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.
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.