A little early still in Ohio, but Henry (who is based in Cleveland) says Democrats see encouraging signs in the suburbs there (Columbus suburbs, in this case).
And remember, if Trump lost Florida, his chances in our final forecast would have dropped to less than 1 percent in the Electoral College, so in many ways, Florida was a real must win for Trump.
Building on Nate’s point, Florida can be idiosyncratic, especially since it looks like Trump’s overperformance there may be limited to Miami-Dade County. Biden can still win the Electoral College by replicating Clinton’s 2016 map plus winning Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. And that’s not even considering states like North Carolina or Arizona that he may still win.
ABC News projects Democratic wins in NC-4, PA-3 and RI-1.
If Trump wins Florida, he’d shoot up to a 33 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, per our choose-your-own adventure interactive. The key question, of course, is how much a pro-Trump polling error in Florida would translate to other states.
We have about 89 percent of the expected vote in Florida, and looking at how the votes have come in so far this evening, there’s been a something of a red shift over the course of the evening: That’s because absentee and early votes, which are more Democratic-leaning, were included in the first batch of numbers reporting, while Election Day votes have been reported later. That explains why The New York Times has Florida as very likely to go to Trump even though the two candidates are still fairly close in vote count.
In defense of candidates like McGrath, isn’t this kind of thing part of having a larger strategy for parties to build up support and infrastructure, and to expand appeals outside of the base?
With 80 percent reported, Biden is up 17 points so far in Johnson County, Kansas, a well-off suburban county to the west of Kansas City. Clinton lost it by 3 points in 2016. That would be a positive sign for Biden, since it might imply a strong performance in other Midwestern suburbs — although again, it’s hard to make too much of things unless we know the mix of early vs. Election Day votes and unless our prior reporting said to expect a red shift in Kansas.
This will be a record-setting election in so many respects, but one record is the wild amount of money spent on this election: $14 billion — about twice as much as was spent in 2016. I’m guessing that a lot of that money didn’t change any minds and likely just made a lot of campaign consultants pretty wealthy. One thing I’ll be thinking about is all the other places where several of those billions of dollars could have gone.
The AP has called Arkansas’s Senate race for Tom Cotton. The one-time Democratic bastion didn’t even field a candidate to oppose the first-term senator.
Speaking of campaign contributions, the evidence about the impact of campaign spending (especially by challengers) on their electoral performance is pretty mixed. Instead, high fundraisers are likely better-quality candidates, so their success doesn’t necessarily reflect an independent effect of campaign contributions on electoral outcomes (at least for federal races).
ABC News projects a Republican win in AR-1 and a Democratic win in PA-2.
For North Carolina, it looks like many of the bigger metropolitan areas have reported, which helps explain Biden’s lead, given that Clinton carried many of those areas by large margins. Still, Biden does look to be doing better in them, at least for the moment. For example, take Wake County in the Raleigh-Durham area. With 82 percent of the expected vote in from there, Biden leads by 33 points, according to ABC News. By comparison, Clinton won that county by 20 points in 2016. But Election Day vote my change things as the night progresses.
The Democratic Senate candidate in North Carolina, Cal Cunningham, is running a net of about 2 points worse than Biden there. After Cunningham’s sexting scandal, polls were all over the place in terms of how Biden and Cunningham lined up, but that’s not great for Cunningham in a state where a Biden win would likely be pretty close.
McGrath benefitted from viral fame, stemming from her 2018 ad “Told Me,” which details her time as a Marine and combat pilot. She raised a lot of money then, and again in 2020, as Nathaniel pointed out. In 2018, Democrats elected a large number of female veterans. But several who lost (like MJ Hegar in Texas), ran again this year. I suspect McGrath will be back.
Polls Closing At 8:30 p.m.
We’re now awaiting results in Arkansas, the only state where polling places close at 8:30 p.m. Eastern. Here’s what our forecast has to say about the Natural State.
Our final forecasts for the 8:30 p.m. races
The final numbers from FiveThirtyEight’s forecast for races where the last polls close at 8:30 p.m. Eastern
The Democrats sure mobilized a lot of small-dollar donations this cycle — but one downside of small-dollar donors is that they aren’t always deployed strategically, as in Kentucky’s Senate race.
ABC News projects Republican wins in GA-3, NC-3, NC-5 and NC-10; and a Democratic win in GA-13.
Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene has won Georgia’s 14th District (which was all-but-assured given that her opponent, Democrat Kevin Van Ausdal, dropped out of the race). As I wrote last week, Greene has previously expressed support for QAnon, a conspiracy theory that alleges the existence of a widespread child sex trafficking ring run by a cabal of satanic and cannibalistic elites, whom only President Trump can stop.
A huge tranche of North Carolina votes just dropped and Biden leads in the early going by about 9 points with 60 percent of the expected vote in, according to ABC News. But based on similar data, The New York Times’ needle shows the outcome at somewhere between Biden by 4 points and Trump by 4 points, so it looks to be on a knife’s edge.
McGrath was one of a handful of high-profile “rebound” candidates — people who lost races in 2018 but threw their hat back in the ring for 2020, sometimes for different offices — including many women. As my colleagues are mentioning, though, she always had a slim chance of winning. Meredith and I will be keeping tabs on some of the other female rebound candidates tonight who have a better shot.
With McGrath losing her challenge to unseat McConnell, I wondered aloud to my colleagues how much of Democratic money had been sunk into candidates who never had a chance this cycle. My colleague Aaron Bycoffe sent me this tweet, which shows that the answer is: a lot. (I have a pet theory that this is a symptom of Democrats’ benefitting from income inequality, but that’ll take some more work to bear out.)
How the Senate’s balance of power shifted
Projected races and whether the winning party switched from 2016
In other states tracked by The New York Times needle, Trump is an 85 percent favorite in Georgia, although Biden is a slight favorite in North Carolina.
How the Senate’s balance of power shifted
Projected races and whether the winning party switched from 2016
Biden already has about 81,000 more votes in Texas’s Harris County than Clinton had in 2016. And Trump has about 55,000 more votes there than he had in 2016.
ABC News projects Democratic wins in GA-5, IN-1 and SC-6; and Republican wins in GA-9, OK-2 and OK-3.
Why have results in Florida changed overall perceptions of this race, at least from my Twitter feed? In part, the answer is the nationalization of our political behavior. Lots of people reckon that a polling error to Trump’s benefit in Florida might signal polling errors elsewhere.
A lot of Democrats were hopeful that McGrath could defeat McConnell in Kentucky, and they gave her $88 million in individual contributions to show it. But our forecast was always skeptical, giving McConnell a 96 in 100 chance. Lo and behold, McConnell is now leading 55 percent to 42 percent and has just been projected as the winner. Ultimately, Kentucky was just too red for him to lose.
Democrats getting fooled into thinking they can oust McConnell has become almost a tradition.
Biden up by 10 points so far in New Hampshire, where early and absentee votes are generally reported together, meaning you wouldn’t expect to see a blue or red shift.
In an effort to give some context to the votes as they pour in, I’m going to share emblematic quotations from voters I surveyed in mid-October. Here’s a Trump voter: “Trump is pro-life, pro-family, pro-business, defends freedom of conscience and religion, and wants to get out of foreign wars.”
Here’s Nathaniel Rakich with an update on the states where polls have already closed.
ABC News projects that Republican Mitch McConnell will win the Senate race in Kentucky.
Right, Amelia. According to New York Times/Sienna College polls of battleground states, of all race and ethnic groups polled, the gender gap was largest among Latinos.
Yes, Clare, I’m thinking about the gender gap as a potential factor for Trump among Latino men in particular. There was some good reporting a couple of weeks ago suggesting that Hispanic men — and to a lesser extent Black men — were sticking with Trump, in part because of his (perceived) macho appeal. I wrote last year about how Trump’s masculine shtick could be a challenge for Biden — and maybe it was, among this subset of Latino men anyway.
We’ve talked a little bit about how Florida Hispanics tend to be more conservative (and Trump has spent a lot of time tying Biden and the Democratic Party to socialism), but could something else be happening here too? Could this be the gender gap rearing its head — i.e., Trump is appealing to men across demographic groups even more than he was in 2016?
ABC News projects Republican wins in FL-1 and OH-7 and Democratic wins in KY-3 and OH-13.
Getting our first votes out of Texas and the news might actually be decent news for Biden. With the early vote now in from parts of the Dallas metroplex. In Dallas County, Biden leads 66 percent to 33 percent with 81 percent of the expected vote reporting, according to ABC News. Clinton carried that by 26 points in 2016. And in Denton County, a big suburban county outside of Dallas, Trump is ahead by 7 points with 98 percent of the expected vote reporting. He won it by 20 points four years ago, so that’d be a big shift if it stays anywhere near that.
ABC News projects that Donald Trump will win Indiana.
ABC News also projects that Republican Bill Hagerty will win the Senate race in Tennessee.
It’s worth noting, though, that our forecast thinks Biden still has a 66 in 100 shot to win the White House even if Trump carries Florida.
ABC News projects that Donald Trump will win Tennessee.
Decision Desk HQ becomes (I believe) the first major race-projector to project Florida for Trump.
The big split in mail vs. Election Day votes just makes election night harder. Like, I think the Midwest sorta looks decent for Biden? But it’s very hard to know much definitively, unless you’ve really done a lot of Times-needle-like analysis on exactly what types of votes are in, or you have a strong sense of what your expectations were.
ABC News projects Democratic wins in six House races — AL-7, FL-9, MA-1, MA-3, PA-18 and TN-5.
ABC News also projects Republican wins in FL-3, GA-10, OH-4 and OH-8.
The New York Times needle also now has Trump at 78 percent to win in Georgia. According to their estimates, only the Latino vote is showing very large changes in Florida and Georgia. It is unclear where Biden is doing worse than expected in Georgia — perhaps he’s just not seeing the gains he needs in areas of strength (suburbs, areas with more college graduates).
With its latest batch of race projections, ABC’s Electoral Vote tally has Biden with 44 and Trump with 15, and 479 more to go. The candidate that gets 270 wins the Electoral College. ABC has five states and the District of Columbia in Biden’s column and two states in Trump’s column.
In South Florida, it also looks like Democratic Rep. Donna Shalala could be up against it in Florida’s 27th Congressional District. She trails by about 3,000 votes (about 1 point) with 85 percent of the expected vote in, according to ABC News, against Republican challenger Maria Elvira Salazar. So if that result and the Republican edge in Florida’s 26th Congressional District hold, South Florida might produce two GOP pickups.
Building on Matt’s point about unexpected Latino support for the president, I did research with a team of scholars (Cheryl Kaiser, Efrén Pérez, Sara Hagá, Corin Ramos and Michael Zárate) exploring Latino and Asian American responses to perceived discrimination. We found repeatedly in different experiments that having Latino or Asian American respondents think about perceived discrimination against their panethnic group did nothing to change their attitudes toward the political parties. With immigration less of a front-page issue in this election, it might well be that Trump’s share of the (admittedly very diverse) Latino vote won’t shrink relative to 2016.
It’s a little hard what to make of Ohio. Biden is ahead, but that’s based on absentee votes, which were expected to be good for him. Counties that The New York Times says are more fully reported also still look pretty good for Biden relative to 2016, but nothing is more than 84 percent in so far.