As it looks more and more like we may be in for a close election, we’re entering this really scary area where all the litigation and election-rule changes and USPS controversies could wind up as potentially decisive, or least could wind up being perceived as having decided the election. If so, I’m very worried about that we won’t wind up with a result that is widely viewed as legitimate, and I’m worried about what might happen as a result.
ABC News projects that Donald Trump will win Alabama.
Colorado is the closest thing to a battleground that’s been called so far. It was also a state where Biden was heavily favored. But the quick call is maybe is a slightly favorable development for him in Arizona and Nevada.
Florida isn’t done counting votes yet, but so far about 10.9 million ballots have been counted (93 percent of its expected vote), according to ABC News. That’s already 70 percent of the voting-eligible population casting a ballot, surpassing the 64.5 percent who voted in 2016. So yeah, turnout — it’s up.
The Biden campaign has responded to their poor performance among Florida Hispanics. Basically they’re saying “we still think we’re OK in the rest of the country.”
ABC News projects that Joe Biden will win Colorado.
Adding to my running, if short, tally of hiccups: In Fulton County, Georgia, mail-in ballot processing was delayed and won’t be completed tonight due to a burst pipe at the State Farm Arena, one of the largest voting centers in Atlanta. There were some technical glitches at this same site during early voting: Voter sign-in tablets generate a card that voters then use in conjunction with a touchscreen device. But on the first day of early voting at State Farm Arena, the cards caused an “invalid” error when inserted into the touchscreens. Once again, it’s important to stress some issues are inevitable, including building malfunctions like a burst pipe. Luckily, 2020 has seen relatively few problems with voting and equipment so far.
Again, I just think it’s really tricky to get an overall sense of the state of things across the country. Florida is likely to go for Trump. Beyond that, the big shift to early and mail voting makes it hard to calibrate models and expectations and hard to know what to think. My best guess is that the polling error in Florida may not be as large elsewhere in the country, especially since it seems to have been concentrated among Cuban voters, a group not present in big numbers elsewhere. But it’s hard to know. It feels like we’re waiting for the next big domino to fall ever since we heard that Trump got those good results in Miami-Dade.
ABC News projects Republican wins in GA-12, KS-1, MO-8, SD-AL and WV-1.
ABC News also projects a Democratic win in NJ-8.
I’m watching PBS, and Judy Woodruff just asked if a candidate has ever tried a base strategy to the extent that the Trump campaign has. The answer that jumps to mind for me is 2004, when Karl Rove designed a successful reelection strategy for George W. Bush this way. But there were some key differences — the economy was strong, the Iraq War hadn’t really plummeted in popularity yet, and that strategy brought a small majority for the reelected president. The Trump administration has really never wielded national majorities — on issues, approval, or the 2016 result.
The New York Times needle now has North Carolina at 88 percent likely for Trump. If all three Southeast states they are tracking go to Trump, that would move national projections closer to 50-50. It also could be a sign of a broader polling error, though it might be specific to the Southeast.
One thing that makes this situation pretty hard to analyze is how much we believe in Biden’s lead in Ohio. If Trump wins Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, he’s at about a 50 percent shot to win the Electoral College, per our scenario tester. But if Biden then wins Ohio, Trump chances plummet to 1 percent.
This is interesting:
Wisconsin will be key to answering the question of whether Biden has a path to 270 electoral votes. And we may not know until very very late tonight:
Galen Druke took a look at FiveThirtyEight’s interactive map to see how the forecast would change if Trump were to win Florida.
ABC News projects Democratic wins in 10 House races — IL-11, NJ-10, NY-7, NY-8, NY-10, NY-12, NY-13, NY-14, TX-20 and TX-35.
ABC News also projects Republican wins in seven House races — GA-8, MO-4, PA-13, TX-1, TX-2, TX-4 and TX-8.
Counting is not proceeding as quickly as promised in Maine, where Republican Sen. Susan Collins is in the fight of her life. Right now, only 2 percent of the expected vote is in, according to the AP.
Fox News is projecting that Democrat John Hickenlooper has defeated Republican Cory Gardner in Colorado’s Senate race. That would be the first flip of the night. And, of course, this is just one news outlet at this point — it could change.
ABC News projects that Donald Trump will win South Dakota.
ABC News also projects that Republican Mike Rounds will win the Senate race in South Dakota.
ABC News projects Democratic wins in NY-5 and OH-3 and a Republican win in PA-12.
And building on Nathaniel’s point, some Pennsylvania counties won’t even begin to count mail-in ballots tonight: 
ABC News projects that Joe Biden will win Connecticut.
Well, Matt, that kind of fluidity among Latinos is also a reminder that ideology depends on a lot of things beyond ethnicity, and as people are in the U.S. for longer (and get more affluent, and achieve higher levels of education), many grow more conservative — Latinos included!
We might be seeing a broader ideological sorting among Latinos, with conservative self-identifiers moving toward Republicans. That would be consistent with the ongoing ideological sorting we have seen among white voters. It could also be a sign that socialist messaging does matter. Latinos who emigrate from a country with a leader on the ideological left are more likely to vote Republican (and the reverse for people who immigrate from places with leaders on the ideological right). That is true not just for Cubans, but also for Mexicans, depending on who was in charge when they emigrated.
As you’ve probably heard us say before, Pennsylvania will be absolutely crucial to the presidential race, but (as expected) it’s taking forever to count the votes there. An hour after polls closed, only 14 percent of the estimated vote is reporting, per the AP.
In Ohio, Biden leads by 18 points among absentee votes and by 2 points among in-person votes. So, that sounds really good for Biden, right? Well, maybe, but we may be seeing the early in-person votes reported first, which are likely better for Biden than the ones cast on Election Day.
As we’ve been saying throughout the night, we’re going to be generally cautious about projections and early numbers, but the new state that people are buzzing about is Ohio. In suburbs outside of Columbus, Democrats seem heartened by the early numbers, and Biden has a pretty good lead with only half the votes in (so, half to come). A lot of people thought Ohio had passed the point of swing state return even at the start of the year. And in many ways, the state has really trended toward Republicans — a trove of white voters without a college education went to Trump. As early as two years ago, Democrats in the state were telling me that the ONLY chance of the party winning the state back on the presidential level was if they nominated Biden. The Scranton/union family/working-class narrative that Biden has was one they felt would win back Obama-Trump voters (white men, more pointedly). So, let’s see what happens tonight!
Cornyn’s win is another defeat for a female “rebound” candidate, MJ Hegar, who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Texas in 2018. Like McGrath in Kentucky, though, she was always a long shot to win — our Senate forecast gave Cornyn an 86 percent chance of winning.
Galen Druke and Geoffrey Skelley discuss why Pennsylvania, the most likely tipping-point state in this year’s election, probably won’t report a winner tonight.
ABC News has just projected that Cornyn will win the Texas Senate race. So far, Cornyn seems to be running about 2 percentage points ahead of Trump in that state.
The challenge with Ohio is that we don’t know exactly what’s early vote (Democratic-leaning) and what’s not (Republican-leaning). Biden leads by about 9 points statewide, according to ABC News, with 52 percent of the expected vote. The county with the largest vote reporting there is Wayne County, on the periphery of the Cleveland metropolitan area, which has 95 percent of its expected vote in. Trump won it by 34 points in 2016 but right now leads by 17 points.
It sounds like Democrats are pessimistic about flipping the North Carolina legislature tonight. That means they likely won’t take full control of state government and next year’s redistricting process.
ABC News projects Republican wins in six House races — OK-4, SC-7, TX-11, TX-13, TX-19 and TX-36.
ABC News also projects Democratic wins in FL-10 and FL-14.
Polls Closing At 9 p.m.
Our final forecasts for the 9 p.m. races
The final numbers from FiveThirtyEight’s forecast for races where the last polls close at 9 p.m. Eastern
ABC News projects that Joe Biden will win New York.
ABC News also projects that Republican John Cornyn will win the Senate race in Texas.
Ohio is one state I’m watching closely given that it was one of the closest in our forecast. But it’s really hard to tell what’s going on there right now. Biden is leading 54 percent to 45 percent, but most of what’s reported are absentee votes.
In Texas, I’m looking at Dallas and surrounding counties and seeing some pro-Dem shifts from 2016. Collin County: 39 percent Clinton to 47 percent Biden; Tarrant County: 43 percent Clinton to 49 percent Biden; Denton County: 37 percent Clinton to 45 percent Biden; and Dallas County: 61 percent to 66 percent Biden.
We’re expecting to know the majority of Texas results tonight, and so far we’re at 62 percent of the expected vote reporting. Most counties report absentee and early votes first, which are expected to be good for Democrats, so Texas is another state in which we’re likely to see a red shift as Election Day results are reported as the night goes on. In other words: Don’t read too much into Biden’s early lead there.
ABC News projects a Republican win in AR-4 and a Democratic win in GA-4.
In Texas, Biden now leads by about 3 percentage points, according to ABC News. But I’m skeptical that he’ll hold onto that. Only 62 percent of the expected vote has come in, and it seems like most of the big metropolitan areas have disproportionately reported their votes, while huge tracts of more Republican and more rural parts of Texas haven’t reported. Granted, we’re also waiting on El Paso County out west (in the Mountain time zone), and Biden has seemed to improve on Clinton’s percentages in a number of these places. But that could change as more votes come in.
ABC News projects that Donald Trump will win Arkansas.
It’s almost 9 p.m. Eastern and I don’t think we’ve gotten a network projection in a single competitive race. I strongly suspect we won’t know the identity of the next president tonight. As I wrote on Saturday, the number of “safe” electoral votes for Biden and Trump don’t even come close to 270, meaning someone (probably Biden) was going to need to get states like Florida projected for him in order for us to get a call tonight. But now that looks unlikely.
If it comes down to the wire in Florida: The state revised its recount laws after the 2000 debacle to standardize them by county. These laws are, of course, only as good as those who enforce them. But if we start to feel shades of 2000, it’s important to note that institutions can and do change — and they did in this case.
ABC News projects that Republican Tom Cotton will win the Senate race in Arkansas.
It’s hard to know whether the results so far feel more like 2016 — when Clinton came up short in a lot of states — or 2018, where GOP results in Florida did not tell us very much about what was going to happen elsewhere.
ABC News projects Republican wins in NC-7, OH-5, SC-3 and VA-1.
We haven’t had any surprising projections yet in the presidential race, and plugging those into our interactive map shows that the FiveThirtyEight forecast would be about the same if it knew how those states were going to be decided. If Florida goes to Donald Trump, though, his chances of winning the Electoral College would go up to 33 percent, from about 11 percent. If we put Georgia in Trump’s column as well, his chances would go to 38 percent. Even with a win in North Carolina, the race would still be a toss-up. In that situation, the candidate who wins Pennsylvania would be the very heavy favorite — as we’ve known for a while. But with less of a cushion, Biden probably couldn’t afford to lose any other close states.
McConnell is giving his victory speech now in Louisville. His overwhelming victory is not surprising at all. But it means that a very central figure in both the Obama and Trump eras will return to Washington. The big question is whether he will remain majority leader or become minority leader — and we likely won’t know that for a while.
Galen Druke and Clare Malone react to the early news out of Florida.
ABC News projects Republican wins in IN-9 and NC-13 and Democratic wins in PA-4 and PA-5.