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

It looks like we’re going to get a big batch of votes from Maricopa County in Arizona within the next half hour or so, according to reporting by our colleague Ben Siegel at ABC News:

ABC News just projected that Georgia’s U.S. Senate race between GOP Sen. David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff will go to a runoff. We’ve been anticipating this as heavily Democratic areas of the state completed their vote counts. The bottom line is that there’ll now be two runoffs on Jan. 5 in Georgia, one for the Perdue-Ossoff race and one for the state’s other seat between Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Democrat Raphael Warnock.

As things stand, those runoffs appear likely to decide control of the Senate, as the GOP looks on track to have a 50-to-48-seat edge going into Jan. 5. If past runoffs in the state are any indication, Republicans may have an upper hand, as turnout and Democratic performance have usually declined in runoffs relative to the first round of voting. In both 1992 and 2008, Senate runoffs resulted in GOP wins, and a high-profile secretary of state race in 2018 also saw the same pattern. Moreover, as Trump looks more and more likely to lose to Biden, it’s easy to imagine Republicans being more motivated to turn out than Democrats, who may feel like they’ve done their duty.

A little bit of gaming out here. If Biden is winning 70 percent of newly-counted votes in Pennsylvania, it would take around 12,000 new votes to be counted there to get him to an 0.5000 percent lead. (Meaning, not rounding up 0.46 percent to 0.5 percent — a true 0.5 percent.) If he’s winning 75 percent of new votes, it would take around 10,000 votes. And if he’s winning 80 percent of new votes, it would take 8,000 votes or so. Allegheny County alone says they have 20-23,000 mail votes still to tally, so we’re certainly going to get plenty enough votes at some point, although the exact timing is somewhat TBD.