What Happened This Week In Washington — And Georgia

Yeah, I think people are still paying too much attention to the raw vote counts and not enough to the needle and things like it. It was pretty obvious an hour ago that Warnock and Ossoff weren’t going to maintain 8-point margins or whatever. It’s also pretty obvious now that the vote that’s left to count looks a bit blue-leaning. Enough for Democrats to win? Probably, but not for sure by any means.

Both Perdue and Loeffler are now in the lead because some of the more recent votes came in from Cherokee and Walton counties and were very good for the Republican candidates. But so far the GOP leads aren’t reflected in the NYT’s needles, which are still tilting slightly toward Ossoff and Warnock. It seems like those Republican gains were anticipated by the needle’s model, so they didn’t change its forecast much.

In case you’re keeping score, FiveThirtyEight’s predictions in November had Republicans favored to win the regular (Perdue) Georgia seat and Democrats favored to win the special (Loeffler) seat. So unless there’s a split tonight, we’ll go 1-1. A split is still possible, though!