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--:-- John Bickley: Months and even years of campaigning came to an end on Tuesday night, and the projected red wave did not materialize. Republicans are expected to take a slight majority in the House, but the Senate is still too close to call. We raised the minimum wage to a livable wage. We guaranteed a woman's right to choose. In the governor's races, incumbents on both sides of the aisle stood strong. After four years, the people have delivered their verdict. Freedom is here to stay.
--:-- Georgia Howe: I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Wednesday, November 9th, and this is Morning Wire.
--:-- John Bickley: Widespread technical glitches at polls in at least one battleground state could mean results won't be known for several days. We have the details. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.
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--:-- John Bickley: After weeks of polls projecting a red wave and with results still coming in, Republicans are poised to only narrowly take the House, while Democrats ended up putting up strong numbers in many of the battleground races. Joining us to discuss is Daily Wire senior editor Cabot Phillips.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So Cabot, this election did not go the way many had projected, including us, and many of the polls we presented ended up missing the mark. Let's start with the Senate. What did the numbers look like at this point?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Well, keep in mind, a good number of the races still have not been called. Most experts had originally predicted anywhere from 51 to 54 seats for Republicans when all was said and done. But at this point, Republicans will be thrilled if they just get to 51 seats. And even that might be a stretch.
--:-- John Bickley: When the night started, they had success in a few states with North Carolina Republican Ted Budd beating out a surprisingly strong showing from Democrat Sherry Beasley, especially early on. And then in Ohio, Republican J.D. Vance had a solid victory over Democrat challenger Tim Ryan. Throw in Marco Rubio, who we'll get to in a second down in Florida. He won pretty easily as well. And Republicans were feeling good at the start of the night.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Right. But then the night started to shift. Yes, it did. In Pennsylvania, the race we've talked about quite a bit, Democrat John Fetterman jumped out to an early lead against Republican Dr. Oz, and he held on to it, though the race did narrow considerably in the end. By 2 a.m. this morning, he was up about two points with 91 percent reporting, and a number of outlets had projected him to be the winner.
--:-- John Bickley: We also saw a disappointing showing in the state of New Hampshire. A lot of polls had Republican Don Bolduc with the lead or at least within the margin of error but it ended up not being all that close as Democrat incumbent Maggie Hassan was declared the winner after jumping to a double lead with 75 of votes in
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Yeah, the easy answer there is the state of Florida. For years, it's been considered a swing state, but that is clearly no longer the case. Republicans had overwhelming success at every level across the state of Florida. Senator Marco Rubio, who we touched on earlier, outperformed expectations and cruised to an early victory over Democrat Val Demings. But the story of the night was Governor Ron DeSantis, who at last count was up 20 points on Democrat Charlie Crist. For context, he won Florida by just 30,000 votes back in 2018. He won by over 1.5 million votes yesterday.
--:-- John Bickley: All right, let's get to the House now. What are we looking at there?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Well, most experts and every polling model out there had Republicans all but guaranteed to take the House with potentially even 30 or 40 seats gained. Again, a number of those races still have not been called, so we don't yet know the final numbers. But most projections seem to indicate that Republicans will maybe scrape by with a majority, but it's going to be close. And even that looks like a tough battle right now.
--:-- John Bickley: So where did Republicans gain ground? Looking state by state, Republicans had, again, a solid showing in Florida where they picked up at least four seats. They also picked up a seat in Georgia, a few in Michigan, and a seat in Texas and New Jersey as well.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Now, for the Democrats' part, they did manage to flip several seats in the state of California, at least one in Illinois, as well as one in North Carolina and Ohio.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, we've highlighted before some of the conservative Latinas running as Republicans in Texas. How did they fare?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Yeah, again, it was a mixed bag here as well. So Mayra Flores, who we talked about a good bit on the show, we actually spoke to her a few times personally. She had won that special election earlier in 2021 in a heavily Latino district. She ended up losing to Democrat Vincente Gonzalez, who was also an incumbent because of redistricting during 2020. Cassie Garcia also lost to Borderhawk Democrat Henry Cuellar. Those were both considered tough races for the GOP heading in, but obviously disappointing for them nonetheless. But Republican Monica de la Cruz did come out on top, winning the 15th district in Texas.
--:-- John Bickley: So that's where Congress stands now until more results are finalized. That brings us to the governor's races, and we'll keep Cabot on for the next segment to break down those key contests.
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--:-- John Bickley: Continuing now with our post-election coverage is Cabot Phillips.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So there were very few flips and the ones we did see were not all that surprising. For example, Democrat Maura Healey picked up the governorship in Massachusetts. Likewise Democrat Westmore won in Maryland replacing outgoing Republican Larry Hogan In both of those cases Democrats replaced moderate Republicans who were retiring an otherwise deep blue state
--:-- John Bickley: All right, so we discussed DeSantis and his 20 victory over Charlie Crist What were some other contests that we saw that Republicans really overperformed or surpassed expectations?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Well, first to your point on DeSantis, many are really crediting him today with turning a purple state into a solid red state. Probably the most significant aspect of that race is that Miami-Dade County went red for the first time in 20 years. That really speaks to the realignment that's underway in Florida, and it's largely propelled by Latino voters.
--:-- John Bickley: Moving on now to other incumbents that had strong showings. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott handily defeated challenger Beto O'Rourke by more than 12 points. And then down in Georgia, Brian Kemp also was able to defeat Stacey Abrams for the second time.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: However, Republican candidates did fail to clinch a couple potential pickup opportunities. So in Michigan, despite closing the distance in recent polls, incumbent governor Gretchen Whitmer, the Democrat, did end up beating Republican challenger Tudor Dixon. And then in New York, the governor's race that everyone was talking about towards the end, polls were all over the place. Alex with Trafalgar had it essentially a toss up. Others had Hochul with an eight or nine or even double digit lead. But in the end, it ended up being about in the middle of those two scenarios. as Kathy Hochul ended up defeating Lee Zeldin by about five points in what was a surprisingly close contest, all things considered.
--:-- John Bickley: So what's going to happen is that over the course of these next couple of hours, you're going to see the race continue to get closer and closer and closer and closer.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So like the House and Senate, this is obviously a letdown for Republicans who had been encouraged by recent polls. What happened overall in this election cycle? Well, it's going to be a while until we know exactly what went wrong. It's definitely worth noting, though, that virtually every polling outlet did show major momentum for Republicans and even outlets that were typically more friendly to Democrats had projected that they would lose the House and likely the Senate. But the prevailing theory right now for how all of those polls were so off in the end is that polls this go around might have ended up exaggerating Republican support because they were trying to compensate for being off in favor of Democrats across the last three cycles. But again, it's early. We haven't had a true postmortem yet, but that does seem to be the prevailing narrative right now.
--:-- John Bickley: Well, Cabot, we really appreciate all the work you've put into this and all your work last night and this morning. will continue to track these races and these outcomes that are still not decided.
--:-- John Bickley: That was Daily Wire's Cabot Phillips. And we needed another stark reminder that we have incompetent people running the show in Arizona. That was Cary Lake Tuesday night after vote tabulation machines experienced widespread malfunctions yesterday in Maricopa County, the most populous county in Arizona. This led Republicans to file an emergency motion to extend voting hours.
--:-- Megan Basham: So, Megan, there were a lot of conflicting reports early on in the day yesterday about what was going on at the polling places. Rumors flying around on social media. What was the problem?
--:-- Megan Basham: Well, Arizona voters began reporting that the vote tabulating machines were spitting out their ballots. There were different estimations about how many polling places were affected. Chairman to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Bill Gates claimed it was 20 percent. But a lawsuit Republicans filed in the evening to keep polls open later claimed it was 36 percent.
--:-- Megan Basham: This was what one Maricopa voter said he experienced I went in to vote filled out my form went through the machine rejected it They have you flip it over upside down put it in four different ways went through again and did the same thing I actually tried it three times on four different sides on two different machines. It would not count it. I was not the only one there having this issue. Some people were going through with spoil ballots, just like me. The poll worker at the machine said this has been happening all morning.
--:-- Megan Basham: Technicians later determined that the issue was that printers weren't producing enough dark marks on the ballots. But by that time, some voters said they were being told that they would have to find another polling place to vote.
--:-- Megan Basham: This was Gates addressing the issue midday yesterday. You never know what's going to happen in an election. No one here at Maricopa County has ever claimed that there is such a thing as a perfect election.
--:-- Megan Basham: Now, Gates went on to say that voters could place their ballots in a secured box that would later be counted after those ballots were transported to a central location later in the night. But there were wide reports that some voters didn't feel comfortable doing that.
--:-- Megan Basham: So as you might imagine, that led to some pretty sharp criticism from Republicans. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, for example, asked, So the Dem nominee for governor, who refused to debate her opponent, is the current Secretary of State in charge of running this election. And now there are problems?
--:-- Megan Basham: Right. So the campaigns for gubernatorial candidate Carrie Lake and Senate candidate Blake Masters, along with the RNC, petitioned to keep the polls open an additional three hours until 10 p.m. What they argued was that hiccups decreased voters' opportunity to cast ballots. They also asked that the court mandate that no early ballot results be announced until an hour after that at 11 p.m.
--:-- Megan Basham: Essentially, what the Republicans were arguing was that some voters at the polling places where machines were malfunctioning were told they could go vote at a different location. But once they got to the second polling place, these voters were then told that they could not vote because they had already checked in at that first precinct.
--:-- Megan Basham: Now, a state judge denied the Republicans' request, but not because of the merits of their argument. Rather, he said that they hadn't offered hard evidence that voters were unable to vote. And he agreed with election officials that since the request came only a few minutes before the polls were scheduled to close at seven o'clock, that just wasn't gonna be enough time to implement the change.
--:-- Megan Basham: Now, it's important to note the context that about 60% of the population of Arizona lives in Maricopa County. And it will still be some time before we know the outcome of the races in Arizona, correct?
--:-- Megan Basham: Yeah, that is correct. Because of these printer issues, Arizona election officials are saying we aren't going to have the results until at least Friday. And I'll go out on a limb and say we may not have heard the last about these ballot issues.
--:-- John Bickley: Now Arizona joins a list of states that are going to have to continue to wait. Megan, thanks for reporting.
--:-- Megan Basham: Yeah, anytime. That's Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham.
--:-- John Bickley: Well, that's all the time we've got this morning. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back this afternoon with more of the news you need to know.
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