The Uncalled Races Of The 2022 Election

And there it is: ABC News reports that Democrat Katie Hobbs is projected to win the Arizona governorship. It’s a big win for Democrats — ending what will be 14 uninterrupted years of Republican leadership in Arizona — and an unexpected one: Our final Deluxe forecast gave Hobbs just a 32-in-100 chance of winning. Democrats have now flipped three governorships in 2022, while Republicans have flipped one.

In this installment of “Model Talk” on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Nate Silver and Galen Druke discuss how Democrats holding onto 50 seats in the Senate impacts the upcoming Georgia Senate runoff, as well as the projections for key U.S. House races that will determine control of the chamber.

They also break down how pollsters did this cycle, including how partisan pollsters over-projected Republican gains. Finally, they answer some listener questions, including why New York and Florida were the exception to a national trend that favored Democrats.

Also with tonight’s updates in Arizona, Republican Juan Ciscomani leads the race for Arizona’s 6th District by 3,502 votes, and Republican Rep. David Schweikert leads in the 1st District by 3,008 votes. We don’t know exactly how many votes remain to be counted in individual congressional districts, but it’s safe to say that Democrats would have to win an extremely high percentage of what remains in order to salvage these seats.

Pima County, Arizona, reported roughly 31,000 ballots tonight, and Maricopa County reported another 71,000, and Republican Kari Lake did not get what she needs. Democrat Katie Hobbs still leads her by 20,481 votes statewide, and considering that most of what remains are provisional ballots (which lean Democratic), that lead will probably only grow from here. Other outlets have begun to declare Hobbs the winner, but we’re still waiting for ABC News to report an official projection.

Democrats’ chances of winning a House majority are low at this point, but those chances will be about zero if Democratic Rep. Katie Porter loses reelection in California’s 47th District. And she very well could: Porter leads Republican Scott Baugh 50.6 percent to 49.4 percent, with 78 percent of the expected vote reporting. We don’t have an exact estimate for number of remaining votes here, but that math suggests somewhere in the high 50,000 range. If so, Baugh needs to win about 55 percent of the remaining votes to catch Porter. And he won nearly 58 percent of the nearly 16,000 votes that Orange County added to the overall tally earlier this evening.

It looks like tonight’s vote update in Maricopa County, Arizona (expected around 8 p.m. Eastern), will include most of what the county has left, and about half of what remains to be counted statewide. We could learn who wins the state’s governorship in just a couple hours.

While we’re waiting for more results in the House, let’s recap the results of some of the most important — but under-the-radar — elections of 2022: those for state legislatures. TLDR: They were quite good for Democrats.

• Votes are still being tabulated in Alaska, but the state Senate and House both look like they’re going to be close, increasing the odds that a bipartisan coalition will form to govern the chambers.
• The results also aren’t final in Arizona, but it appears that Republicans have narrowly retained their legislative majorities.
• Democrats expanded their majorities in the Colorado state Senate and House.
• Democrats failed to end the GOP supermajority in the Kansas state House, meaning Republican legislators can still pass legislation over reelected Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto.
• Democrats kept control of the Maine state Senate and House, two of the most hotly contested chambers this cycle.
• Democrats flipped both the Michigan state Senate and House, taking full control of state government for the first time since 1984.
• Democrats flipped the Minnesota state Senate and kept control of the House, giving them full control there too.
• Democrats also kept control of the Nevada state Senate and Assembly but failed to get a supermajority that could override Republican Gov.-elect Joe Lombardo’s vetoes.
• Republicans kept the New Hampshire state Senate and tentatively have a narrow 203-197 majority in the House. But about two dozen House seats are going to recounts, so they haven’t clinched the chamber yet.
• Republicans also failed to gain a supermajority in the North Carolina state House, so they will not have the numbers to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes.
• Democrats held onto both the Oregon state Senate and House, and voters also passed a ballot measure that would penalize legislators for unexcused absences from the capitol. In recent years, Republicans have staged walkouts from the legislature in order to stall Democrats’ agenda.
• Republicans held onto the Pennsylvania state Senate, but the House is on a razor’s edge: 101 seats have been projected for Democrats, and 100 have been projected for Republicans, with two seats still undecided: House District 142 and House District 151.
• Democrats and Progressives together won a supermajority in the Vermont state House, which means they can now override Republican Gov. Phil Scott’s vetoes.
• Republicans failed to gain a supermajority in the Wisconsin state Assembly, meaning Democratic Gov. Tony Evers will continue to have the ability to block Republican legislation.

In this video, Galen Druke examines the uncalled races that will determine control of the House. Who will win? And what would a slim Republican majority mean for the next Congress?

The one governor’s race still in suspense is Arizona’s. (We also don’t have a projection in Alaska, but incumbent Republican Mike Dunleavy is quite likely to win.) Right now, Democrat Katie Hobbs has 1,212,665 votes, and Republican Kari Lake has 1,187,893 — a gap of 24,772 votes. Approximately 170,000 votes are left to count statewide, which means Lake needs to win 57 percent or more of them in order to take the lead. She hasn’t been hitting that in vote drops so far, so Hobbs is favored here, but it’s not a sure thing quite yet.

I went on ABC News Live this morning to talk about Democrats’ path to victory in the House. The outcome could lead to chaos in Washington.

Does Nate Silver buy that Sen. Raphael Warnock is favored to win Georgia’s Senate runoff?

ABC News is reporting that Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer is projected to win Oregon’s 5th District, defeating Democrat Jamie McLeod-Skinner. This light-blue seat is a big gain for Republicans, who now have 212 seats in the House according to ABC News estimates. McLeod-Skinner shook this race up in May when she defeated centrist Democratic Rep. Kurt Schrader in the primary, a result that caused many election observers to give the GOP a better shot of picking up this seat. That came to pass, narrowly, as Chavez-DeRemer is on course to win by about 2 points, 51 percent to 49 percent.

• Republicans hold slim leads in five seats outside of California, which would get them to 216 seats if they retain their edge. The GOP is up in Arizona’s 1st and 6th District, and we know that the outstanding vote in the 1st District is probably Republican-leaning while the 6th District’s last vote update was also more favorable to the GOP. Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert has a slight lead in Colorado’s 3rd District, such that her opponent will probably need to win close to two-thirds of the outstanding vote to overtake her. Similarly, Republicans lead in New York’s 22nd District and Oregon’s 5th District, and Democrats need to win at least three-fourths of the vote in each to catch the GOP candidate — a tall order.
• Conversely, Democrats have an edge in three seats outside of California. They are favorites in the two ranked-choice voting races in Alaska’s At-large District and Maine’s 2nd District, as each Democrat is not that far from the 50 percent mark in first-choice votes. They also have an edge in Oregon’s 6th District. Should Democrats win those seats, that would put them at 209.
• That leaves 10 California-based districts, where some seats still have less than half of the expected vote reporting. In the Southern California-based 47th and 49th districts, Democratic Reps. Katie Porter and Mike Levin have an edge, respectively, as they both lead with more than 70 percent of the expected vote reporting. Additionally, Democrats have a sizable lead in the 9th and 21st districts, although with much left to be reported. Meanwhile, the 13th District looks like it could go either way. But Republicans need to only win two of the 10 still-undecided California seats, and they have meaningful leads in the 3rd, 22nd, 27th, 41st and 45th districts. Democrats are going to need the trend in vote reports to shift in almost all of those seats to keep the GOP from gaining a House majority.