Dem
54
Ties
2
GOP
44
There wasn't quite as much news, in terms of ballot-counting, as we expected yesterday. A few more House seats have been called by at least some outlets, with the result being that nearly all the media outlets that make calls have the Democrats with 255 to 259 seats. Most of the uncalled seats look to favor the Republicans, so a good guess is that the blue team will end up with something like 260-262 seats.
As expected, Alaska released some more vote totals yesterday. Mary Peltola (D) now stands at 49.0% of the vote, with a total of 118,926 ballots currently being counted for her. That gives her a lead of 4,250 votes over Sen. Dan Sullivan, who currently has 47.2% of the vote and 114,676 ballots being counted for him. Nobody has called the race yet, but the math is getting daunting for Sullivan.
The math is even worse for the three Republicans who aspire to be Alaska's next governor. In that race, Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins now has 49.9% of the vote and 119,860 ballots, so he's right on the cusp of the promised land. The odds of any of the Republicans surpassing him, even with the ranked choice ballots, are looking to be slim and none, and slim just left town.
Over in the Kansas governor's race, Democrat Cindy Holscher has extended her lead; she has 551,467 votes, which is good for 50.3% of the total, and puts her about 7,500 votes ahead of Republican Ty Masterson. The final result will come down to an estimated 23,000 provisional ballots that have yet to be approved and counted. Assuming that all 23,000 are deemed valid, Masterson would need about two-thirds of them to pull ahead. If a few thousand of them are tossed, then he'd need more than 70%.
And finally, the Mississippi Senate race is still chugging toward the finish line. In the latest release, with about 97% of the votes counted, Democrat Scott Colom extended his lead a little bit. He now leads by 2,607 votes out of 953,547 votes counted. There is much talk, from both Colom and from Mississippi news outlets, that the final result will be known sometime this afternoon. We cannot tell how certain that is, but we'll certainly have it tomorrow if it's true. (Z)