You know, Jeff, we keep hearing about residents of blue states moving to red states and making them purple — “Californication” or “Californiazation” out west — but in Florida, people keep moving there, and voting Republican. Clearly, the Republican leaders in Florida know what they’re doing. Maybe some year the GOP will nominate the governor of Florida to be president…
As expected, Jim Justice has won the West Virginia seat held by outgoing Sen. Joe Manchin, per AP projections, putting Republicans one early step on the path toward retaking the Senate.
Trump’s margins in Florida are almost inconceivable for a modern Republican presidential performance. He’s looking set to win Miami-Dade County going away, and even his own home county of Palm Beach County (historically a rich Democratic stronghold) is competitive.
Florida is permanently a different state than it was before Covid.
The early exit polling out of Georgia, where polls just closed, found Donald Trump is winning independents by a significant 54 to 43 percent. In 2020, Joe Biden carried independent voters in Georgia. If that finding is representative of the final results, that will be a big hurdle for Harris to overcome.
NBC’s Steve Kornacki zoomed in on Florida’s Osceola County’s early vote dump (71 percent of the county’s total) to see if this county with its large Puerto Rican population reacted negatively to the joke that consumed the final week of election news coverage. His verdict: No signs of that so far.
So far, Trump has improved substantially on his 2020 performance in Osceola, and that’s just accounting for early and mail voting. The Election Day vote tends to favor the GOP, and Trump may be poised to flip this majority Hispanic county into his column for the first time.
Some of the obvious races are starting to get called. The AP has called Kentucky and Indiana for Donald Trump and projects that Republican Mike Braun has won the gubernatorial election in Indiana. Kamala Harris
Georgia, Florida, and Virginia have now closed. FL will report lightning fast, and the only question is Trump’s margin. GA intends to have 3/4 of its vote counted within the next hour, so we’ll have a sense of how the night is going quickly.
We should have most of Georgia in by 8pm. That will start to give us an indication of whether the Kamala Harris Electoral College blowout scenario is still in play. If she wins the state, she’ll almost certainly take the election, whereas to Trump, Georgia is necessary but not sufficient.
Hamilton County’s (still preliminary) returns confirm that affluent, degree-holder-dominated suburbanites continued to drift into the Democratic column over the last four years, but we probably knew that. What we don’t yet know is whether Trump’s strength among white working-class and minority voters, particularly males, will show up in force.
Election watchers have been keeping a close eye on Indiana’s Hamilton County, where its previously GOP-leaning affluent, degree-heavy suburbs have drifted toward the Democratic column in recent cycles.
In 2016, Donald Trump carried the county with 56 percent of the vote. In 2020, Trump carried it with just over 52 percent of the vote. Today, with 65 percent of the (mostly early) vote in, Harris leads Trump in Hamilton County by 50 to 48.8 percent.
Trump may yet take the county as more of the vote comes in, but it seems likely that the its Democratic drift has continued apace. And if the results here say anything about this demographic more broadly, one that may make up the backbone of Harris’s coalition, what it is saying is good for Democrats.