Newly counted ballots have given Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto an insurmountable lead in her Nevada Senate election. All the networks have now called it. That means that Democrats have retained control of the Senate.

As of this morning it’s more than a theoretical possibility that Democrats will remain in charge of the House next year. Dave Wasserman of The Cook Report this morning put it this way: When you put aside the races already called and the ones in which each party has a clear lead, you’re left with six seats he considers genuine tossups — #AZ01, #AZ06, #CA13, #CA22, #CA41, #WA03. If Democrats get all six, if they run the table, they stay in the margin 218-217.

That sounds unlikely and it is unlikely. But you also have to see it through the prism of the fact that Democratic candidates have been running tables, improbably coming from behind or coming out on top, since mid-Tuesday evening. So it could happen.

Let me add one sort of odd note here. There’s actually a pretty good argument that it’s in Democrats’ political interests not to get the majority here.

Let me follow up on yesterday’s post about this quasi-revolt against Mitch McConnell. I’ve tried to look more at the whole picture. Or perhaps I was still too sleep deprived yesterday afternoon. But all of these leadership questions and battles we’re seeing now are just proxy battles over Trump. One part of the GOP blames Trump for their disappointing showing and sees this as their best opportunity in years to push him aside, in most cases lining up behind Ron DeSantis, at least for now, as the vehicle to do that. These mini-revolts against McConnell are really just attempts to open up new fronts against McConnell to defend and protect Trump.

Entirely predictably the knives are already out in the House for probable Speaker Kevin McCarthy. On cue they all come from the hard right of the caucus who believe the problem in 2022 is that Republicans weren’t sufficiently feral. More interesting is a push on the Senate side to delay the Republican leadership elections in the upper chamber. The wannabe mutineers don’t seem quite willing to say what they’re doing. They’re not coming out against McConnell, proposing an alternative leader or criticizing his management. But since McConnell’s leadership is almost universally assumed there’s only one logic and aim of delay.

ITEM One: I continue to be calmly stunned that the battle for control of the House still does not seem settled. Any Republican margin is likely to be so minuscule that it amounts to something of a poisoned chalice for Kevin McCarthy and the GOP generally. As I’ve noted repeatedly, the debt ceiling remains the sui generis, overriding thing. But if you set that aside, given that Democrats will not get 52 senate seats, in purely political terms there’s actually some real advantage in having Republicans hold the House by only one or two seats.

We need to remember that Donald Trump is a pathological liar. That said, I think this requires some explanation, if only a clear and definitive confirmation that this did not happen.

John Fetterman’s Pennsylvania Senate run turned out to be one of the most high-stakes, closely watched and — for many — most emotionally engaging of the cycle. Now we are going to learn how it unfolded from the inside. On Monday at 2 p.m. ET will be joined for a TPM Newsmaker briefing by Fetterman campaign manager Brendan McPhillips. We’ll talk about the early salad days when it seemed like Fetterman might win in a landslide, the tightening polls, press criticism over Fetterman’s absence from the campaign trail, the debate and what the campaign did to secure victory in the final days when many election analysts were predicting a Mehmet Oz win in a Republican wave.

TPM’s Kate Riga and I will lead the discussion and take your questions. The briefing is open to all TPM members. If you’re a member you should be receiving an email shortly with instructions on how to register and join us on Monday.

Democratic strategists Simon Rosenberg and Tom Bonier were the two most prominent voices telling us for weeks that the 2022 Red Wave was a mirage. They were right. We talked to them yesterday about what they saw. If you weren’t able to join us live you can see the discussion after the jump.

One of the clearest takeaways from the 2022 midterm was that Trump-backed candidates did quite poorly. Meanwhile Ron DeSantis chalked up a thundering reelection victory in Florida, just shy of 60% of the vote. That is the kind of reelection victory that cues up a big state governor for a presidential run. DeSantis can say plausibly that he essentially owns the state of Florida and that he has a politics that sells in a large and diverse state. These factors have begun to coalesce into a push within the GOP to move not beyond Trumpism, which DeSantis embodies, but beyond Trump himself. Trump is old, profoundly divisive, in deep legal trouble. Meanwhile Republicans have suffered defeat in the last three electoral cycles largely because of opposition to him.

Moving away from Trump, though, will be a lot harder than it looks.

This has seemed more plausible over the course of the day. But events this evening make it seem like Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D) very much has the inside track to claim reelection in Nevada. Not quite a lock. But getting close. Cortez Masto is currently still behind by about 16,000 votes, though she made up significant ground today. The key is that there are likely 100,000 or more votes outstanding. Those are overwhelmingly mail votes from the two big urban counties, a bucket of votes Cortez Masto has been winning by a two-thirds margin. If those vote totals are roughly accurate and something in the neighborhood of that percentage holds up she should cut right through Laxalt’s lead in the next few days.

It’s not a certainty but it’s getting close.