It’s amazing what is happening in gubernatorial races. Some outlets have called Pennsylvania for Shapiro.
The Senate is looking like a matter of how the dice roll in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin. There’s still room for hope. The Dems could even end up with 51 seats if everything goes our way, but a 50-50 split is probably more likely.
ETA: The counting seems to have slowed down in those states (especially in the cities). We may not know how those go for a while. The next big batch of counted votes to come in could be pivotal.
If polls are as off as they seem, I’m not sure there’s any way for fivethirtyeight to recover. Really, with how long it takes for urban votes to be processed, there isn’t much point to poll watch tonight, anyway.
If this all culminates in an end to horserace poll prognastication, then I’m all for it!
It’s only 2:00pm here in Japan, so I am still desparately waiting for something, anything to come in from counts in these key states, but you’re right: I’m not going to get any definitive answers until it’s bedtime for me here at the earliest…
Johnson is up by 40k votes in Wisconsin, but there are still votes to count in Milwaukee and Madison. If we can get rid of him, that would be quite a good day for everyone.
I think Wisconsin is looking a lot tighter than it seems. Barnes has cut Johnson’s lead pretty severely in the last hour and Milwaukee has a lot of votes outstanding and it’s tipping to Barnes heavily.
At this point it’s clear that the Dems have held pretty resoundingly. They’re still going to lose the House, but not by enough to give McCarthy a strong coalition. He’ll spend a lot of time on sham investigations, but I can imagine there will be plenty of circumstances to peel of 5+ R centrists for legislation. Compared to what was originally projected and with the “red mirage” of the past month, this is a huge night for democracy.
Oh, and holding the Gov’s offices in PA, WI and AZ (as of 2am est) gives democracy a significantly better chance of surviving 2024.
These governor races suggest that people in the Rust Belt and Sun Belt are a lot less interested in what the Republicans are selling compared with 2016. There could still be some unpleasant surprises out west, but I would not count on it. Pennsylvania may end up being the only Senate seat that actually changes hands, and that’s enough.
I don’t imagine many Republicans are going to be out there voting for Walker in a runoff if it’s already 50D to 49R, so fingers crossed on that as well.
After nearly a year of constant media reports about how D’s will get crushed as if it’s an immutable and prophesied truth, it’s clear that win or lose this isn’t going to happen. If anything there’s still hope of keeping control of the House and picking up a critical additional Senate seat when it’s all said and done.
There’s definitely no “red tsunami” or whatever other clever metaphor that has been getting plastered everywhere since Biden came into office.
If this doesn’t happen and we lose either/both chambers, it won’t be as bad as I feared. Sure it will be a shit show but the circular firing squad of the far right and lite right R’s will spend all their time in-fighting. There won’t be enough majority to get anything of importance passed. There won’t be endless impeachments of Biden and his cabinet. They will be lucky to get a select committee going to look at Hunter Biden’s laptop. Any majority will be razor thin and so-called “reasonable Republicans” may end up caucusing with D’s anyway. Kevin McCarthy will be lucky if he is even named speaker. They won’t lower gas prices. They won’t end inflation. They won’t end crime. They also won’t cut social security, create a federal ban on abortion, or kill the ACA. If they FAFO, it’ll do little to help them in 2024.
It’s clear that the Senate will remain razor thin even if we lose the majority so I don’t expect anything to change here unless we can pick up an additional seat (and I’m confident Warnock will win GA). And regardless, Biden still has the veto power and there’s no way the Senate would be able to scrape together the votes to override that.
If we end up losing in the end, the next two years will no doubt be a gridlocked shit show where nothing gets done. But on the upside, R’s won’t have a chance in hell of getting their fascist far right agenda anywhere and it’ll only serve to expose them as having zero interest in actually helping their constituents. The drip feeding of dopamine from “pwning the libs” loses its power when your elected representatives aren’t actually doing anything else for you in the end.
I cannot stress how big of a deal this is. For the president’s party (and an unpopular president at that) to do this well in the midterms is huge. It really goes to show how far out of touch the GQP is.
Right? At this point I don’t think they have a shred of credibility left. They have been spectacularly wrong with nearly every major prediction since 2016.
I love how they are, at this very second, saying, “Well actually this is not all that far from what was expected given our probably confidence ranges.”
