As much of the community fixates on the historically narrow presidential race, some GW students are weighing in on contentious down-ballot elections that could determine control of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. 

In an election cycle marked by fiery debates and polarizing ad buys, congressional control relies on seats in battleground states, like Montana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Arizona, which will shape the legislative agendas for the House and Senate for the next two years. More than a dozen students — many of them first-time voters — said these air-tight races catalyzed them to vote, but even as the students monitor competitive races through local media coverage and dispatches from family members at home, uncertainty remains on which major party will tip the scale on the Hill.

Congress is currently split down the aisle, with Republicans controlling the House and Democrats controlling the Senate, both with slim margins. But with 34 seats in the Senate and all 435 House seats up for grabs this year, the parties have wrestled to flip the chambers in their favor.

Junior Isabella Marias, a political science student from Scottsdale, Arizona, said the deadlocked local House race for Arizona’s 1st congressional district — one of 22 toss-up House races — pushed her to the polls. She hopes voters unseat seven-term incumbent Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ) and elect Democratic physician Amish Shah, a former member of the Arizona State House of Representatives, who she campaigned for in the primaries. 

“It’s a completely unpredictable election,” Marias said.

As a resident of a border state, she said immigration policies are particularly salient to her when voting and that she opposes Schweikert’s stances that she said “treat immigrants as subpar to Americans.” Schweikert opposes illegal immigration and giving amnesty to undocumented immigrants and has supported former President Donald Trump’s plan to build a border wall since 2016.

Shah has worked to strengthen border security through a bipartisan approach by increasing funding for the border by more than $200 million in Arizona’s state legislature, but Republicans say he hasn’t gone far enough after he voted against a package of budget legislation that included border security funding.

Marias added that she values Shah’s record of defending reproductive rights because she doesn’t want to send a representative to Congress who would vote to restrict a woman’s right to make abortion choices in Arizona. Schweikert has sponsored a “Life at Conception Act” six times that would have made abortion nationwide almost completely illegal and voted against protecting access to contraceptives.

“Schweikert has been in office for around 20 years now, I want to say, so that would be a huge deal if the Democrat were finally going to win,” Marias said.

Marias said friends at GW have told her that her vote matters “a lot more” than theirs because she lives in an area with tight House, Senate and presidency races. She said she sent in her mail-in ballot on Oct. 21 but is anxious about the possibility of her ballot not being received, which would help candidates she opposes, like Schweikert, win.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that it’ll be a very close race,” Marias said. “The fear is definitely like my vote isn’t counted, and it’s that close.”

Junior Brandon McNamara, a political science and entrepreneurship student from Austin, Texas, said he was close to abstaining from voting this election year because he didn’t feel represented by either major party’s presidential candidate. But he said the highly contentious race for the Texas Senate seat, where he felt a stronger pull to support Democratic candidate Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX), pushed him to cast his ballot.

He said he sided with Allred because of his stances on issues, like immigration, where he feels Allred has taken a more bipartisan stance in establishing border security, like pushing for the Bipartisan Senate Border Bill, and on abortion, where Allred has committed to protecting reproductive rights in Congress amid the state’s abortion ban.

“I should vote at least for the candidates I agree with strongly or feel strongly towards, like Allred,” McNamara said. “I felt much stronger about voting in the Senate race than in the presidential where I felt that there was a clearer choice in candidate.”

Allred faces off against Republican two-time incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who has held the seat since 2013 and received an endorsement from Trump. Democrats have poured millions into the race in efforts to flip the seat blue, while Republicans are confident Cruz can hold onto his post as polls show the race in a dead heat. 

McNamara said he thinks Cruz will pull off a win on Election Day but added that many Texans don’t view the incumbent as a “common man” after he received backlash in 2021 for traveling to Cancún, Mexico, as Texas endured the harshest storm locals had seen in generations.

“It seems like he’ll desert us sometimes in times of need,” he said.

Sophomore Hayden Rometty, a political communication student from Farmington Hills, Michigan, said he’s voting for Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers because of his emphasis on bringing manufacturing jobs back to Michigan, which have dropped by 6.4 percent since 2019, and curbing inflation, which spiked in 2021.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) retired this year, leaving the seat open and pitting Rogers, a former Michigan congressman, against Democratic candidate Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) — one of four toss-up Senate races expected to determine control of the upper chamber. 

He said he opposes Slotkin’s support for electric vehicle mandates. Slotkin has been under fire from Republicans who tie her to President Joe Biden’s emission standards that would require two-thirds of cars to be electric by 2032 because of her refusal to vote to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s limits on tailpipe pollutants from cars and trucks. Slotkin has contended that she supports investment in electric vehicles but not a mandate.

Rometty said Rogers has contended that electric vehicle mandates would reduce manufacturing and auto jobs in Michigan, industries central to Michigan’s economy. He added that Republicans criticize Slotkin for voting for the Inflation Reduction Act in Congress, which they said didn’t lower inflation.

“A lot of people in Michigan see her as someone who is maybe less understanding of some of the issues that Michiganders are concerned about,” Rometty said. “She’s a little bit more distant, and she’s a little more connected to Washington.”

Junior Bridget Munoz, a statistics and philosophy student from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, said she voted this election to unseat incumbent Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), who’s been in office since 2017, because she opposes book bans and mandating parental consent for a student’s request to change the name or pronouns they use at school. Fitzpatrick voted in favor of the Parental Bill of Rights Act, which passed the House in March 2023 and would have mandated parental consent for pronoun changes and required parents to receive a list of books accessible in the school library, among other proposed policies. 

Munoz said her high school district had a “serious book banning issue” and forbade students from reading any book that mentioned homosexuality. She said Fitzpatrick’s support for such mandates could put students in unsafe situations at home. 

“He runs on this platform that he claims to be the one true centrist candidate,” Munoz said. “That’s like his whole thing, but it’s kind of more of just conservatism, disguised as centrism, to try to sway people into thinking he’s truly relatable.”

Fitzpatrick, whose sister was Munoz’s dance teacher as a kid, is running against Democratic candidate Ashley Ehasz, in a competitive race that leans Republican and a rematch of the 2022 midterm elections. 

“That kind of worries me, that it is so 50-50,” Munoz said. “That’s what is scary right now.”