Ron Barber, the former aide of shot US lawmaker Gabrielle Gifford, won an election on Tuesday to succeed her in Congress, in a disappointment for Republicans hoping for an upset ahead of November ballots.
With 86 percent of votes counted Barber, a Democrat like Giffords, had won 52 percent against 45 percent for Republican Jesse Kelly in the election, triggered by Giffords’ decision to step down after last year’s deadly shooting rampage in Tucson, Arizona.
Top congressional Democrat Nancy Pelosi hailed the result as a “well-deserved victory.”
“Congressman-elect Barber follows in the footsteps of our extraordinary colleague, Congresswoman Gabby Giffords — and he has enormous shoes to fill,” she added.
“Gabby left a legacy of strength, resolve and independence in the House,” she added in a statement cited by the Arizona Central Web site. “We look forward to Ron Barber continuing in that same tradition.”
A recent poll had put Barber — who was wounded in the shooting in January last year that nearly killed Giffords — 12 points ahead of the Republican challenger, but the lead was reported to have narrowed ahead of the vote.
Giffords stepped down in January to focus on her rehabilitation after being shot in the head in an attack that left six people dead, including a US federal judge and a member of the congresswoman’s staff.
She campaigned with Barber at the weekend with her husband Mark Kelly, a retired NASA astronaut, who told supporters in Tucson that the special election would be packed with emotion.
The victory in Arizona’s politically moderate 8th District means the Democrats keep a seat seen as crucial to their long-shot bid to take back Congress in 2012.
While Giffords vocally backed her hand-picked successor, Republicans have sought to make the race a referendum on President Barack Obama’s handling of the economy ahead of November’s White House and congressional elections.
It was watched closely for clues to the broader electoral map, as the seat is seen as important for Democratic efforts to regain control of the House of Representatives, which they lost to Republicans in 2010.
The winner serves out the remaining months of Giffords’ term and will have a leg up in the November election, which both candidates have already said they would contest in a rematch.
The district leans Republican, but Barber clearly benefited from widespread goodwill towards Giffords, who has made what has been described as a miraculous recovery after being shot through the head.
The tragedy united people in the US — and long-bickering lawmakers — in grief.
The 42-year-old Giffords, a onetime rising star in the Democratic Party, continues to speak haltingly and walks with difficulty.
Until Monday the race was a nail-biter, with internal polling in both camps showing the campaign going down to the wire.
A Kelly victory would have come as a shock to Democrats and been taken as a sign that voters feel Obama’s policies have not done enough to turn around a struggling national economy and reduce the high unemployment rate.
Tuesday’s vote was a chance at political redemption for Kelly, who lost to Giffords in 2010 by just 4,000 votes.
That bruising campaign was occasionally off-color, such as when Kelly invited supporters to shoot a loaded M-16 rifle with him and the candidates ran a more civil, issues-oriented race this year. However, that did not stop outside groups — which have poured vast amounts of money into the race — and party committees from going negative with a series of attack ads on both sides.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
‘PLAINLY ERRONEOUS’: The justice department appealed a Trump-appointed judge’s blocking of the release of a report into election interference by the incoming president US Special Counsel Jack Smith, who led the federal cases against US president-elect Donald Trump on charges of trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat and mishandling of classified documents, has resigned after submitting his investigative report on Trump, an expected move that came amid legal wrangling over how much of that document can be made public in the days ahead. The US Department of Justice disclosed Smith’s departure in a footnote of a court filing on Saturday, saying he had resigned one day earlier. The resignation, 10 days before Trump is inaugurated, follows the conclusion of two unsuccessful criminal prosecutions
RSS