11:17 PM: Over the last couple weeks I’ve noted many times that we would not only have political winners and losers tonight but also pollster winners and losers. And well, we have ’em. The mainstream pollsters’ numbers look pretty solid. The numbers from GOP pollsters like Trafalgar, Insider Advantage, Rasmussen, etc. are taking it on the chin pretty hard. But it goes beyond differences of methodology. There was always a strong assumption from a lot of knowledgable people that those outfits had shoddy verging on bogus polling practices. So you take the mainstream number, tack on 5 points and that’s your poll. If there’s a major polling error for most pollsters you look pretty smart. But it’s sort of like a broken clock being right twice a day. Like I said, many thought this. But they’d gotten closer to the mark in 2016 and 2020. So it was hard to make the argument too confidently.
11:09 PM: Earlier in the evening I mentioned those three Virginia House seat bellwethers. We now have results in each. Luria, the most vulnerable, has conceded defeat. The other two held their seats. In advance this result seemed to presage Republicans winning the House but by a slender margin. And that’s where we seem to be.
10:57 PM: A huge bummer but not unexpected. NBC calls Ohio for JD Vance.
10:48 PM: Don’t want to assume anything else. But Lauren Boebert seems to have a race on her hands.
10:39 PM: I’ve been cautious about this. But The New York Times’ Nate Cohn has been looking at county totals in Pennsylvania and Fetterman is beating Biden’s 2020 numbers basically everywhere. This looks like a pretty strong signal in the noise. We need to see a lot more. But that’s pretty telling.
10:34 PM: NBC calls Virginia’s 7th district for Abigail Spanberger. [10:43 PM: Now AP too. This one’s done.]
10:28 PM: I think we can say with some confidence now that this is not a GOP wave election. But it’s still true that the GOP did not need a wave to win the House or even the Senate. We know a lot more about the outlines of this than we knew a few hours ago.
10:13 PM: To make the point more directly, I’m literally not looking at statewide totals in really any race. Or barely any. Sort of impossible for me to have any idea what they mean. Almost entirely looking at completed or near completed counties. And to be clear, look at what analysts I trust say about them. That’s when you can make comparisons.
10:08 PM: Possibly some encouraging signs for Fetterman in Pennsylvania. Will need to see more. Very early.
10:00 PM: Looking increasingly likely that Rep. Abigail Spanberger will hold on for reelection in Virginia 7. Not a shocker by any means but definitely a bellwether.
9:46 PM: Veteran Dem Rep Marcy Kaptur was supposed to be in some danger. Not likely to lose but in danger in a red wave. Ryan Brune now thinks she’ll win by double digits. It’s not a huge thing that Kaptur is reelected. But if she’s reelected comfortably that’s another result that puts some real bounds on the scale of Republican victories.
9:37 PM: Given all uncertainty created by different methods of voting and when those different buckets of votes are counted, it’s become a much bigger deal not just to look at key counties and precincts but when entire counties are counted. Once a county is fully counted, you can set aside election day voting, early voting and just look at earlier elections. So for instance, if a Democrat is exceeding Biden’s margins in a state Biden won that’s a clear signal, regardless of what the statewide totals are. Right now that kind of analysis is making New Hampshire look like a hold for Democrats and North Carolina a hold for Republicans. Again, broadly in line with the polls.
9:19 PM: Here’s one metric to see the night so far. Election watchers were looking at three House races in Virginia: Incumbent Dems Reps. Luria, Spanberger and Wexton. Luria was the most endangered. If she held on, significant GOP underperformance and conceivably even a Dem House hold. In a wave, Spanberger would lose too. In a total blowout even Wexton might go down. At the moment, Spanberger is looking like she likely, but by no means definitely, will hold on. And Luria is still in it. With those two races close, I assume Wexton is in good shape. Big picture that looks like GOP House pick up by probably not a big majority. Again, very early. Virginia’s one state. But this starts to give us a general sense of where we might be headed.
9:14 PM: You wouldn’t expect there to be much concern about a congressional race in Rhode Island. But there was a lot of Democratic fretting about Seth Magaziner in RI-2. The local affiliate has just called that race for Magaziner. So that’s a D hold.
9:05 PM: We’re still very early and at a point where it’s difficult to get an outline of big pictures. Having said that, what seems clear so far is that the polls were broadly accurate. By which I mean, the close races are super close. Maybe that’s not the hugest headline. But it’s a data point that’s still pretty key. On something like the Senate I think we’re still very much in jump ball territory. The races that were supposed to be super close appear to be super close. And we don’t know who is winning them.
8:58 PM: Fairly encouraging numbers for Democrats in New Hampshire. They’re running ahead of Biden’s 2020 numbers, at least in some key areas.
8:15 PM: We have some possibly encouraging reporting for Abigail Spanberger in VA-7. I want to be clear what my metric is here. To me, if a Dem who was supposed to go down in a GOP wave is holding there own, that’s encouraging. Doesn’t mean they’re going to win. But a good sign for them and gives us some hints about the broader story. More on this in a moment.
8:00 PM: So here’s something interesting. In the Georgia Senate race, a lot of the Walker-leaning polls showed him getting like 25% of the African-American vote. That would be super high for a Republican. And most political observers were skeptical of that. Early results throw a lot of cold water on that prediction. So that puts a dent in the credibility of a lot of the polls that showed Walker strength. Again, doesn’t mean Warnock wins. But it’s an encouraging sign for him.
7:52 PM: We’ve talked a lot about “red mirages”, same day votes showing big GOP wins then slowing giving way to early Dem-leaning votes. That pattern, which we saw in spades in 2020, is a big deal tonight too. But there’s more than that. We knew in 2020 that early versus same day was hugely, hugely polarized by party. It still is to a great degree. But we don’t know just how much. That adds another wrinkle of uncertainty. So just keep that in mind. That’s one reason I suspect we’re not seeing a lot of early calls. It doesn’t mean races are necessarily close. It just really complicates the way race-callers look at results and infer where things are going.
7:36 PM: Here are the five states where abortion is literally on the ballot. TPM Alum Alice Ollstein (we have so many amazing alums) has this deep dive on the referendum in Kentucky, which seems to be really struggling (i.e., the anti-abortion referendum is struggling.)
7:32 PM: In Georgia the Senate race looks about as tight as the polls have been suggesting for some time. Meanwhile, there’s a big divergence between Kemp and Walker, which is again just what the polls have shown for a long time. So the early look at Georgia says it’s pretty much what the polls have been predicting. Worth noting that at this point in the evening “close” may not be that close in the final result.
7:26 PM: The only signal I’ve been able to pick out from the noise so far is that Florida looks quite rough for Democrats tonight. But the shape of the electorate in Florida does not look like the shape in other states. That does not mean that Dems are having a great night elsewhere. Just that Florida looks like it’s own thing and not necessarily representative of the rest of the country. Again, very, very preliminary reads.
So here we are. The first polls are closing. Remember: whatever happens, history doesn’t end. There’s an up and a down side to that and it’s good not to get too bound up in either.
The Supreme Court heard a case Tuesday that the conservatives could use to significantly reduce the enforceability of major social safety net programs like Medicaid.
Twice in recent history the President’s party has gained seats in a midterm election. The last time was 20 years ago. For years, I was unreasonably pleased with myself that I was one of the few people I knew who predicted Democrats would gain House seats in the 1998 midterm — the Lewinsky scandal/impeachment midterm. It wasn’t any great insight. That was what the polls actually said. They said it very clearly. But the political class had convinced themselves that the polls were not accounting for the intensity of evangelical Republicans who would swamp the Democrats at the polls. That didn’t happen. The polls had said as much.
I learned a lesson from this that, for a political observer, polls are something like a pilot’s control panel when flying in stormy weather. What pilots are taught is in stormy weather you watch the instrument panel and absolutely disregard everything else. Your sense of direction — your feel for up and down — will fool you, and then you crash. The instrument panel is right.
There’s a real oddity for us, or at least to me, about this moment in our history. “Vote fraud” propaganda and voter suppression have been central issues in TPM’s coverage literally from day one, going back 22 years now. So all the different misleading and disingenuous games, the ways to fool people about alleged fraud, the ways to use the numbers to bamboozle people — we’ve been writing about all of these for years. But now what was a matter of relatively marginal mainstream media interest is the very center of the story. In stories like the one below and this one yesterday we see the same old — really, ancient story — “vote fraud” propaganda and suppression tactics targeting largely African-American cities — in this case Detroit and Philadelphia. So, from an editorial point of view, we find ourselves explaining to longtime readers points we were explaining and reporting on back in 2002 and 2006 and 2016.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) signaled on Monday that the violent assault on her husband, Paul Pelosi, on Oct. 28 will be factored into her decision on her political future.
This article first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Leola Scott recently decided to become a more active citizen. The 55-year-old resident of Dyersburg, Tennessee, was driven to action after her son was stabbed to death and nobody was charged.
In August, Scott tried to register to vote. That’s when she learned she’s not allowed to cast a ballot because she was convicted of nonviolent felonies nearly 20 years ago.
One in five Black Tennesseans are like Scott: barred from voting because of a prior felony conviction. Indeed, Tennessee appears to disenfranchise a far higher proportion of its Black residents — 21% — than any other state.
The figure comes from a new analysis by the nonprofit advocacy group The Sentencing Project, which found that Mississippi ranks a distant second, just under 16% of its Black voting-eligible population. Tennessee also has the highest rate of disenfranchisement among its Latino community — just over 8%.
While states around the country have moved toward giving people convicted of felonies a chance to vote again, Tennessee has gone in the other direction. Over the past two decades, the state has made it more difficult for residents to get their right to vote back. In particular, lawmakers have added requirements that residents first pay any court costs and restitution and that they be current on child support.
Tennessee is now the only state in the country that requires those convicted of felonies be up to date on child support payments before they can vote again.
The state makes little data available about who has lost the right to vote and why. Residents who may qualify to vote again first have to navigate a confusing, opaque bureaucracy.
Scott says she paid off her court costs years ago. But when she brought a voting rights restoration form to the county clerk to affirm that she had paid, the clerk told her she still had an outstanding balance of $2,390.
“It was like the air was knocked out of me,” she said. “I did everything that I was supposed to do. When I got in trouble, I owned it. I paid my debt to society. I took pride in paying off all that.”
Scott does not have receipts to verify her payments because she made them so long ago, she said. And there is no pathway for her to fight what she believes is a clerical error.
She is now a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the Tennessee NAACP challenging the state’s voting rights restoration process. In court documents, the state denied allegations that the restoration process is inaccessible.
Overall, according to The Sentencing Project, about 470,000 residents of Tennessee are barred from voting. Roughly 80% have already completed their sentence but are disenfranchised because they have a permanently disqualifying conviction — such as murder or rape — or because they owe court costs or child support or have gotten lost in the system trying to get their vote back.
Over the past two years, about 2,000 Tennesseans have successfully appealed to have their voting rights restored.
Those convicted after 1981 must get a Certification of Restoration of Voting Rights form signed by a probation or parole officer or another incarcerating authority for each conviction. The form then goes to a court clerk, who certifies that the person owes no court costs. Then it is returned to the local election commission, which then sends it to the State Election Commission for final approval. (Rules on voting restoration were revised multiple times, so older convictions are subject to different rules.)
Republican Cameron Sexton, speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, said people convicted of felonies should have to pay court costs and child support before voting.
“If someone’s not paying or behind on their child support payment, that’s an issue,” he told ProPublica. “That’s an issue for that child, that’s an issue for that family, not having the things that they agreed to in court to help them for that child.”
When asked about Tennessee being the only state to require that child support payments be up to date before voting rights can be restored, Sexton said, “Maybe Tennessee is doing it correctly and the others are not.”
A 2019 report from the Tennessee Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that the requirements for repayment have been especially burdensome to women, the poor and communities of color. The report also noted that Tennessee has increasingly levied court charges “as a means for funding the State’s courts and criminal justice system.”
Georgia previously required payment of restitution and fines in order to restore voting rights. But in 2020, the office of Georgia’s secretary of state clarified that anyone who has completed their sentence may vote, even if they owe court costs or other debts that were not incurred as part of their sentence.
Disenfranchisement does not solely impact the lives of individual voters — it can have consequences for elections, too. This is particularly true for multiracial communities in Tennessee, according to Sekou Franklin, a political science professor at Middle Tennessee State University. He pointed to county-level races that have been decided by a few dozen votes.
“There are real votes that are lost that can shape elections,” Franklin said.
Black Tennesseans, even those who were not enslaved, have been disenfranchised for centuries. In 1835, the new state constitution took away the right to vote from free Black men, who had been able to vote under the previous constitution. It also stipulated that anyone convicted of an “infamous” crime — a list that included robbery, bigamy and horse stealing — would lose their voting rights, often permanently.
The civil rights laws of the 1960s opened up voting again for Tennesseans. But soon lawmakers began adding back in provisions that disenfranchised people convicted of felonies. Legislators updated the statute every few years, adding to the list of crimes that permanently disqualify someone from voting. The result is a convoluted list of eligibility criteria for voting rights restoration that depend on what a person was convicted of and when the conviction took place.
The reality of disenfranchisement in Tennessee received some national attention recently around the case of a Memphis woman, Pamela Moses. Three years ago, she got her probation officer’s signoff to vote again. The next day, the Tennessee Department of Correction asserted the officer had made an error. Prosecutors then charged Moses with lying on an election document. She was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison, but a judge later threw out the conviction.
Tennessee lawmakers from both parties have tried, unsuccessfully, to make it easier for residents to get their vote back.
In 2019, two Republican lawmakers sponsored a bill that would have automatically restored voting rights to people upon completion of their sentence. It was supported by a bipartisan coalition of civil rights advocates, including the libertarian group Americans for Prosperity and the Tennessee American Civil Liberties Union. But it never gained traction among legislators.
In 2021, two Democrats sponsored another bill that would have granted automatic vote restoration, but that bill also died. The sponsors said that the Republican supermajority in Tennessee’s legislature simply doesn’t have an appetite to take it on.
“We said we wanted to do criminal justice reform, but all we’ve done is really nibbled around the edges,” state Sen. Brenda Gilmore told ProPublica, referring to a bill she co-sponsored with a fellow Democrat.
Dawn Harrington, the founder of Free Hearts, an organization that supports formerly incarcerated women, also advocated for the 2021 bill.
On a trip to New York City in 2008, Harrington carried a gun that was licensed in Tennessee. Because New York does not recognize permits from other states, she was convicted of a gun possession charge.
After serving a yearlong sentence on Rikers Island, she returned to Tennessee and set out to have her rights restored. Tennessee requires the incarcerating agency to sign the rights restoration form, but Harrington struggled to find someone in New York willing to sign it. After nine years, her rights were finally restored in 2020.
“I don’t know if you know the show ‘The Wiz,’ but I literally eased on down the road,” Harrington said about having her voting rights restored. “I danced. I was so happy I cried. I was feeling all the emotions. You never know how much something means to you until it’s taken away.”
