Striking Silver

Democrats clinched the Senate majority for the 118th Congress late last night with Democratic  U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto winning a second term and narrowly edging out Republican challenger Adam Laxalt.  Laxalt is the grandson of the late and revered U.S. Senator Paul Laxalt, who served in the same seat Senator Cortez Masto now holds (from 1975 to 1987), but he's hardly as august; he supports the rigged-election theory that Trump won the 2020 presidential election and he based his entire candidacy "the radical left, rich elites, woke corporations, academia and the media" were "taking over America."

Voters in the Silver State rejected Laxalt's raging paranoia, and Democrats struck Senate-majority gold.  

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee put a good chunk of its money in defending vulnerable seats like Cortez Masto's, limiting its  efforts at flipping Republican seats to just one - outgoing Senator Pat Toomey's seat in Pennsylvania (which Democrat John Fetterman won). By gambling on Nevada (see what I did there?), the DSCC was taking a grave chance, sacrificing potential pickups in states like Ohio, where Democrat Tim Ryan ran a great campaign but couldn't get the DSCC to give him a cent.  He lost to venture capitalist and memoirist  J.D.Vance, who campaigned on the same fear-based platform Laxalt had espoused.  If Cortez Masto had lost, Democratic control of the Senate would have been decided in the coming runoff in Georgia, and as that already happened in 2020, no one really wanted to go through that again.  

I'm still ticked off about what happened to Tim Ryan in Ohio, by the way, and I'll get to that later.