How Election Week 2022 Went Down

I’m curious for Kaleigh’s thoughts here (don’t let me put you on the spot!), but: Does a loss for Hines means that election deniers might … underperform this year? Or, at the very least, be hampered by their false claims regarding the 2020 election?

Polls have now closed in Ohio, a state with a number of high-profile races. At the top of the ticket is the Senate race to succeed retiring Republican Sen. Rob Portman. It’s been a tight race, though Republican candidate J.D. Vance has recently widened his lead over Democrat Rep. Tim Ryan. Our forecast shows Vance favored, with an 87-in-100 chance of winning. Since control of the Senate is at stake tonight, any close race will be crucial for either party, and this is one of them.

The makeup of the Ohio Supreme Court is also at play tonight. Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, is vacating the seat after two decades on the court. Republicans currently hold a 4-3 majority on the court, so whichever party wins this race will have partisan control. Polls have shown a close race between Republican Justice Sharon Kennedy and Democrat Justice Jennifer Brunner.

Meanwhile in the House, there are three races I’m particularly watching tonight, in Ohio’s 1st, 9th and 13th Districts.

In the 1st District, which includes Cincinnati but also Republican-leaning Warren County, Republican incumbent Rep. Steve Chabot is hoping to foil a challenge from Democratic candidate and Cincinnati City Councillor Greg Landsman. Republicans in the Ohio Legislature redrew Chabot’s district during reapportionment to make it much more competitive, which has made this a tight race. If Democrats can flip the seat, it would be a meaningful coup in an election year that seems to be favoring the GOP. But our forecast has the odds in Chabot’s favor, with a 84-in-100 chance of winning.

In the 9th District, Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur is trying to fend off a challenge from Republican J.R. Majewski. During redistricting, Republicans in the state legislature redrew this district to favor the GOP, making this race more competitive than it would have been under the old map. But Majewski is a weak candidate. He’s an election denier who attended the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol (though those haven’t been disqualifying factors for other candidates running tonight) and reportedly misrepresented his military service record. And in our forecast, it looks like Kaptur will be able to hold onto her seat: She has a 3-in-4 chance of defeating Majewski.

Then there’s Ohio’s 13th District, one of the nation’s most competitive. With Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan vacating the seat to run for Senate, and just a marginal Republican lean to the district, it’s anyone’s race. The race pits two millennial women candidates against one another. Democrat Emilia Sykes is a member of the Ohio Legislature and part of a local political dynasty — both of her parents served in the state legislature, and her father is currently a state senator. She’s facing Republican candidate Madison Gesiotto Gilbert, a lawyer and the former co-chair of the national Women for Trump organization. She also worked on Trump’s campaign and on his inaugural committee, and is a former Miss Ohio USA — the pageant owned by Trump from 1996 to 2015. And like Sykes, Gilbert has a name-recognition factor: She’s married to former Pittsburgh Steelers offensive tackle Marcus Gilbert. This race tests two very different kinds of candidates in a fairly evenly matched field, and it’s remained competitive. Heading into tonight, our forecast sees Gilbert with better than 4-in-5 odds of winning.

We are getting results in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District, where Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger is trying to fend off Republican Yesli Vega. Vega leads 61 percent to 39 percent, with 38 percent of the expected vote reporting.

But we also have most of the votes in from Culpeper County in central Virginia at the rural-exurban edge of metro Washington, D.C., and based on our benchmarks for where candidates want to be relative to a 50-50 race in the district, the news is actually decent for Spanberger. With 94 percent reporting from Culpeper, Vega leads by about 16 points there, 58 percent to 42 percent. But our benchmarks suggest Vega would want to be up more like 26 points to be running 50-50. We’ll see if this pattern holds as we get more votes from other places in the district.