Dem
55
Ties
1
GOP
44
This news broke just as we were preparing to post today's (very late) posting. The various outlets that call electoral races are being extra-cautious, because of the still-somewhat-unfamiliar vagaries of ranked choice voting. However, NBC and several other outlets now say that Mary Peltola will very likely soon be Sen.-elect Mary Peltola (D-AK). We saw very nearly the same verbiage about 48 hours before the Mississippi Senate race was called for Sen.-elect Scott Colom (D).
The basis for this "firm but don't hold us to it" conclusion is the latest group of votes reported from the Last Frontier. The folks up north have de-iced their tabulating machines enough to count 96% of the vote. And with only a smallish number of ballots remaining (about 12,000), Peltola has 49.8% of the vote, as compared to 46.1% for Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK).
Those numbers are not likely to change much once the remaining ballots are added. Even if you grant Sullivan 60% of the outstanding ballots (and that's better than he's done in any part of the state, or with any constituency), he'd still only be up to 46.6%. And with or without such a surge, he would need something like 95% of the ballots currently being counted for the more conservative Gerald Heikes (R), and for the fake Dan Sullivan ("R"). As we have discussed many times now, a big chunk of the fake Dan Sullivan votes are going to become Peltola votes. Meanwhile, some number of the Heikes/fake Sullivan voters (particularly the Heikes voters) are not going to rank other choices, and so their ballots will be exhausted and excluded.
And so, barring a development even more unexpected than South Carolina's and Mississippi's Senate seats going Democratic in the same election, Peltola will become the 56th member of the incoming Senate Democratic Caucus. Happily, her total vote is almost certainly going to be greater than that of the two Dans Sullivan combined, so Donald Trump and AG Todd Blanche are just going to have to find something else to obsess over.
And now, we await only final word from up north, and the results from a few straggler House races. At the moment, most outlets have called something like 256 seats for the Democrats and 170 for the Republicans, which leaves about 9 seats still up in the air. (Z)