10:52 PM: We’re coming up on our third hour of vote counting. And the picture is pretty clear: Republicans have all but certainly won three of the six races of the evening. To retake the state senate Dems have to win all three remaining races. And at the moment they’re leading in all three. Just not by big margins or with too little of the vote in to have a clear sense of the final result. Got that? Good.
10:57 PM: More news out of district 18. The Republican Hopper has just reclaimed a narrow 2 point lead, now with a big 79% reporting. However, all the remaining votes appear to be in a county the Democrat King has been winning. Simply too close to call.
11:22 PM: We’ve finally gotten the call for Olsen (R) in the 14th district. So GOP holds three or six.
11:06 PM: Dem King retakes nominal lead (just over 100 votes) in 18th district. It’s starting to look like district 18 is where this is all going to come down to.
11:07 PM: AP calls district 32 as Dem pick up.
11:13 PM: As noted above, looks like this comes down to district 18 — Hopper (R), King (D). Right now essentially tied with 87% reporting. But the remaining vote is in a county King has been winning.
11:21 PM: The race in District 8 has just tightened up big time. Now a two point race after a bunch chunk of Republican votes came in. But that county is now tapped out and the remaining votes are from counties where the race has been close.
10:22 PM: We’re almost 90 minutes into the counting. And the picture is starting to get clearer. We have two Republican incumbents who have clearly held on — Cowles and Harsdorf, though the later hasn’t been called yet. Another Republican, Olsen, has a 10 pt margin with 71% of the vote in. That’s looking fairly solid in the GOP column, but far from a sure thing. After that you have three races where the Dems are either ahead or very close. But these all have very few or relatively few precincts reporting. Big picture is that Dems can still get the 3 seats but they need everything to fall their way. No margin for error. Latest results here.
10:32 PM: Dems now tied or ahead in three races. But with very lower totals reporting in 2 of the 3.
10:36 PM: Unless returns speed up in districts 8 and 18 this could be a pretty long evening.
10:39 PM: We must be close to seeing a call for Republican Olsen in district 14, 8 point spread with 86% reporting.
10:44 PM: Olsen (R) now up by 8 points with 94% in. A bit surprised we haven’t seen a call there yet. Should happen momentarily.
10: 49 PM: Have an unconfirmed report that the reason for the odd lack of a call in the Olsen race is that a lot of the remaining vote is in the challengers hometown. That’s a helluva deficit to make up. But the folks at AP are understandably reluctant to call it.
10:02 PM: So we’re on to our second hour of vote counting. The early returns look encouraging for Republicans. But a lot of votes remain to be counted. The two Republicans who looked to be in the best shape doing into the evening — Cowles and Harsdorf — both have big leads with more than half the precincts reporting.
10:09 PM: Stubbornly few precincts reporting in two races it looks like the Dems would have to win tonight to get pick up 3 seats. Incumbent Republicans Darling and Hopper, both with fewer than 10% of precincts reporting.
10:11 PM: Beware of early returns: new precincts just came in for district 8, the Darling race, took the number from 71% to 29% for the incumbent to 55% to 45% for the incumbent.
10:14 PM: AP calls 2nd district for Republican Robert Cowles.
10:19 PM: The ride’s getting a little bumpy. New results just pushed Pasch (D), who had been down 2 to 1 into the line with 57% to 43%. Remember though, still quite few (18%) precincts reporting.
9:05 PM: Polls just closed a few moments ago in Wisconsin. We’ll be reporting live results on our TPM Election Scoreboard.
9:12 PM: While we’re waiting, here’s a playbill of what to watch for tonight.
9:17 PM: First results trickling in.
9:18 PM: Interesting fact: 5 of the 6 Democratic challengers tonight are women.
9:36 PM: Half hour after polls closed and we still don’t know much. What little data we have looks encouraging for Republicans. But none of the races have more than single digits reporting. So we really can’t draw any conclusions from what we have so far. We’re looking more closely at which precincts are reporting to see what we can glean if anything from what we have so far.
9:42 PM: Key point: the current numbers look strong for Republicans. But the Republican areas seem to be coming in first. So that needs to be factored in.
9:52 PM: Almost an hour into the counting. Two of the races are basically tied, four have Republicans up by solid margins. But most of the races have relatively few districts reporting. The exceptions are Cowles and Harsdorf who now have solid leads with more than 30% reporting. That’s not terribly surprising since those two were considered the safest Republicans up tonight.
We’re now 20 minutes out from polls closing in Wisconsin tonight. We’ll have the results live on our TPM Election Scoreboard.
Here are a few things to watch for. Read More
Don’t forget: We’ll be bringing you live election returns tonight from the Wisconsin recall elections. Polls close at 9 PM Eastern, 8 PM local time.
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Sounds like the state GOP in Wisconsin has the state’s text messaging buzzing today with campaign ads.