A deeper dive into midterm results

As the dust continues to settle on midterm elections, here are some of the emerging themes.

😬 Projections of a ‘red wave’ were overblown… As of late last night, control of both chambers was still undetermined – but the available results show the GOP on track to have the weakest performance for an out-of-power party against a first-term president since the post-9/11 midterms of 2002.

• The NY Times needle, which stopped updating yesterday morning, projects Dems have a 66% chance of winning the Senate and Republicans have an 83% chance of taking back the House.

🏛️ Control of the Senate comes down to three races… Senate elections in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada are currently too close to call. Whichever party wins at least two of those three contests will have a majority in the chamber.

• Arizona and Nevada both have hundreds of thousands of votes still left to count.
• In Georgia, incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker will have a runoff election on Dec. 6 after neither one won 50+% of the vote (the Libertarian candidate earned 2%).

🧹 Expanded state abortion rights are headed for a clean sweep… In California, Michigan, and Vermont, voters approved state constitutional amendments explicitly protecting the right to an abortion. 

• In Kentucky, voters rejected a proposed amendment that would have explicitly declared there’s no right to an abortion. 
• In Montana, a ballot proposal that would mandate healthcare professionals provide life-saving care to any infant “born during an attempted abortion” is too close to call, with current results leaning towards rejection.

☝️ Some election firsts... Floridian Maxwell Frost became the first member of Gen Z to be elected to Congress; Wes Moore will be Maryland's first Black governor and the third Black governor in US history; Massachusetts’ Maura Healy became the first openly lesbian governor elected in the US.

+What voters were thinking: Here are the most important factors US voters said motivated them in the midterm election, per APNews. (Spoiler alert: inflation was #1, followed by the future of democracy.)