Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.
Filed under 2020 Election
ABC News projects that Joe Biden will win New York.
ABC News also projects that Republican John Cornyn will win the Senate race in Texas.
Ohio is one state I’m watching closely given that it was one of the closest in our forecast. But it’s really hard to tell what’s going on there right now. Biden is leading 54 percent to 45 percent, but most of what’s reported are absentee votes.
In Texas, I’m looking at Dallas and surrounding counties and seeing some pro-Dem shifts from 2016. Collin County: 39 percent Clinton to 47 percent Biden; Tarrant County: 43 percent Clinton to 49 percent Biden; Denton County: 37 percent Clinton to 45 percent Biden; and Dallas County: 61 percent to 66 percent Biden.
We’re expecting to know the majority of Texas results tonight, and so far we’re at 62 percent of the expected vote reporting. Most counties report absentee and early votes first, which are expected to be good for Democrats, so Texas is another state in which we’re likely to see a red shift as Election Day results are reported as the night goes on. In other words: Don’t read too much into Biden’s early lead there.
ABC News projects a Republican win in AR-4 and a Democratic win in GA-4.
In Texas, Biden now leads by about 3 percentage points, according to ABC News. But I’m skeptical that he’ll hold onto that. Only 62 percent of the expected vote has come in, and it seems like most of the big metropolitan areas have disproportionately reported their votes, while huge tracts of more Republican and more rural parts of Texas haven’t reported. Granted, we’re also waiting on El Paso County out west (in the Mountain time zone), and Biden has seemed to improve on Clinton’s percentages in a number of these places. But that could change as more votes come in.
ABC News projects that Donald Trump will win Arkansas.
It’s almost 9 p.m. Eastern and I don’t think we’ve gotten a network projection in a single competitive race. I strongly suspect we won’t know the identity of the next president tonight. As I wrote on Saturday, the number of “safe” electoral votes for Biden and Trump don’t even come close to 270, meaning someone (probably Biden) was going to need to get states like Florida projected for him in order for us to get a call tonight. But now that looks unlikely.
If it comes down to the wire in Florida: The state revised its recount laws after the 2000 debacle to standardize them by county. These laws are, of course, only as good as those who enforce them. But if we start to feel shades of 2000, it’s important to note that institutions can and do change — and they did in this case.
ABC News projects that Republican Tom Cotton will win the Senate race in Arkansas.
It’s hard to know whether the results so far feel more like 2016 — when Clinton came up short in a lot of states — or 2018, where GOP results in Florida did not tell us very much about what was going to happen elsewhere.
ABC News projects Republican wins in NC-7, OH-5, SC-3 and VA-1.
We haven’t had any surprising projections yet in the presidential race, and plugging those into our interactive map shows that the FiveThirtyEight forecast would be about the same if it knew how those states were going to be decided. If Florida goes to Donald Trump, though, his chances of winning the Electoral College would go up to 33 percent, from about 11 percent. If we put Georgia in Trump’s column as well, his chances would go to 38 percent. Even with a win in North Carolina, the race would still be a toss-up. In that situation, the candidate who wins Pennsylvania would be the very heavy favorite — as we’ve known for a while. But with less of a cushion, Biden probably couldn’t afford to lose any other close states.
McConnell is giving his victory speech now in Louisville. His overwhelming victory is not surprising at all. But it means that a very central figure in both the Obama and Trump eras will return to Washington. The big question is whether he will remain majority leader or become minority leader — and we likely won’t know that for a while.
Galen Druke and Clare Malone react to the early news out of Florida.
ABC News projects Republican wins in IN-9 and NC-13 and Democratic wins in PA-4 and PA-5.
A little early still in Ohio, but Henry (who is based in Cleveland) says Democrats see encouraging signs in the suburbs there (Columbus suburbs, in this case).
And remember, if Trump lost Florida, his chances in our final forecast would have dropped to less than 1 percent in the Electoral College, so in many ways, Florida was a real must win for Trump.
Building on Nate’s point, Florida can be idiosyncratic, especially since it looks like Trump’s overperformance there may be limited to Miami-Dade County. Biden can still win the Electoral College by replicating Clinton’s 2016 map plus winning Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. And that’s not even considering states like North Carolina or Arizona that he may still win.
ABC News projects Democratic wins in NC-4, PA-3 and RI-1.
If Trump wins Florida, he’d shoot up to a 33 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, per our choose-your-own adventure interactive. The key question, of course, is how much a pro-Trump polling error in Florida would translate to other states.
We have about 89 percent of the expected vote in Florida, and looking at how the votes have come in so far this evening, there’s been a something of a red shift over the course of the evening: That’s because absentee and early votes, which are more Democratic-leaning, were included in the first batch of numbers reporting, while Election Day votes have been reported later. That explains why The New York Times has Florida as very likely to go to Trump even though the two candidates are still fairly close in vote count.
In defense of candidates like McGrath, isn’t this kind of thing part of having a larger strategy for parties to build up support and infrastructure, and to expand appeals outside of the base?
With 80 percent reported, Biden is up 17 points so far in Johnson County, Kansas, a well-off suburban county to the west of Kansas City. Clinton lost it by 3 points in 2016. That would be a positive sign for Biden, since it might imply a strong performance in other Midwestern suburbs — although again, it’s hard to make too much of things unless we know the mix of early vs. Election Day votes and unless our prior reporting said to expect a red shift in Kansas.
This will be a record-setting election in so many respects, but one record is the wild amount of money spent on this election: $14 billion — about twice as much as was spent in 2016. I’m guessing that a lot of that money didn’t change any minds and likely just made a lot of campaign consultants pretty wealthy. One thing I’ll be thinking about is all the other places where several of those billions of dollars could have gone.
The AP has called Arkansas’s Senate race for Tom Cotton. The one-time Democratic bastion didn’t even field a candidate to oppose the first-term senator.
Speaking of campaign contributions, the evidence about the impact of campaign spending (especially by challengers) on their electoral performance is pretty mixed. Instead, high fundraisers are likely better-quality candidates, so their success doesn’t necessarily reflect an independent effect of campaign contributions on electoral outcomes (at least for federal races).
ABC News projects a Republican win in AR-1 and a Democratic win in PA-2.
For North Carolina, it looks like many of the bigger metropolitan areas have reported, which helps explain Biden’s lead, given that Clinton carried many of those areas by large margins. Still, Biden does look to be doing better in them, at least for the moment. For example, take Wake County in the Raleigh-Durham area. With 82 percent of the expected vote in from there, Biden leads by 33 points, according to ABC News. By comparison, Clinton won that county by 20 points in 2016. But Election Day vote my change things as the night progresses.
The Democratic Senate candidate in North Carolina, Cal Cunningham, is running a net of about 2 points worse than Biden there. After Cunningham’s sexting scandal, polls were all over the place in terms of how Biden and Cunningham lined up, but that’s not great for Cunningham in a state where a Biden win would likely be pretty close.
McGrath benefitted from viral fame, stemming from her 2018 ad “Told Me,” which details her time as a Marine and combat pilot. She raised a lot of money then, and again in 2020, as Nathaniel pointed out. In 2018, Democrats elected a large number of female veterans. But several who lost (like MJ Hegar in Texas), ran again this year. I suspect McGrath will be back.
Polls Closing At 8:30 p.m.
We’re now awaiting results in Arkansas, the only state where polling places close at 8:30 p.m. Eastern. Here’s what our forecast has to say about the Natural State.
Our final forecasts for the 8:30 p.m. races
The final numbers from FiveThirtyEight’s forecast for races where the last polls close at 8:30 p.m. Eastern
| President races | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| chance of winning | |||
| Race | Democrat | Republican | Forecasted avg. vote margin |
| Arkansas | 1.0% | 99.0% | R+23 |
| Senate races | |||
| chance of winning | |||
| Race | Democrat | Republican | Forecasted avg. vote margin |
| Arkansas | >99.9% | R+76 | |
| House races | |||
| chance of winning | |||
| Race | Democrat | Republican | Forecasted avg. vote margin |
| AR-1 | >99.9% | R+100 | |
| AR-2 | 34.2% | 65.7 | R+3 |
| AR-3 | 0.1 | 99.9 | R+30 |
| AR-4 | <0.1 | >99.9 | R+37 |
The Democrats sure mobilized a lot of small-dollar donations this cycle — but one downside of small-dollar donors is that they aren’t always deployed strategically, as in Kentucky’s Senate race.
ABC News projects Republican wins in GA-3, NC-3, NC-5 and NC-10; and a Democratic win in GA-13.
Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene has won Georgia’s 14th District (which was all-but-assured given that her opponent, Democrat Kevin Van Ausdal, dropped out of the race). As I wrote last week, Greene has previously expressed support for QAnon, a conspiracy theory that alleges the existence of a widespread child sex trafficking ring run by a cabal of satanic and cannibalistic elites, whom only President Trump can stop.
A huge tranche of North Carolina votes just dropped and Biden leads in the early going by about 9 points with 60 percent of the expected vote in, according to ABC News. But based on similar data, The New York Times’ needle shows the outcome at somewhere between Biden by 4 points and Trump by 4 points, so it looks to be on a knife’s edge.
McGrath was one of a handful of high-profile “rebound” candidates — people who lost races in 2018 but threw their hat back in the ring for 2020, sometimes for different offices — including many women. As my colleagues are mentioning, though, she always had a slim chance of winning. Meredith and I will be keeping tabs on some of the other female rebound candidates tonight who have a better shot.
With McGrath losing her challenge to unseat McConnell, I wondered aloud to my colleagues how much of Democratic money had been sunk into candidates who never had a chance this cycle. My colleague Aaron Bycoffe sent me this tweet, which shows that the answer is: a lot. (I have a pet theory that this is a symptom of Democrats’ benefitting from income inequality, but that’ll take some more work to bear out.)
How the Senate’s balance of power shifted
Projected races and whether the winning party switched from 2016
| State | Incumbent | Winner | Switched Party? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Delaware | Democratic | Democratic | |
| Kentucky | Republican | Republican | |
| Massachusetts | Democratic | Democratic | |
| New Hampshire | Democratic | Democratic | |
| New Jersey | Democratic | Democratic | |
| Oklahoma | Republican | Republican | |
| Tennessee | Republican | Republican | |
| West Virginia | Republican | Republican |
In other states tracked by The New York Times needle, Trump is an 85 percent favorite in Georgia, although Biden is a slight favorite in North Carolina.
How the Senate’s balance of power shifted
Projected races and whether the winning party switched from 2016
| State | Incumbent | Winner | Switched Party? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Delaware | Democratic | Democratic | |
| Kentucky | Republican | Republican | |
| Massachusetts | Democratic | Democratic | |
| New Hampshire | Democratic | Democratic | |
| New Jersey | Democratic | Democratic | |
| Oklahoma | Republican | Republican | |
| Tennessee | Republican | Republican | |
| West Virginia | Republican | Republican |
Biden already has about 81,000 more votes in Texas’s Harris County than Clinton had in 2016. And Trump has about 55,000 more votes there than he had in 2016.
ABC News projects Democratic wins in GA-5, IN-1 and SC-6; and Republican wins in GA-9, OK-2 and OK-3.
Why have results in Florida changed overall perceptions of this race, at least from my Twitter feed? In part, the answer is the nationalization of our political behavior. Lots of people reckon that a polling error to Trump’s benefit in Florida might signal polling errors elsewhere.
A lot of Democrats were hopeful that McGrath could defeat McConnell in Kentucky, and they gave her $88 million in individual contributions to show it. But our forecast was always skeptical, giving McConnell a 96 in 100 chance. Lo and behold, McConnell is now leading 55 percent to 42 percent and has just been projected as the winner. Ultimately, Kentucky was just too red for him to lose.
Democrats getting fooled into thinking they can oust McConnell has become almost a tradition.
Biden up by 10 points so far in New Hampshire, where early and absentee votes are generally reported together, meaning you wouldn’t expect to see a blue or red shift.
In an effort to give some context to the votes as they pour in, I’m going to share emblematic quotations from voters I surveyed in mid-October. Here’s a Trump voter: “Trump is pro-life, pro-family, pro-business, defends freedom of conscience and religion, and wants to get out of foreign wars.”
Here’s Nathaniel Rakich with an update on the states where polls have already closed.
ABC News projects that Republican Mitch McConnell will win the Senate race in Kentucky.