Election night in America [With lots of updates]

I love to blog an election nights, and have done so once every two years since 2002. However, I don’t think our subscribers love to be inundated with emails from us (or just about anyone else). Therefore, this will be my only post tonight.

But because it’s still early (a little after 8:00 in the East), I will updating the post throughout the night. Readers interested in the updates are invited to visit our Substack from time to time.

Let’s begin by looking at the early returns from Virginia. There are two key House races in the Commonwealth.

In one of them (Virginia’s 7th district which spans a good chunk of central Virginia and reaches the D.C. exurbs), faux moderate Democrat Abigal Spanberger is trying to hold off the challenge of Republican Yesli Vega. The latter is one of those “great life story” candidates. The daughter of immigrants from El Salvador, she began a career in law enforcement after her brother was severely wounded by a gang member. Now, she is Prince William County’s first Latina supervisor.

Vega is energetic and charismatic, but her campaign has suffered from a few own goals. The worst is probably her claim, in the context of discussing abortion with a voter, that women might be less likely to get pregnant from rape “because it's not something that's happening organically.”

Spanberger’s campaign charges Vega with going further to deny that women who are raped can become pregnant. The charge is false, but the whole business may have hurt Vega.

The other Virginia race (the 2nd district located in the Tidewater region) features two female military veterans, incumbent Democrat incumbent Elaine Luria and Jen Kiggans. Luria is another faux moderate.

Glenn Youngkin carried this area by about 10 points last year, whereas he carried the area the seventh district encompasses by only 5 points. Moreover, Kiggans seems to have done a better job than Vega at deflecting the charge of being an extremist.

Victories by Vega and Kiggans could be viewed as signaling a big night for the GOP. If the Dems hold both seats, this could be seen as a sign that there will be no massive Red Wave.

Both views would be premature, but neither would be far-fetched.

So what does the early count show? It shows Kiggans leading Luria by 16 percent (14,000 votes) with about 30 percent of the vote counted. Vega is also ahead with 35 percent of the vote counted, but the returns in that race are heavily influenced by a rural slice of the county, and FiveThirtyEight suggests she may be underperforming there.

In Florida, meanwhile, it’s a very good night for both Gov. DeSantis and Sen. Rubio. In fact, both have already been declared winners. :

No surprise, but gratifying nonetheless.

In addition, the GOP has flipped Florida’s 13th District, the seat held by failed gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist. The Republican winner is Anna Paulina Luna, whom Donald Trump backed. I don’t know her position on the 2020 election, but she’s been labeled an “election denier.”

The polls in Nevada won’t close for hours. But Jon Ralston, the dean of Nevada political reporter says:

I had thought that the statewide Rs -- or some of them -- would probably win rural Nevada by 50,000 votes. That would be in line with 2018. But every rural county I have seen shows eye-popping numbers for the GOP, the latest one being Nye. It could be much higher than 50,000.

He’s talking about exit poll numbers, I assume.

UPDATE: The GOP has flipped two more Florida seats. ABC News projects that Republican Cory Mills has flipped the Orlando-based Seventh District and that Republican Aaron Bean has won the Fourth District in North Florida.

If my math is correct, Florida alone has taken the GOP three-fifths of the way to flipping the House, all other things being equal. Which makes me wonder why The New York Times’ “Needle,” which I have to be pretty reliable in the past, rates the Republican chances of capturing the House as only “Leaning.”

Here’s another possible GOP pick-up, this one in Rhode Island. Republican Lee Fung is two points ahead of Democrat Seth Magaziner with two-thirds of the vote counted. Providence is slightly overrepresented in the vote that’s been counted, which is good news for Fung. This one is way too close to call, but Fung would seem to have a better than even chance (absent Democrat hanky-panky) of breaking the Democrats’ stranglehold over House seats in New England.

UPDATE: Vega continues to lead with 80 percent of the vote counted. However, the lead is only by 3 percentage points (6,000 votes). Based on what I’ve seen from Virginia in the past, I worry that the lead will not hold up, but maybe I’m being too pessimistic.

Kiggans’ lead is by more than 10 points (20,000 votes) with 60 percent of the vote counted. I read somewhere that, unlike the norm, the mailed votes are being counted last in this race. If so Kiggan’s lead may not be insurmountable, but Lurie has a big gap to close.

UPDATE: The Georgia Senate race is among the three most important contests this year, in my opinion. Neither candidate seems to have the edge right now, at least according to FiveThirtyEight:

With 52 percent of the expected vote reporting in Georgia, the Senate race has narrowed to Warnock 50 percent, Walker 48 percent. And the county-level benchmarks are sending mixed messages. Warnock is beating his benchmarks in some key counties, like Fulton and Gwinnett. But if you click “show more rows,” you can see that Walker is outperforming his benchmarks in several small, rural counties. Basically, this one still looks like it will be very close — possibly runoff territory.

(Emphasis added)

OOPS: Magaziner is now leading Fung in Rhode Island and is likely to win.

In Virginia my best guess, for what it’s worth, is that Spanberger beats Vega but Kiggans unseats Luria.

Other than in Florida, it does not look like there’s a Red Wave yet. However, no such wave is required to win the House or even the Senate. And much of the country hasn’t been spoken for at all yet.

UPDATE: As expected, Texas has reelected Gov. Abbott. Beto O’Rourke didn’t come close to unseating Abbott.

I confess to liking O’Rourke. Not because I agree with him on any issue I can think of, but because I like the fact that he campaigns relentlessly and on a “retail” basis in parts of Texas where he’s massively unpopular. Either he’s a masochist or he possess a naive faith in his power to reason with people who disagree with him.

Maybe it’s the contrarian in me that explains my strange respect for Beto O’Rourke.

UPDATE: Speaking of Texas, the GOP has a great chance of picking up Texas’s Fifteenth congressional district, an open seat that has been held by Democrat Vicente Gonzalez. Republican Monica De La Cruz is leading there and is considered likely to win.

Redistricting pushed Gonzalez into the Thirty-Fourth district where he faces Republican Mayra Flores. Flores trails by 10 points (10,000 votes) with about half of the vote in.

UPDATE: As I feared, Spanberger has pulled ahead of Vega with nearly all of the vote counted. If this result holds, I think it will be a case of the GOP leaving a win on the table by nominating a flashy candidate with a “great life story” instead of a more conventional candidate capable of running a gaffe-free campaign and appealing to swing voters.

Meanwhile, Jen Kiggans, who more closely fits the latter description, seems headed to victory in the other hotly contested Virginia race. To be fair, though, her district is a little more GOP-friendly than Vega’s (as shown by the 2021 results cited above).

UPDATE: Don Bolduc is another candidate the Republicans would have been better off not nominating. I had hopes for him until I watched his debate with Maggie Hassan. His performance struck me as laughable at times.

Bolduc trails Hassan by more than 10 points with around 40 percent of the vote in. That margin should shrink as the election-day vote share increases. But according to FiveThirtyEight, Hassan is running about even with the way Joe Biden did in 2020. Biden carried New Hampshire by 7 points.

And just now, the race was called for Hassan by one outlet.

WANT SOME GOOD NEWS? Republican Mike Lawler leads DCCC chair Sean Patrick Maloney by ten points with around three-fifths of the vote counted.

AS I SIGN OFF, HERE’S WHAT I THINK: The GOP will probably lose in Arizona and Pennsylvania (though it still could win in either or both). If the GOP does lose in these two states (and barring a big upset elsewhere), it will need to win in Georgia and Nevada in order to gain control of the Senate.

I’ve been bullish on Nevada all along, but can’t be too bullish given what I’ve seen tonight from around the country. Anyway, it will be hours before the results from Nevada lend themselves to any conclusion.

As of now, Georgia seems more likely than not to be headed to a runoff. If so, we won’t know who wins there until about a month from now. But if the GOP loses in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, winning in Georgia won’t be enough to flip the Senate.

In sum, the Senate really does look like the toss-up the New York Times’ “Needle” says it is (as of 11:30 in the East).

As for the House, it seems very likely to flip, although GOP gains will probably fall short of what I expected them to be.

All in all, a somewhat disappointing night, in my view. Still, I’m delighted that Ron DeSantis has crushed it in Florida. May this be the springboard to a successful run for the GOP presidential nomination and the White House.

Thanks to those who have read my coverage.