Mark Kelly Wins Arizona Senate Race, Putting Democrats a Seat From Control

 CNI - Mark Kelly Wins Arizona Senate Race, Putting Democrats a Seat From Control, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona won a tough campaign for re-election on Friday, The Associated Press reported, defeating his Trump-backed Republican rival, Blake Masters, to put Democrats within one seat of retaining control of the Senate.

Democrats hope to clinch the chamber when votes are fully counted in the Nevada contest between Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, and her Republican challenger, Adam Laxalt, who held a tiny lead late Friday but was expected to fall behind.

If Mr. Laxalt were to prevail, control of the Senate would hang in the balance until the runoff election on Dec. 6 in Georgia between Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat seeking a full term, and his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker, the former football star.

Mr. Kelly, long seen as one of his party’s most vulnerable incumbents, rose to victory with the support of national Democrats and some top state Republicans who played up his willingness to reach across the aisle and who cast his candidacy as necessary to preserve American democracy. With 83 percent of the vote counted, he led Mr. Masters by 5.7 percentage points.

Mr. Masters, a venture capitalist and political newcomer who embraced former President Donald J. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, burst into Arizona politics with millions of dollars in support from the technology billionaire Peter Thiel, his former employer.

With an ideological fervor that excited the state Republican Party’s ascendant right wing, he portrayed himself as an internet-savvy insurgent while playing to xenophobic and racist fears, claiming that Democrats were trying to bring more immigrants to the country to change its demographics and gain a political edge. He struggled, however, to win over the state’s independent voters, who have helped push Arizona from reliably red to tossup and who now make up about a third of its voting population.

Tensions have run high since Tuesday as election officials count votes in Arizona, which has long been at the center of conspiracy theories and skepticism about the 2020 presidential election. Mr. Masters and the other top three Republican candidates on the statewide ballot — all of whom have advanced false claims of election fraud in 2020 — have made baseless suggestions that election officials are incompetent and hinted at malfeasance.