U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego has won his U.S. Senate race, making him the first Latino U.S. Senator in Arizona history.
The Associated Press called the race at 9:50 p.m. Arizona time, with Gallego, a Democrat, defeating Republican Kari Lake, who has now lost her second statewide race after her 2022 loss to Gov. Katie Hobbs.
There is no way for Lake to become the state's next senator.
An analysis by Capitol Media Services show that as of Monday afternoon there were fewer than 76,000 votes to be tallied in four counties where the Republican contender has outpolled Gallego.
But as of the same time, the Secretary of State's Office reported that Gallego was outpolling Lake by more than 68,000.
Theoretically, that could have allowed Lake to catch up if she got pretty much every single one of those votes in Cochise, Pinal, Yavapai and Yuma counties. But even in Yavapai County, which among those probably has the largest GOP margin, Lake was getting fewer than two out of every three votes.
The other side of the equation is that the largest collection of untallied votes is in Maricopa County, where more than 84,000 votes have yet to be tallied. Here, more than 2 million have been counted.
What makes that significant is that as of Monday afternoon, Gallego had received slightly more than a million of them against about 911,000 for Lake.
Put another way, for every nine votes coming in for Lake, Gallego is getting 10.
That disparity shows up in even greater form in heavily Democratic Pima County.
Election officials on Monday said they still had nearly 63,000 ballots not yet counted.
But of the more than 461,000 that have been tallied, for every two votes that Lake got, Gallego picked up three.
In the past two elections, some of the last votes to be counted actually skewed in favor of Republican candidates. In fact, ahead of then 2022 election, some GOP officials were telling people not to vote early amid false claims that mail-in voting was insecure.
This year, however, the party engaged in an active effort to ``bank'' early votes. That gave many Republicans, including Donald Trump, an edge from the get-go that he never lost.
Even with that push, though, Lake never caught up with Gallego.
Lake also ran far behind Trump.
Those Monday numbers show the former president with more than 1.66 million votes against just 1.46 million for the GOP senate hopeful
Messages left with the Lake campaign were not immediately returned.
What also remains to be seen is whether Lake will accept the results.
She spent the last two years in court contesting her 17,117-vote loss in the 2022 gubernatorial race to Democrat Hobbs. Not a single court accepted her arguments that there were flaws in the way the election was conducted.
The victory for Gallego is bittersweet. A former state legislator before being elected to the U.S. House, he goes to a Senate that had been in Democratic hands to one where the Republicans now will be in control for at least the next two years.
But while the GOP majority expected to hit 53, it is short of the 60 needed by Republicans to avoid a filibuster of their measures.
Still, that rule does not apply to confirming nominees for the U.S. Supreme Court, pretty much clearing the way for Trump to fill any vacancies.
And there's something else: There isn't going to be a Democrat in the White House for the next four years to quash some GOP priorities.
As of Tuesday, however, control of the U.S. House remained undecided.
Republicans gained one seat, bringing their total to 214, with Democrats keeping control of 204. But it takes 218 for a majority in the 435-seat chamber, with several races undecided.
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