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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 2020, 2020, 2020.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ellen Nilsson, lots of focus on the presidential race, of course, but you cover Congress for Vox. What's going on there?
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Yeah, I mean, I think that we had a different result than a lot of people expected in Senate and House races. The theories heading into the 2020 election was that if it was a big night for Biden, it would also be a big night for Democratic candidates in Senate and House races. But that did not trickle down to those Senate and House races.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Well, let's start with the Senate. What were the expectations there specifically? I mean, we spoke to you about whether Democrats could flip the Senate, and it was certainly an expectation a lot of people had, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. And I mean, so we should say right now that the Senate result is still uncertain and it could be uncertain for another few months. That's because there are still races that are yet to be called in North Carolina, Georgia and Alaska, although we should note that Alaska is a pretty heavily Republican state.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: What we do know is that Democrats ultimately lost a lot of the states that they were hoping to flip, but they still have a very narrow potential path to a majority.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: OK, and I think as we currently stand, we're at 48, 48, 48 Democratic senators, 48 Republican.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: When we talked to you earlier this election season about the Senate and whether the Democrats could flip it, it seemed like the best shots they had were in four states, which, if I recall correctly, you called the core four. Colorado, Cory Gardner, Arizona, Martha McSally's name, Susan Collins, North Carolina, Tom Tillis.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What happened to the core four?
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: So Democrats won Colorado. Democrat John Hickenlooper, NBC News Now projects, has won the state of Colorado. And Arizona. Democrat Mark Kelly declared the winner. Kelly is a former NASA astronaut and has led by a sizable margin actually for months. A huge win there for Democrats. They were able to flip those two Republican seats. They did not do as well in Maine.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I am the first person since Maine directly elected its senators to win a fifth term. And we still don't know the results in North Carolina.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: What happened in Maine?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Susan Collins was looking like she was really in a precarious position. And I know they also have ranked choice voting there. Did that play an important role in the race?
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Ultimately, it didn't. There was a lot of speculation going into the race and election day that if Collins and her Democratic challenger, Sarah Gideon, didn't get 50 percent at least on election day, then it would trigger an instant runoff, ranked choice voting. And that could potentially benefit Gideon since the next highest third party vote getter was a progressive.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But ultimately, you know, Collins, I think, ran ahead of what all the public polling had been saying. The latest New York Times and Siena College poll has Democrat Sarah Gideon with a large lead over Collins. It finds Gideon holds 49 percent support among likely Maine voters compared to the longtime senators, 44 percent.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Collins is is just, you know, she's a longtime senator. She's been in office, I think, for over 20 years. She has a really solid brand in the state. And yeah, she was able to, I think, you know, get well over 50 percent of the vote needed to avoid ranked choice voting, an instant runoff and to beat Gideon pretty handily.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what about the final race of the Corps for North Carolina?
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Yeah, so there's a lot we still don't know about North Carolina. It's a really close state, both for the presidential and for the Senate results.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And basically right now you know Republican incumbent Tom Tillis appears to be slightly ahead with Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham trailing But there are still a lot of outstanding votes yet to be counted And North Carolina has already said that we might not know the results for both the presidential and the Senate race until next week potentially
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: So in North Carolina, votes have to be postmarked by Election Day, but the state allows them at least mail-in ballots to come in until the 12th. So basically, they need to wait for all of those mail-in ballots to come in and then count them. And that should be done by next week.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So if Tillis pulls through in North Carolina, what does that mean for control of the Senate? What will it look like?
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: So if Tillis wins in North Carolina, that means that Democrats' path shrinks that much more, basically. But they still have a very narrow and, you know, I will say they would be the underdogs in this scenario, I think. But they do have a narrow path that goes through Georgia.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Georgia? What's up in Georgia?
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: So there are two Georgia Senate races. One was a race between Democrat John Ossoff and Republican Senator David Perdue. The other one is a special election between Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's no room in this country for racism, but this isn't what the Black Lives Matter political organization is about. They want to abolish the police completely within five years. And we can see what's happening across the country with this threat of defunding the police.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: And Democrat Reverend Raphael Warnock. We're sick and tired, as Fannie Lou Hamer would say. We're sick and tired of being sick and tired. Why black folks so tired? We are tired because we cannot get any rest.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The special election result we already know is going to a runoff. That was a special election where there were like 20 candidates running. Georgia has this system known as a jungle primary where, like, all of the parties are on the ballot. It's not just Democrats versus Republicans.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: So we already know that Loeffler and Warnock are going to a runoff that will be decided on January 5th. Then there's the Ossoff-Purdue race.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, perhaps Senator Perdue would have been able to respond properly to the COVID-19 pandemic if you hadn't been fending off multiple federal investigations for insider trading. you did say COVID-19 was no deadlier than the flu. You did say there would be no significant uptick in cases. All the while, you were looking after your own assets, and you did vote four times to end protections for pre-existing conditions.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: That's just, you know, Democrat, Republican. The most insidious thing that Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden are trying to perpetrate, and Bernie and Elizabeth and Kamala, or Kamala, Kamala, Kamala, Kamala, I don't know. Whatever.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then there's also a libertarian candidate that is receiving a small number of the ballots. But you might have been noticing something as we were giving you those Georgia results. Both candidates are now below the 50 percent mark in Georgia. And there is a stipulation in the Peach State that if no federal candidate receives 50 percent plus one vote on the election, the top two vote getters advance to a runoff.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Of course, things could change, but it looks like the rest of the votes that are coming in are from predominantly Democratic areas. So it looks like, as of now, both Georgia Senate races are headed to a runoff, which will be decided on January 5th, 2021.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And if the Democrats were to win both of those, that seems like a long shot. But what would that mean for the ballots in the Senate? You're right. It is a long shot. But if Democrats won both of those, they would be at a 50-50 split, Democrats and Republicans.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: But we have to remember that if Joe Biden wins the presidency, the vice president becomes the Senate president. And so Vice President Kamala Harris would essentially be the tiebreaker vote in any, you know, 50-50 split in the Senate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So that would give Democrats the barest majority possible in the U.S. Senate. And what would that barest of leads mean for, like, the Democratic legislative agenda? I mean, it would certainly mean that they might have to kind of dial back their ambitions a little bit.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: You know, Democrats have had a really like they have their eyes on a lot of priorities that need to happen. I mean, I think number one is more COVID-19 relief. Number two is, you know, a jobs bill to kind of get the economy stimulated a little bit more and get more people back to work.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But, yeah, I mean, they're going to have to talk to Republicans more. They're probably going to have to be more bipartisan compromise than they may have initially wanted in the first place.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: And so, you know, ending the filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, all of these wildly ambitious, perhaps a little politically unorthodox ideas, not going to happen?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, we don't know for sure. It depends, you know, if they do have that tiebreaker vote and they do have 51 votes, then they do have a simple majority.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: And ending the filibuster is something that would happen with a simple majority. So it still is possible if they, you know, win both of these Georgia races or win the North Carolina Senate race. It is possible, but it is looking a little bit more unlikely than it did a few days ago.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the likeliest scenario here we should just note is that Republicans maintain control of the Senate
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Yeah I mean if Republicans maintain their hold in Georgia and maintain their hold in North Carolina then yes they will maintain control of the Senate
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It should be noted that Republicans pretty easily flipped the Alabama Senate seat, which Democrat Senator Doug Jones was holding. But they weren't able to pick off Democratic Senator Gary Peters in Michigan.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: So, yeah, it's just very close. But it is definitely possible that Mitch McConnell will remain Senate majority leader.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Up next, the call is coming from inside the House. I'm Sean Ramos-Furham. It's Today Explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ella, we just talked about the Senate. Let's talk about the House. Democrats held control of the House of Representatives?
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Yes. So far, it looks like Democrats are going to retain their control of the House of Representatives. But right now, it looks like their majority might actually be smaller than it used to be.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Right. Which I think comes as a bit of a surprise when compared to expectations here, people were talking about a blue wave.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: What happened?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So there were a few factors that sort of went into Republicans' good night in the House. Six Republican women have flipped seats from Democrats in places like South Carolina, South Florida, Minnesota, places across the country. That's a big win.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Republican women have been trying to win seats for years. They've largely failed. This time they succeeded.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you can remember that in 2018, Democratic women candidates overperformed men and it was, you know, kind of known as the year of the woman. So 2020 sort of might be known, at least in the House, as the year of the Republican woman.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: The other thing, too, is that we saw in some of the early presidential returns that Joe Biden was looking a bit weaker than expected with Hispanic voters, especially in states like Florida and Texas.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that was true for Democrats down ballot as well. They actually lost a couple of House seats in Florida, kind of in the Miami area, two seats that they had gained in 2018.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: And we saw that Biden was also doing weaker than expected in Miami-Dade County. And then Democrats also, they didn't lose any incumbents in Texas, but they had 10 targeted districts to flip in Texas. And they didn't flip any of them, which is kind of stunning considering that, you know, that was sort of like Democrats' top target.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They were pretty bullish on it. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had opened an in-person field office in Austin, Texas. So they were really devoting a lot of resources, and that just didn't pan out for them.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: So I think it was a combination of maybe people underestimating the strength that Trump had with down-ballot voters and the fact that he kind of acted a little bit as a turnout machine for House and Senate Republicans.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then also, yeah, this potential split ticket effect where people may have assumed that Biden was going to do better on the presidential level. And so they kind of wanted to have a little bit of a check on his power in the legislative branch.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: So all told, how many seats did the Democrats lose and win here? Right now, and of course, these numbers could change, the Democrats lost a little under 10 seats. But they also flipped three, including two open House seats in North Carolina and then one seat in Georgia that was a Republican seat.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Will that make a difference legislatively?
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: It could. But if Democrats still have 218 votes you know they can still pass party line votes out of the House. I think that sort of the biggest difference legislatively might sort of be the dynamics between the Democratic led House. And if the Senate remains in Republican hands, then the Republican controlled Senate, because then that would still be, you know, split control of government and Congress.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It would mean that there would have to be bipartisan negotiating on bills. And, you know, McConnell made it very clear that he wasn't interested in taking up any of the Democratic bills that the House passed in 2019 and 2020.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: So there could sort of continue to be this sense of what I like to call legislative paralysis on Capitol Hill, where there's just not a lot of stuff getting done.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is this going to lead to any, you know, serious reflection in the Democratic Party where, expectations were set so high and then ended up falling pretty short?
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: There's already been some chatter about replacing the person who was head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is the campaign arm for House Democrats.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And one of the names floating around is a Latino member of Congress. And it's worth noting that a Latino member of Congress controlled the DCCC in 2018 when they had such a good year.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Obviously, you know, I think that there is definitely going to be some reflection on where they need to make up ground going into 2022, which is going to be, you know, another really pivotal midterm year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, like, all told, the Democrats look like they maybe had a disappointing result in the Senate. But even our episode where we're talking about whether Democrats could flip the Senate, I mean, we were considering it as a somewhat unlikely scenario.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: So is this basically what people expected? Like a Biden win, a GOP majority in the Senate and a Democratic majority in the House. Was this the most discussed scenario, all told?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, I think that it probably could have been discussed a little bit more. There was a lot of excitement around the Senate races because Democrats had expanded, I think, their number of paths.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: But it probably was worth repeating more that a lot of these races were just in very Republican states. I mean, you know, even Georgia is historically a really Republican state.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A lot of the hype and a lot of money went to candidates like Amy McGrath in Kentucky and Jamie Harrison in South Carolina, who, you know, they may have been fundraising a lot.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: And you could argue that Harrison made that race more competitive for Democrats than had been in past years. But there are still fundamentally very Republican states with the very Republican electorates that like Donald Trump.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so I think that, you know, amidst all of the hype, there probably could have been a bigger dash of reality as far as, you know, just the electorate in a lot of these states.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: And there was so much hype for the Senate races in particular and so much money, like tens of millions, record-setting money dumped into those races.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Could some of the fundraising have been better distributed to maybe help the Democrats in House races in Texas over, you know, trying to unseat Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, which was just extremely unlikely to begin with?
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Oh, yeah. I mean, both in House races and also, you know, state legislature races where Democrats also didn't have a good night. And state legislatures very much matter when it comes to the House because state legislatures often are the ones that are going to be drawing new congressional districts in 2021 based off of the census.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So yeah, you know, money could have gone elsewhere rather than in South Carolina or Kentucky, and it probably would have gone further and maybe would have netted a different result for Democrats in other places.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: That just makes me wonder, is this like a leadership issue? Is this bad strategy on the part of the Democrats?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It could be. I think that there is definitely, you know, some conversations that have to be had at the level of, you know, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi as far as what went wrong, what they might need to do next time.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: I mean, Democrats in the Senate in particular have been on a losing streak. You know, they've been out of power for the last six years. They could be out of power for at least two more years, if not longer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There definitely needs to be some conversations as to how they're missing, what ways they need to do better. But also, I mean, it's just that the Senate is tough all the time. More power is concentrated in more Republican states, basically.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: I don't think, at least for Nancy Pelosi's part, that she's going to get a serious leadership challenge. I don't know about Schumer, but we'll have to see.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ella Nilsson, she's covering all the election things along with the rest of the Vox newsroom over at Vox.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: More tomorrow on Today Explained.
