At long last, that’s a wrap
But in Nevada’s gubernatorial contest, Sisolak has a steeper mountain to climb to catch Lombardo, who leads Sisolak by about 3 points. In this case, Sisolak needs to win at least 65 percent of the roughly 95,000 votes that are still being tallied, which is a higher rate than he’s been winning in the most recent reports from Clark and Washoe counties. So this suggests Lombardo is favored to hold on.
Laxalt leads Cortez Masto by about 1 point in Nevada’s Senate race, but Cortez Masto has a path to victory — if she can win a clear majority of the outstanding votes, that is. ABC News estimates around 95,000 votes are still in the process of being counted across Nevada, and Cortez Masto would need to win about 55 percent of those to edge ahead of Laxalt. Most of the remaining votes are mostly ones cast by mail, which are Democratic-leaning, so there’s a good chance she will win more of those than Laxalt will. About two-thirds of those votes are in Clark County, and another 20 percent or so are in Washoe County (Reno), and Cortez Masto has been winning more than 60 percent of the vote batches most recently reported from those places. All of this suggests that Cortez is more likely to overtake Laxalt than not, but we’ll have to wait and see what the actual votes say.
In Arizona’s gubernatorial race, though, we estimate that Lake would have to win only about 53 percent of the outstanding ballots in order to win. That hasn’t been happening so far in the vote drops we’ve seen, but it’s certainly within the realm of possibility.
As we wait for more updates from Arizona tonight, here’s where things currently stand in the Senate race. About 500,000 ballots remain to be counted, and we estimate that Masters would have to win at least 61 percent of them in order to get more votes than Kelly overall, considering Kelly’s current 115,037-vote lead. That’s a tall order.
Now that the Election Day chaos has subsided to a steadier election-week dynamic, I’ve had more time to look over results in other states and districts where we have nearly full results. One that stuck out to me was the Kansas governor’s race, where Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly has won reelection over Republican Derek Schmidt, the state’s attorney general. Kelly leads by 2 percentage points, 49.4 percent to 47.4 percent, with 99 percent of the expected vote reporting, but this marks the second time she’s been elected without an outright majority — in 2018, she won with 48 percent.
In 2022, Kelly might’ve had an even closer call had it been a pure head-to-head race with Schmidt, but conservative independent Dennis Pyle and Libertarian Party nominee Seth Cordell have 3.2 percent combined — more than the margin between Kelly and Schmidt. It’s likely that a strong majority of those voters might’ve preferred Schmidt over Kelly if those were their only choices. After all, Pyle is a state senator who was a Republican until this year, and he campaigned to the right of Schmidt. Meanwhile, we know libertarian voters are not all Republican-leaning, but those willing to vote for the two major parties to have historically tended to lean more toward the GOP. But Kansas is not Georgia, so Kelly didn’t need to worry about winning an outright majority — just more votes than Schmidt.
Speaking of Maricopa County:
The “early ballots dropped off on Election Day” part is key. Republicans are hoping that these ballots will be better for them than the ones that reported on Wednesday and Thursday, which were primarily early ballots dropped off on the Saturday, Sunday and Monday before Election Day. On one hand, maybe that will be true: Republicans love to vote on Election Day. But on the other hand, Republicans don’t love to vote absentee (in Arizona, they refer to in-person early voting and absentee voting collectively as “early voting”). So it’s kind of a nebulous gray zone. We’ll have our answer tonight!
I’ve been watching to see how candidates who denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election did on this year’s ballot. As our forecast predicted, a majority of these candidates are projected to win. However, there’s an interesting caveat here. A big chunk of those candidates (though not all) are incumbent members of Congress who voted not to certify the 2020 election but who also more or less dropped the subject after Jan. 6. We still count them as election deniers because they took legal action to try to overturn the results and, following that, never publicly changed their position. But they also didn’t make election-fraud claims central to their campaigns. Candidates who did do this, especially newcomers, mostly lost. This suggests that playing to voters who don’t trust the results of the 2020 election wasn’t a winning strategy by itself. I have the full breakdown in my latest story, which is on the site now.
One of the biggest questions right now is who will win the Arizona governor’s race. It’s very close at the moment (a margin of 26,979 votes), and it will probably be determined by whether the remaining ballots are Democratic-leaning or Republican-leaning. But there is one potentially good sign for Hobbs. There are three counties in Arizona that have more or less counted all their votes: Gila, Graham and Greenlee. Hobbs is running 2 percentage points ahead of Biden’s 2020 performance in Gila, 6 points ahead in Graham and 2 points ahead in Greenlee. And Biden, of course, beat Trump statewide in 2020, 49.2 percent to 48.9 percent.
Of course, we shouldn’t read too much into these numbers. Gila, Graham and Greenlee are very small counties (that’s why they’re the first ones to finish counting). On the other hand, Maricopa County contains 62 percent of Arizona’s population, so really, that’s the ballgame. If Hobbs underperforms Biden there, it doesn’t much matter what she did in the rest of the state.
Looking at Washington’s 3rd District, one interesting nugget is that Gluesenkamp Perez leads by about 14 points in Clark County, while Democratic Sen. Patty Murray leads there by only about 5 points in the Senate race. In other words, Gluesenkamp Perez has won over some voters who backed Republican Senate candidate Tiffany Smiley. And Clark is key because it will have almost two-thirds of the 3rd District’s total vote. Biden carried Clark 51 percent to 46 percent in 2020, so it’s also clear Gluesenkamp Perez will outrun his showing — but by how much will determine whether she or Kent wins.
We have new numbers in Nevada’s Senate and gubernatorial races since last night. Washoe County, the other big county in Nevada (although not as big as Clark), released an updated count close to midnight Eastern yesterday that included 18,000 newly tallied votes. In the Senate contest, Cortez Masto led Laxalt among those ballots, 61 percent to 36 percent, while Sisolak led Lombardo 58 percent to 37 percent in the governor’s race.
Statewide, Laxalt now leads Cortez Masto by just 1 percentage point, 49 percent to 48 percent, while Lombardo holds a larger 3.1-point advantage, 49.7 percent to 46.6 percent. Based on ABC News estimates, there are a bit more than 90,000 votes left to tally in Nevada, which we also know are mostly mail-in ballots. Those are likely to be Democratic-leaning votes.
Everyone is watching Clark County, Nevada, but the real heads are watching Clark County, Washington. That’s the biggest county in Washington’s 3rd District, where Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez leads Republican Joe Kent 51 percent to 49 percent. According to local reporter Evan Watson, there are roughly 53,000-54,000 ballots left to count there, and 44,000 of them are in Clark County. But when Clark County updated its results last night, Kent barely gained any ground at all, raising Democratic hopes that Gluesenkamp Perez could hold on.
If she does, it would be a huge upset — our preelection forecast gave Gluesenkamp Perez just a 2 percent chance of winning. That can be chalked up to the district’s red hue (it has a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean of R+11). But Kent is a particularly extreme candidate — he has ties to white nationalist groups, and he is spreading conspiracy theories about the slow vote count in the district this week (which is a completely normal aspect of Washington’s vote-by-mail system). If Republicans lose here, the blame will fall squarely on former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Kent in the primary in order to oust the district’s outgoing Republican representative, Jaime Herrera Beutler, who voted to impeach him.
Good morning! Three days after Election Day, control of the Senate and House are still up in the air. And frankly, we’d be surprised if a chamber gets projected today, either. However, we can probably expect a handful more projections in individual House races, and maybe in Arizona’s Senate race if today’s ballot drops are as good for Democrats as they were on Wednesday and Thursday. We’ll be with you all day, so don’t go anywhere!
We just got our nightly dose of ballots from Maricopa County, Arizona! About 78,000 of them, and they were good but not great for Democrats. (For example, Hobbs led Lake 55 percent to 45 percent in this batch.) An earlier vote update out of Pima County, though, was better for Democrats, and of course, since they lead in every statewide race we’re watching, they just need to not lose these additional ballot drops. Statewide:
- Kelly now leads Masters for Senate by 114,894 votes (52 percent to 46 percent)
- Hobbs now leads Lake for governor by 26,879 votes (51 percent to 49 percent)
- Fontes now leads Finchem for secretary of state by 109,244 votes (53 percent to 47 percent)
- Mayes now leads Hamadeh for attorney general by 16,414 votes (50.4 percent to 49.6 percent)
ABC News reports that Rep. Kim Schrier is projected to win reelection in Washington’s 8th Congressional District, defeating Republican challenger Matt Larkin. Schrier had a 72-in-100 chance of winning her third term.
ABC News reports that Democratic Reps. Dina Titus and Steven Horsford are projected to win Nevada’s 1st and 4th Congressional districts, respectively. Horsford was favored in our final forecast but Titus was in a toss-up race. Titus also had been unhappy about the Democratic-drawn map, which turned her solid blue seat into a light blue seat, exposing her to greater danger. But so far the Nevada lines have worked out for Democrats. Horsford and Titus are projected to won, while Democratic Rep. Susie Lee is also narrowly up in the 3rd District.
About 12,300 votes were just reported in Clark County, Nevada, and they were good for the Democratic candidates. Laxalt’s statewide lead has shrunk to 12,671 votes (49 percent to 48 percent) in the Senate race, and Lombardo’s is down to 31,600 votes (50 percent to 46 percent) in the governors race. In addition, Francisco Aguilar — Democrats’ candidate for secretary of state — has taken the lead over Republican Jim Marchant, who falsely believes recent elections have been rigged.
Another day, another lack of projection in either the Senate or the House. Honestly, at this point, it’s looking like it might take until the weekend.
Things are still pretty much where they were yesterday. Democrats seem likely to (eventually) win Arizona and Nevada, giving them control of the Senate regardless of what happens in the Georgia runoff. And Republicans have a much clearer path to 218 House seats than Democrats do. Here’s a closer look at the races that are still up in the air.
Senate
Republicans are virtually guaranteed to have at least 49 seats in the next Senate, and Democrats have clinched 48. That means Democrats need to win two of Arizona, Georgia and Nevada to keep control.
- In Arizona, Kelly leads Masters 51 percent to 46 percent — a margin of 98,141 votes. There are over 600,000 ballots left to count statewide, but it will be difficult for Masters to overcome that deficit.
- In Nevada, Laxalt leads Cortez Masto 49 percent to 48 percent — a margin of 15,867 votes. However, there are roughly 100,000 ballots left to count, and they’re mostly mail-in ballots, which favor Democrats. So we think Cortez Masto will probably take the lead once they’re counted.
House
ABC News currently estimates that Republicans will win at least 211 House seats and Democrats will win at least 201. If you give each unprojected district to the party that is currently leading in that race, you end up with 222 Republican seats and 213 Democratic seats. That probably won’t happen — we’re expecting at least a few lead changes — but it gives you a sense for what the final margin might be. In a word, narrow.
Governor
- In Arizona, Hobbs leads Lake 50.4 percent to 49.6 percent. Just 15,024 votes separate the two, and that isn’t a safe lead at all with 600,000+ ballots left to count.
- In Nevada, Lombardo leads Sisolak 50 percent to 46 percent, or 34,207 votes. Sisolak will need those remaining mail ballots to be very blue in order to pull out a win here.
- In Oregon, Kotek leads Drazan 47 percent to 44 percent with 84 percent of the expected vote reporting. Drazan would need the outstanding ballots to be pretty red in order to close that gap.
- In Alaska, Dunleavy has 52 percent, Gara has 23 percent, Walker has 20 percent and Pierce has 5 percent. It sure looks like Dunleavy has won reelection, but it’s unclear whether we’ll need ranked-choice tabulations to tell us that.
Pueblo County, Colorado, just reported about 2,000 votes in the tight race for Colorado’s 3rd District, and it was a big help to Republican Lauren Boebert. She extended her lead from 652 votes to 1,229, and she now leads Democrat Adam Frisch 50.2 percent to 49.8 percent districtwide. This isn’t over yet, but you’d rather be Boebert than Frisch at this point.
We can do the same exercise with the Arizona gubernatorial race. There, because Katie Hobbs has only a slight lead right now, Kari Lake need only win 51 percent of the outstanding vote in order to win.
Mark Kelly currently leads Blake Masters 51 percent to 46 percent in Arizona’s U.S. Senate race. But given that there are more than 600,000 votes left to count, it’s maybe better to think of it as Kelly having 38 percent of the final vote, Masters having 34 percent and 27 percent being unknown. As this graphic shows, Masters would need to win about 57 percent of the outstanding vote in order to pull ahead of Kelly.
In Colorado’s 3rd District, Boebert may hold on: She now leads by 794 votes and her lead grew even with light-blue Pueblo County reporting most of its remaining votes. ABC News estimates that around 5,000 votes are outstanding in the district, which means Frisch would need to win 58 percent of those to win, which seems unlikely. But as we’ve seen, the vote method and timing matters. Colorado is a vote-by-mail state, but votes dropped off on Election Day tend to be more Republican, while those coming through the mail tend to be more Democratic. So until we have the results in hand, it’s hard to know just how red or blue a batch of newly reported votes will be.
Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller has conceded to his Republican challenger, Brenna Bird. It’s an historic win: Miller has served as Iowa attorney general for 38 years. He’s the longest-serving attorney general in U.S. history — and voters just rejected him. It’s really emblematic of how Iowa has transformed into a reliably Republican state.
Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado’s 3rd District, who is in a nail-biter finish with Democratic challenger, former Aspen City Councilman Adam Frisch, has taken the lead — though by fewer than 500 votes. With 96 percent of the expected vote reporting, we’re all but guaranteed to have a recount on this race: Colorado requires it when the margin of victory is 0.5 percentage points or less.
Fourteen House seats have flipped in the midterms so far, with a net gain of +8 seats for Republicans — over the +5 threshold they’d need to take control of the chamber — and redistricting (read: gerrymandering) is a large part of the reason why. Republican flipped three seats in gerrymandered Florida and Tennessee. Republicans also performed well in New York’s congressional races, flipping three seats there, where a previously enacted Democratic gerrymander was struck down. Had this map stayed in place, New York Democrats might have squeaked out more seats in the state, despite the GOP’s overperformance. Of course, redistricting isn’t the sole reason why more House districts have flipped from Democrats to Republicans than the other way around — but it’s certainly one of the main ones.
Which House and Senate seats have changed hands so far
Races that ABC News has projected for the party that does not currently hold the seat, as of 12:56 p.m. Eastern
| race | incumbent party | name | party | current lead |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AZ-2 | D | Eli Crane | R | R+7.3 |
| FL-13 | D | Anna Paulina Luna | R | R+8.1 |
| FL-7 | D | Cory Mills | R | R+17.1 |
| IA-3 | D | Zach Nunn | R | R+0.7 |
| MI-3 | R | Hillary Scholten | D | D+12.9 |
| NJ-7 | D | Thomas H. Kean Jr. | R | R+4.7 |
| NM-2 | R | Gabriel Vasquez | D | D+0.7 |
| NY-17 | D | Michael V. Lawler | R | R+1.2 |
| NY-3 | D | George A.D. Santos | R | R+8.4 |
| NY-4 | D | Anthony P. D’Esposito | R | R+3.8 |
| OH-1 | R | Greg Landsman | D | D+4.9 |
| TN-5 | D | Andy Ogles | R | R+13.6 |
| VA-2 | D | Jen A. Kiggans | R | R+4.1 |
| WI-3 | D | Derrick Van Orden | R | R+5.3 |
| race | incumbent party | name | party | current lead |
| PA | R | John Fetterman | D | D+4.0 |
Speaking of election deniers, it seems like gubernatorial and secretary of state candidates who also denied or questioned the legitimacy of Biden’s win have lost in a majority of races so far.
How election deniers are doing tonight
Gubernatorial and secretary of state candidates who have either denied or questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election and their results, as of 11:56 a.m. Eastern
| CANDIDATE | OFFICE | Position on 2020 election | % REPORTING | MARGIN | STATUS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mike Dunleavy | AK Gov. | ❓ Raised doubts | 72% | +29.0 | — |
| Kay Ivey | AL Gov. | 🚫 Denied legitimacy | 97 | +37.8 | ✓ Won |
| Wes Allen | AL SoS | ❓ Raised doubts | 97 | +34.8 | ✓ Won |
| Sarah Huckabee Sanders | AR Gov. | ❓ Raised doubts | 95 | +28.0 | ✓ Won |
| Kari Lake | AZ Gov. | 🚫 Denied legitimacy | 76 | -0.7 | — |
| Mark Finchem | AZ SoS | 🚫 Denied legitimacy | 75 | -4.8 | — |
| Dominic Rapini | CT SoS | ❓ Raised doubts | 97 | -11.8 | ✗ Lost |
| Brad Little | ID Gov. | 🚫 Denied legitimacy | 98 | +40.2 | ✓ Won |
| Darren Bailey | IL Gov. | ❓ Raised doubts | 86 | -10.2 | ✗ Lost |
| Derek Schmidt | KS Gov. | ❓ Raised doubts | 98 | -1.8 | ✗ Lost |
| Geoff Diehl | MA Gov. | 🚫 Denied legitimacy | 86 | -28.6 | ✗ Lost |
| Dan Cox | MD Gov. | 🚫 Denied legitimacy | 76 | -22.5 | ✗ Lost |
| Paul R. LePage | ME Gov. | ❓ Raised doubts | 86 | -16.4 | ✗ Lost |
| Kristina Karamo | MI SoS | 🚫 Denied legitimacy | 98 | -13.9 | ✗ Lost |
| Tudor M. Dixon | MI Gov. | 🚫 Denied legitimacy | 99 | -10.5 | ✗ Lost |
| Kim Crockett | MN SoS | 🚫 Denied legitimacy | 97 | -9.1 | ✗ Lost |
| Audrey Trujillo | NM SoS | 🚫 Denied legitimacy | 97 | -11.8 | ✗ Lost |
| Joe Lombardo | NV Gov. | ❓ Raised doubts | 84 | +3.9 | — |
| Jim Marchant | NV SoS | 🚫 Denied legitimacy | 84 | +0.2 | — |
| Douglas V. Mastriano | PA Gov. | 🚫 Denied legitimacy | 98 | -14.0 | ✗ Lost |
| Henry McMaster | SC Gov. | ❓ Raised doubts | 99 | +17.4 | ✓ Won |
| Kristi Noem | SD Gov. | ❓ Raised doubts | 99 | +26.8 | ✓ Won |
| Monae Johnson | SD SoS | ❓ Raised doubts | 99 | +29.7 | ✓ Won |
| Greg Abbott | TX Gov. | ❓ Raised doubts | 99 | +10.9 | ✓ Won |
| H. Brooke Paige | VT SoS | 🚫 Denied legitimacy | 95 | -30.0 | ✗ Lost |
| Tim Michels | WI Gov. | ❓ Raised doubts | 94 | -3.4 | ✗ Lost |
Let’s recap races where Republican candidates had between a 75-in-100 and 95-in-100 chance of winning according to our final preelection forecast. As Nathaniel previously said, the projection of Colorado’s 8th District is the latest big upset as it looks like voters really showed up for Democrats. There are now five seats that Republicans lost in races they were favored to win. It’s also notable that North Carolin’s 13th, New Mexico’s 2nd and Ohio’s 1st and 13th districts had Republican candidates that either denied, raised questions or did not comment on whether President Biden won the 2020 election fair and square (he did). So it looks like the election-denying strategy did not court enough voters.
The status of ‘Likely Republican’ House races
Results in districts where the Republican candidate had between a 75 percent and 95 percent chance of winning, according to the Deluxe version of FiveThirtyEight’s final preelection forecast, as of 11:50 a.m. Eastern
| race | democrat | republican | Percent reporting | Vote Margin | ABC Projection |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AZ-6 | Engel | Ciscomani | 75% | R+3.1 | |
| CA-45 | Chen | Steel i | 52 | R+10.0 | |
| CO-8 | Caraveo | Kirkmeyer | 78 | D+0.4 | ✔ D |
| FL-13 | Lynn | Paulina Luna | 95 | R+8.1 | ✔ R |
| FL-27 | Taddeo | Salazar i | 82 | R+14.6 | ✔ R |
| IA-1 | Bohannan | Miller-Meeks i | 88 | R+6.6 | ✔ R |
| IA-2 | Mathis | Hinson i | 92 | R+8.2 | ✔ R |
| MI-10 | Marlinga | James | 99 | R+0.5 | ✔ R |
| MT-1 | Tranel | Zinke | 99 | R+3.3 | ✔ R |
| NC-13 | Nickel | Hines | 99 | D+2.6 | ✔ D |
| NE-2 | Vargas | Bacon i | 98 | R+4.4 | ✔ R |
| NM-2 | Vasquez | Herrell i | 99 | D+0.7 | ✔ D |
| NY-1 | Fleming | LaLota | 99 | R+11.7 | ✔ R |
| OH-1 | Landsman | Chabot i | 91 | D+4.9 | ✔ D |
| OH-13 | Sykes | Gilbert | 92 | D+5.2 | ✔ D |
| WI-3 | Pfaff | Van Orden | 94 | R+5.3 | ✔ R |
ABC News reports that Republican Ryan Zinke is projected to win Montana’s 1st Congressional District, where he’s defeated Democrat Monica Tranel. This means Montana will now have two Republican representatives, since it gained a seat in reapportionment. For Zinke, this also marks a return to the House after he resigned from the state’s now-extinct at-large seat in 2017 to accept an appointment as secretary of the interior in the Trump administration. But his time in that role produced a number of controversies and potential scandals, and a Department of the Interior report published in February concluded Zinke had behaved unethically during his cabinet tenure by working on a land deal that involved a foundation he’d established. Zinke also caught flak for having largely been away from Montana until he decided to run for the House, having been in California much of the time. So while Zinke is projected to win, he’s underperforming: He leads by only 3 points in a district that has an R+10 partisan lean.
The three largest legislative chambers in the United States are the U.S. House of Representatives (435 members), the New Hampshire House of Representatives (400 members) and the Pennsylvania House of Representatives (203 members). And amazingly, all three look like they’re going to be decided by extremely narrow margins. The clerk of the New Hampshire House estimates that the current results translate to 203-197:
And in Pennsylvania, the House is currently 100-100, with three seats still TBD:
ABC News reports that Democratic Rep. Jahana Hayes is projected to win reelection in Connecticut’s 5th District. She had a 61-in-100 chance of winning in our preelection forecast, so this win was expected but not guaranteed. And as a native New Englander, I must add this note: This means it’s quite likely that Democrats will continue to represent every House seat in New England. The only unprojected race there is Maine’s 2nd, and Democratic Rep. Jared Golden will almost certainly win there after ranked-choice tabulations.
The lesson is, don’t draw a district using water contiguity across Long Island Sound. Even Democratic-leaning judges might look askance at lines like that.
So govern with more subtlety than Andrew Cuomo. Got it.
Well, Chad, I think it’s a bit of a different situation. Their map probably would have helped them too, had it not been struck down. Theoretically, Nevada’s, New Mexico’s or Illinois’s map could have been struck down too. So I guess the lesson is “don’t let your map get struck down”? Or, to be a little more helpful, try to draw a map that has at least some justification you can point to. For example, in New Mexico, Democrats claimed they were trying to increase Hispanic representation.
Are there lessons there for New York Democrats, who overreached with their proposed map, saw it struck down in court and are now watching as the state is going to send at least 10 Republicans to the House?
Yeah, Geoffrey, a lot of us analysts warned Democrats that their gerrymanders could backfire in states like New Mexico, Nevada and Illinois because they were spreading themselves very thin. But so far, it seems to have worked like a charm. In Nevada, Democrats lead in all three of their at-risk seats, the 1st, 3rd and 4th. And in Illinois, Democrats won the D+4 17th District, the D+6 6th District, the D+7 13th District and the D+7 14th District.
ABC News is reporting Democrat Gabe Vasquez is projected to win New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District, defeating Republican Rep. Yvette Herrell. This is a bit of an upset based on our forecast, which had viewed Herrell as a favorite. But New Mexico Democrats, who had full control over redistricting, drew the state’s new congressional map with an eye on taking Herrell out, as they shifted the southern-most seat in the state from R+14 to D+4 based on our partisan-lean metric. In doing this, they did potentially put the Democratic-leaning 3rd Congressional District at risk by making it only marginally blue, but that decision appears to have paid off, as Democrats have swept all three of the state’s House races.
Chad, Hobbs leads by 47,000 in Maricopa, and Kelly leads by 92,572. But I’d be careful assuming that the remaining ballots there will favor Democrats. In 2020, Arizona was one of the few states where Republicans gained on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday as more votes were counted.
And what’s the margin in Maricopa so far, Nathaniel? Presumably this is going to help each Democrat?
For context, Kelly’s lead in Arizona’s Senate race is currently less than 100,000 votes, and Hobbs’s lead in the gubernatorial race is around 13,000.
According to Yvonne Wingett Sanchez of the Washington Post and Brahm Resnik of KPNX-TV, Maricopa County, Arizona, has between 400,000 and 410,000 ballots left to count. The next update from the county will be between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. local time, which is 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. for you East Coasters.
I ever tell you guys about the time I was in a Denver park and (at least to my somewhat trained eye) Michael Bennet walked by with John Hickenlooper? They were dressed in jeans and light puffy jackets and were deep in conversation. I heard them say only one word as they passed: “Democracy.”
It was a perfect moment.
ABC News is reporting that Democrat Yadira Caraveo is projected to win Colorado’s 8th Congressional District. This is a big upset — Caraveo had just a 9-in-100 chance of winning in our final House forecast. But Colorado really showed up for Democrats on Tuesday; Gov. Jared Polis won reelection by a punishing 17-point margin, Sen. Michael Bennet is winning by 11 and of course, Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert is locked in the race of her life in the 3rd District.
Our first projection of the morning: Democratic Rep. Greg Stanton is projected to win Arizona’s 4th District, ABC News reports. This is not a surprise — Stanton had a 94-in-100 chance of winning according to our preelection forecast, and he currently leads Republican Kelly Cooper 57 percent to 43 percent.
Just in case anyone was ~ curious ~ about where some of these close races could be headed — recount laws, like most of election administration, differ by state. Most of the tight races we’re watching right now are western states. Here are their recount laws:
- In Arizona, a recount is automatically triggered if the margin between two candidates is within 0.5 percent; there is no deadline for completion.
- The same margin of 0.5 percent would trigger an automatic recount in Colorado, which sets a deadline for completion 30 days after the election.
- There is no threshold that triggers an automatic recount in Nevada, but any losing candidate can request one.
Remember, though, that recounts rarely reverse election results — the shifts that result from them are generally so small that they would only matter in the closest of races.
Good morning, election f(r)iends! We’re back on duty refreshing state election websites and Twitter to bring you the latest results. We still don’t know which party will control the Senate or the House, but to our eyes, the Senate leans Democratic at this moment and the House leans Republican. As we wait for official projections, I recommend reading some of the analyses we wrote yesterday about things we do know:
- Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux on how abortion really seemed to be important after all — Democrats had a better-than-usual midterm, and the abortion-rights side won in virtually every race where abortion was at stake.
- Alex Samuels with a curtain-raiser on the Georgia Senate runoff, which is now officially on for Dec. 6.
- And some guy named Nate Silver on how candidate quality mattered.
Those are all the results we’re expecting this evening — and unfortunately, we’re not much closer to knowing which party will control the Senate or House. We’re pausing the live blog for now, but we’ll be back tomorrow morning around 9 a.m. Eastern!
We’ve now entered Election Week, the magical time when we await vote updates from the counties in states like Arizona and Nevada as they work to process and count all remaining votes. In Arizona, much of this revolves around Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and about 60 percent of the state’s vote in most elections. We just got a new batch of about 60,000 votes added to Maricopa’s total, which was slightly Democratic-leaning. In the Senate race, Kelly edged Masters 55 percent to 43 percent in this update, while in the gubernatorial race, Hobbs led Lake 54 percent to 46 percent. Statewide, Kelly now leads Masters by 5 points, 51 percent to 46 percent, with 76 percent of the expected vote reporting. Meanwhile, Hobbs has a minuscule lead of 0.6 points over Lake, 50.3 percent to 49.7 percent.
There are plenty more votes to count, however: About 600,000 votes statewide in each race, around 80 percent of which are in Maricopa County and Pima County (Tucson). The Pima votes (20 percent of the total) will be probably be somewhat Democratic leaning, while Maricopa’s share (60 percent of the total) will likely vary a lot from batch to batch. Given Kelly’s lead, he appears more likely to retain his edge than Hobbs in the gubernatorial contest, but we’ll just have to see what future updates bring.
We just got a new batch of ballots from Clark County, Nevada — about 14,000 worth — and they were good for Democrats. Cortez Masto cut her deficit by about 6,000 votes, and Sisolak cut his by about 4,000. As far as we know, there are about 70,000 ballots left to count in Clark County, and at that rate, Cortez Masto would be able to overtake Laxalt statewide. But that’s a big if.
ABC News reports that Republican Zach Nunn is projected to win the race for Iowa’s 3rd District. This is a flip for Republicans in a seat that’s no stranger to swings: The incumbent, Democratic Rep. Cindy Axne, flipped the seat from red to blue in 2018. However, she only held onto the seat narrowly in 2020, and this year was always going to be a struggle — according to our forecast, Nunn was slightly favored to win. This is a significant loss for Democrats, though, as more closely contested races are decided. Republicans swept the board in key races in Iowa this year, with projected victories in all four House races, the governor’s race and the Senate.
ABC News reports that a Republican is projected to win another New York seat — this time it’s Anthony D’Esposito, the Republican candidate in the state’s Democratic-leaning 4th District. It’s an open seat vacated by retiring incumbent Democrat Rep. Kathleen Rice, so it’s a flip for Republicans. We’re still waiting on a few more calls for House races in New York — we’ll see if those go Republicans’ way as well.