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!