With a fair dose of humility — I pedantically explained to my grandmother that Trump could not win on Election Night 2016 despite her insistence otherwise, and she foresees a Trump landslide this time around — I submit these predictions for Tuesday.
- Joe Biden will become president-elect with a six-point popular vote advantage and 305 electoral votes to President Trump’s 233. North Carolina, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nebraska’s second congressional district will flip from red to blue. The president will narrowly — by three or less points — hold on to Texas, Georgia, and Florida. He’ll have more convincing wins in Iowa and Ohio. Suburban discontent and subpar GOP Senate candidates will sink him in Arizona and North Carolina. He’ll compensate for suburban losses in Texas, Florida, and Georgia with increased shares of the Latino and African-American vote. Biden will sweep the “Blue Wall” states in the Midwest that Trump shocked the world by winning in 2016. He was always the Democrats’ best bet for taking them back, and he will succeed on all three counts, although just barely in the case of Pennsylvania.
- Biden will be declared the winner tomorrow night. Pennsylvania may very well be the disaster some expect it to be, and I suspect that Trump will not call to concede until he knows its fate, but most if not all of the major outlets will feel confident enough projecting Biden as the winner before we wake up for work on Wednesday morning.
- On November 4, Republicans and Democrats will each have 49 senators ready to caucus with them in the Senate. GOP incumbents Cory Gardner of Colorado and Martha McSally of Arizona have trailed their opponents for the duration of the race, and they will both be unseated on Tuesday. North Carolina’s Thom Tillis will run behind the president in a state that Biden will win and leave the upper chamber as well. Steve Daines and Joni Ernst will win in Montana and Iowa respectively, where the polls have made a late break toward the GOP. Susan Collins, who if the polls are to be believed should be soundly defeated, will overcome the odds and ranked-choice voting to earn a fifth term in the Senate and carry on the time-old Maine tradition of electing moderate Republican women to the Senate — there are some people you just don’t bet against. John James and Jason Lewis will fall short in their challenges to two very nearly anonymous Democratic incumbents. In other, less toxic years for Republicans, they would have prevailed. Whether Mitch McConnell or Chuck Schumer is majority leader will depend on the two Georgia seats, both of which will go to run-offs. Senator Kelly Loeffler will be the Republican nominee against Democrat Raphael Warnock in the special election for the seat that once belonged to Johnny Isakson. Oh, and Mitch McConnell will defeat Democratic cash vacuum Amy McGrath by double digits.