ABC News projects Democratic wins in CO-2 and MO-1 and a Republican win in LA-1.
In case you still harbored any hope of getting a projection in Pennsylvania tonight, 274,000 mail ballots in Philadelphia County won’t be counted until tomorrow at the earliest. These votes are likely to be overwhelmingly for Biden.
Doing this math quickly, but Biden leads by about 145,000 votes in Arizona’s Maricopa County early and absentee votes. Republicans won the Election Day vote today there by 34,000 votes, so that looks like it would not be enough for Trump to overcome Biden’s current lead.
Speaking of North Carolina, ABC projected North Carolina’s 2nd district for Madison Cawthorn. He’s just 25 years old and will be the youngest member of Congress come January. He was one of the rare candidates to beat a Trump-endorsed nominee in a primary this year; in a runoff this summer, he bested Lynda Bennett, who Trump endorsed, by a 32-point margin. Nathaniel and I wrote about Trump endorsements over the summer.
As we wait on more results from North Carolina, one reason Trump may be in a position to win the state is because of his performance in swingy Robeson County in the eastern part of the state, where a plurality of the population (42 percent) is of Native American descent as it’s the home of the Lumbee Tribe. Trump leads there 58 percent to 41 percent with 93 percent of the expected vote in, according to ABC News. Trump only won it by 4 points in 2016.
Biden leads by 10 so far in Maricopa County in Arizona, which is early and absentee votes. There’s a good chance that Trump will rebound with Election Day votes there, although it’s a state where a lot of people vote early. Trump won Maricopa by 3 points in 2016.
ABC News projects Republican wins in six House races — MI-2, MI-4, NE-3, OH-15, OH-16 and PA-14.
ABC News also projects a Democratic win in MI-14.
Arizona’s pretty important here, obviously. If Trump wins Georgia, Florida and North Carolina but loses Arizona, his chances fall to 20 percent. If he wins Arizona in addition to Georgia, Florida and North Carolina, his chances improve to 55 percent instead, as Biden is then almost entirely dependent on the Midwest.
Our final forecasts for the 10 p.m. races
The final numbers from FiveThirtyEight’s forecast for races where the last polls close at 10 p.m. Eastern
South Carolina was another closely watched Senate race this year, but at least one network thinks Republican Lindsey Graham has held onto his seat. (ABC has yet to make a projection.)
ABC News projects Republican wins in AR-3, CO-4, GA-11, TN-6 and WV-2.
ABC News also projects Democratic wins in NY-16 and TN-9.
While we’re trying to make sense of Florida results, one interesting (and potentially complicating) point is the changing nature of ethnic identification. A study by Pew shows that Latino identification tends to decline across generations. This “assimilation” into white identity could affect the relationship between the Latino vote and the Republican Party in the future, as work by political scientists Ashley Jardina shows.
With 56 percent of the expected vote reporting, Republican Roger Marshall leads Democrat Barbara Bollier 49 percent to 47 percent in Kansas. However, Bollier’s base in Johnson County (the Kansas City suburbs) has almost all reported, so Marshall may have the upper hand. That said, Kansas also accepts mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, which could give Bollier a final boost in a few days’ time.
It can be tricky to track each networks’ projections for each state, and networks are being more cautious about making projections with this year’s large number of mail-in ballots. The Upshot has a table that can come in handy that includes each outlet’s projected winner. Very concise and easy to compare.
It’s early, but if Trump is reelected, given how Ohio and Texas are looking now, it’s liable to be with an extraordinary split between the popular vote and the Electoral College vote. Something I’ve written about in the past is the tension between our institutions — which build in a notion of substantial state-level autonomy — and our political behavior, which has stopped taking states seriously as meaningful units.
ABC News projects Republican wins in 10 House races — GA-1, MO-3, MO-7, MS-1, TN-1, TN-2, TN-3, TN-4, TN-7 and TN-8.
ABC News also projects a Democratic win in MS-2.
ABC News projects that Republican Ben Sasse will win the Senate race in Nebraska.
It’s really tight in North Carolina. With 81 percent of the expected vote reporting (per the AP), Biden leads 50.1 percent to 48.7 percent and Cunningham leads 48.3 percent to 47.5 percent.
If there is a lot of litigation coming out of this election, one thing that I have top of mind is whether its presence worsens the legitimacy of the outcome. Litigation plays an important role for clarifying laws, but our tradition of adversarial legalism (e.g., lawyers duking it out in the court of law) could cut against building legitimacy for those exact same laws and their downstream outcomes.
It’s early, but Collins is considerably outperforming Trump in returns from Maine so far.
Julia, you are the expert here, but my sense is that we often coalesce around an election narrative too quickly — and folks like you and I (read: professors) spend the next few years trying to insist that it was more complicated than we thought. Like how 2004 became about “values voters,” even though an incumbent was running during a war with reasonable economic growth.
ABC News projects Democratic wins in six House races — CT-3, IL-8, MA-9, NJ-6, NJ-9 and NJ-12.
ABC News also projects Republican wins in MI-10 and MO-6.
Chris Christie just said on ABC that he thinks Trump will win Ohio by 1 to 2 points. Maybe … but, if so, it’s not such a bad result for Biden in terms what it implies for other states because that’s basically what the polls showed there. If Biden loses Ohio by 1 or 2, he’s probably winning Pennsylvania, in other words.
To try to give people a sense of how far we may be from knowing the winner of the election, here’s a look at the FiveThirtyEight preelection snake chart without the states projected by ABC so far. Colorado is the closest state to the tipping point to be called, and the other states toward the middle of the chart have yet to be decided.
We’ll have to wait to see if Oregon votes to decriminalize shrooms, though, Maggie! Also on the ballot tonight.
New Jersey is on track tonight to become the 12th state to legalize recreational marijuana.
I’m not necessarily feeling solid about all my life choices right now, but the way that people are interpreting results we don’t have yet is making me feel like my choice to write about election interpretation was a good one.
Since it’s looking less and less like we’ll see a Democratic blowout tonight, this has consequences, even if Democrats eventually win the trifecta. For one, it makes it harder for Republicans to move on from Trump’s hold on the party, since Trump will likely wind up having overperformed expectations. A return of moderate Republicans was already unlikely, but it is becoming less and less so by the minute tonight. Second, it will make it harder for Democrats to get much done. They really need 52 or 53 seats in the Senate to have a chance at getting rid of the filibuster and moving some major legislation. That’s looking less likely right now.
ABC News projects Republican wins in AL-2, AL-3, AL-4, IL-18 and OK-1.
ABC News also projects Democratic wins in MA-5 and NJ-1.
Yes, Amelia, having lived through every hour of the 36-day Florida recount in 2000, I may have an exaggerated sense of how often states that cast millions of votes are decided by just hundreds.
Well, Dan, and the closer the result, the more likely we are to be in a situation where there’s a lot of litigation and fighting over whether individual ballots get counted — and that can both take time and end up with situations where the courts can be decisive. Again, the margins have to be very close for a court decision to make the difference, but it can happen.
How the House’s balance of power shifted
Projected races and whether the winning party switched from 2016
To be honest, one of my fears heading into tonight is just that the outcome would be very close in the decisive states. America’s election administrators are an incredible group doing a lot of work to protect the franchise — and with it democracy. But in races where millions of ballots are cast, our decentralized system of administering elections can be an imprecise way to measure the difference between 50.1 and 49.9.
How the Senate’s balance of power shifted
Projected races and whether the winning party switched from 2016
ABC News projects Democratic wins in CO-6, CO-7 and IL-5; and Republican wins in IL-15 and KS-4.
Hickenlooper flipping Gardner’s Senate seat in Colorado was probably Democrats’ least surprising Senate pickup, but a pickup nonetheless.
ABC News projects that Donald Trump will win South Carolina.
I know 2017 isn’t a real answer, Micah, but tonight feels like halfway between 2016 and 2018 for me. Florida was kind of an early indicator for Trump in 2016, but the Biden lead in Ohio (so far) makes it tough to tell.
It sure seems like the polls missed in Florida — and possibly elsewhere, too. Which raises a question: How do the polls miss? One thing that’s critical to know is that nowadays, response rates to surveys are very low. Even high-quality surveys get response rates of 2 to 3 percent. And it’s really hard to recruit Americans who don’t like politics — which, to be fair, is most people, though not most FiveThirtyEight readers. I recently started with a sample of 10,000 Pennsylvania voters who had voted in only one recent election. I then sought out information on their email addresses before using Facebook to try to recruit them to take a survey. Around 1,200 people saw my ad, 48 clicked, 6 completed the survey. Today’s pollsters do innovative work but on a very hard problem.
I’ve been keeping an eye on my home state, Virginia, which hasn’t yet been called by ABC News. Zoom in on the map, and you can see why — relatively little of the vote is in from the state’s major metropolitan areas (Richmond, the D.C. suburbs, Virginia Beach/Norfolk). Those are all areas that have made Virginia a much more reliably blue state in the past few cycles. So until that vote comes in, the state is going to look kind of wonky, including in some House races that could be close (VA-05, for example).
ABC News projects Democratic wins in nine House races — CO-1, IL-1, IL-2, TX-9, TX-18, TX-29, TX-30, TX-32 and TX-33.
ABC News also projects Republican wins in six House races — TX-3, TX-12, TX-26, TX-27, TX-31 and WV-3.
Biden’s lead is holding at 11 points in New Hampshire, which is very close to the polling averages there. The state is counting slowly, but it’s an interesting state to look at because the early and Election Day vote are reported simultaneously there.
I keep hearing pundits answering questions like Micah’s with, “Well, this feels like 2020.” And I think they have a good point.
Micah, I guess I’d have to say it feels like 2018 so far? Of course, we didn’t entirely realize things were getting out of wack vis a vis our expectations in 2016 until around the 10 o’clock hour. So I guess time will tell?
Biden’s lead has shrunk to 3.5 points in Ohio, where Trump now leads among in-person votes, countering Biden’s absentee advantage. One positive for Biden, though, is that Cleveland and Cincinnati haven’t reported as much of their returns as the state overall.
Micah, my brain is saying 2018. Things are just really unclear at the moment. But also it’s a really distinct year with regard to how many votes have not been counted and how long it may take to count them.
Yeah, Micah, I don’t think we have enough results yet to make that call. It is still early! Don’t let the sun setting at 4:30 p.m. fool you.
So the big question of the night so far seems to be: Does it feel more like 2016 (Democrats favored, became clearer and clearer as the night wore on that polls underestimated Republicans), or does it feel more like 2018 (Democrats favored, early results looked like GOP would overperform polls again but ended up being sorta outlierish)? Both are still on the table, right?
ABC News projects Republican wins in ND-AL, PA-9, PA-15, TX-14 and TX-17.