Just before 2 a.m., I’m just trying to make sense of the Senate results. If I’m making sense of this right, Democrats have clearly won 54 senate seats, appear likely to win 55 and could still win 56.
The final uncertain seat is in Mississippi. The Times calls it a toss-up with a 61% chance of Republicans winning it. But election watchers I trust seem to think it’s just a bit more likely that Colom will win. To be clear, they’re talking about just likelihoods and a bit more likely, in their view, that Colom will win. To be fair to the Times, these are models that are fully devised in advance. And this is extremely close. When it’s that down to the wire, it’s down to picayune details, idiosyncrasies of particular counties that may just be hard for a model to fully capture. The people I’m following suggest that in the key counties where votes remain the last ballots tend to lean Democratic.
In any case, we don’t know what’s going to happen. Let’s put it this way: it’s a genuine toss up and there are real reasons to think the odds at least slightly favor Scott Colom.
It may have been our most recent podcast. But I got asked which Senate seat I would personally most like to see a Democrat win. I chose this seat, even though I thought it pretty unlikely. I simply like Scott Colom. And some of it is history. To see a Black Democrat win a senate seat in Mississippi as, among other things, a rebuke to the Callais decision which effectively repealed the Voting Rights Act would be a sweet moment of righteous rebuke.
We’ll see what happens.
It’s going to take a bit of time to work through all the numbers but a voting backlash by Black voters, especially in the Deep South, is one of the big stories of the night. That is along with a massive swing of Hispanic voters back to the Democrats.
One final thought. Florida is not simply a Red state. Tonight it was the citadel. Democrats had key House wins. But for Senate and Governor it was one of the few states that were seen as at all contested in which both hung on.
