Republicans took control of the U.S. Senate at the culmination of an intense and costly battle for control of Congress.
The Associated Press made the call shortly after midnight Wednesday.
The call came shortly after the AP predicted that MAGA Republican Bernie Moreno would topple Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Sen. Ted Cruz would defeat rival Rep. Colin Allred in Texas.
Thirty-four of the 100 Senate seats were on the ballot in 2024. Seven of them were open seats with no candidate running for re-election. Democrats have narrowly controlled the chamber for the past four years, but Republicans flipped enough seats on Tuesday to retake it. Republicans picked up a second seat in West Virginia, where Jim Justice won the seat vacated by former independent Senator Joe Manchin.
The Senate race was one of the most expensive in American history, reportedly costing more than $2.5 billion. Most of the spending was centered on highly competitive races in Ohio, Montana, and Pennsylvania. The competition between Brown and Moreno brought a whopping total spending total of $526 million, of which $310 million was spent in 2024 alone.
In the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats were able to narrowly expand their majority in the Senate to 51-49. For the past two years, Vice President Kamala Harris has served as the tie-breaking vote in the divided Senate. With the House of Representatives under Republican control since 2022, the divided 118th Congress has been largely ineffective as a legislative body.
One of the most notable events in the Senate in the past two years had little to do with lawmaking. In September 2023, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) died in office at the age of 90, having spent more than three decades in the Senate. Her death, and reports of efforts by her staff to conceal her declining health, revived criticism of elderly politicians who refuse to leave office despite their inability to cope with the rigors of the job. In February, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) – currently 82 years old – announced that he would step down from his caucus leadership position.
But among the most dramatic exits from the Senate this election cycle is that of Bob Menendez, who resigned as a Democratic senator from New Jersey after being convicted on corruption charges in July. The former senator and his wife accepted cash payments, luxury cars and even solid gold bars from foreign clients in exchange for Menendez’s influence in Congress.
Rep. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) won Menendez’s seat on Tuesday, becoming the first Korean American to be elected to the Senate.
With the prospect of taking over the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, Republicans will likely walk away from the 2024 election with the first unified Congress since 2017, when the party controlled both chambers during Trump’s first two years in office. If Trump wins the presidency, all three branches of government would be under GOP control.
A source