Leading Off
● AZ-Sen: On Thursday, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema took a 9,610-vote lead over Republican Martha McSally; on Wednesday, McSally held a 17,000-vote lead. Another 130,000 votes were counted in Maricopa County, which is home to three-fifths of the state, while Pima County added 24,100 to its total, with smaller counties added much-smaller batches.
Campaign Action
There are about 500,000 uncounted ballots statewide, and about 345,000 are in Maricopa County, where Sinema currently leads 50-48. The biggest question right now is whether the remaining Maricopa County ballots will continue to trend Sinema's way, or if this was just an unusually good batch for her. The Associated Press' Nick Riccardi said that this first drop was from ballots mailed in just before Election Day at a time when Democratic turnout was at its highest. However, the county recorder says that about half of the remaining ballots come from this group. The county has another update set for 7 PM ET (5 PM local time) on Friday, so we'll hopefully know more soon about the state of the race.
With so many ballots still left to be counted, Republicans have filed a lawsuit against every county recorder, the officials who administer elections in each county, over how they're verifying ballot signatures in a state where mail ballots could make up roughly four-fifths of votes. While the GOP has sued Democratic and Republican recorders alike, they're undoubtedly doing this with one big target in mind: Democratic Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes.
The GOP is taking issue with how Fontes announced shortly before Election Day that his office would contact every voter whose signature on their mail ballot didn't appear to match the one they had on file to give them an opportunity to confirm their identity, even after Election Day, pointing out that others like Pima County have been doing this for years. While Republicans have claimed they merely want all 15 counties to have the same procedure, their lawsuit could disenfranchise roughly 5,600 voters in Maricopa County.
State Judge Margaret Mahoney rejected the GOP's request for an immediate ruling on Thursday, and importantly refused to order counties to temporarily quarantine the affected ballots that had been "cured" after Election Day. Mahoney has signaled she would issue a final ruling on Friday after a newly scheduled hearing.
Uncalled Races
You can keep tabs on all remaining uncalled races via our tracker.
● FL-Sen, FL-Gov: The state of Florida appears to be careening toward a massive set of recounts, perhaps even bigger than what we saw after the 2000 presidential race because multiple contests may be involved. As additional votes get tallied, the results in three races Republicans had led in on election night—for senator, governor, and agriculture commissioner—have grown tighter, so much so that in the last of those, Democrat Nikki Fried has now taken the tiniest of leads on Republican Matt Caldwell.
All three are currently within margins that will trigger automatic recounts under state law (albeit two different types), and so long as results hold until Saturday at noon, when counties are due to report returns to the state. In the race for governor, Democrat Andrew Gillum currently trails Republican Ron DeSantis by 0.44 percent, meaning ballots in this contest would be subject to a machine recount since the margin is under 0.5 percent.
In the Senate and agriculture commissioner races, however, the spreads are even tighter. In the former, Republican Gov. Rick Scott has just a 0.18 percent lead on Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, while in the latter, Fried is up a mere 2,910 votes, or 0.04 percent. Because both of these margins are under 0.25 percent, that means these races would both undergo a manual recount.
It's entirely unclear how many ballots remain to be counted, many of which are in Broward County, a large Democratic stronghold. The vote tallies coming in from Broward have been strange, though, since far fewer votes were cast for Senate there than for any other statewide election, possibly due to poor ballot design that caused voters to miss the race. (This phenomenon does not appear to have been repeated in other counties.) For greater clarity, we'll have to wait until Saturday, at which point any legally mandated recounts will be ordered.
● GA-Gov: Republican Brian Kemp declared victory (and resigned as secretary of state) on Thursday, but Democrat Stacey Abrams is not conceding in the hopes that Kemp's vote share—currently 50.33 percent—falls below a majority as additional ballots are counted, which would force a Dec. 4 runoff. The problem is that Kemp is around 25,000 votes above that threshold while there appear to be only some 21,000 provisional ballots left to be tallied.
Abrams' team also filed a lawsuit on Thursday seeking to have Dougherty County, a predominantly black county of 90,000 in the southwestern part of the state, count any absentee ballots it receives by Friday. Such ballots must normally be received by Election Day, but the Abrams campaign says Dougherty County failed to send out absentee ballots in a timely fashion, in part due to Hurricane Michael.
● CA-10: No new ballots were counted since the last Digest, so Republican Rep. Jeff Denham still holds a 50.6-49.4 lead over Democrat Josh Harder, a margin of 1,287 votes. An update is not expected until Friday evening.
● CA-39: Under 1,000 new votes were counted, but Republican’s Young Kim gained just three total votes. Her lead over Democrat Gil Cisneros remains 51.3-48.7, or 3,874 votes.
● CA-45: After some more votes were tallied on Thursday, Republican Rep. Mimi Walters now holds a 51-49 lead over Democrat Katie Porter, a margin of 4,037 votes. That’s a narrowing from Walter’s previous edge of 6,074 votes, so good news for Porter.
● CA-48: Democrat Harley Rouda has expanded his lead to 51.2-48.8 over Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a margin of 4,756 votes. That’s an improvement from Rouda’s previous edge of 3,602 votes.
● GA-07: Republican Rep. Rob Woodall’s lead over Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux’s lead remains unchanged at 890 votes, a margin of 50.2 to 48.4. Some 1,500 provisional ballots still need to be reviewed in Gwinnett County, where Bourdeaux currently leads 55-45, though not all of these ballots will be valid. Bourdeaux’s campaign has suggested it might seek a recount, which it’s entitled to if the margin is less than 1 percent.
● ME-02: GOP Rep. Bruce Poliquin now leads Democrat Jared Golden 46.2-45.5 with 95 percent of precincts reporting, a margin of 1,910 votes. That’s an improvement from Poliquin’s previous edge of about 900 votes. However, Poliquin remains well below a majority, so this race is destined to be resolved in the first-ever instant runoff for a federal election, whose tabulation will begin on Friday.
● NJ-03: Democrat Andy Kim’s 49.8-48.9 lead over Republican Rep. Tom MacArthur hasn’t changed and still stands at 2,622 votes. A number of absentee and provisional ballots remain to be counted, though most of these are in Burlington, where Kim is currently leading 59-40, so MacArthur doesn’t seem to have much of a path.
● UT-04: Salt Lake County added about 15,000 more votes to its total on Thursday, increasing Democrat Ben McAdams’ lead over GOP Rep. Mia Love from about 5,414 votes on Wednesday evening to 7,128 as of Thursday evening.
Love's hopes rely in large part on the remaining ballots from conservative Utah County, where she's ahead 74-26 right now. The county says it plans to post more results on Friday. However, Utah County makes up just 12 percent of this district, so there may not be enough votes out there to save Love unless the remaining Salt Lake County ballots are pretty good for her; McAdams currently leads in Salt Lake County, which makes up about 85 percent of the seat, 55-45.
It's not clear how many ballots are left in each county for this race, but the Salt Lake Tribune's Robert Gehrke writes that as of Thursday evening, there are 92,000 ballots left countywide in Salt Lake County and 89,000 in all of Utah County. Gehrke estimates that, based on the district's previous voting patterns and the current returns, that for just the 4th District there are 51,000 remaining Salt Lake County ballots and 15,000 Utah County ballots, respectively (both counties are split between multiple congressional districts), with fewer than 300 more coming from the seat's two remaining counties.
Gehrke estimates that if his totals are right and each candidate carried the remaining ballots by the same margin that they're winning each county right now, Love would net just 2,267 more votes —about 4,500 fewer than she'd need to pull ahead. To win under this math, Love would need to do about 3.6 percent better in each county than she's done so far. However, since the Salt Lake County ballots that were counted on Thursday only increased her deficit, it may be too much for her to hope that the rest will be good enough for her.
Senate
● AL-Sen: If you're already thinking about the 2020 Senate races, well, you're in good company. Democratic Sen. Doug Jones has a very tough task ahead of him if he is to win a full term in this incredibly red state, and one very familiar name seems to be eyeing a comeback bid. On Wednesday, hours after Donald Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Politico reported that Sessions was considering a bid for his old seat.
However, while Sessions served for 20 years, he may find out the hard way that he can't come home again. Trump spent most of Sessions' tenure publicly taunting the "beleaguered" attorney general, and local party officials tell Politico the attacks have done the former senator plenty of harm with the base. And if Trump is still angry come 2020, a single tweet could be enough to immediately sink a Sessions comeback. Of course, Trump has a tendency to vigorously praise former enemies who suck up to him on TV, so we shouldn't count out the possibility that Sessions will be back in his good graces by then.
There is no shortage of other Alabama Republicans who could run. Rep. Bradley Byrne, who represents the Mobile area, has been flirting with a bid for a while, and he reiterated Wednesday that he was still interested. Byrne, who said he anticipated deciding in the spring, also insisted that a Sessions run wouldn't change his plans, though he hoped to meet with him in the next few weeks.
Byrne ran for governor back in 2010, but that experience did not go well for him. Byrne, who had served as chancellor of the state's community college system, began the primary as the frontrunner, but lost the runoff to Robert Bentley 56-44. Byrne wound up caught in an unusual position where he was successfully attacked from both the right and the left, with Bentley hitting him for having once been a Democrat. Bentley, who was still years away from the sex scandal that would end his governorship, also played up his own ties to prominent social conservatives.
At the same time, teachers unions—one of the only liberal influences left in Alabama—had it in for Byrne, and they, too, ran ads against him. Bentley, in turn, openly called for Democrats to vote for him, which may have been the difference-maker.
Gubernatorial
● KY-Gov: Attorney General Andy Beshear has had the 2019 Democratic primary to face GOP Gov. Matt Bevin to himself since July, but he may get some company soon. State House Minority Leader Rocky Adkins has been talking about running for a while, and the Lexington Herald-Leader writes that he's "expected" to enter the race next week. The paper also says that former Auditor Adam Edelen, who narrowly lost re-election in 2015, is also expected to announce he's in sometime in November.
We may also have a new name to watch. Retired Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath narrowly lost Tuesday's race for the 6th Congressional District to GOP Rep. Andy Barr 51-48, and her campaign manager Mark Nickolas, told the Herald-Leader the next day that he "feel[s] strongly that Amy McGrath should get back on the horse and run for governor." Nickolas says he hasn't spoken to McGrath about this idea but plans to in the next few days. Kentucky's filing deadline is Jan. 29 and the primary is in May.
● WI-Gov: This CBS headline just says it all: "Scott Walker narrowly loses Wisconsin governor's race—and he can't ask for a recount because of a law he put in place."
House
● GA-06: In a victory as amazing as it is sweet, Democrat Lucy McBath has defeated Republican Rep. Karen Handel in Georgia's 6th Congressional District—a seat made famous, of course, by last year's special election. McBath led Handel 50.5 to 49.5, a margin of almost 3,000 votes, as of Thursday morning, prompting Handel to concede.
This seat was historically Republican—very, very Republican—voting for Mitt Romney by a wide 61-38 margin in 2012. However, the affluent and well-educated Atlanta suburbs gave Donald Trump a hostile reception and held him to a narrow 48-47 win over Hillary Clinton. That opened a door for Jon Ossoff, an investigative filmmaker and first-time candidate who energized a massive grassroots army and raised tens of millions of dollars for the special election prompted by GOP Rep. Tom Price's resignation in early 2017.
Ossoff ultimately fell short against Handel, losing 52-48. But he left an important legacy: By organizing voters in an area that Democrats had never previously competed in, he helped lay the groundwork for the next race—and McBath capitalized on it in tremendous fashion.
As Ossoff himself noted, McBath was "a really strong candidate," emphasizing, "I can't take credit for her strength." A former flight attendant, McBath's son, Jordan Davis, was murdered by a gunman in an apparent hate crime in 2012, a tragedy that spurred her to become an outspoken gun safety activist. She'd initially intended to run for local office but wound up running for Congress, though after Ossoff's loss, the 6th District still looked like a long-shot target that might not quite have been ready to change hands.
But McBath's strong campaign made this race competitive once again, and she received a major boost via millions in outside spending from the group Everytown for Gun Safety, for which she had been a spokesperson. That prompted the NRCC to make its own seven-figure buy to save Handel, but it wasn't enough. Last year, what Ossoff dubbed the "hot-take caldera" insisted that Democrats couldn't win the House if they couldn't win Georgia's 6th; now, thanks to McBath, they've won the House—and Georgia's 6th.
● MD Redistricting: On Wednesday, a federal district court panel unanimously struck down Maryland's 6th Congressional District on the grounds that Democrats had discriminated against Republicans in violation of their First Amendment rights when they flipped it from red to blue in 2012 due to redistricting. The judges ordered the Democratic state legislature and GOP Gov. Larry Hogan to redraw the map ahead of the 2020 elections, which could result in the district becoming strongly Republican again. However, it's unclear whether this case will survive a likely appeal to the Supreme Court.
Before Justice Brett Kavanaugh replaced mercurial Justice Anthony Kennedy this fall, the Supreme Court punted on what to do about setting a federal standard against gerrymandering in this case and another one in Wisconsin this summer, sending them back to the district court level. But Kavanaugh is widely expected to join the other four Republican justices in blocking all challenges to partisan gerrymanders at the federal level whenever a case like this one makes it back to the high court.
While Maryland Democrats would gain from the Supreme Court overturning this decision, the national party and democracy itself have far more to gain from seeing it upheld. That's because Republicans would have far more to lose if it were to set a precedent that could be used to strike down largely GOP-drawn maps in the rest of the country, which is why it's so unlikely the majority of ultra-conservative justices would be eager to set such a precedent.
● NY-11: If you spent Tuesday night watching GOP Rep. Dan Donovan's surprise loss to Democrat Rose and thinking that Team Red should have nominated former Rep. Mike Grimm instead, well … you have something in common with Mike Grimm. The former congressman, who resigned in disgrace in 2015 before a short stint in prison on tax evasion charges, told BuzzFeed Tuesday as results were still coming in that he would "probably" look at another bid for his old Staten Island-based seat.
Grimm challenged Donovan in the June primary, but while Grimm had spent his career building up a Trump-like cult of personality by portraying the Obama Justice Department as out to get him, the White House backed the incumbent. Donovan ended up winning that race 66-34, but the race left him without much money in the bank at the end of June. Rose went on to outraise Donovan $2.18 million to $485,000 from July 1 to Oct. 17, and the big financial disparity may help explain the incumbent's defeat in this 54-44 Trump seat.
● OK-05: Probably the biggest shock on election night anywhere was Democrat Kendra Horn unseating GOP Rep. Steve Russell 51-49 in Oklahoma's 5th Congressional District, an Oklahoma City seat that had backed Donald Trump 53-40 two years ago. There were signs, though, that this race was worth watching, especially in the final days. To begin with, while Trump still handily carried this district, he did perform a bit worse than Mitt Romney's 59-41 margin four years before, an early indication that this seat could be in play in a good political climate for Democrats.
Horn, who has worked for several nonprofits, also ran a much more serious campaign than any Democrat here had in a long time. She outraised Russell $541,000 to $207,000 from July 1 to Oct. 17, though she had to use some of that money to win a late August primary runoff. Mike Bloomberg's Independence USA super PAC also went up with a $410,000 TV buy supporting Horn and attacking Russell in the final week of the race in what was the only serious outside spending for either side. Still, even with Horn's financial advantages, it seemed unlikely that she would score a win in a red seat that hadn't sent a Democrat to the House since the mid-1970s. So, what happened?
It seems that Russell just didn't think he was in for a rough ride until perhaps election night. Newsok.com's Justin Wingerter writes that Russell was so slow to start campaigning that there was speculation in GOP circles that he would end up not seeking re-election. Russell did ramp up his schedule in the final month by hitting industry events such as an oil and gas conference and a health center ribbon-cutting, but it was too little, too late. Roll Call's Bridget Bowman notes that, according to two unnamed sources, Russell never even told the NRCC he was in danger.
It's also likely that outgoing GOP Gov. Mary Fallin's toxic unpopularity dragged Russell down in this district, which she'd represented from 2006 to 2010. While Republican Kevin Stitt beat Democrat Drew Edmondson 54-42 statewide in the race to succeed Fallin, Stitt did poorly in the Oklahoma City area. Daily Kos Election's preliminary calculations have Edmondson carrying Oklahoma's 5th 53-44.
Independence USA ads wisely made sure to tie Russell to Fallin's legacy, hitting Russell for voting with Fallin to underfund schools while he served in the legislature. In a state that has seen budget cuts lead to four-day school weeks and a teachers' strike, this seems to have been an effective line of attack for voters frustrated with Fallin and looking for change.
Still, the few polls we'd seen showed Russell far ahead. His campaign released several surveys from the firm VCreek/AMG during the general election giving him a wide lead, including a final mid-October survey that had him ahead 51-35. A pair of fall polls from the independent firm SoonerPoll also showed a similar result, with their late October poll giving Russell a 49-37 edge. It's unclear if the polls were just very off or if things changed dramatically in the final days as the spending increased. Either way, though, they obscured just how much trouble Russell was really in—and Horn was there to take advantage of it.
Grab Bag
● Radio: On Wednesday afternoon, Daily Kos Political Director David Nir joined SiriusXM host Michelangelo Signorile to discuss the outcome of the 2018 midterms, looking both at the key results and the trends that drove them. You can listen to the full interview right here.
● Where Are They Now?: About to be in jail. On Wednesday, former Texas Rep. Steve Stockman, a far-right Republican who was elected to his only two terms in 1994 and 2012, was sentenced to ten years in prison for money laundering.
In April, Stockman was convicted after prosecutors argued he'd misused $1.25 million in political donations for, among other things, "hot air balloon rides, kennel bills … a new dishwasher, a pricey New Orleans hotel, flights to Africa, rehabilitation for alcoholism ... and a trip to Disneyland." The judge had earlier ruled that Stockman was a flight risk and that he has to await his sentence in federal custody, and the former congressman appeared in court Wednesday sporting an orange jumpsuit.
● Programing Note: The Daily Kos Elections team will be taking a short post-election break, so there will be no Live Digest Friday, but we'll be back Monday. For those who read us on the web or via email, there will be no Morning Digest Monday, but we'll be back on the web and in your inbox on Tuesday. Have a good weekend!