We officially have a Senate flip, with a call of the North Carolina race for Cooper. He’s up 65-33 with half of the vote in.

The NYTimes model now has Andrews as 93% to win South Carolina, which would be big news. Silver’s final model had her at 33% to win. She’s ahead 51.5% to 46.8% with two-fifths of the vote in.

Although the big-ticket races in Florida are looking like close misses for the Democrats, two Florida Democratic incumbents that the Republicans had hoped to unseat have won re-election: Moskowitz in the 25th (Silver had him as 77% to win), and Cantor in the 14th (Silver had her as 85% to win). An even more vulnerable incumbent, Soto in the 9th, is currently up 50.2% to 49.8% and is seen by the NYTimes as a slight favorite to hold on; Silver had him as only 42% to win.

NYTimes just turned on The Needle, which gives us some additional perspectives:

In KY-6, despite the Democrat Dembo being behind 43-53, NYTimes thinks Dembo is stil a narrow favorite to pull it out.

Conversely, even though Ford is ahead 56-44 in IN-5, NYTimes thinks Spartz will win by 2 or 3 in the end.

NYTimes thinks Moody will win Florida by 3 points in the end. They don’t have a forecast for the Florida Governor race, where at this moment Jolly is still narrowly ahead, 49.5% to 49.2%, with nine-tenths of the vote in. They also don’t have a forecast for the Georgia Governor race, with Bottoms is up 59-41 with more than half the vote in.

Intriguingly, the NYTimes now has Andrews as a 72% favorite to beat Graham in South Carolina. With about one-quarter of the vote in, Andrews is currently ahead 51-48.

Some, but not all, outlets have already called the Georgia Senate race for Ossoff, less than an hour after the polls have closed there. Keisha Lance Bottoms is running about 4% behind Ossoff as the Democratic candidate for Governor, but that may be enough to get her over the finish line against Republican billionaire Rick Jackson.

Anna Paulina Luna is the Republican incumbent in the Florida 13th, in the suburbs of Tampa (including Dunedin, spring training home of my Blue Jays). Under its new boundaries, this district would have gone 56-43 for Trump in 2024. Silver’s model had Luna at 67% to win re-election. With more than 95% of the vote in, Luna is leading very narrowly, 49.4% to 48.7%. That would seem to portend a good, but not amazing, night for the Democrats.

Indiana 5th is still looking good for the Democratic challenger, J.D. Ford; he is now ahead of Spartz 57-43 with three-fifths of the vote in. Another early Midwest harbinger district is the Kentucky 6th, which Silver’s model had as a toss-up. Here the Republican candidate is up 53-43 but with only one-quarter of the vote in, but that is not necessarily bad for the Democrats given where the reported vote has come from.

With 84% of the Florida Senate vote now in, Moody has taken a 49.7% to 49.2% lead over Nixon.

The vote in Florida is now about two-thirds complete, and in the Senate race Nixon has a narrow lead over Moody, 49.9% to 49.0%. With polls still open in the panhandle, public models are not yet showing estimates of what the final result will be, but the prediction markets have not moved in Nixon’s direction on this news. In the Governor’s race, where former Republican Congressman David Jolly is running for the Democrats against Black Republican Congressman Byron Donalds, Jolly is up 50.6% to 48.3%.

And we are here at last. The TV coverage has been on for an hour, but the only polls that closed an hour ago were in certain parts of Indiana and Kentucky. Things will start to get more interesting going forward.

One House race of note so far is the Indiana 5th, where the incumbent is controversial Republican Victoria Spartz. Silver’s model had Spartz at 81% to win re-election. With 36% of the vote in, Spartz is behind, 38-62. However the vote that has reported so far is largely from the suburban portion of this district rather than its rural portion, and includes a lot of early vote. Will be interesting to watch this one evolve.

Things continue to look promising for the Democrats on the eve of the 2026 elections. The final patch of NYTimes polls coming out yesterday were almost unbelievably good for the blue team: El-Sayed winning 53-42, Talarico winning 50-43, Hamilton winning 49-44. Jackson winning 51-45, Brown winning 49-44. If those polls are on target, a blue tsunami is coming.

Silver’s model’s likelihood that the Democrats get to 51 Senate seats cracked 80% for the first time yesterday and continued to tick up slightly today. He now sees 54 seats as being only slightly less likely than 53.

Over in the House, I noted recently that every single one of the 17 seats in my former state of Illinois is, per Silver’s model, at least a 99.5% favorite for either the Democrats (14) or the Republicans (3). I suppose that’s modern gerrymandering at its finest. Speaking of modern gerrymandering, North Carolina had adopted a new map last year that was intended to change the partisan balance of its delegation from 10-4 Republican to 11-3. However the district that was supposed to flip, the Democratic-held 1st, has become the most expensive House race in U.S. history with over $50 million in spending from both sides combined, and per Silver’s model is seen as an 88% favorite to remain in Democratic hands.

Shifting gears, I wanted to mention two recently filed lawsuits related to actions taken by the administration.

First, a U.S. company that imports Canadian cheeses recently filed a lawsuit in the Court of International Trade regarding Trump’s new 50% tariffs against Canada under Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Act. The lawsuit articulates 5 separate independent grounds as to why the tariffs are invalid, each of which is quite possibly correct, and any of which would suffice for plaintiffs to win.

Second, Virginia and D.C. filed suit this weekend to block Trump’s plans to start building a controversial 250-foot tall Triumphal Arch, for which construction could start as soon as Thursday. The case has ended up in the courtroom of Judge Chutkan, best known for presiding over Special Counsel Smith’s election interference case against Trump.

Shocking news out of Michigan this morning where Haley Stevens, the losing candidate in the Senate Democratic primary, has suddenly endorsed Republican candidate Mike Rogers.

Stevens, whose primary campaign against U.S.-born Egyptian-American Abdul El-Sayed was heavily funded by the pro-Israel AIPAC, had previously pledged to support El-Sayed. Earlier this week her Jewish fiance endorsed Rogers, leading to attempts among the Democratic establishment to hold a unity rally today. However tensions between the El-Sayed and Stevens camps continued to escalate this week. As recently as yesterday, Stevens was reportedly continuing to tell Democratic party figures that she would continue to support El-Sayed. Now, this. Stevens is currently the Representative for the Michigan 11th, a safe Democratic seat, but is not running for re-election in light of her Senate bid; reportedly her entire senior staff have resigned this morning in light of her endorsement.

Polling in recent weeks has consistently shown El-Sayed ahead of Rogers; the current polling average as shown on Nate Silver’s site has El-Sayed at 49.6%, versus 45.5% for Rogers. How much impact will Stevens’ late endorsement have? I’m not sure there is much relevant precedent to consider here. I should mention that the vitriol against El-Sayed by his political opponents has gotten very extreme in recent days, including but not limited to Trump having referred to him as a “Jihadist”. While I don’t agree with El-Sayed across his entire platform of ideas, every time I listen to him I am more impressed with his political talent. As far as I’m concerned, he’s far, far closer to being a “great American” than is our President.

In other news this morning, Senator Murphy (D-CT) has suffered a stroke, at the age of 53. A potential Presidential candidate in 2028, in recent months he has been an increasingly visible Democratic figure on foreign affairs and military issues.

Finally, as I was writing this a federal judge released an opinion dismissing a recent DOJ lawsuit, U.S. v. Alaska, which attempted to preemptively prevent Alaska from certifying the results of the upcoming Senate election, on the grounds of potential voter confusion regarding the presence of the two Dan Sullivans on the four-person ranked choice ballot. There was reporting this week connecting the Democratic candidate, Mary Peltola, to the presence of the non-incumbent Dan Sullivan on the ballot; she denies involvement. Honestly, this all feels like much ado about nothing, particularly in a ranked choice state. But there has been a lot of noise about it in recent weeks and it will be interesting to see what effect, if any, that noise has on the results of the election.