Tuesday night’s story was about the surprisingly strong Democratic performance almost everywhere except Florida and the New York City metro area. Progressives won; moderates won; mostly everyone won (except people running against Ron DeSantis). But with votes still being counted in much of the West, a lot is still unclear. Let’s review the known unknowns!
We don’t know …
• Who controls the House. Thanks in part to a resurgence of Republicanism in the New York suburbs, the New York Times’ vaunted election needle currently favors Republicans pretty strongly to take the House of Representatives. But they’re not expected to have a wide majority—13 seats, the needle predicts at the moment—and it’s not entirely out of the question that a strong Dem performance on the West Coast could mean the chamber doesn’t flip. But counting is slow out there because of their “laid-back” and “chilled-out” way of life. (Or maybe it’s just their heavy use of mail-in ballots, which can be postmarked up until the day of the election—who’s to say?)
• Who controls the Senate. Yes, that would be the other big one, huh? Democrats are considered likely to hold on there because Maggie Hassan was reelected in New Hampshire, John Fetterman flipped the seat of the retiring Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, and Mark Kelly is looking good against Blake Masters in Arizona. In Nevada, though, Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto may or may not get enough mail-in votes to take the lead back from Republican Adam Laxalt. Also, Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock appear to be headed for a runoff in Georgia. If Democrats win one of those races, they maintain a 50–50 “majority” in the chamber on the basis of Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote. If they win both, it’s 51–49. If they win neither, Mitch McConnell is the majority leader again.
• Who won the Los Angeles mayor’s race. One of the potential sub-narratives that could emerge from the election is that Democrats appear to have done quite well in the heartland—perhaps buoyed by the youth vote, abortion rights, and the MAGA extremeness of GOP candidates in those states—but not as well in the coastal suburbs where they’d previously made gains in the Trump era. Republican candidates in those areas campaigned on crime and homelessness issues—a strategy perhaps best exemplified by a non-Republican, Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, who ran as a conservative Dem against party mainstreamer Karen Bass. (California’s primary-runoff system allows Democrats to face one another in general elections.) Caruso currently leads … but with only 14 percent of votes counted, as of publication time.
• Whether prominent members of the House in each party suffered extra-embarrassing defeats. New York Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney was the chair of Democrats’ national House efforts. Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert was one of the leaders of the Republicans’ 2020 class of provocative Trump supporters. Both are currently losing their races, albeit with votes left to be counted. [Update, Nov. 9, 11 a.m.: Maloney has conceded.]
• Whether a “stolen election” Republican takes the governorship in Arizona. The continuity of the democratic process won key victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, where voters selected Democratic candidates who are not going to cause a constitutional crisis if their party’s presidential candidate loses the state in 2024. In Nevada, Republican Joe Lombardo, who is at least not an outright 2020 election denier, has a narrow lead. But in Arizona, super-MAGA TV anchor Kari Lake—who’s basically made her entire campaign about election “fraud”—is still in it against Democrat Katie Hobbs, with more than 30 percent of ballots still to be counted.
• Whether Montana protects certain abortion rights. For several election cycles now, liberal ballot initiatives like raising the minimum wage and restoring voting rights to convicted felons have done well, even in states where conservative candidates otherwise did well. That trend appears to have continued, with Nebraska voters approving a $15 minimum wage and Kentucky voters shooting down a proposal that would have declared that the state does not protect the right to an abortion. In Montana, though, an initiative that would impose criminal penalties on medical providers under circumstances that its advocates believe constitute “abortion” has yet to be called.
That’s it. Everything else in American politics has been settled definitively. Happy poll watching!
