Democrat John Fetterman will defeat Republican Mehmet Oz in a key race for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, Fox News decision desk and NBC News project.
Democratic Representative Tom Malinowski will be ousted by Republican Thomas Kean Jr. in NJ-7, a key swing district, CNN projects.
Democratic Representative Vicente Gonzalez will defeat Republican Representative Mayra Flores in TX-34, CNN projects.
Wisconsin — Michels is pulling within 25k of Evers, but almost 40% of Milwaukee has yet to be counted. He's almost certainly done for.
Johnson is 80k ahead of Barnes and should be able to withstand the Milwaukee surge.
It's hard to look at tonight's result as anything other than a strong repudiation of the decision to nominate candidates based primarily on their loyalty to Trump and their willingness to indulge his stolen election fantasies. In Georgia, Ohio, and New Hampshire candidates endorsed and heavily promoted by Trump (Walker, Vance, Buldoc) are significantly underperforming the more traditional Republicans (Kemp, DeWine, Sununu). In Pennsylvania, Trump pushed Mastriano (who got clobbered) and Oz (who is likely to lose). Throughout the country, MAGA supported House candidates are losing. Meanwhile, in Florida, Ron DeSantis managed to unite traditional Republican voters, populists, and win over independents through competent governance. And that was the guy that Trump decided to take shots at in the run up to the election. Republicans have a pretty clear choice — they can continue to make the party a vehicle for Trump's ego, lose winnable races, and claim fraud after the fact. Or they can move on and start winning again.
Some good news out of New York. From Henry Olsen:
“Rs will flip NY 17, 18, & 19, seizing the entire Hudson River Valley. They will also flip IA 3 – the one county out is a big GOP one and the margin will exceed Axne's lead. Ds will flip OH 1 (Chabot) and win NC 13 (open – notional R).”
A further thought on the success of incumbents tonight: even if Dr. Oz pulls this out, it seems clear that Pat Toomey would have won re-election. It also seems clear that Rob Portman would have walked off in Ohio without needing all the resources that went into electing J.D. Vance. Democrats had only one incumbent senator retire, in Vermont. Republicans were defending five of them, six if you count the special election in Oklahoma. Even the easy wins in Missouri, Alabama, and Oklahoma came after expensive primaries. I can't blame Richard Shelby or Jim Inhofe for retiring at their ages, and maybe the party was better off with Richard Burr retiring, but Republicans clearly would have better off had Toomey and Portman not retired – and it seems clear that they retired in large part because the experience of serving with Donald Trump and facing the wrath of his most dedicated supporters made it miserably unpleasant for them to continue working in the Senate and running for office. There are important lessons there.
One of the jarring contrasts tonight: incumbents of both parties are mostly doing very well. The hyped challengers to Republican incumbents have failed miserably thus far in statewide races – it looks as if every single Republican incumbent in the Senate or the governorships will win (with the caveat that we know nothing about Lisa Murkowski's race). The hoped-for defeats of Democratic incumbents have mostly fizzled, in the House as well as the statewide races. This, despite the fact that polls show that 68% of the voters think the country is on the wrong track, and maybe a third of that think the country is on the right track. Look at COVID policy: voters rewarded Ron DeSantis and Brian Kemp for getting lockdown policy right, but they exacted no penalty on Gretchen Whitmer, Kathy Hochul, or other Democrats for getting it wrong.
This may be an unpopular point, but it seems to me that polling in this election has actually proven to be pretty good. The races that were expected to be blowouts have proven to be blowouts (e.g., Florida, Ohio governor, Pennsylvania governor) while the Senate races we were waiting for (Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania) were statistically tied. Expectations of a wave were largely based on the fact that in prior midterms, the Senate races have tended to break in the end toward the opposition party. But the polls showed that Democrats had a chance in all of them. We'll have to wait for more dust to clear to have a better evaluation of the performance of polls. But so far, the results are consistent with the range of outcomes that one could have anticipated through polling.
Republican Representative Ted Budd will defeat Democrat Cheri Beasley in the closely watched U.S. Senate race in North Carolina, CNN and NBC News project.