“They are not expecting this to be wrapped up tonight,” CNN’s Abby Phillips says of the Harris campaign. “This is going to be not resolved tonight in their eyes,” her colleague, Jeff Zeleny, confirms.
So, even if Harris addresses her supporters tonight, she is unlikely to concede the race even if the returns suggest she lacks a viable path to 270 electoral votes. Her opponent, Donald Trump, is unlikely to exercise similar forbearance.
Returns continue to look bad for incumbent Republican Marc Molinaro in New York’s 19th district. He’s down 10 points to Democrat Josh Riley with 82 percent of the vote in and the heavily Republican areas mostly already counted. Molinaro won a very close election over Riley to take this seat in 2022, and the rematch is looking considerably worse for the Republican.
Republican Zach Nunn pulls ahead in Iowa’s 3rd district, with 84 percent reporting. A lot of the vote yet to be counted is in Nunn-friendly territory, so he may hang on there. This would be a key hold for Republicans if he wins, who are looking to keep their thin House majority.
Decision Desk calls what was obvious a while ago, that Bernie Moreno has defeated Sherrod Brown for Senate in Ohio.
I think the logic behind not calling Virginia yet is that there are still lots of votes to be counted in Virginia Beach, which will probably slightly favor Trump, and a lot of votes to be counted in the Richmond suburbs, which will probably slightly favor Harris. Most of the vote in the rural Trump counties and the Northern Virginia Harris counties has already been counted. But there’s still a lot of the city of Richmond yet to report, and that’s deep blue. Harris leads by over 50,000 votes with 80 percent reporting, so even if she just treads water, she would still win. Advantage Harris, but the state is much closer than expected.
The Trump campaign’s significant gains in Hispanic-dominated precincts across the country will impose on the Democratic Party the same conundrum that forced the GOP to perform some soul-searching after 2012. The party will have to ask itself how it managed to sacrifice its appeal to Latino voters, and what it can do to repair the damage.
As mentioned below, as Fairfax, Arlington, and Alexandria report all their results, I think Harris’ lead in Virginia, currently just 1.5 percentage points, will grow. But if Trump is even reasonably close in Virginia, there will be not just questions about “how did the pollsters miss this?” but really tough questions for how the heck the Harris campaign was so blindsided by their weakness in Virginia.
On the current trajectory, Trump is on track to win a convincing victory in the Electoral College. He has better than even odds of winning the popular vote, too – the first time a Republican will have done so in 20 years. He is highly likely to enter office alongside a GOP-controlled Senate and, while the margins are likely to be excruciatingly tight, a GOP-led House so long as the median tossup district follows the winner of the presidency (which usually occurs).
Republicans are favored to walk into 2025 with unified government. That may prompt Republicans to speculate wildly about the reforms they might enact while they control the reins of power in Washington, but that daydream is likely to be short-lived once they remember they will be compelled to rewrite the tax code when the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expires next year.
There are many competing and incompatible views about how the government should approach tax code reform within the GOP, but that is a fight for another day. Tomorrow, barring a change in the weather, Republicans celebrate.
And now AP calls Iowa for Trump. A lot of wasted breath on that Selzer poll a few days ago . . .
An extremely close race so far in Iowa’s 3rd district. Democrat Lanon Baccam leads incumbent Republican Zach Nunn by less than 5,000 votes with 80 percent reporting.