ABC News projects Republican wins in OH-10, TX-25, WI-6 and WI-8; and a Democratic win in AZ-2.
Maybe it’s just because 2020 has been such a long year, but I keep being struck by how early it is, especially given the nature of how votes are coming in. Very little that was truly competitive has been projected at this point.
If Trump wins Florida, what can we say about the polling error? Could we be seeing a national polling error, or something more specific to Florida or the Sun Belt?
A key state for which we are waiting on more returns is Arizona, which has reported three-fourths of its expected vote. At the moment, Biden leads by about 9 points, but the Election Day vote will make it closer, one way or another. The key to Arizona is Maricopa County, which made up 60 percent of the vote in 2016 and is one of the largest by population in the country. Home to Phoenix, the county currently gives Biden a 9-point lead based on 77 percent of the expected vote, about matching the state.
ABC News projects that Republican Bill Cassidy will win the Senate race in Louisiana.
ABC News projects Republican wins in NC-8 and WY-AL.
Lummis will be the first woman to represent Wyoming in the Senate.
The Senate’s not looking fantastic for Democrats, and the scenarios where they have some huge majority are likely off the table.
ABC News projects that Donald Trump will win Mississippi.
South Carolina Democratic candidate Jaime Harrison had a ton of buzz and great fundraising. But he was always running in a state that is fairly consistently Republican. Trump seems to have won South Carolina fairly easily, which no doubt helped Graham.
The Washington Post’s election night model still shows Biden with a chance to win North Carolina, but it does show Trump leading in suburban counties, which is interesting.
ABC News projects that Republican Cynthia Lummis will win the Senate race in Wyoming.
Trump’s lead is now up to 7 points in Ohio. With that said, the blue, urban counties are pretty underreported relative to the rest of the state.
With the possibility of a split between the Electoral College outcome and the popular vote, I started digging to find out how various politicians justify the Electoral College. To lay my cards on the table, I think that defenses based on states as autonomous political communities are more compelling than defenses based on the particular features of this political moment (say, that the Electoral College protects certain groups of voters like rural voters). Interestingly, one of the strongest defenses of the Electoral College came from now-defeated Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, who said:
“The Electoral College is another unique system the founders created to take into account a state’s population but maintain each state’s unique, independent voice when electing the president. Our founding fathers did not get everything right, but their system did create a union where every single state is appropriately represented in Congress and in the manner in which we elect the president.”
The problem, though, is that that’s not how most Americans think about representation nowadays.
ABC News projects that Republican Lindsey Graham will win the Senate race in South Carolina.
And to build on Lee’s point, experimental research indicates that the divergence in outcomes between the popular vote and Electoral College harm perceptions of the legitimacy of our democracy (among Democrats). Given how recent this phenomenon is, we don’t really know how resilient our political system is to this.
ABC News projects a Democratic win in IL-9.
ABC News has projected that Republican Mike Parson has been reelected governor of Missouri. This ensures that Republicans will have total control of the congressional redistricting process there in 2021.
As we watch the results tonight, it’s important to keep in mind that in any other presidential democracy, this would not be a particularly close election. The only thing making this election so close is the Electoral College. Similarly, the only thing making the Senate so close is the small-state bias. If Trump ekes out an Electoral College victory, it will be the third time in six elections that a Republican has won the Electoral College and the presidency while losing the popular vote. Republicans have won the popular vote only once since 1988. And Republican senators have represented a majority of Americans only for one Congress in the past 40 years, despite having a Senate majority more than half that time.
ABC News projects that Joe Biden will win Illinois.
ABC News also projects that Democrat Dick Durbin will win the Senate race in Illinois.
Georgia’s special Senate election is a weird one — instead of being a traditional Democrat-versus-Republican race, 20 candidates of all parties faced off on a single ballot. If no candidate got a majority (which was obviously very likely), the top two finishers would advance to a Jan. 5 runoff. There were only three serious contenders for those two spots, and one of them, Republican Doug Collins, just conceded. So it’ll be Democrat Raphael Warnock vs. Republican Kelly Loeffler in January.
ABC projects that Democrats will retain the House of Representatives. Not a huge surprise — they were 97 percent favorites in our model.
ABC News projects that Donald Trump will win Missouri.
Pennsylvania continues to loom large in the electoral calculus, so it’s worth revisiting this piece by Nick Field on the pro-GOP shift in voter registrations in the Keystone State after last spring.
I agree with Lee that this is a stress test for our democracy. There’s not a ton of doubt that Biden will win more votes than Trump — though this could prove not to be true in the end, of course — but the Electoral College is front and center tonight.
ABC News projects that Donald Trump will win Nebraska’s two statewide electoral votes as well as one electoral vote for Nebraska’s 3rd Congressional District.
ABC News projects that Donald Trump will win Kansas.
Thinking about Georgia, Trump has a slight upper hand, at least according to The New York Times needle. With 55 percent of the expected vote in, the Times gives him about a 4 in 5 shot of carrying the Peach State. But the good news for Biden is that he still has a chance, probably thanks to the shifts we’re seeing in the Atlanta metro area. Suburban/exurban counties such as Cherokee, Fayette and Newton all have 95 percent or more of their expected vote reporting, and in each, Biden has improved on Clinton’s margin by 11 to 12 points.
The Washington Post’s election night model (by my very own brother, Lenny Bronner!!) is now up for several states, including New Hampshire, Maine and Virginia, with more coming soon. It shows that Biden is running ahead of Trump in both suburban and rural counties in New Hampshire.
This is shaping up to be quite a stress test for our rickety old democracy. Is it too early yet to raise the possibility that when all the votes are counted, we wind up with a 49-49 Senate and two run-off elections in Georgia (which uses a two-round system)?
How the Senate’s balance of power shifted
Projected races and whether the winning party switched from 2016
ABC News projects Republican wins in IL-16, PA-16, UT-1 and WI-7; and Democratic wins in AZ-7 and MA-6.
The New Hampshire projection is a pretty decent sign that the polling error might not be as large outside of Florida.
ABC News projects Republican wins in IL-12, OH-14, PA-11, SC-5 and WI-5.
ABC News also projects Democratic wins in GA-2, MA-2, MA-4 and TX-16.
Most Senate candidates are running at roughly the same level as their party’s presidential candidate. Susan Collins is the exception so far. But she is likely to need a large advantage over Trump in Maine.
The close race in Texas has come as somewhat of a surprise, but it was once the norm. John F. Kennedy narrowly won the state in 1960, after supposedly choosing Lyndon Johnson as his running mate in order to help deliver the state. It was also close in 1968, ultimately going to Democrat Hubert Humphrey, although Richard Nixon won the state in his 1972 sweep.
ABC News has projected that New Hampshire will go for Biden. After the Granite State went for Clinton by just 0.4 points in 2016, Biden gets the checkmark while only about one-third of the expected vote has been reported.
This is a potentially material issue in Georgia. A reported 80,000 mail ballots are delayed in being reported in Gwinnett County because of a software error. Those are likely very blue votes.
ABC News projects that Joe Biden will win New Hampshire.
Jones losing in Alabama was not a big surprise. He won such an unusual race in 2017, facing a scandal-plagued opponent in Moore. Jones voted for Trump’s impeachment and against the Supreme Court nominations of both Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — moves that excited liberals but also probably didn’t help in a very pro-Trump state. It is assumed that Jones will be appointed to something in a Biden administration, if the former vice president wins the election.
ABC News projects that Donald Trump will win Louisiana.
A good data point for Trump:
ABC News projects Democratic wins in MN-3, MN-5, WI-2 and WI-4; and Republican wins in LA-6, MN-6 and WI-1.
I’m spinning forward a little here — of course, we don’t have all the votes yet in many of the key states — but what we’re seeing in the results in Ohio is interesting. Biden has gained in the college-educated suburbs, and it looks like he could lose counties (or a least a county) that Clinton won in 2016, the sorts of places with a lot of white, non-college-educated voters. This has implications for our potential tipping-point state of Pennsylvania. Biden had a narrow lead in polls there, and Western Pennsylvania looks a lot like Northeastern Ohio demographically and economically.
The AP has projected that Republican Tommy Tuberville has defeated Democratic Sen. Doug Jones in Alabama. Jones impressively won a 2017 special election against Roy Moore, who was accused of making sexual advances toward teenagers, but this race was always going to be tough for him given how red Alabama is. However, ABC News and other outlets still haven’t projected the race.
ABC News projects Republican wins in AL-1, AZ-4, LA-3 and OH-2; and Democratic wins in AZ-3, LA-2, NC-1 and NY-20.
ABC News projects Missouri’s 1st District for Cori Bush. In the 2020 Democratic primary, Bush challenged incumbent Lacy Clay, who had represented that district since 2001. As Nathaniel and I wrote over the summer, Bush’s success in her primary was thanks in part to an increasingly powerful progressive campaign apparatus.
North Carolina has reported about 84 percent of the total number of expected votes there tonight, and so far, as we expected, an early lead for Democrats that was due to mail and early votes is narrowing significantly as more Election Day votes are being reported. But late-arriving mail ballots, which may be more Democratic, could still shift the race.
Right, Nate, but to reiterate what your earlier point, Biden’s win in NE-02 is big, opening up a number of paths for him. Winning NE-02 means he could win the presidency if he wins Arizona — which looks pretty good for Biden with roughly 80 percent of the vote in — and holds onto Michigan, which maybe his Minnesota win is a good sign for, as you said.