 "Will Democrats Regain Control of the Senate? 10 Races to Watch")
Republicans and Democrats are battling fiercely for control of the Senate. Here are 10 pivotal races that we’re watching.
Arizona
PHOENIX — Senator John McCain seems poised to earn a sixth term in the Senate in what once seemed like a potentially close race against his Democratic rival, Representative Ann Kirkpatrick.
Mr. McCain, 80, weathered a revolt from the right within the Republican Party. And he found himself in an awkward relationship with Donald J. Trump, who last year mocked Mr. McCain’s military service and years as a prison of war in Vietnam, saying: “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
Mr. McCain nonetheless endorsed Mr. Trump, justifying his decision not as a personal choice, but as a matter of respect for his party. His support was fleeting. He withdrew it last month, prompted, he said, by Mr. Trump’s “demeaning comments about women and his boasts about sexual assaults.”
Ms. Kirkpatrick, 66, embraced the positions pushed by Hillary Clinton, banking on support from Latino voters, moderate independent voters and disaffected middle-of-the-road Republicans to propel her to victory.
Mr. McCain was buoyed by a deep campaign war chest and by help from the Republican establishment. Last week, Mitt Romney, the party’s nominee in 2012, stumped for him in Arizona.
Mr. McCain seized on Ms. Kirkpatrick’s support of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act as a main point of attack. In ads, his campaign assailed her for calling her vote for the program her “proudest moment” in Congress and declared her “too liberal for Arizona.” —Fernanda Santos
Florida
MIAMI — After seeing his presidential hopes crater and then jumping back into the race for his Senate seat, Senator Marco Rubio is hoping to win a second term in a race against his Democratic rival, Representative Patrick Murphy.
In an election pitting two young, ambitious strivers, Mr. Rubio, a Republican, has been by far the better-known, better-financed candidate, a lawmaker who ran for president this year and began his career in the Florida Statehouse, where he became speaker of the House. But the race proved surprisingly tight as Mr. Rubio, 45, struggled to characterize his support for Donald J. Trump, his onetime opponent in the presidential primary contests. Mr. Trump bested Mr. Rubio in the Florida primary and ridiculed him as “Little Marco.” Even as Mr. Rubio endorsed Mr. Trump, who is highly unpopular among Hispanics, a crucial constituency for the senator, he mostly avoided mentioning him on the stump.
A moderate South Florida congressman, Mr. Murphy, 33, was depicted by Mr. Rubio as overprivileged and overly reliant on his father’s considerable fortune and connections. Mr. Murphy, one of the youngest candidates to run in a high-profile Senate race, was in turn accused of inflating his résumé and accomplishing little in Congress during his two terms.
The two candidates took opposite tacks on a number of issues, with Mr. Murphy supporting abortion rights, a minimum-wage increase, the Affordable Care Act and an end to the United States’ economic embargo on Cuba. —Lizette Alvarez
Illinois
CHICAGO — Senator Mark S. Kirk of Illinois, considered perhaps the most imperiled incumbent Republican in the Senate, is trying to hold off a challenge from Representative Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat.
Mr. Kirk, a centrist Republican with bipartisan alliances, has long walked a delicate line in a state that tends to vote for Democrats, especially in presidential election years. It is a model that has seen success in Illinois in decades past but that has grown increasingly tangled in this battering election year. Some of Mr. Kirk’s stances have appealed to Democrats and independents (he has supported gay rights, for instance), but he has risked annoying his Republican base along the way. (He said he would support Donald J. Trump if he were the party’s presidential nominee, then backed away from him.)
It did not help Mr. Kirk’s chances that only days before the election, he seemed to denigrate the background of Ms. Duckworth, 48, a military veteran who lost her legs in the Iraq war after the Black Hawk helicopter she was co-piloting was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade in 2004. Ms. Duckworth was born in Bangkok to a Thai mother of Chinese descent, and her father was a Vietnam War veteran. She has been in the House since 2013 and worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs before that.
The re-election effort of Mr. Kirk, 57, a former Naval reservist who previously served in the House of Representatives, was complicated by a medical problem. Mr. Kirk had a stroke in January 2012, and was sidelined for about a year during his first term in the Senate to undergo operations and rehabilitation. —Monica Davey
Indiana
INDIANAPOLIS — Evan Bayh, a Democratic former senator, finds himself in a close race with Representative Todd Young, a Republican, in Mr. Bayh’s bid to recapture his old Senate seat in Indiana.
Democrats had viewed Mr. Bayh’s candidacy as a prime opportunity to claim an open Senate seat that had been held by a Republican and bolster their efforts to gain control of the chamber. Indiana voters are deeply familiar with the Bayh name: Mr. Bayh was popular during stints as governor and senator, and his father, Birch, also represented the state in the Senate.
But Mr. Young, a congressman who represents part of southern Indiana, found success framing Mr. Bayh as an outsider whose connections to Indiana had eroded. Mr. Bayh, 60, who left Congress six years ago, did not help matters when he gave an interviewer the wrong address of the Indianapolis condominium he claims as his home. His work as a consultant for a lobbying firm has also been scrutinized closely.
“Evan Bayh had his chance, but he put money ahead of us,” Mr. Young, 44, a former Marine, said in one advertisement.
Mr. Bayh has sought to portray himself as a moderate with deep Indiana roots, pledging to “reject the extremes of both parties.” He appeared in one ad playing driveway basketball, one of the state’s favorite pastimes, with his sons. But the comment section of that video underscored Mr. Bayh’s challenge in returning home. “Wonder whose driveway you borrowed,” wrote one viewer. —Mitch Smith
Missouri
SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — Senator Roy Blunt, a Republican who has served in Congress for nearly two decades, is facing an unexpectedly stiff challenge from Jason Kander, Missouri’s 35-year-old Democratic secretary of state.
Missouri was not expected to be one of the prime battlegrounds in the battle for control of the Senate. But Mr. Blunt, 66, has had to fend off accusations that he is the very type of Washington insider that his party’s presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, built his campaign against. And although Missouri has been a reliably red state in recent years, Mr. Blunt’s support of Mr. Trump also turned off some of the moderate voters who have traditionally backed him.
Mr. Blunt also had to confront a candidate as well positioned as a Democrat can be in a right-leaning state like Missouri. Mr. Kander is a military veteran who was viewed as a long shot when he announced his candidacy last year. But he surged in the polls after releasing an ad in which he put together an assault rifle while wearing a blindfold, touting his support of the Second Amendment and taunting his opponent over who really knew their way around firearms in this gun-loving state.
Mr. Kander hammered Mr. Blunt as out of touch with his home state and in it for himself, highlighting that the senator’s wife and children were lobbyists. Mr. Blunt, for his part, painted Mr. Kander as a shill for President Obama and Hillary Clinton, who are very unpopular in the state. —John Eligon
Nevada
LAS VEGAS — Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democratic former attorney general of Nevada, is in a close race with Representative Joe Heck, a three-term Republican congressman, to fill the seat of Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic minority leader, who is retiring after three decades in the Senate. Outside groups spent nearly $50 million on the tight race, but the biggest factor may have been Donald J. Trump.
Ms. Cortez Masto, 52, a former Nevada attorney general and the granddaughter of a Mexican immigrant, focused her campaign on immigration reform and future Supreme Court picks before the Senate. She capitalized on the extensive ground operation built by Hillary Clinton, and energized Latinos by railing against Mr. Trump’s plan to build a border wall, while trying to pin Mr. Trump’s most controversial views on her opponent.
Mr. Heck, 55, a physician and Iraq war veteran, tried to stress a record of across-the-aisle compromise. But he was tripped up by Mr. Trump’s statements on immigration, veterans and women, observers said.
Mr. Heck started off critical of Mr. Trump during the primary contests, then threw his support behind him after his nomination, only to call in October for Mr. Trump to step down.
“He was doing a good job trying to thread the middle and not alienate the base until the whole Donald Trump thing,” said David Damore, a professor of political science at the University of Nevada. “Then it was like he couldn’t say anything right.”
Mr. Heck relied on the financial backing of groups outside the state — including money from the conservative activists Charles G. and David H. Koch. — Dave Philipps
New Hampshire
CONCORD, N.H. — Two well-known, well-liked lawyers, Senator Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, and Gov. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat, are facing off for Ms. Ayotte’s Senate seat in one of the year’s most closely watched and evenly matched races. The race has cost about $100 million, a jaw-dropping sum for such a small state.
The main challenge for both was to keep their bases happy while appealing to the state’s large number of independents. This forced both candidates to emphasize bipartisanship and to try to keep politics out of major issues, like the state’s crushing opioid epidemic.
Ms. Ayotte, 48, a former prosecutor, has been a rising star in Washington, where she allied herself with conservative causes, like defunding Planned Parenthood and opposing a confirmation vote on a Supreme Court nominee.
She sought to present a more moderate face at home. But her delicate dance around Donald J. Trump’s candidacy at the top of the Republican ticket drew considerable negative attention. After saying she “absolutely” saw him as a role model, she said she would not vote for him.
Ms. Hassan, 58, a former State Senate majority leader who helped pass same-sex marriage, allied herself with the Democrats’ biggest stars, including President and Michelle Obama, as they flooded the state for Hillary Clinton.
But Ms. Hassan has broken with her party on other occasions, saying, for example, that the federal government needed better screening of Syrian refugees before she would allow them in New Hampshire. —Katharine Q. Seelye
North Carolina
RALEIGH, N.C. — Senator Richard M. Burr, a 20-year Republican veteran of Congress, is locked in a tight battle with Deborah Ross, a Democratic former state director of the American Civil Liberties Union, in a Senate race that Mr. Burr began as a heavy favorite.
Ms. Ross, 53, a lawyer who served from 2003 to 2013 in the State House of Representatives, blasted Mr. Burr, 60, early in the race as a self-dealing politician who exemplified a dysfunctional Washington. She also criticized him for continuing to support the Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, after Mr. Trump’s vulgar comments about women, and for being named to Mr. Trump’s “national security advisory council.”
Late in the campaign, Ms. Ross called attention to an Oct. 29 recording of Mr. Burr in which he said he was “a little bit shocked” that a National Rifle Association magazine with a picture of Hillary Clinton on it did not have a bull’s-eye over the candidate. On the tape, Mr. Burr also vowed that if Mrs. Clinton were elected, he would work to keep her from filling the vacancy on the Supreme Court.
Mr. Burr, known for wearing shoes without socks in the Senate, worried some Republican leaders with his decidedly mellow attitude toward campaigning. But both sides viewed Ms. Ross as vulnerable because of her A.C.L.U. background, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee blanketed the airwaves with ads claiming that Ms. Ross opposed a state sex offender registry, an allegation Ms. Ross strongly rebutted.
In a state with numerous military bases and veterans, Mr. Burr, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, emphasized his national security credentials, touting, among other things, a bill he had sponsored that would prevent President Obama from closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. —Richard Fausset
Pennsylvania
PHILADELPHIA — Senator Patrick J. Toomey, a staunch fiscal conservative who has struggled to distance himself from Donald J. Trump, is trying to fend off a challenge from Katie McGinty, a Democrat and onetime environmental adviser to President Bill Clinton who has never held elective office.
The race was the most expensive Senate contest in the nation. Mr. Toomey, 54, who once ran the free-market advocacy group Club for Growth, pitched himself to voters as a bipartisan deal maker, highlighting his effort to promote criminal background checks for gun buyers after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
Ms. McGinty, 53, a former aide to Gov. Tom Wolf and a onetime environmental adviser to President Bill Clinton, cast herself as a pro-business environmentalist and ran on a traditional Democratic platform, supporting abortion rights and an increased minimum wage.
With control of the Senate at stake, money poured in from outside groups, and spending topped $118 million, the Center for Responsive Politics reported.
Each side attacked the other on ethics; Republicans accused Ms. McGinty of using political ties to funnel business to a company where her husband worked as a consultant. Democrats accused Mr. Toomey of conflict of interest, holding stock in a bank of which he had been a founder while fighting new banking regulations.
But Ms. McGinty went into Election Day with a slight edge, as the race tested whether Mr. Toomey could survive “the Trump drag,” said Jennifer Duffy, an analyst for The Cook Political Report. Mr. Toomey never endorsed Mr. Trump. But he also never said whether he would vote for him. —Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Wisconsin
MIDDLETON, Wis. — An important Senate race that had been seen as leaning heavily Democratic has narrowed into what looks like a photo finish between Russ Feingold, a former Democratic senator, and Ron Johnson, the Republican who unseated him in 2010 after three Senate terms.
For more than a year this election cycle, Mr. Feingold appeared to be coasting to victory, with polls showing him holding a double-digit lead over Mr. Johnson, 61, a former manufacturing executive. They sparred over campaign finance, Mr. Feingold’s signature issue during his time in the Senate; the Affordable Care Act, which Mr. Feingold supported; and the economy in Wisconsin, where job growth has trailed its neighbors. Mr. Feingold said Mr. Johnson’s decisions had imperiled jobs in the state. Mr. Johnson called Mr. Feingold, 63, a “career politician,” and even some former Feingold supporters said they wondered if he were overstaying his welcome.
But as the campaign drew to a close, the candidates were locked in a tight race, a Marquette University poll found, after some Republican groups had already pulled television advertising to run in the state.
An influx of money in the last weeks of the campaign, totaling about $20 million, seemed to have an effect, as did Mr. Johnson’s attempt to soften his image with television ads portraying him hugging constituents and changing a diaper. — Julie Bosman
Arizona
PHOENIX — Senator John McCain seems poised to earn a sixth term in the Senate in what once seemed like a potentially close race against his Democratic rival, Representative Ann Kirkpatrick.
Mr. McCain, 80, weathered a revolt from the right within the Republican Party. And he found himself in an awkward relationship with Donald J. Trump, who last year mocked Mr. McCain’s military service and years as a prison of war in Vietnam, saying: “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
Mr. McCain nonetheless endorsed Mr. Trump, justifying his decision not as a personal choice, but as a matter of respect for his party. His support was fleeting. He withdrew it last month, prompted, he said, by Mr. Trump’s “demeaning comments about women and his boasts about sexual assaults.”
Ms. Kirkpatrick, 66, embraced the positions pushed by Hillary Clinton, banking on support from Latino voters, moderate independent voters and disaffected middle-of-the-road Republicans to propel her to victory.
Mr. McCain was buoyed by a deep campaign war chest and by help from the Republican establishment. Last week, Mitt Romney, the party’s nominee in 2012, stumped for him in Arizona.
Mr. McCain seized on Ms. Kirkpatrick’s support of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act as a main point of attack. In ads, his campaign assailed her for calling her vote for the program her “proudest moment” in Congress and declared her “too liberal for Arizona.” —Fernanda Santos
Florida
MIAMI — After seeing his presidential hopes crater and then jumping back into the race for his Senate seat, Senator Marco Rubio is hoping to win a second term in a race against his Democratic rival, Representative Patrick Murphy.
In an election pitting two young, ambitious strivers, Mr. Rubio, a Republican, has been by far the better-known, better-financed candidate, a lawmaker who ran for president this year and began his career in the Florida Statehouse, where he became speaker of the House. But the race proved surprisingly tight as Mr. Rubio, 45, struggled to characterize his support for Donald J. Trump, his onetime opponent in the presidential primary contests. Mr. Trump bested Mr. Rubio in the Florida primary and ridiculed him as “Little Marco.” Even as Mr. Rubio endorsed Mr. Trump, who is highly unpopular among Hispanics, a crucial constituency for the senator, he mostly avoided mentioning him on the stump.
A moderate South Florida congressman, Mr. Murphy, 33, was depicted by Mr. Rubio as overprivileged and overly reliant on his father’s considerable fortune and connections. Mr. Murphy, one of the youngest candidates to run in a high-profile Senate race, was in turn accused of inflating his résumé and accomplishing little in Congress during his two terms.
The two candidates took opposite tacks on a number of issues, with Mr. Murphy supporting abortion rights, a minimum-wage increase, the Affordable Care Act and an end to the United States’ economic embargo on Cuba. —Lizette Alvarez
Illinois
CHICAGO — Senator Mark S. Kirk of Illinois, considered perhaps the most imperiled incumbent Republican in the Senate, is trying to hold off a challenge from Representative Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat.
Mr. Kirk, a centrist Republican with bipartisan alliances, has long walked a delicate line in a state that tends to vote for Democrats, especially in presidential election years. It is a model that has seen success in Illinois in decades past but that has grown increasingly tangled in this battering election year. Some of Mr. Kirk’s stances have appealed to Democrats and independents (he has supported gay rights, for instance), but he has risked annoying his Republican base along the way. (He said he would support Donald J. Trump if he were the party’s presidential nominee, then backed away from him.)
It did not help Mr. Kirk’s chances that only days before the election, he seemed to denigrate the background of Ms. Duckworth, 48, a military veteran who lost her legs in the Iraq war after the Black Hawk helicopter she was co-piloting was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade in 2004. Ms. Duckworth was born in Bangkok to a Thai mother of Chinese descent, and her father was a Vietnam War veteran. She has been in the House since 2013 and worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs before that.
The re-election effort of Mr. Kirk, 57, a former Naval reservist who previously served in the House of Representatives, was complicated by a medical problem. Mr. Kirk had a stroke in January 2012, and was sidelined for about a year during his first term in the Senate to undergo operations and rehabilitation. —Monica Davey
Indiana
INDIANAPOLIS — Evan Bayh, a Democratic former senator, finds himself in a close race with Representative Todd Young, a Republican, in Mr. Bayh’s bid to recapture his old Senate seat in Indiana.
Democrats had viewed Mr. Bayh’s candidacy as a prime opportunity to claim an open Senate seat that had been held by a Republican and bolster their efforts to gain control of the chamber. Indiana voters are deeply familiar with the Bayh name: Mr. Bayh was popular during stints as governor and senator, and his father, Birch, also represented the state in the Senate.
But Mr. Young, a congressman who represents part of southern Indiana, found success framing Mr. Bayh as an outsider whose connections to Indiana had eroded. Mr. Bayh, 60, who left Congress six years ago, did not help matters when he gave an interviewer the wrong address of the Indianapolis condominium he claims as his home. His work as a consultant for a lobbying firm has also been scrutinized closely.
“Evan Bayh had his chance, but he put money ahead of us,” Mr. Young, 44, a former Marine, said in one advertisement.
Mr. Bayh has sought to portray himself as a moderate with deep Indiana roots, pledging to “reject the extremes of both parties.” He appeared in one ad playing driveway basketball, one of the state’s favorite pastimes, with his sons. But the comment section of that video underscored Mr. Bayh’s challenge in returning home. “Wonder whose driveway you borrowed,” wrote one viewer. —Mitch Smith
Missouri
SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — Senator Roy Blunt, a Republican who has served in Congress for nearly two decades, is facing an unexpectedly stiff challenge from Jason Kander, Missouri’s 35-year-old Democratic secretary of state.
Missouri was not expected to be one of the prime battlegrounds in the battle for control of the Senate. But Mr. Blunt, 66, has had to fend off accusations that he is the very type of Washington insider that his party’s presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, built his campaign against. And although Missouri has been a reliably red state in recent years, Mr. Blunt’s support of Mr. Trump also turned off some of the moderate voters who have traditionally backed him.
Mr. Blunt also had to confront a candidate as well positioned as a Democrat can be in a right-leaning state like Missouri. Mr. Kander is a military veteran who was viewed as a long shot when he announced his candidacy last year. But he surged in the polls after releasing an ad in which he put together an assault rifle while wearing a blindfold, touting his support of the Second Amendment and taunting his opponent over who really knew their way around firearms in this gun-loving state.
Mr. Kander hammered Mr. Blunt as out of touch with his home state and in it for himself, highlighting that the senator’s wife and children were lobbyists. Mr. Blunt, for his part, painted Mr. Kander as a shill for President Obama and Hillary Clinton, who are very unpopular in the state. —John Eligon
Nevada
LAS VEGAS — Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democratic former attorney general of Nevada, is in a close race with Representative Joe Heck, a three-term Republican congressman, to fill the seat of Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic minority leader, who is retiring after three decades in the Senate. Outside groups spent nearly $50 million on the tight race, but the biggest factor may have been Donald J. Trump.
Ms. Cortez Masto, 52, a former Nevada attorney general and the granddaughter of a Mexican immigrant, focused her campaign on immigration reform and future Supreme Court picks before the Senate. She capitalized on the extensive ground operation built by Hillary Clinton, and energized Latinos by railing against Mr. Trump’s plan to build a border wall, while trying to pin Mr. Trump’s most controversial views on her opponent.
Mr. Heck, 55, a physician and Iraq war veteran, tried to stress a record of across-the-aisle compromise. But he was tripped up by Mr. Trump’s statements on immigration, veterans and women, observers said.
Mr. Heck started off critical of Mr. Trump during the primary contests, then threw his support behind him after his nomination, only to call in October for Mr. Trump to step down.
“He was doing a good job trying to thread the middle and not alienate the base until the whole Donald Trump thing,” said David Damore, a professor of political science at the University of Nevada. “Then it was like he couldn’t say anything right.”
Mr. Heck relied on the financial backing of groups outside the state — including money from the conservative activists Charles G. and David H. Koch. — Dave Philipps
New Hampshire
CONCORD, N.H. — Two well-known, well-liked lawyers, Senator Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, and Gov. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat, are facing off for Ms. Ayotte’s Senate seat in one of the year’s most closely watched and evenly matched races. The race has cost about $100 million, a jaw-dropping sum for such a small state.
The main challenge for both was to keep their bases happy while appealing to the state’s large number of independents. This forced both candidates to emphasize bipartisanship and to try to keep politics out of major issues, like the state’s crushing opioid epidemic.
Ms. Ayotte, 48, a former prosecutor, has been a rising star in Washington, where she allied herself with conservative causes, like defunding Planned Parenthood and opposing a confirmation vote on a Supreme Court nominee.
She sought to present a more moderate face at home. But her delicate dance around Donald J. Trump’s candidacy at the top of the Republican ticket drew considerable negative attention. After saying she “absolutely” saw him as a role model, she said she would not vote for him.
Ms. Hassan, 58, a former State Senate majority leader who helped pass same-sex marriage, allied herself with the Democrats’ biggest stars, including President and Michelle Obama, as they flooded the state for Hillary Clinton.
But Ms. Hassan has broken with her party on other occasions, saying, for example, that the federal government needed better screening of Syrian refugees before she would allow them in New Hampshire. —Katharine Q. Seelye
North Carolina
RALEIGH, N.C. — Senator Richard M. Burr, a 20-year Republican veteran of Congress, is locked in a tight battle with Deborah Ross, a Democratic former state director of the American Civil Liberties Union, in a Senate race that Mr. Burr began as a heavy favorite.
Ms. Ross, 53, a lawyer who served from 2003 to 2013 in the State House of Representatives, blasted Mr. Burr, 60, early in the race as a self-dealing politician who exemplified a dysfunctional Washington. She also criticized him for continuing to support the Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, after Mr. Trump’s vulgar comments about women, and for being named to Mr. Trump’s “national security advisory council.”
Late in the campaign, Ms. Ross called attention to an Oct. 29 recording of Mr. Burr in which he said he was “a little bit shocked” that a National Rifle Association magazine with a picture of Hillary Clinton on it did not have a bull’s-eye over the candidate. On the tape, Mr. Burr also vowed that if Mrs. Clinton were elected, he would work to keep her from filling the vacancy on the Supreme Court.
Mr. Burr, known for wearing shoes without socks in the Senate, worried some Republican leaders with his decidedly mellow attitude toward campaigning. But both sides viewed Ms. Ross as vulnerable because of her A.C.L.U. background, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee blanketed the airwaves with ads claiming that Ms. Ross opposed a state sex offender registry, an allegation Ms. Ross strongly rebutted.
In a state with numerous military bases and veterans, Mr. Burr, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, emphasized his national security credentials, touting, among other things, a bill he had sponsored that would prevent President Obama from closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. —Richard Fausset
Pennsylvania
PHILADELPHIA — Senator Patrick J. Toomey, a staunch fiscal conservative who has struggled to distance himself from Donald J. Trump, is trying to fend off a challenge from Katie McGinty, a Democrat and onetime environmental adviser to President Bill Clinton who has never held elective office.
The race was the most expensive Senate contest in the nation. Mr. Toomey, 54, who once ran the free-market advocacy group Club for Growth, pitched himself to voters as a bipartisan deal maker, highlighting his effort to promote criminal background checks for gun buyers after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
Ms. McGinty, 53, a former aide to Gov. Tom Wolf and a onetime environmental adviser to President Bill Clinton, cast herself as a pro-business environmentalist and ran on a traditional Democratic platform, supporting abortion rights and an increased minimum wage.
With control of the Senate at stake, money poured in from outside groups, and spending topped $118 million, the Center for Responsive Politics reported.
Each side attacked the other on ethics; Republicans accused Ms. McGinty of using political ties to funnel business to a company where her husband worked as a consultant. Democrats accused Mr. Toomey of conflict of interest, holding stock in a bank of which he had been a founder while fighting new banking regulations.
But Ms. McGinty went into Election Day with a slight edge, as the race tested whether Mr. Toomey could survive “the Trump drag,” said Jennifer Duffy, an analyst for The Cook Political Report. Mr. Toomey never endorsed Mr. Trump. But he also never said whether he would vote for him. —Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Wisconsin
MIDDLETON, Wis. — An important Senate race that had been seen as leaning heavily Democratic has narrowed into what looks like a photo finish between Russ Feingold, a former Democratic senator, and Ron Johnson, the Republican who unseated him in 2010 after three Senate terms.
For more than a year this election cycle, Mr. Feingold appeared to be coasting to victory, with polls showing him holding a double-digit lead over Mr. Johnson, 61, a former manufacturing executive. They sparred over campaign finance, Mr. Feingold’s signature issue during his time in the Senate; the Affordable Care Act, which Mr. Feingold supported; and the economy in Wisconsin, where job growth has trailed its neighbors. Mr. Feingold said Mr. Johnson’s decisions had imperiled jobs in the state. Mr. Johnson called Mr. Feingold, 63, a “career politician,” and even some former Feingold supporters said they wondered if he were overstaying his welcome.
But as the campaign drew to a close, the candidates were locked in a tight race, a Marquette University poll found, after some Republican groups had already pulled television advertising to run in the state.
An influx of money in the last weeks of the campaign, totaling about $20 million, seemed to have an effect, as did Mr. Johnson’s attempt to soften his image with television ads portraying him hugging constituents and changing a diaper. — Julie Bosman
© 2016 The New York Times News Service