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

* Many individual races made history, but the overall results
corresponded with predictions

Democrats will win control of the United States House of
Representatives, several media outlets projected late Tuesday, in a
major blow to U.S. President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, NBC and ABC
are projecting that Republicans will retain control of the
Senate.

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.