats across the state.

Like many pro-Trump Republicans, Williams has attempted to paint his opponent as weak on crime, spending nearly $3 million on attack ads with help from the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Congressional Leadership Fund, according to The New York Times.

Despite Republican spending, Mannion appeared to have a sizable lead ahead of Election Day. One Democratic PAC called the 314 Action Fund canceled a $600,000 ad and mailer blitz effort for Mannion because he didn’t appear to need the extra boost, according to Syracuse.com.

An anti-abortion, Trump-endorsed Republican propelled by Mitch McConnell and cryptocurrency PAC dollars has won the Ohio Senate election—flipping a key seat for Republicans.

Republican Bernie Moreno beat incumbent Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown 50.5 percent to 46.1 percent according to the Associated Press, which called the race on Tuesday evening, with 91 percent of votes counted.

This is a much-needed win for Republicans,  who now hold a nine-seat majority in the Senate, with 11 votes still remaining to be called.

Thanks to dark money, the only Democratic senator in the state was finally unseated after first being elected in 2007. The race had garnered more ad spending than any other Senate race in history with nearly $500 million spent between the two candidates.

On the Republican side, Defend American Jobs, a super PAC tied to the cryptocurrency industry spent over $40 million to support Bernie Moreno. While the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC affiliated with  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell spent over $160 million for Moreno, more than any other Republican Senate candidate this year.

Their investment made up for the fact that Moreno continued to flaunt his extremist MAGA views on the campaign trail, rallying against “wokeness” and bashing reproductive rights.

“You know the left has a lot of single-issue voters,” Moreno said back in September. “Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen, abortion’s it! If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else!’

“It’s a little crazy, by the way, but, especially for women that are past 50. I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you,’” Moreno continued.

Moreno also made headlines for allegedly lying about his business dealings and for appearing on a gay hookup app, despite his anti-LGBTQ+ record.

The Colombian immigrant Moreno later went on to copy Trump’s playbook and spread racist rumors about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.. In September, Moreno wrote that thousands of “illegal Haitians” were “sucking up social services and even reportedly killing and eating pets.”

“We need to deport illegals, not invite them to wreak havoc on our communities,” he added.

The MAGA Republican won out as Trump won the state, as he did in 2016 and 2020.

Donald Trump has won North Carolina, securing 50.8 percent of the vote over Vice President Kamala Harris.

It’s the third time in a row that the Tar Heel State has sided with the MAGA leader since he entered national politics in 2016. That year, Trump convinced North Carolinians to turn out en masse for him, winning by a margin of nearly four percent, with more than 177,000 votes over Hillary Clinton. But that level of support crumbled after Trump spent four years in office, after which he won the swing state by just 1.3 percent over President Joe Biden.

The outcome in North Carolina brings Trump to 230 electoral votes. He needs just 40 votes more to return to the White House.