Democrats Retake House, Republicans Retain Senate, U.S. Media Project: U.S. media

History was made as Rashida Tlaib became the first female Muslim to be elected to the House of Representatives after winning in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District. Fellow Democrat Democrat Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who won the seat formerly occupied by Keith Ellison, is set to follow. Meanwhile in Colorado, Jared Polis became the first openly gay American elected governor. In another first, Sharice Davids won the House race in Kansas and Deb Haaland won a seat in the House of Representatives in New Mexico, becoming the first two Native American in the House. In Florida, former Republican U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis beat Democratic Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum after both the gubernatorial race and the Senate race were neck-and-neck for hours. Santis hoped to ride Trump’s backing to victory in the governor’s race, while Gillum sought to energize his party’s voters as an unabashed liberal in a campaign marked by a deadly hurricane and gun violence. Jewish Republican candidate Lena Epstein lost her bid to replace another GOP congressman in Michigan’s 11th district, losing to Democrat Haley Stevens. A local businesswoman, Epstein served as chair of Trump’s 2016 campaign in her state. Epstein drew fire when she invited prominent Messianic Jew Loren Jacobs to speak at a campaign rally with U.S. Vice President Mike Pence. At the event, designed to boost the campaigns of Michigan Democrats, Jacobs led a prayer for the victims of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, a move denounced as insensitive to the victims of the tragedy and their families. The first Senate contest in which national TV networks declared a result, shortly after poll closing hour, was Virginia, where Democratic Senator Tim Kaine won reelection, beating Republican challenger Corey Stewart. The losing candidate, Stewart, is a far-right extremist who received strong support from Trump’s former political adviser, Steve Bannon. MSNBC called Virginia’s 10th district, in the suburbs of Washington D.C., as the first “flip” of the night. The network projects that Democrat Jennifer Wexton defeated Republican incumbent Barbara Comstock. Elaine Luria, one of the group of female Jewish military veterans running for office in the midterms, appeared to have pulled out a narrow surprise victory in Virginia’s 2nd congressional district. The Virginia Department of Elections reported that after 98 percent of the vote was counted Tuesday night, Luria was in the lead by less than 2 percent, ahead by 4,273 votes. Luria is a former Navy commander running in the district that includes the massive Norfolk U.S. Navy base. Her odds against incumbent one-term Republican Rep. Scott Taylor, who won his seat by a wide margin in his last race, but was plagued by a corruption investigation into his staff during the campaign. The media outlet also projected an important flip in New York, where Democrat Max Rose, a 30-year-old Jewish veteran, is set to win in the 11th district, defeating Republican incumbent Dan Donovan. This is the Democrats’ first win of the night in a district that Trump won decisively in 2016. In Georgia, Democrats hoped to overcome years of Republican dominance, starting with Stacey Abrams’ candidacy for governor. She hoped to become the first black female governor in U.S. history as she ran against Republican Brian Kemp. They were competing to replace term-limited Republican Nathan Deal. Polls have now also closed in West Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Vermont, Indiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Conneticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Tennessee. In New Jersey, a pro-Israel Senate stalwart, Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez held onto his seat against GOP challenger Bob Hugin despite being plagued by corruption scandals. Last year he went on trial for corruption charges, but the proceedings ended in a mistrial. Menendez bucked the Obama administration in 2015, voting against the Iran nuclear deal. Pro-Israel donors and PACs contributed generously to his race as a result. In New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. In Indiana, ABC News has called the Senate race for Republican challenger Mike Braun, who according to the network will defeat Democratic incumbent Joe Donnelly. In Vermont, Senator Bernie Sanders was reelected, while Christine Hallquist runs to be the first transgender governor in the United States. In Ohio, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown will keep his seat after beating Republican challenger Jim Renacci, NBC projects. Trump won Ohio by 8 percent in 2016. Brown has represented the state in the Senate since 2006. In Maryland, another Jewish Democratic Senate incumbent, Ben Cardin, also handily won his re-election bid. Cardin, a centrist Democrat, is a mainstay of the pro-Israel force on his side of the aisle. The son of the late Jewish leader Shoshana Cardin, he opposed the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and authored a bill that would impose penalties on companies that comply with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel. Illinois Notorious Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi candidate Arthur Jones lost his bid for Congress in Illinois’ 3rd Congressional District, defeated by the incumbent Democrat Dan Lipinski, who received 66 percent of the vote, to Jones 33 percent. 70-year-old Jones ran unopposed on the Republican primary ballot in March. His affiliation with neo-Nazi organizations – he was an actual member of the American Nazi Party until 1980 and now heads his own neo-Nazi group called America First – was so undeniable that some Republican leaders went beyond distancing themselves from him: actively encouraging voters to cast their ballot for his opponent. It was a lack of vigilance by the state party that led to Jones becoming the official Republican contender. He is a perennial candidate, running to keep his name in the headlines and hoping that persistence and clever tactics will catch the party off guard. The party believed that because it had disqualified Jones in the past for failing to meet the threshold of signatures – after finding that many signatures on his election petition were invalid – he would make the same mistake twice. But Jones fooled them, submitting his petition on the last possible day, preventing the party from finding another contender and pulling together the right number of signatures. Throughout the campaign, Lipinski has done what he can to deprive Jones of a platform for his self-described “racialist” views, opposing school integration, interracial marriage and other manifestations of racial equality. Meanwhile, in the state’s 6th district, Peter Roskam lost to Democratic challenger Sean Casten. Roskam was one of the closest legislators to AIPAC and other pro-Israeli groups. Florida In the highest-profile governor’s race of the midterms, Democratic Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum faced Republican Rep. Ron DeSantis in a highly charged contest. It was also a race in which Jewish mega-donors were heavily invested – San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer contributed nearly $10 million dollars to PACS supporting Gillum and to the candidate directly. Former New York City mayor and businessman Michael Bloomberg and George and Alex Soros also gave generously to Gillum. In a bid to win Jewish Democratic voters to his camp, DeSantis positioned himself as a defender of Israel and accused Gillum of being hostile to the Jewish state and supporting the anti-Israel boycott movement. In one of their debates, the Republican told Gillum that his positions would be appropriate if he was “running for mayor of the Gaza Strip” and that he was aligned with a social justice group that believes “Israel is a genocidal apartheid state.” Gillum shook off the criticism, noting that as Tallahassee mayor he had travelled to Israel multiple times and said his support of Israel was “beyond reproach.” In the Florida Senate race, both incumbent Senator Bill Nelson and Governor Rick Scott enjoyed long-standing strong ties to the Jewish community and records of support for Israel, so there was little to attack on either side. Scott, however, took the opportunity to hammer the incumbent senator for voting in favor of the Iran nuclear deal in 2015. Jewish veteran congresswoman and former Democratic National Committee head Debbie Wasserman Schultz faced a long-shot challenge from right-wing activist Joe Kaufman – who has run against her three times in the past. Schultz, elected the first-ever Jewish congresswoman from Florida in 2004, was also challenged for her seat representing southern Broward County from Tim Kanova her Democratic primary opponent, who ran to her left as an Independent candidate. Virginia Republican Corey Stewart, who challenged incumbent Democrat and former vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine for the Senate, was unquestionably the most controversial GOP nominee for a Senate seat. Stewart came to the race with problematic ties to white supremacists and a history as an outspoken “neo-Confederate” who fought the removal of Confederate statues. Running as a maverick firebrand, however, proved difficult. In the closing weeks of the campaign, trailing his rival by more than 20 points – who raised nearly 20 times more money than Stewart – he made a last-ditch attempt to moderate his image, with little success. Jewish Republicans celebrated a victory in a congressional race they invested considerable money and energy – the contest in which Virginia’s 5th where Democratic candidate Leslie Cockburn faced the GOP’s Dave Riggleman in an effort to replace retiring Republican Rep. Thomas Garrett. Cockburn’s race was a longshot in a district that voted for Trump 53 to 42 percent. But Cockburn, a former journalist and producer for the CBS’s “60 Minutes,” had a high profile and a celebrity connection – her daughter is actress Olivia Wilde. Cockburn also co-authored the book “Dangerous Liaison” in 1991 that was highly critical of Israel. The Republican Jewish Coalition was so opposed to Cockburn that it funded a $300,000 ad campaign publicizing the fact that Cockburn had dined with Saddam Hussein’s sons Uday and Qusay, and the late Libyan strongman Muammar Ghadafi, calling her “out of touch” and “out to lunch.” The state Republican party ran ads saying that Cockburn “hates Israel.” Georgia Race played a major role in the hard-fought Georgia governor’s race between Stacey Abrams, who Democrats hoped would become the first female African-American governor in the nation, and Republican Brian Kemp. In the closing days of the race, a white supremacist group funded racist and anti-Semitic robocalls, which impersonated Oprah Winfrey, who came to the state. Members of the Jewish community in Georgia defended Abrams as a strong supporter of Israel and the Jewish community against Kemp’s attacks on her, calling her “someone that’s hanging out with Linda Sarsour and is being funded by people like George Soros.” Abrams had been photographed at a women’s rally with Palestinian activist and Women’s March leader Sarsour, and Soros donated to her campaign. Reuters contributed to this report.]]>