Arizona

PHOENIX (AP) — Democrats padded their narrow leads in key Arizona contests on Thursday, but the races for U.S. Senate and governor were still too early to call with about a fifth of the total ballots left to be counted.

Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly led Republican Blake Masters by 5.6 percentage points, while Democrat Katie Hobbs had a much tighter lead of 1.4 points against Republican Kari Lake in the governor’s race. Democrats also led in the races for secretary of state and attorney general.

PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona Democrats maintained small but dwindling leads over their Republican rivals in the races for U.S. Senate and governor, contests that could determine control of the Senate and the rules for the 2024 election in a crucial battleground state.

The races remained too early to call two days after the election, with some 600,000 ballots left to count, about a quarter of the total cast.

PHOENIX, Ariz., Nov 9 (Reuters) - Republicans made modest gains in U.S. midterm elections but Democrats performed better than expected, leaving control of Congress and the future of President Joe Biden's agenda unclear on Wednesday morning.

Many of the most competitive races were too close to call and Republicans acknowledged that the election was not producing the sweeping "red wave" victory they had sought.

(AP) --- Final voting began without major hitches Tuesday in midterm elections under intense scrutiny after two years of false claims and conspiracy theories about how ballots are cast and counted.

With polls open across most of the country, no big problems were reported early on, though there were hiccups in some places, which is typical on any Election Day.

PHOENIX (AP) — Gathered at a table in the state Capitol a little less than two years ago, two Republicans and a Democrat took part in a ceremony prescribed by state law that made official Joe Biden’s 10,500-vote victory in Arizona’s 2020 presidential contest.

PHOENIX (AP) — Long before he assembled one of the largest far-right anti-government militia groups in U.S. history, before his Oath Keepers stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Stewart Rhodes was a promising Yale Law School graduate.

He secured a clerkship on the Arizona Supreme Court, in part thanks to his unusual life story: a stint as an Army paratrooper cut short by a training accident, followed by marriage, college and an Ivy League law degree.

PHOENIX (AP) — Simmering discontent among a segment of Arizona Republicans over John McCain’s famous penchant for bucking his party boiled over in the winter of 2014 with the censure of the longtime U.S. senator.

McCain’s allies responded with an all-out push to reassert control over the Arizona Republican Party. Censure proponents were ousted or diminished, and McCain went on to defeat his far-right challenger in a blowout during the 2016 primary.

YUMA, Ariz. (AP) — As hundreds of migrants line up along an Arizona border wall around 4 a.m., agents try to separate them into groups by nationality.

“Anyone from Russia or Bangladesh? I need somebody else from Russia here,” an agent shouts and then says quietly, almost to himself, “These are Romanian.”

It’s a routine task for the Border Patrol in the wee hours in this flat expanse of desert where the wall ends. Migrants from at least 115 countries have been stopped here in the last year, but that may be less striking than what’s missing: Mexicans are virtually absent.

PHOENIX (AP) — Republican Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers lost his bid for a state Senate seat after refusing then-President Donald Trump’s pleas to help overturn the 2020 election results and testifying before Congress about the efforts.

Bowers tried to move to the state Senate because of term limits. He lost to former state Sen. David Farnsworth, who criticized him for refusing to help Trump or go along with a contentious 2021 “audit” that Republican leaders in the Senate commissioned.

PHOENIX (AP) — Republican primary voters in Arizona and Kansas on Tuesday are deciding whether to elevate loyalists to former President Donald Trump who support his false claims that he won the 2020 election and send them to the general election.

The GOP primary elections for secretary of state are the latest this year to feature candidates who doubt the security of their states’ elections despite the lack of evidence of any problems widespread enough to change the results. Republican voters elsewhere have split on sending those candidates to the November ballot.