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.
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.