Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.
The Situation In Nevada
Why isn’t Nevada being called? I honestly don’t know, but in theory, one reason might be that there are still some in-person votes left to be counted and in some cases in-person votes can be strongly Republican.
The thing is, though, that the in-person votes that remain are: (i) from mostly blue Clark County, i.e., Las Vegas and (ii) are all same-day registration (SDR) votes, i.e., voters who register for the first time or change their registration information at the polling place.
And we have data on those same-day registrants — data provided, of course, by friend of FiveThirtyEight and editor of the Nevada Independent Jon Ralston. It shows that SDRs are split almost evenly by party, so there’s no particular reason to expect Trump to have an advantage here. In fact, in Clark County, Democrats have a slight, 4-point advantage among SDRs.
Apart from the SDRs, there are also 58,000 more mail votes left to count — also overwhelmingly in Clark County. Biden’s going to do well with those, adding to his 23,000-vote lead statewide. There’s no reason to think Trump can gain back enough with what’s left out there (the SDRs or a few other miscellaneous categories of provisional votes, most of which usually don’t wind up getting counted) to have a shot at winning the Silver State.
To use a poker metaphor (apropos in this rare instance), I don’t know whether you’d say Trump is drawing dead, but he’s gotta be pretty close to it.
“We’re going to win this race,” Biden says, speaking close to 11 p.m. in a strange, quasi-president-elect moment. He says he will win Pennsylvania and Georgia. “We are on track to win more than 300 electoral votes.”
In other news, the Associated Press has now projected that Georgia’s regular Senate election will go to a runoff between Republican David Perdue (who is at 49.8 percent) and Democrat Jon Ossoff (47.9 percent). That would set up two runoff Senate elections in the Peach State on Jan. 5 that would together determine which party controls the Senate.