Sarah, I think the real takeaway for me is to not treat voters of a specific racial or ethnic group as a monolith. Hakeem Jefferson and Alan Yan had a really nice piece showing diversity of opinion among Black people, for example.
In terms non-college-educated white voters, it’s hard to judge the preelection polls against more long-run trends in which the “white working class” has been moving toward the Republican Party for quite a while now (even before 2016).
Rather important update on Philadelphia:
ABC News projects Democratic wins in CA-19, CA-51 and MD-6.
Micah, I think the reason you’re getting conflicting reports is that there’s conflicting information. There are the counties Dan mentioned where Trump is replicating his 2016 performance. But there’s also Lackawanna County, where Biden is leading by 8 points, comfortably ahead of Clinton’s 3-point lead in 2016. (Of course, Biden is from Lackawanna County, so he may have home-field advantage.) Ultimately I think this will come down to how many mail-in votes there are to count in the Philadelphia area.
Micah, a handful of Pennsylvania counties are basically done counting, reporting more than 98 percent of their expected votes. One is Columbia County. There, Trump netted 8,934 votes in 2016, winning 63-31. With Trump is now netting 9,556 votes there, winning 65-33. Another is Jefferson County, which was 78-19 in 2016 and is now 79-20. Lycoming (home to Williamsport) goes from 70-25 for Trump in 2016 to 70-28 Trump so far in the 2020 count. So Trump is roughly running at his 2016 pace.
I’ve seen some conflicting tea-leaf reading in fully-reporting counties in Pennsylvania. Can anyone give me an overview of what we know, if anything, there?
Are Any Of The Races Projected So Far Surprising? Not To Fivey Fox.
When ABC News projects a winner in a presidential, Senate or House race, Fivey Fox dutifully posts it here on our live blog. But if the projection differs from what we expected according to our final forecast, Fivey posts it along with either a 😮, 😲 or 🤯 emoji — depending on how unexpected the projection is.
So far … lots of projections, and no emojis. But several swing states in the presidential race like Florida and Georgia, which our forecast had listed as “slightly favored” for Biden, have not yet been projected by ABC News. If those states go for Trump, that will surprise (😮) Fivey Fox.
ABC News projects Democratic wins in NC-2, OR-1, OR-3 and VA-3; and Republican wins in ID-1 and OR-2.
That’s a good point about Latino voters, Nate. And we’ve written on the site about how the Latino vote in a state like Arizona is very different than in a state like Florida. That said, I don’t know how much to make of the Latino vote in Florida. Or how much to take what happened in Florida and apply it elsewhere. Is it possible Biden is also underperforming with white voters, even though preelection polls showed Biden eating into Trump’s edge among white voters without a college degree? What do people think?
Steve Bullock outperforming Biden by about 6 points in Montana, although Biden is actually leading there right now (which probably won’t hold).
ABC News projects Democratic wins in seven House races — CA-28, CA-30, CA-32, CA-33, CA-52, MD-7 and MD-8.
ABC News also projects a Republican win in IA-4.
New Mexico is a fairly unique state, but it’s a mildly good sign for Biden in Arizona and Nevada that it’s been called for him. His apparent problems with Latino voters in Florida may not have translated to the Southwest.
ABC News projects that Donald Trump will win Idaho and Joe Biden will win New Mexico.
ABC News also projects that Republican Jim Risch will win the Senate race in Idaho.
The New York Times needle, with some updates, are still giving Biden a chance in Georgia and North Carolina, although Trump is favored in both states.
I know it’s a small group (maybe 5 percent of the state), but I also wonder how the Latter-Day Saint vote looks in Arizona. As FiveThirtyEight contributor Daniel Cox wrote, a fair share of Latter-Day Saints didn’t support Trump in 2016. Some of that is likely on account of their views on immigration, which are somewhat out of step with the Trump administration’s policies.
ABC News projects Democratic wins in six House races — CA-20, CA-24, CA-26, CA-37, CA-38 and CA-47.
Ohio, on the other hand, seems to be increasingly in Trump’s column: 88 percent of the expected vote is accounted for, and Trump leads by nearly 8 points. (Remember Trump won Ohio by 8 points in 2016.)
Fox News, which has its own decision desk and exit poll data, has called Arizona for Biden and Florida for Trump. They also called the Arizona Senate for Kelly. We have seen no other news organization call Arizona, which may mean this call is premature. Keep an eye on other outlets to see if they wind up backing up or conflicting with Fox.
Arizona is looking promising for Biden. I wrote a couple of months ago about why the state seems to have been trending more and more purple. Barry Goldwater might be spinning in his grave, but analysts I talked to there said the state was a lot more independent-minded and small-c conservative (as opposed to Republican) than we give it credit for.
ABC News projects a Democratic win in CA-18.
This would reflect a 5-point improvement for Biden relative to Clinton in Iowa, though it’s likely not enough for him to win the state.
Another consequence of Democrats not picking up a bunch of Senate seats would be that it would become very unlikely they’d have the votes to do anything about the courts. So that 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court would be a lot more durable.
Just speaking hypothetically: If Trump wins Florida, North Carolina and Ohio, but Biden wins Arizona, Biden is an 85 percent favorite in our scenario generator. There’s a 6 percent chance of an Electoral College tie, though.
ABC News projects a Democratic win in CT-1.
This is the northeastern Pennsylvania county that includes Biden’s birthplace of Scranton:
It’s still early in Montana, but two major counties are reporting almost all of their expected votes: Lewis and Clark and Missoula. Democrat Steve Bullock is falling short of Democratic Sen. Jon Tester’s 2018 margins in those counties; considering that Tester eked out just a narrow win, that’s not a good sign for Bullock.
I published a book earlier this year, “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America,” in which I worried about an escalating feedback loop of hyper-partisan animosity undermining the very legitimacy of our democracy. I offered this conclusion: “We know how democracies die. They die when the country splits apart into two sides that distrust and fear each other so much that one side blows up norms of fair play to keep the other side out of power. Once that happens, it’s hard to build back stability. Unfortunately, this is where America’s doom loop of toxic two-party politics is headed.” Tonight, I’m feeling more pessimistic than I was when I finished the book. It feels like the time sands are slipping through the hourglass faster than I feared.
I still believe that electoral reforms that would break this razor’s-edge zero-sum binary and move us to a proportional, multiparty system hold tremendous promise. I just hope we can find a path to get there. Perhaps when this all is over, we’ll have a genuine soul-searching and start having a bigger conversation about what we want our democracy to be.
Biden leads by 9 points in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District and, more unexpectedly, by 11 points in Nebraska’s 1st Congressional District. However, early votes were expected to be counted first in Nebraska, which means the results will likely become redder later on.
ABC News projects a Democratic win in CT-4.
One more comment about the Electoral College: One possible outcome for tonight is that Biden could win the Electoral College relatively narrowly despite a fairly solid win in the popular vote. (This is just one of many possible outcomes, of course) The Electoral College has traditionally done the opposite and exaggerated narrow outcomes — for instance, turning a 51 percent victory for Reagan in 1980 into a red map (over 90 percent of the Electoral College). This change in its function shows how institutions can change even when nothing about the formal rules of the game have been altered.
Galen Druke speaks to Sarah Frostenson about what New Hampshire and Arizona can tell us about the state of the race right now.
Yeah, Nathaniel, it’s pretty clear that we are a long way from knowing the result in in many states, including Pennsylvania, where just 42 percent of the expected vote is in, according to ABC News. At the moment, Trump leads there, but none of the five big counties in the Philadelphia area have reported more than 33 percent of their expected vote, and Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) has reported just 17 percent. So just as I wrote before the election, I think we can expect a big “blue shift” in the results thanks to as-yet-uncounted votes in these Democratic-leaning areas, which might be enough to put Biden in the lead — although the jury’s most definitely still out there.
ABC News projects that Democrat Jack Reed will win the Senate race in Rhode Island.
As you plan your sleep schedule for the rest of the week: We should have near-complete unofficial results from Wisconsin early tomorrow morning, as Milwaukee is expected to finish counting around 6 a.m. Eastern. Michigan originally said it would take until Friday to count all of its votes, but officials have revised that estimate to say they’ll be done tomorrow as well. Finally, Pennsylvania results probably won’t be known until Friday.
ABC News projects that Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith will win the Senate race in Mississippi.
With 82 percent of the expected vote reporting in Ohio, we can see that an early lead for Democrats in the absentee ballots that were counted first has now turned into a Republican lead as Election Day votes were reported, as we expected. But as Nate said earlier, urban counties are somewhat underreported relative to the rest of the state, so that Election Day vote could shift again — and there are likely some more absentee ballots outstanding as well.
ABC News projects Republican wins in SC-4 and UT-3.
Another sign that we’re not going to know enough to know who won tonight.
As I’m watching us go back and forth about the Electoral College, and seeing all this energy going into counting and calling different states, it also occurs to me how much energy the debates over electoral machinery distract from discussion of actual substantive issues that affect people. Maybe it’s just late, but this feels unsustainable.
ABC News projects Republican wins in LA-4 and MS-3.
These Ohio results may turn out to be an aperitif to Western Pennsylvania ones, though we don’t yet know the results in Pennsylvania and may not for some time.
There are certainly scenarios in play (if Biden loses Pennsylvania but wins Arizona) where we wind up with a 269-269 tie. In that case, Biden would need to carry either Nebraska or Maine’s second congressional district to win. Nebraska is the more likely of the two, although given that Biden won New Hampshire, Maine-2 is plausible for him also.
ABC News projects that the special Senate election in Georgia will go to a runoff between Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican Kelly Loeffler.
ABC News projects that Joe Biden will win Oregon and Washington.
ABC News also projects that Democrat Jeff Merkley will win the Senate race in Oregon.
It was always a long shot that a winner would be declared tonight, but now it looks like we might not even have a good idea who’s won when we go to bed. Georgia has had enough problems that it seems like it will be impossible to project tonight. North Carolina looks close enough that it might come down to late-arriving mail ballots. And we’ve long known that results in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin won’t be final for a day or three. Ultimately, I think the presidency comes down to those three states — which, unfortunately, we know the least about right now.
Our final forecasts for the 11 p.m. races
The final numbers from FiveThirtyEight’s forecast for races where the last polls close at 11 p.m. Eastern
ABC News projects that Joe Biden will win California.
Even if Biden is elected president, he is now more likely to face a Senate that is either Republican-controlled or has a slim Democratic majority, with moderates as pivotal votes.