Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.

As more Nevada results trickle in, another 1,000 or so votes from rural Nye County have come in, which improved Trump’s position by roughly 300 net votes. As such, the overall picture remains essentially unchanged in Nevada: Biden leads by 0.9 points. And the challenge for Trump is that much of the outstanding vote is still going to come from Democratic-leaning Clark County, home to Las Vegas.

So that would imply that Biden only needs to win the remaining votes by 63-37 or thereabouts. He’s been running ahead of that pace so far.

Meanwhile, another 4,500 votes came in from Georgia, which went 63 percent to 36 percent for Biden, but given the small number, they moved things only very slightly in Biden’s direction. According to ABC News, Trump now leads Biden by 0.27 percentage points, or 13,540 votes. Earlier today, we heard there were about 61,000 votes left to count, but since then, around 10,500 more votes have come in, and Georgia’s secretary of state just said that 50,401 ballots are still outstanding.

The Philadelphia County Board of Elections has appealed this morning’s order in the case involving the Trump campaign’s demand for closer observation of the ballot-counting process. The case is now with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The board is asking the court to reverse this morning’s order from a state appeals court, which granted the Trump campaign expanded access to observe the vote-counting process.

Because turnout was so high, Biden is likely to wind up with one of the higher percentages of votes as a share of the U.S. population that we’ve seen in a long time:

A little inside baseball, but this dynamic may affect how different networks are handling Nevada. If you’ve called Arizona (which I don’t think you should have!), then a Nevada call would give Biden the election. But Nevada is probably callable at this point!

Yeah, Nate — Chad and I even made a video to explain that this is normal:

In following the chatter on social media and cable news, it seems clear that people are still somewhat surprised by the magnitude of the blue shift in states where mail votes report last, even though it’s very much in line with what we and other data geeks expected.

Washoe County (Reno), a key swing county in Nevada, just announced quite a few results, but they were essentially a wash.

I’m not a decision desk, but I suppose I think Nevada is on the verge of being callable at this point. Two-thirds of the state’s population is in Clark County and Biden is gaining big in Clark County! Not sure I see the route for a Trump comeback.

The Nevada results I just posted about were in Clark County (Las Vegas) only, but now some more rural counties — specifically, Elko and Lyon — are reporting new results as well. Those counties narrowly helped Trump, who now trails by 0.95 percentage points.

The new batch of Nevada results looks like it contained 9,101 new Biden votes and 4,706 Trump votes, or a ratio of 66-34 in Biden’s favor. That means it actually widened Biden’s statewide lead to 12,042 votes, or 49.5 percent to 48.5 percent. If the rest of Nevada’s mail ballots are this blue, it’s hard to see Trump carrying Nevada.

Philadelphia has counted 266,159 mail-in ballots, and as of Election Day, it had received 346,194. With the caveat that ballots can arrive after Election Day, that means that there are no fewer than 80,035 mail ballots still to be counted. The statewide margin for Trump now stands at 116,224. And with a court ruling, vote counting in Philadelphia can continue.

Not surprising, but the first votes in from Clark County have expanded Biden’s lead in Nevada. Nevada’s looking good for the vice president.

The announcement from Fulton County, Georgia, that Geoffrey mentioned about 20 minutes ago also has implications for the state’s regular Senate race. Perdue is now at 49.997 percent of the vote, per the secretary of state’s website, meaning this race is now in runoff territory. (And it’s unlikely Perdue will gain from here, given the types of ballots — absentee ballots and ballots from Democratic-leaning counties — that remain uncounted.)

This press conference is odd, Clare, but it’s nothing new for the Trump administration. We’ve been writing about false claims of voter fraud coming out of the Trump team since before he was elected and it seems to be what they are swinging back to now. Back in 2016, on the campaign trail, Trump was peddling a discredited research paper from Old Dominion University to claim that there was widespread voter registration by noncitizens and undocumented immigrants. Later, the president set up a voter fraud commission that attempted to prove fraud by merging voter registration information from around the country in a plan that would have almost certainly been filled with data error, had states gone along with it. That commission was headed up by Kris Kobach, who basically spent his entire career making allegations of widespread voter fraud that — despite actively and aggressively seeking out and prosecuting cases — he has been unable to prove. In the big picture, experts agree that voter fraud is very rare, and usually the result of mistakes or poorly informed voters, not intentional malevolence.

Also, dead voters are definitely a thing that has come up in claims like this before. Kobach, for example, staged a whole press conference around the claim of dead voters in Kansas in 2010. He cited the case of Albert K. Brewer, a dead man who was still voting, as an example. But the Topeka Capital-Journal found that Brewer was alive. Kobach’s staff had confused him with his father, also named Albert Brewer but with a different middle initial. The elder Brewer had indeed died, in 1996, on his son’s birthday.

It’s now 9 a.m. in Nevada, which means further results should be announced any minute. Currently, Biden has a 7,647-vote lead in Nevada, but local analyst Jon Ralston thinks there could be about 150,000 ballots still uncounted.

Quick legal update: The Trump campaign/GOP case in Chatham County, Georgia, alleging mishandling of late-arriving ballots, was dismissed by a judge on Thursday morning after a hearing where evidence and arguments were presented.

Looking down the ballot a bit, drugs did well this year, with four states easing restrictions on marijuana use and Oregon passing two measures that both legalize hallucinogenic mushrooms for medical purposes and decriminalize possession of small amounts of hard drugs like heroin. But there’s another way voter support for changes in drug laws affected this election. In Minnesota, there’s evidence that the GOP recruited people to run with marijuana legalization parties in key elections throughout the state. In some cases, these spoiler candidates won upwards of 6 percent of the vote — more than the margin between the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (Minnesota’s Democratic Party) and GOP candidates — and seem to have been a decisive factor in tipping at least one election to the GOP. The state DFL is now claiming that this plan is to blame for the party’s losses in state legislature races. In any event, the state Senate remains in GOP control, a fact that, ironically, probably means Minnesota won’t be legalizing marijuana anytime soon.

This Nevada press conference is odd. The people coming up to the podium aren’t clearly identifying themselves, then a (presumably) Trump campaign official came up and said they wouldn’t take questions. “Ask your questions of Clark County,” the official says. A reporter says “but they’re not filing suit, you are.” Anyhow, bizarre. Again, no proof that anything untoward is happening in Clark County.

This announcement was made just minutes before we expect to get more votes reported out of Nevada, where Biden currently has a very narrow lead over Trump and an estimated 150,000 votes are still outstanding.

In its press conference in Las Vegas right now, Trump’s campaign is saying it’s are filing a lawsuit asking for a court injunction to stop vote counting due to “improper votes.” The campaign claims it has evidence of nonresidents voting in Nevada and that “we believe there are dead voters that have been counted.” Campaign members making the announcement are refusing to give their names to reporters there, saying “do your job, it’s pretty easy to find out.” They have not provided any evidence to back up their claims of “dead voters” or nonresidents voting.

In Georgia, ballots continue to trickle in. Deep-blue Fulton County (where much of Atlanta proper is) just reported another 6,000 or so votes, 76 percent of which went for Biden. This took Trump’s statewide edge from 0.4 points to 0.3 points. Hard to say just how many votes are left to report — we last heard around 60,000 an hour or so ago — but we know Biden needed to win probably 62 percent or more of those to take the narrowest of leads. The new votes from Fulton surpass that mark.

Just getting this press live stream from the Trump campaign in Nevada loaded now. It’s a series of voters alleging fraud. Very in keeping with the tenor of the Trump campaign.

Just a quick note here about the campaign spin as we wait today for the official vote count. The Biden campaign is expressing some pretty strong confidence about Pennsylvania. They also say they expect to win Nevada, but that the rural vote count will make it look less positive for Biden initially. Speaking of Nevada, we are waiting for Trump’s campaign to hold a press conference there any minute now …

Where Trump’s Legal Maneuvering Stands

As we wait for results in a handful of states, the Trump campaign has been busy filing lawsuits alleging various kinds of voting-related misconduct and trying to intervene as a party in the Pennsylvania ballot deadline case at the Supreme Court. That might sound serious, but it’s important to remember that anyone can file a lawsuit, so the mere fact of bringing an issue to court doesn’t mean it’s a decisive issue — or even evidence of actual wrongdoing. So here’s an overview of where the litigation stands and what the outcome might be. In most cases, the issues that are being raised do not appear to be especially consequential, at least right now.

Pennsylvania

The Trump campaign and other Republicans have filed multiple lawsuits in Pennsylvania, claiming various kinds of election-related irregularities:

• A lawsuit filed in state court by the Trump campaign claiming that observers were not able to “meaningfully” oversee the count, and asking for the count to be stopped. On Thursday, a state appellate court issued an order guaranteeing that GOP ballot observers can watch the process within six feet. The order did not stop the count in Philadelphia, however.
• Another lawsuit filed in state court by the Trump campaign and the RNC that tries to move up the deadline for when mail-in voters with missing ID information would need to provide that information. Currently the deadline is Nov. 12, but the Trump campaign wants it to be changed to Nov. 9.
• Another state court lawsuit filed by Pennsylvania Republican candidates and voters, involving ballots that were corrected during the initial ballot-processing (“pre-canvassing”) period on Nov. 3.
• A federal case filed by a Republican candidate objecting to the process of “curing” or correcting problems with mail-in ballots in Montgomery County, just outside Philadelphia. At a hearing yesterday, the judge in the case seemed skeptical that the Republican claims had affected the integrity of the election, and in any case, a relatively small number of ballots (fewer than 100) appear to have been affected.
• The Trump campaign has asked to intervene as a party in the Supreme Court litigation over Pennsylvania’s ballot-receipt deadline, which was extended to Friday by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has declined twice to overrule the deadline, but several conservative justices indicated that they might be willing to revisit the case, potentially throwing the validity of any ballots postmarked on Election Day that arrive in that three-day window into question. However, it’s also not clear whether a large number of ballots are actually arriving late — Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said on Wednesday that there are only “hundreds” so far.

Michigan

• The Trump campaign is suing to stop the vote count in Michigan, claiming that it was not given access to observe the counting, and asking to review ballots that it was not able to witness. It’s not clear what the campaign is really trying to accomplish here, since Biden is leading in the state. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson also said that the claim “doesn’t really line up with the facts.”

Georgia

• The Trump campaign and the Georgia GOP filed a lawsuit asking a judge in Chatham County to make sure that late-arriving ballots are being properly segregated from on-time ballots. (In Georgia, ballots must be received by 7 p.m. on Election Day to count.) The campaign claims that the county might be mishandling ballots, but this appears to be based on a single allegation from a Republican poll observer involving a small number of ballots. In any case, the lawsuit isn’t seeking to stop on-time ballots from being counted.

Wisconsin

• The Trump campaign has indicated that it will file a formal recount request in Wisconsin — but this can’t happen until the last county has submitted its canvass to the state elections commission, which will happen sometime between Nov. 10 and 17. (And it’s worth mentioning here that recounts rarely reverse the outcome of elections — including in 2016, when Trump’s lead over Clinton was basically unchanged after a Wisconsin recount.)

Depending on the presidential and U.S. Senate results in states such as Arizona, control of the Senate may come down to two January runoffs in Georgia. In the state’s regular contest, Republican Sen. David Perdue is right at 50.0 percent, but may finish below a majority against Democrat Jon Ossoff as the final Democratic-leaning mail and provisional ballots are counted. If so, they will join the special election runoff between Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Democrat Raphael Warnock. And Republicans would probably head into the runoffs with an edge, as turnout and Democratic performance have usually declined in prior runoffs. In both 1992 and 2008, Georgia Senate runoffs resulted in GOP wins, and a high-profile secretary of state race in 2018 also saw the same pattern. Moreover, if Trump loses to Biden, it’s easy to imagine Republican voters being more motivated to turn out than Democratic ones, who might feel like they’ve done their duty.

One of the misinformation memes I keep seeing over and over on social media is the idea that more people have voted in one toss-up state or another than were registered to vote on Nov. 1. Some of these rumors are just deliberately misleading, as Jane Lytvynenko and Craig Silverman pointed out at BuzzFeed. But I suspect that part of what is making misinformation feel “truthy” here is that a lot of people are still pretty unfamiliar with the idea of same-day voter registration. This is a thing that has expanded massively in recent years. There are now 21 states that allow same-day registration plus the District of Columbia and North Carolina (which allows it for early voting, though not on Election Day). A decade ago, there were just 11. Nevada, for example, implemented its same-day registration in 2019, so this is its first election with it in place. So even though it’s not reasonable to spread false claims of voter fraud, it is reasonable that some of the audience seeing those claims isn’t thinking about the reality that a given state’s Nov. 1 voter registration figures are not the whole story of their voter registrations for the election.

To give you an idea of how much same-day registration can change things, let’s look at the impact in North Carolina in 2016, as recorded in a report by the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. In that election, more than 100,000 voters registered at the same time they voted. Now, North Carolina does this a little differently than other states with same-day registration in that it only applies to early voting, not on Election Day proper. But you can see how it could easily make a big change in voter registration numbers. What’s more, at least in North Carolina, same-day registration doesn’t seem to be disproportionately used by one party or the other. In 2016, 35 percent of SDR users were Democrats, 34 percent were Republicans and 30 percent were unaffiliated. It’ll be interesting, when all is said and done, to see how many people in these swing states were using same day registration this year and how much it affects the outcomes.

One thing to consider when evaluating how the polls did this year is that some states may have a lot of provisional ballots. Those could be especially Democratic in states where the provisionals consist mostly of people who intended to vote by mail but decided to vote in-person instead because of concerns about whether their ballots would be counted on time. Nate Cohn over at The New York Times estimates that provisionals alone could shift the results by 2 points toward Biden in Pennsylvania, for instance, once they’re counted.

The state of Georgia has released estimates about where outstanding absentee ballots remain to be counted. There’s good news for Biden here: They’re mostly in blue counties. Below, I’ve listed each county’s partisan lean in 2016 — that is, how much more Democratic or Repbulican it was than the state overall in presidential voting that year. Weighting the counties by how many votes they have outstanding, Clinton won them by an average of 14 points in 2016, a year when she lost Georgia by 5 points statewide. Thus, these counties are 19 points bluer than the state on average.

Considering that, on top of that, absentee ballots are likely to be considerably bluer than how the counties vote overall, catching up in Georgia looks achievable for Biden. There are also more outstanding votes reflected here (about 61,000) than earlier estimates, which had been closer to 50,000. One small bit of caution, though, when you’re perusing results: now and then, it will turn out that a group of votes that one source says is still outstanding have actually been counted already, or vice versa. The data on Georgia here would seem to be relatively clear and explicit, but you should always be careful — gathering information about the outstanding number of votes is always complicated in real time.

The Georgia secretary of state keeps revising the estimate of the number of absentee ballots remaining: The latest word is 61,367. That means Biden has to win at least 65 percent of them in order to take the lead.

A handful of votes just trickled in for Georgia’s regularly scheduled Senate election, where the race will go to a runoff if no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote. The Republican in the race, incumbent Sen. David Perdue, is clinging to an outright victory by fewer than 2,000 votes, and as more absentee ballots are counted it’s likely he’ll drop below that mark. The special election for Georgia’s other Senate seat is also going to a runoff. If Democrat Mark Kelly hangs on to win in Arizona, and the Republican candidates keep their leads in North Carolina and Alaska, the Senate outlook would be 50-48 going into the two Georgia runoffs, and their outcomes would determine which party would control the chamber — a Republican win in either one would give the GOP control. (If the Senate is ultimately 50-50, the vice president would break ties.)

On a related note, as our quantitative editor Laura Bronner explains here, the shifts in the vote count this election are a result of the way we voted this year and NOT a sign of fraud.

The president has been tweeting more this morning about wanting to “stop” the (legitimate, of course) vote count. Apparently, what Trump means, according to his campaign, is that they want to stop the count until the Trump campaign can monitor it (again, as we’ve said before, there is no proof of fraud.) The specific rules for partisans observing the vote-counting process vary from state to state and the National Conference of State Legislatures has a handy guide for those rules. But take for instance, Pennsylvania, which is a pretty big prize today. “Partisan observers are permitted to be present when absentee and mail-in ballot envelopes are opened, and when the ballots are counted and recorded,” the NCSL writes. In Arizona, “Partisan observers are authorized to observe processing at the county recorder’s office.” In Nevada, “Members of the general public may observe the preparation of absentee ballots at central counting boards.” So, it’s unclear why the Trump campaign would argue that these vote counts would need to be stopped so they can observe them; they’re already allowed to observe.

It looks like another 20,000 or so votes have come in from Philadelphia, and they broke 92 percent for Biden. Along with about 9,000 votes from deep-blue Montgomery County that broke 73 percent for Biden, this cut Trump’s statewide advantage from 2.6 percentage points to 2.3 points. It might seem wild that the Philadelphia tranche of votes could be that Democratic, but look at this way: Philadelphia usually votes around 80 percent (or a little higher) for Democratic presidential candidates. Clinton, for example, won 82 percent of the county’s votes in 2016. Right now, Biden is at about 80 percent in Philadelphia. But we also know that voters who used mail-in ballots were more likely to be Democrats, so you’re talking about the most Democratic votes out of a strongly Democratic-leaning pool of voters.

Philadelphia is now reporting an overall margin of about 360,000 votes for Biden, extending his lead there by about 17,000 votes, compared to yesterday. Along with a batch of Montgomery County votes, about 73 percent of which went to Biden, Trump’s lead in the state is now down to about 140,000 votes.

Trump spent the last push of the campaign downplaying the severity of the coronavirus pandemic and dismissing concerns about it as politically motivated, while his surrogates have made claims that the coronavirus pandemic would disappear once it was no longer a politically useful tool to drive votes to Democrats and stop his rallies. So it’s worth pointing out that the pandemic has not stopped in its tracks since the votes have been cast. In fact, yesterday turns out to have been a new high in daily new cases with 100,000 people diagnosed. This is a big deal because it’s indicative of the ongoing surge in cases that America is experiencing right now, with many of the hotspots centered in rural counties where the president has had a large following. It’s both a shift in how many people are getting COVID-19 and where they are getting it. So far, thankfully, daily deaths appear to not be rising in the same way. (Although 1,280 Americans died from COVID-19 on Election Day, according to the nonprofit federal data aggregator USA Facts.) There are multiple reasons for why that is, though, and it’s something we’ll be returning to in the next few weeks.

Even though it’s been projected as a Biden win, here’s a short update on the vote in Michigan — a reminder that the near-final figures in a state can seem different from the narrative surrounding them as counting was going on. With pretty much everything in, Biden leads Trump 50.6 percent to 47.8 percent. That’s close, of course, but it’s not quite the razor-thin margin we saw on Wednesday morning. It speaks to just how much of a blue shift can happen due to outstanding votes in Democratic-leaning areas from mail-in ballots. Of course, we’re waiting to see just how that may play out even more prodigiously in Pennsylvania — or how a red shift might get Trump close to a win in Arizona.

Some quick live-blog housekeeping, dear readers. Today we’re watching (like everyone else in the world): Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. Here’s what we think will happen in terms of timing:

• Philadelphia City Commissioners will give an update on the mail-in ballot count at around 9 a.m., we’ll be here to cover that.
• Georgia is still counting votes, and Trump’s lead there has narrowed to less that 20,000. We’re hopeful to get more votes there throughout the morning, but … 🤷
• Nevada is expected to announce more results beginning at 12 p.m. ET.
• Finally, Arizona, too, is still counting votes and Trump is cutting into Biden’s lead there. We expect Maricopa County to report more votes at 9 p.m. ET, and some more Pima County results this evening.

The upshot of all this is that we expect things to be busy today, with some possible lulls (between 10-12, for example). But honestly, we’re not totally sure and will be standing by in case counts start updating at any time. Stay tuned!

With 20 Electoral College votes, Pennsylvania is the biggest prize left on the table, and we’re following it closely as it continues to count votes over the next 24-48 hours (or so).

Trump and Biden are now separated by about 164,000 votes, with Trump leading. But the more than 460,000 outstanding mail ballots left to be counted are likely to lean heavily Democratic. And at least 116,000 of them come from Philadelphia, a very Democratic-leaning city where mail ballots so far have gone to Biden by more than a 9 to 1 ratio. If Biden wins those outstanding mail ballots by something approaching the margins he has been winning mail ballots statewide, those mail ballots should give him the lead statewide.

Still, there’s some uncertainty here, with different sources showing different numbers of outstanding mail ballots. The New York Times’ dashboard, for instance, may overestimate the outstanding votes in places like Philadelphia; its current estimate implies turnout for the two major parties in excess of 800,000, a sizable increase over the roughly 693,000 votes cast for major parties in 2016 at a time when lots of college students aren’t in town due to remote learning. That discrepancy could reflect a lag in adjusting for mail ballots that have already been counted. Or it could reflect provisional ballots — or the fact that mail ballots can arrive after Election Day, too.

And it’s hard to know how many total provisional ballots are out or how they are likely to break given all the voting by mail, although Biden won the large number of provisional ballots in York County, a GOP stronghold. The upshot: The votes are certainly out there for Biden to take the lead, and that’s my best guest, but there’s no guarantee. Caution is the word of the day.

Good morning, early birds! Overnight, both Georgia and Arizona tightened some but are still led by Trump and Biden, respectively. While we aren’t expecting to get our next update from Maricopa County in Arizona until 9 p.m. tonight, Georgia is expected to finish counting its remaining 25,000 ballots today. Elsewhere, Nevada will announce more results starting at noon Eastern, and we continue to get results at a steady pace in Pennsylvania — which may be Biden’s best chance to end this race.

At this point, we’re just sort of playing a waiting game for more results to come in from Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia, frequently pressing refresh on our browsers. Even though we suspect you’re doing the same thing, we’re going to sign off for the time being and come back at you if there’s any breaking news.

Meanwhile, Georgia, which has turned out to be a really competitive race (less than a percentage point separates Trump and Biden), is still at 95 percent of the expected vote reporting, but almost all of Georgia’s counties where the vote is outstanding are blue counties, like Fulton (Atlanta). However, according to a Georgia elections official, as of 8:30 p.m. ET, Biden needs to win 64 percent of the outstanding vote to overtake Trump. That might prove a tall order, but this is definitely the closest toss-up state we’ve seen in this presidential race — compared to, say, Ohio and Iowa.

Decision Desk also shows Perdue at 50.15 percent in Georgia’s remaining Senate race, which requires a candidate to get a majority to avoid a runoff election in January. If he falls below 50 as more Democratic votes come in, we would be in for runoff elections for two Senate seats in January, both in Georgia. With Republicans currently leading in North Carolina and Alaska, that might offer Democrats their last chance at Senate control. Winning those two seats, alongside a Biden presidency, could make the Senate tied with the vice president serving as the tiebreaking vote. That prospect would lead to a lot of political focus on Georgia for the next two months.

Results aren’t final, but Biden’s lead in Nebraska’s 2nd District is really fairly big (6.6 points), which suggests it will be a thorn in the side of Republicans going forward.

As we wait for more returns from, well, anywhere, I took a look at the Pennsylvania Department of State website’s tracker of outstanding mail ballots to see where things stand in that pivotal state. Turns out there are about 763,000 total mail ballots left to count in the state, which is … a lot. At the moment, Trump leads Biden by about 187,000 votes in Pennsylvania, which translates to 3 percentage points. Now, I don’t know how many of those 763,000 votes might not be counted for various reasons, but if we just round down to 750,000 outstanding ballots, Biden would have to win 62 percent or so to have a threadbare lead. But the challenge for Trump is that because mail ballots tilt Democratic, Biden has been winning recent new tranches of mail ballots by margins far larger than that. It’s true that some of these outstanding votes are from Republican areas of the state, but a quarter of them come from the Philadelphia area (including 120,000 from Philadelphia proper), where those votes will be very Democratic. There are also about 85,000 mail ballots left to count from Democratic-leaning Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) and Lehigh County (Allentown). Point is, there may well be enough for Biden to overcome Trump’s current lead.

Trump’s lead in Georgia is now down to 31,748 votes, per Decision Desk HQ.

Fundamentally, the issue for Trump is that while Georgia projects to be very close and Arizona — at least in my view — projects to be very close, Biden is way ahead of the pace he needs to overtake Trump in Pennsylvania. If it were three toss-ups, that would be one thing, but Biden could wind up winning Pennsylvania fairly comfortably.

Arizona is also the last potential gain for Democrats in state legislative chambers. Democrats were expected to gain control of five or six state legislative chambers. Instead, Republicans are gaining so far.