The five most expensive Senate races of 2022 have seen nearly $1.3 billion in spending across the primary and general elections, according to OpenSecrets, a staggering sum that speaks to the massive amounts of money flooding the political system.

Leading the way is the Pennsylvania Senate race, where Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz are squaring off in the general election. All told, nearly $375 million has been spent on the race this cycle, OpenSecrets found.

Election Day is Tuesday, but with early voting, the more accepted use of mail voting and the prospect of razor-thin races, it's really Election Season.

And Tuesday only marks the beginning of the next phase in that season.

Gird for many of these elections to go on for days, if not weeks. This is all perfectly normal when there are close elections. It doesn't mean that there is fraud — despite the lies about his 2020 loss that former President Donald Trump has pushed and so many candidates he's backed have promulgated.

When are we going to know the results of the midterms? In 2020, due to slow vote counting in many states, it took days — until Saturday, Nov. 7 — for ABC News to declare Joe Biden the president-elect. We likely won’t have to wait that long this year, but it is again possible that we won’t know the winners of the 2022 election on election night. States like Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania that are key to Senate control could take multiple days to count all their votes.

Voters won’t immediately know the results of the 2022 midterm elections , with some of the most consequential races not expected to be called for days — maybe even weeks.

The fate of both the House and Senate for the next two years will be decided after the polls close on Tuesday. However, a number of factors could delay how long until voters and candidates know the results of their races, especially for those in key battleground states that are set to determine which party will gain control of Congress.

Control of the Senate rests on a knife’s edge, according to new polls by The New York Times and Siena College, with Republican challengers in Nevada and Georgia neck-and-neck with Democratic incumbents, and the Democratic candidate in Pennsylvania clinging to what appears to be a tenuous advantage.

The bright spot for Democrats in the four key states polled was in Arizona, where Senator Mark Kelly is holding a small but steady lead over his Republican challenger, Blake Masters.

The battle for the Senate is anyone’s ballgame with only a week to go until voters head to the polls.

Republicans, needing to net only one seat, are knocking on the door as the national environment moves increasingly in their direction and some surveys show them in the lead in both Georgia and Nevada. According to FiveThirtyEight’s latest projections, the fight for the majority is a “dead heat,” turning the final days into an all-out sprint to get voters out to the polls. 

Here are five races that will determine the Senate majority.

Arizona

A projection from election handicapper FiveThirtyEight shows a dead heat in the race for control of the Senate, with each party given a 50% chance of winning a majority in the upper chamber next year.

The first thing Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto wants you to understand is that Nevada elections are always close.

“Nevada is a purple state and it’s independent and it’s strong,” she told me in early October, in a union hall she’d just used for a campaign event. “I also know a lot of the polling gets Nevada wrong, so I really don’t utilize or worry about that.”

If she sounds defensive, that’s because the country’s first and only Latina senator is quite literally the Democrat most at risk of losing her Senate seat next month.

The crucial battles in the midterm elections are coming into sharp focus with less than four weeks to go.

Republicans are expected to prevail in their quest to retake the House majority. But the Senate is a different story.

Control of the upper chamber, currently split 50-50, is on a knife-edge. The fight will be decided by whoever can eke out victories in a handful of states.

Three states are more important than all others — not only because the races are close but because they give one party or the other their best chance to flip a seat.

Pennsylvania