US 2022 Election Results

Just to emphasize how unlikely that Democratic pickup in Washington’s 3rd District was, our midterm forecast gave Gluesenkamp Pérez just a 2-in-100 shot of defeating Kent. That is the upset of the cycle thus far. While Kent always seemed likely to be a weaker GOP candidate than Herrera Beutler, a Republican losing an R+9 seat is highly unusual in a midterm when Democrats control the White House.

Aaaaand right after I posted that update from Washington’s 3rd District, ABC News reported that Gluesenkamp Pérez is projected to defeat Kent to flip this seat for Democrats. At this point, ABC News estimates that Republicans have won 211 seats and Democrats 206 seats. It seems more likely than not Republicans will get to 218 seats and a majority, but Democrats are keeping their hopes alive with this kind of pickup, as they need to win two-thirds of the remaining unprojected contests.

Many on the right are also consolidating around the belief that Republicans lost the Senate because of certain strategic decisions made by McConnell’s aligned super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund. The group, which spent north of $200 million, trained its firepower on Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. It did, however, leave Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters to twist in the wind against Sen. Mark Kelly, while putting some money into Alaska to defend Sen. Lisa Murkowski against a Republican challenger, Kelly Tshibaka. As far as the Alaska decision goes, supporting incumbents is the job of a party leader, even if the incumbent is running against a member of the same party. And Arizona? Well, according to the New York Times, the head of Senate Leadership Fund, Steven Law, said over the summer that Masters “had scored the worst focus group results of any candidate he had ever seen,” one of the more hilariously mean leaked details from all of the 2022 campaign postmortems.

It’s funny. Nowhere in this blame game has anyone brought up the major factor in Senate Republicans’ midterm screw-up—the one Republicans really could blame McConnell for. They could argue that it was electorally unwise for him to have spent so much capital over the last six years engineering a 6-to-3 conservative Supreme Court that would deliver unpopular policy edicts, costing Republicans at the polls. But everyone’s still on the same page about that.

Regardless, the rush on the right—and among ambitious Senate Republicans hoping, someday, to win a Republican presidential primary—to blame McConnell for the losses is an indication that the right still isn’t prepared to acknowledge the core problem.

The current Democratic majority, which came into existence after two Georgia runoffs on Jan. 5, 2021, is Donald Trump’s fault. Mehmet Oz is Trump’s fault. J.D. Vance, whose more-competitive-than-necessary race required McConnell’s PAC to spend over $30 million in Ohio, money that could have gone elsewhere, is Trump’s fault. Herschel Walker still could become a senator pending the Georgia Senate runoff, but a better Republican candidate in Georgia would not have lagged behind Gov. Brian Kemp’s lead by five points. A better candidate would have won outright on Tuesday. Walker is Trump’s fault. Trump and McConnell share some blame for Adam Laxalt in Nevada. But in a world where an experienced politician like Laxalt didn’t become a 2020 election-denier in order to be competitive in a 2022 primary, he could’ve had a little less baggage. Blake Masters could have won the Arizona primary without Trump’s endorsement (although he got that anyway). But the absence of Gov. Doug Ducey, a much better candidate, contending in that primary is Trump’s fault.

There’s been much talk since the election that Republicans might finally be turning on Trump after he directly cost them seat after seat in the midterms. But what we’re seeing so far is acquiescence to the Trump-generated, blame-shifting narrative that it’s McConnell’s fault, in effect, for doing an inadequate job shining up the lousy Senate candidates Trump, and Trumpism, left him with.

Many of these Senate Republicans who want to delay leadership elections would love to see the party turn on Trump. They know Trump is a drag on the party, and they want him to step aside so they can be president. As ever, though, they don’t want to be the ones who do the turning. It’s much easier to ride with the base, point the finger at Mitch McConnell, and let Trump wriggle out of another jam.

Adam Sexton, the political director for Manchester news outlet WMUR, gave updates on the ongoing recounts on his Twitter feed.

"Shocker in Manchester's Ward 6 New Hampshire House of Representative race - after she congratulated Gagne, there was still counting left and it turns out Maxine Mosley won by a single vote. A flip for the Democrats," he wrote in a tweet on Monday.

Nathaniel Rakich, a senior election analyst at election tracker Five Thirty-Eight, also commented on the shocking turnaround.

"Wow! Democrats erased a 23-vote deficit in a recount to win this NH House seat by ONE vote," he tweeted. "They need to do the same in 3 more seats to win a majority."

Fair question:
1. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/rep-boebert-appears-video-suggest-rep-omar-mistaken-terrorist-capitol-n1284677
2. https://oliverwillis.com/lauren-boebert-scandals-controversies/
3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2022/01/25/lauren-boebert-shakes-up-campaigns-compliance-support-after-recent-gaffes/
4. https://www.csindy.com/opinion/columnists/fairandunbalanced/opinion-boebert-s-race-for-top-crazy/article_04e46a7a-6585-11eb-b9ce-6b8bef672390.html
5. https://politicalwire.com/2021/02/03/boeberts-mileage-reimbursements-raises-red-flags/
6. https://nypost.com/2021/01/16/gop-rep-lauren-boebert-and-husband-have-racked-up-arrests/
7. https://news.yahoo.com/rep-lauren-boebert-failed-disclose-200942251.html

And it goes on and on and on. She is a dismal representative for her district. I have a feeling a lot of Republicans voted for her opponent. I sure would have.

She's an embarrassing person

of less than average education - let alone average smarts. Say what you want, she's not the brightest crayola in the box, and you know it.

There are some people who should not be allowed around semi-automatic weapons, and she and her husband are two of them.

Boebert said she and a staffer were in an open elevator and noticed an alarmed Capitol police officer sprinting for the door as it closed.
"What's happening? I look to my left, and there she is: Ilhan Omar," Boebert said. "And I said, well, she doesn't have a backpack, we should be fine."
Boebert's audience can be heard on the video clapping and cheering in approval before she continued her anti-Muslim riff. "So we only had one floor to go," Boebert added. "I said, 'Oh look, the jihad squad decided to show up for work today.'"

Mocking School Shooting Victim
Boebert mocked a survivor of the 2018 Parkland school shooting.
Lashing out at David Hogg, Boebert tweeted, "Give your keyboard a rest, child."
Boebert was defending videos of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene harassing Hogg as he lobbied for gun safety laws after the shooting.

Republican officials in a rural Arizona county refused Monday to certify the 2022 election despite no evidence of anything wrong with the count, a decision that was quickly challenged in court by the state's top election official.

The refusal to certify by Cochise County in southeastern Arizona comes amid pressure from prominent Republicans to reject results showing Democrats winning top races.

Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who narrowly won the race for governor, asked a judge to order county officials to canvass the election, which she said is an obligation under Arizona law. Lawyers representing a Cochise County voter and a group of retirees filed a similar lawsuit Monday, the deadline for counties to approve the official tally of votes, known as the canvass.

The two Republican county supervisors delayed the canvass vote until Friday, when they want to hear once more about concerns over the certification of ballot tabulators, though election officials have repeatedly said the equipment is properly approved.

State Elections Director Kori Lorick wrote in a letter last week that Hobbs is required by law to approve the statewide canvass by next week and will have to exclude Cochise County's votes if they aren't received in time.

That would threaten to flip the victor in at least two close races — a U.S. House seat and state schools chief — from a Republican to a Democrat.

Last week, the Berks County Republican Committee asked multiple precincts to recount their midterm election ballots by hand. They claimed voting machines switched votes from Republican to Democratic candidates.

“A recount is only an investigation,” Committee Chair Clay Breece wrote in a statement. “We are asking for a court order to open the ballot boxes so the paper ballots are manually counted by human beings to verify that the machines are working as advertised.”

County spokesperson Stephanie Weaver said those claims will delay the county’s ability to certify results.

“We have found no evidence to support these claims,” she said. “All of our voting equipment underwent thorough testing prior to Election Day. When we received claims on Election Day, we immediately deployed a machine technician to the precinct to investigate. The machines were tested again at that time and determined to be working properly.”

Berks County plans to challenge the recount requests in court this week.

Recount requests are legal. But the Pa. state department says this is an organized effort by election denial activists to ‘flout the will of the people.’

Similar requests were filed in Bucks, Lebanon, and Forest counties, among others. Some recount petitions have yet to be ruled on by Pa. courts.

Officials in Luzerne County where paper shortages caused Election Day ballot problems deadlocked Monday on whether to report official vote tallies to the state, effectively preventing their certification of the results.

Two Democratic members of the Luzerne County Board of Elections and Voter Registration voted to certify, both Republicans voted “no” and the fifth member, Democrat Daniel Schramm, abstained.

A judge extended voting in Luzerne by two hours, to 10 p.m., during the Nov. 8 election after the supplies ran short at some polling places. It’s unclear how many people were kept from voting as a result.

Georgia Voters Defy Efforts to Suppress Them

Tuesday afternoon, I waited over an hour and a half to vote in Atlanta in the Georgia Senate runoff between Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker.

This is my second election cycle in Georgia, but I still can’t get used to the wait times to vote. It’s a voter suppression tactic in and of itself. It’s a poll tax paid in time.

I lived more than 25 years in New York, where I took for granted that voting was a casual affair. For years, I would take my children into the booth with me so that they could see how the electoral process worked. There was never a line. Maybe there was a person or two in front of us, but no real delay.

I wouldn’t do that here in Georgia. Forcing a child to wait in a long line in the cold could by itself be considered abusive.

But, as I waited, something else occurred to me: Voter suppression is one of the surest cures for apathy. Nothing makes you value a thing like someone trying to steal it from you.

The line, and all the people patiently waiting in it, is a symbol of resilience and perseverance. It is a reminder that people will work hard to overcome obstacles to accomplish things they deem essential.

Waiting in line is such a feature of Georgia voting that some counties even publish their waiting times online so that voters can plan their arrivals to have the shortest wait.

These waits can disproportionately affect nonwhite voters. According to a report by Georgia Public Broadcasting and ProPublica before Election Day in 2020, a shrinking number of polling places “has primarily caused long lines in nonwhite neighborhoods where voter registration has surged and more residents cast ballots in person on Election Day.”

According to the report, the nine metro Atlanta counties “have nearly half of the state’s active voters but only 38 percent of the polling places.”

During the general election, voters set a record for the number of early votes cast in a Georgia midterm election, and on Monday and again on Tuesday they set records for single-day early voting in a Georgia runoff. It is interesting to note that an estimated 35 percent of the early votes so far are from African Americans, a slightly greater figure than their percentage of the population of Georgia.

This is a testament to the fortitude of those voters, because they were the ones targeted by Georgia’s latest round of voter suppression with “uncanny accuracy,” as the Brennan Center for Justice’s president, Michael Waldman, put it last year. Waldman wrote that Gov. Brian Kemp “signed his voter suppression bill in front of a painting of a plantation where more than 100 Black people had been enslaved. The symbolism, unnerving and ghastly, is almost too fitting.”

People who defend voter suppression point to these numbers as proof that their critics are simply being hyperbolic and creating an issue where none exists. But that is the opposite of the truth as far as I can see it. From my perspective, voters are simply responding with defiance to the efforts to suppress.

And yet that defiance might still not be enough to overcome all of the obstacles placed in voters’ way. While those record daily numbers are heartening, they are in part a result of a new Republican election law that cut the number of early-voting days roughly in half. Even with the extraordinary turnout, it is unlikely this year’s early voting will match that of last year’s runoff between Warnock and the Republican incumbent, Kelly Loeffler.

In addition, Republicans have fielded a singularly offensive candidate in Walker, a man not fit for elective office, a walking caricature of Black competence and excellence, as if Black candidates are interchangeable irrespective of accomplishment and proficiency.

The whole time I was waiting in line, I kept thinking about how the wait would have been impossible for someone struggling with child care or elder care, or someone whose job — or jobs — wouldn’t allow for that long a break in the middle of the day.

Also, I voted on an unseasonably warm day. What about those whose only opportunity to vote might be a day when it was raining or cold? The line at my polling place was outside for 90 percent of the time I waited.

I have nothing but disdain for the efforts to suppress the vote in my new home state, but I have nothing but admiration for the voters’ determination not to be suppressed.

Democracy is being saved by sheer force of will, by people climbing a hill that should never have been put in front of them.

Asian American voters could help decide the Senate runoff in Georgia, experts say

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, who make up 4.7% of the state’s electorate, might be the margin of victory in an election that's expected to be a close call, and the country is taking notice.

The last few weeks have seen the formation of Georgia’s first AAPI Caucus, in-language campaign ads, and national celebrities and organizations are descending on Georgia to help get out the Asian vote.

Asian voter turnout nearly doubled in Georgia between 2016 and 2020, AAPI Data reported last year, and their ballots amounted to more than the margin with which President Joe Biden won the state. Leading up to the Dec. 6 runoff, both parties are coveting their vote.

“Georgia is an extremely competitive state, and we have over 100,000 South Asians and 250,000 Asian Americans,” said Neil Makhija, executive director of civic organization Indian American Impact. “We have been the margin in the past and we can easily be the margin again.”

On the ground, organizations like Makhija’s have gone door to door, encouraging the state’s large AAPI population to come to the polls.

“We’re engaging in an all-hands-on-deck effort to reach out to our community via WhatsApp and platforms that political campaigns have traditionally just ignored or not even recognized as useful,” Makhija said. “We’re also meeting people at their doors.”

When it came to appealing to South Asian voters in Georgia, Nabilah Islam said her “secret weapon” had been under her nose for years. During her recent campaign for state Senate, the 33-year-old Bangladeshi American brought conversations about issues to aunties and uncles on their home turf: WhatsApp.

It paid off. She's now the first South Asian ever elected to the Georgia state Senate.

Islam’s home state is looking ahead to the highly anticipated U.S. Senate runoff between Warnock, the Democratic incumbent, and Walker, a Republican.

“I think folks have come to recognize how powerful our voting bloc is,” Islam said. “We are part of the reason that candidates cross the finish line.”

Warnock and Walker make final push for AAPI support
This week, Warnock’s campaign released a series of digital campaign ads in Vietnamese, Mandarin and Korean in an effort to mobilize Asian voters.

The importance of language access can’t be understated when trying to reach minority communities, advocates said, and it’s something campaigns have historically left until the last minute — or failed to do at all.

The 2022 election for the House of Representatives was so close1 that if any number of things had gone differently, Democrats might have kept their majority. And one of the biggest things that affected the battle for the House was redistricting — the decennial redrawing of congressional districts’ lines to account for the results of the 2020 census.

But was the impact of redistricting significant enough to swing the House to the GOP? As I wrote in June, the 2021-22 redistricting cycle didn’t radically change the partisanship of the national House map, so I mostly agree with those who say redistricting didn’t cost Democrats the House. But at the same time, those who say Republicans won only because they gerrymandered are also technically correct. How can both things be true? Allow me to explain.

Warnock Has A Small Lead In Georgia — But Walker Could Still Win

The Georgia runoff is upon us! Today, the last U.S. Senate election of 2022 will finally be decided. And according to the polls, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock is slightly ahead of Republican Herschel Walker — but the election is still very close.

During the Nov. 8 general election, Warnock received 49.4 percent of the vote and Walker 48.5 percent. Although other Georgia Republicans won their races comfortably, Warnock’s advertising and fundraising prowess and Walker’s many scandals and controversies helped send this race to a runoff. (Georgia is one of the few states that requires runoff elections when neither candidate gets a majority of the vote in the general election.)

We aren’t issuing a forecast for this runoff as we did for the general election, but we have calculated a polling average. And as of Monday at 4 p.m. Eastern, Warnock was averaging 50.2 percent support, and Walker was averaging 48.2 percent. Again, this isn’t a prediction of the final results, just a summary of the polls conducted of the runoff.