I’m going to start this piece off with a bit of a mea culpa. I fully expected the results of the election to drag out until the weekend. I did not expect as many of the swing states to break for Trump as they did or as early as they did.
Instead, around 0115, Pennsylvania was called for Trump and sealed the Electoral College numbers. As of this writing, just before noon on Wednesday, he also leads the National vote with 71,660,413 votes or 51% of the total.
The dominoes started falling for Trump fairly early last night. He picked up Georgia shortly after the polls closed with North Carolina following close behind. The big pickup came with Pennsylvania, where Trump won by some 150,000 votes.
Right now, Trump has 286 electoral votes of the 270 need to win with two states left to be decided.
Arizona and Michigan have yet to be called. Trump is up by a bit more than a million votes in Arizona with 67% of precincts reporting. Michigan is a bit tighter. He leads there by 60k votes with 95% reporting.
Those two states are window dressing however, as he already surpassed the 270 threshold.
In other races, the Republicans took control of the Senate by picking up seats in Montana, West Virginia, and Ohio. There are four Senate races yet to be called, AZ, PA, NV and MI. Of the four, it looks like the R’s will pick up Pennsylvania; Repub Dave McCormick is up by 50k over incumbent Bob Casey with 92% in. The races in Nevada and Michigan are too close to call, with the Dem Slotkin up by 7k votes in MI and our boy Captain Sam Brown up by a couple of hundred over the incumbent Dem Jacky Rosen. That leaves us with Arizona. Kari Lake is down by nearly a million votes with 66% of precincts reporting.
The House is too close to call at this point, but it’s looking like the Republicans will retain a slim margin in that chamber. DDHQ is predicting a 220-215 R majority.