By Moira Warburton and Leah Douglas
(Reuters) – Businessman Elon Musk, an ally of President-elect Donald Trump, endorsed Republican Senator Rick Scott for U.S. Senate majority leader on Sunday as the race to fill the influential post heats up after the party won control of the chamber.
Republicans are expected to hold at least 52 seats in the 100-member Senate after capturing three previously held by Democrats in West Virginia, Ohio and Montana in last Tuesday’s election. Current Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who has led his party in the chamber since 2007, has said he will step down from leadership after the election.
“Rick Scott for Senate Majority Leader!” Musk, a tech billionaire who has emerged as a major backer of Trump in recent months, wrote in a social media post on Sunday.
Musk is the world’s wealthiest person. Scott, who represents Florida in the Senate, is a former healthcare executive and the wealthiest sitting senator. Musk endorsed Trump on July 13, the day the former president was shot in the ear in a Pennsylvania assassination attempt.
In an interview on Fox News on Sunday, Scott said that the Senate needs to implement real change.
“We can’t keep doing what we’re doing,” Scott said. “That’s what Donald Trump got elected to do, to be the change.”
Trump campaigned on promises, among other things, to deport immigrants who are in the United States illegally, cut taxes, impose tariffs on international trading partners and loosen fiscal policy.
Scott has the backing of several hard-right Republican senators, but it remains whether he can bring Republican moderates to his side.
Each party votes on their leader in the Senate in January, after senators have been sworn in to the new Congress. Whoever wins the Republican leadership will succeed Democrat Chuck Schumer as majority leader.
The outcome of two Senate races – in Pennsylvania and Arizona – has not yet been called by Edison Research. Republican Senate candidate David McCormick of Pennsylvania told Fox News on Sunday that he is not ready to support a particular candidate yet, but said Republicans “can’t have incrementalism” in their agenda.
HOUSE CONTROL STILL UNCLEAR
Control of the U.S. House of Representatives has not yet been decided. Republicans already have won 213 seats, according to Edison, just shy of the 218 needed to retain their current majority. If Republicans lead both chambers, it would mean that most of Trump’s agenda would have a much greater likelihood of winning congressional approval than if Democrats controlled one of them.
Partial results show Republicans have a narrow lead in nine of the remaining uncalled House races and Democrats in seven, according to a New York Times analysis, although many thousands of votes remain to be counted.
Gaining control of the House would give the Republicans broad power to potentially push through an agenda of tax cuts, border security control and energy deregulation.
Most of the remaining House seats are in Western states, where vote tallying typically takes longer than elsewhere in the country.
(Reporting by Leah Douglas and Moira Warburton; Editing by Will Dunham)
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