Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.

We’ll have to wait a bit longer than anticipated for North Carolina results tonight. Instead of 7:30 p.m., we’ll get the first results at 8:15 p.m. because one precinct is staying open 45 minutes late. We should get results fast and furious after that, though.

What do cattle herders in South Sudan and voters in Minneapolis have in common? Today, the answer is the Nonviolent Peace Force, a nonprofit protection agency that usually works in international conflict zones. But when I went to vote this morning at my polling place in the Near North neighborhood of Minneapolis, there were the Nonviolent Peace Force volunteers, wearing blaze orange vests with the words “Democracy Defenders” on the back.

They were there largely because the NPF’s U.S. office is located here, said Marna Anderson, NPF’s US director. After a police officer killed George Floyd this summer, the agency decided that it wanted to bring its work close to home, using volunteers from the community, just like they do elsewhere.

But distrust and tensions are running high in this city. When I got home from voting, my neighborhood listserv was blowing up with folks who were worried the Democracy Defenders were there to disrupt or intimidate voters. And that, too, is familiar to Anderson. “It’s just the nature of what happens in a conflict. When you have a lot of tension between groups and political polarization there’s a lot of suspicion,” she said.

So far, Anderson said, it’s been a perfectly boring day in Minneapolis. But there was an incident at the polling station where she was volunteering that really highlighted the need for peaceful conflict resolution in the face of partisan suspicion. A pickup truck with two Trump flags and an American flag pulled up outside Loring Elementary, sparking anxiety in this heavily Black part of the city. But it turned out the two men inside were just there to vote. When a poll worker asked them to move their car further away from the polling place, they did. “That could have easily been a problem,” she said. “In this environment it’s easy for rumors to get started and people to react without thinking.”

The Democrats are favored to win back control of the Senate. But even in a year in which Democrats are likely to win the popular vote by a hefty margin, they are at a significant disadvantage in the Senate because of the chamber’s small-state rural bias.

On the one hand, the Senate has always been unequal, long giving less populous states an outsized voice relative to their population. But for more than a century, that fact didn’t pose much of an issue in terms of which party won. Until the 1960s, Republicans and Democrats competed for both densely and sparsely populated states at roughly the same rate.

But over the last several decades, that’s changed. The parties have reorganized themselves along urban-rural lines, and there is now a clear and pronounced partisan bias in the Senate thanks to mostly rural, less populated states voting increasingly Republican. It’s reached the point that Republicans can win a majority of Senate seats while only representing a minority of Americans.

In fact, over the last four decades, Republicans have represented a majority of Americans just once — from 1997 to 1998. And yet, the GOP has held a Senate majority for 22 of the last 40 years.

If Democrats indeed gain control of the Senate, the question of statehood for Washington, D.C., will leap to prominence. After all, it’s not hard for Democrats to look at the last 40 years and believe that adding a low-population Democratic state is only fair.