Editor’s Blog
7 PM is when this really starts. Polls close in all or most of Florida, Virginia and Georgia. We’ll get a bunch of results pretty quickly. Here’s my results watching guide. Of course, you can find all results in our map right you can see to the right. In these states we also have big governors races.
Here’s my guide to watching tonight’s results and my list of the early races to watch to get a sense of what to expect over the course of the evening. Here’s some exit polls – which will be updated over the course of the evening. You can look at exits for different states, nationwide, etc.
Here’s the race I’m watching right now: Kentucky 6. (This race will be an important tell. But so far we only have a thousand votes – 6:22 pm.)
Also. This guy (Steve Schale) knows Florida. Watch his updates.
6:34 PM: Basically we have some results from Indiana and Kentucky. But tiny amounts. Really nothing that tells us anything. At 7 PM we get Florida and Virginia and some of Georgia. We’ll know a lot pretty quickly then.
6:46 PM: Okay, we’re starting to get some actual numbers from KY-6. Basically tied, with minuscule lead for McGrath. But again, sub-1% reporting. Counting real slow.
6:59 PM: About 6% in and KY-6 is really straight up tie, keeps going back and forth.
So here we are, not much left but the counting. We’ll be hosting election results on the front page of the site. But you can bookmark this page too, where you can find all the results for Congress, governors and major state propositions and referenda. If you want a list of people who are highly knowledgeable and try to make sense of the numbers in real time, here’s my Twitter list of smart election data people.
Below is a list of races to watch in the early evening to get a sense of where things are going.
John Light has put together a handy guide for tracking the Senate results tonight (Prime subscribers). Really pleased with this. Check it out!
How are things going in Dodge City? Well …
I’m back at the Expo Center where press aren’t being allowed to shoot inside. Brad Schlozman, who’s representing Ford County in a lawsuit over voting, says it’s state law. Our attorney says, “That’s insane.” pic.twitter.com/SJvGkgcpww
— Katie Moore (@katie_reports) November 6, 2018
So here we are.
Because of the nature of our biennial federal elections, unified Republican control of the federal government and a thoroughly pliant Congress, Donald Trump has had free rein, more or less untrammeled, for almost two years. Democrats and all Trump’s opponents have had no recourse or ability to constrain him beyond organizing, protesting and trying to make a public case against the Trumpian slide into quasi-democracy and authoritarian rule. Read More
In Missouri last night Trump claimed that if Democrats are elected they’ll destroy Obamacare.
The initial polls closing on the East Coast can feel a little anticlimactic, with a dribble of returns signifying very little and many hours of tabulating still to come. However, we may start to get a feel for where the night is going as some of those early East Coast returns in key races signal whether the day’s paradigm is a maximal Dem gain or a maximal GOP hold, or merely somewhere in between. Cameron Joseph highlights a few of those canary in the coal mine races that may tell us early which way things are headed.
Today is a better day than most to remember that the GOP’s forever war to tilt the election playing field in its favor by denying the franchise to minority urban voters while maximizing the franchise for white rural voters remains a defining feature of American politics.
The next big GOP power grab on this front is already in the works. Tierney Sneed has more in this Prime piece.
Your emails and photos from Election Day are one of the best parts of working at TPM. Keep ’em coming!
This is really, really important. We’ve talked about the various ways Republicans have tilted the electoral playing field to lock in disproportionate electoral power for Republicans, particularly older and whiter populations outside the big cities. This is another example of that played out in the attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. Read our report.
CNN, NBC, FB and now even Fox News have either refused to run or dropped the President’s closing ad for being too racist.
I’ve been trying to hit various polls, late shifting races and more here in the Ed Blog. But I think the best wrap is this podcast episode Cameron Joseph and I just did. We work our way through all the latest trends, what to make of the polls, possible big surprises and the heavy weight of uncertainty. You can listen here or subscribe on iTunes.
Or maybe not. Ben Smith and I were on a panel a couple weeks ago at a conference about content moderation, the press, the 1st amendment, yada yada. The conference was organized by TPM alum and now law professor big shot Kate Klonick. The panel was moderated by Jack Balkin of Yale Law School. Video of the panel after the jump …
Gab, the Twitter-like social network for racists and anti-Semites, is back online after getting dumped by its former web host. Allegra Kirkland has the story.
In related news, President Trump comments on his latest ad.
There are now three states in which the total “early vote” is larger than the entire vote (early and election day) in 2014. Those states are Texas, Nevada and Arizona.
Don’t forget to join us tomorrow night. We’ll be hosting live election results for every congressional race, gubernatorial race and major referendum and proposition across the country. We’ll also be bringing you all the latest news, commentary, video of key moments and all the rest. We’re going to leave everything on the field bringing you coverage of the most important mid-term elections of our lifetimes. Join us.
I’ve been waiting so long for this. You’ll remember that one of the big scammers in the US Attorney firing scandal, which was really a voter suppression scandal, was a guy named Bradley Schlozman, a character who was just as democracy-malevolent as Hans von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams but somehow outdid them both in pure hapless gooberism. Well he’s back, as the lawyer representing the official trying to find ways to make it hard to vote in Dodge City, Kansas. John Light has our full Schloz report and retrospective (sub req) here.
If you really need an additional Schlozman fix watch this video of Sen. Leahy slapping Bradley around in congressional testimony in 2007. Video after the jump …
This is an ad (“Like a Girl”) for MJ Hegar who’s running against Rep. John Carter (R-TX). I’m not sure whether it’s getting a heavy run on TV. But Hegar has massively out-raised Carter. So I’m not sure why it wouldn’t be. Cook rates this a “Likely Republican” district, so well on the outer margin of the possible for a Democrat. As far as I can tell though it hasn’t been polled.
Ad after the jump … Read More
From TPM Reader AC in Georgia …
You are undoubtedly getting a massive number of emails from across the country, and especially the most contested races. I thought I’d throw in a few cents, fwiw.
We live in John Lewis’s City of Atlanta district, but we’ve been canvassing heavily in the burbs — GA-6 and GA-7, both competitive House races in increasingly Asian and Latinx communities (Gwinnett County), as well as the southern suburbs of Clayton County, which are majority African American. Much of this organizing has been done through the Working Families Party (which you no doubt know from NY politics, and is trying to build a base in the South) and the New Georgia Project (founded by Stacey Abrams herself as the sort of ACORN-ish nemesis of the GOP vote-suppressing crowd).
Are you a big TPM fan? Want to find out about a new way to support TPM at a higher level than Prime and get a bunch of cool stuff in the process? Let us introduce you to TPM Inside.
A brief note on reader reports I have and will be publishing. In the nature of things some of them will be very rah-rah. That’s natural for people heavily involved in organizing in the final days of a campaign. That’s just as it should be. Do not assume by what I publish that I’m validating anyone’s predictions, positive or negative, implicit or explicit. My interest is getting reports from people who are in the nuts and bolts of get out the vote and organization- and capacity-building.
An update from a TPM Reader in Tennessee. It’s an interesting update on a lot of fronts, much as the one I posted over the weekend from Maine. But one key point is the importance of political organizing, building organizational capacity at the state and local level, even if a lot of the results may only show up in future elections.
I wanted to send you a quick update from the deep red state of Tennessee. I don’t know if Democrats will win any new seats here, though Bredesen has a shot at it and we should pick up some state legislative seats. But I wanted to let you know that Democrats are energized and more importantly ORGANIZED here like never before.
It turns out the backstory to Brian Kemp’s accusation against the Georgia Democratic party is about as stupid as you could imagine. According to this report, a voter found the vulnerability, alerted an attorney for the plaintiff’s in one of the on-going lawsuits against Kemp’s office. That lawyer alerted the attorneys for Kemp’s office. There were apparently a couple lines of communication. See the details here. But the gist is this. There was a security vulnerability in the system Kemp’s is responsible for securing. His office was alerted the vulnerability. Then instead of focusing on fixing it he put out a press release accusing the state Democratic party of trying to “hack” the state system. Shocking and awful and about as bad as you can imagine.