US Georgia Senate runoff election live

Live commentary from late Wednesday morning on the final contest of the US midterm elections. Also: polls turn against NZ Labour and Jacinda Ardern.

Live Commentary

3:44pm Thursday I’ve done a Conversation article which includes the Georgia Senate runoff result. The big advantage of Dems holding the Senate is that the Senate alone can confirm Biden’s judicial nominations for the next two years.

4:56pm Warnock’s lead out to 51.3-48.7 with 99% reporting. This result means Dems hold the Senate by a 51-49 margin, with Pennsylvania (a Dem gain) the only state to change hands this cycle. But the Senate races up in 2024 are bad for the Dems, as they will be defending 23 seats to just ten Rep defences.

2:59pm CNN and the AP have CALLED for Warnock, who currently leads by 50.7-49.3 with 98% in.

1:50pm The NY Times Needle is back. Warnock’s win probability is over 95% and his final winning margin is projected to be 3.2%. Warnock has just moved ahead in the live count again, but there’s still lots more votes to come in metro Atlanta.

1:37pm Cook Political Report analyst Dave Wasserman has seen enough.

1:23pm Warnock has retaken the lead in the live count, by 50.4-49.6 with 78% in.

1:16pm Back from lunch, and the Needle is still down. Walker is barely ahead now by 50.12-49.88 with 74% reporting. Metro Atlanta should get Warnock home from here.

12:54pm Walker now up by 51.0-49.0 in the live count with 65% in. It was about this time on Nov 8 that his lead maxxed.

12:44pm Live count has Walker hitting the lead by 50.6-49.4 with 59% in. But there’s still lots left to count in Atlanta, so Warnock should win.

12:40pm NY Times Needle has paused updates while they investigate a data issue. It had narrowed just before pausing.

12:26pm Needle now up to a 79% chance of Warnock winning, with a final projected margin of Warnock by 2.5%. That’s with an estimated 53% in.

12:18pm Needle now giving Warnock a 71% chance to win and a 1.8% lead in its final results projections. Still a range of Walker by five to Warnock by nine.

12:01pm Needle so far says result could be between a seven-point win for Walker and a nine-point win for Warnock. Best estimate is Warnock by 0.8%.

11:54am The NY Times needle so far has Warnock barely ahead by 0.8% when all votes are counted. That would line up well with his November 0.9% margin, but be worse than the polls.

11:35am With 34% reporting according to CNN, Warnock leads by 61-39. This would be early votes so far.

9:59am Wednesday Late polls are good news for Dem Warnock, with two giving him a five-point lead and one from the Rep-aligned Trafalgar group giving him a four-point lead. I have an appointment, but will be back at 11:30am.

Guest post by Adrian Beaumont, who joins us from time to time to provide commentary on elections internationally. Adrian is a paid election analyst for The Conversation. His work for The Conversation can be found here, and his own website is here.

The United States November 8 midterm elections are not quite finished, as the Georgia Senate contest has gone to a runoff today, with polls closing at 11am Wednesday AEDT. At the November 8 election, Democrat Raphael Warnock won 49.4% and Republican Herschel Walker 48.5%. A Libertarian, with 2.1%, prevented a majority for either candidate, and so the runoff. Polls for the runoff suggest Warnock is narrowly ahead.

Democrats currently lead the Senate by 50-49. Even if Warnock loses, they will still control the Senate on Vice President Kamala Harris’ casting vote. But this election is important because Democrats face a very difficult Senate map in the 2024 elections.

Of the 33 Senate seats up for election in 2024, 23 are Democrat-held and just ten Republican-held. Democrat-held seats include three states – West Virginia, Montana and Ohio – that Donald Trump won easily in both 2016 and 2020. Democrats need to win Georgia next week to have a realistic chance of keeping the Senate after the 2024 elections.

At the November 8 election, Warnock took a big lead in early counting, but his lead fell back as the Election Day votes were counted. Walker led at various points, but late counting in Democratic areas gave Warnock a narrow win. If the result is close, I would not expect this contest to be called until Wednesday night AEDT.

NZ Labour has slid behind National in polls

The next New Zealand election will be held in late 2023. At the October 2020 election, Labour won a landslide, with 50.0% to 25.6% for the conservative National, 7.9% for the Greens and 7.6% for the right-wing ACT. At that election, PM Jacinda Ardern was assisted by her success at keeping COVID out of NZ.

NZ uses proportional representation with a 5% threshold, but parties under 5% can enter parliament by winning a single-member seat. The Maori party won two seats at the 2020 election on only 1.2% of votes.

National has now taken the lead, and the two most recent polls by media pollsters – Reid Research and Kantar Public – would give National and ACT combined a majority. Other polls suggest Labour could cling on with support from the Greens and the Maori party. Labour’s problems are probably due to the waning of the COVID boost and the rise of inflation.

95 comments on “US Georgia Senate runoff election live”

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  1. Shame they couldn’t have organised this before the runoff – this in the Dominion System case…

    Rupert Murdoch, the 91-year-old chairman of Fox News parent company Fox Corp, will be forced to answer questions under oath next week about his network’s coverage of the 2020 presidential election.

  2. HOLY CR*P: Trump Just Lied that He DID NOT Say to ‘Terminate’ the Constitution – Which He Def Said

    https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/5/2140187/-CRYBABY-TRUMP-Doubles-Down-on-His-Constitution-Bashing-and-Misquotes-Himself-to-Gaslight-His-Cult

    ” Trump is now lashing out the media for reporting verbatim what he said. He wrote…

    The Fake News is actually trying to convince the American People that I said I wanted to ‘terminate’ the Constitution. This is simply more DISINFORMATION & LIES, just like RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, and all of their other HOAXES & SCAMS. What I said was that when there is ‘MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION,’ as has been irrefutably proven in the 2020 Presidential Election, steps must be immediately taken to RIGHT THE WRONG. Only FOOLS would disagree with that and accept STOLEN ELECTIONS. MAGA!”

  8. Vic

    Loved your typo ‘warlock’ – it reminds me that Walker at an election rally spent some time talking about whether he’d rather be a werewolf or a vampire. No wonder even the Republican Lieutenant Governor of Georgia Geoff Duncan said he did not vote for Walker.

    Ps – I think Herschel came down on the side of vampire. Just weird. Maybe playing all that American Football had some detrimental effects.

  9. “9:59am Wednesday Late polls are good news for Dem Warnock, with two giving him a five-point lead and one from the Rep-aligned Trafalgar group giving him a four-point lead. I have an appointment, but will be back at 11:30am.”…

    Well, in my view this is a strong test to see how De-Moronised the voters in Georgia are.
    So far, I am optimistic!

    Walker is Trump’s candidate, and this will definitely be a test for “Trump’s zombie grasp on America”
    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/06/georgia-senate-runoff-warnock-walker-robert-reich

  10. “NZ Labour has slid behind National in polls”

    This slide:

    “National polled 39 per cent in the well-regarded poll, up seven points, compared to Labour’s 37 per cent, down three.”

    That looks like it’s within the margin of error, doesn’t it?

    We will have to wait for “the trend” before reaching firmer conclusions on Ardern and the NZ Labour party….

  11. Early vote has Warnock… slightly over-performing November, but there is always the risk where E-Day vote happens to be even more R than it was last month… we shall see.

    But my gut feel of 52-ish for Warnock feels OK.

  13. Alpo

    The 5% threshold can be crucial (as was the lower threshold in the recent Israeli election). ACT used to never get to 5% but got seats because their leader won his electorate. But in 2020 they got past the threshold and won 10 seats while NZ first fell below 5% and got none.

    Some people vote for Labor or National in their electorate but then some other party in the list vote for ‘balance’ but the list vote is ultimately what decides the numbers in the parliament if not the individual members.

    The worst situation is to have a few Monty Pythonesque ‘splitters’ on your side of politics all getting less than 5% and no directly elected members.

    I do feel with the fall of NZF and the rise of ACT that Labor could be in trouble and there may be a National/ACT government elected. But as you say we are still a fair way off.

    Ps – Adrian wasn’t there an election in one of the Balkan countries where a party ‘gamed’ a similar electoral system by sort of having two supposedly separate parties (who were really the same organisation) and encouraging votes for one in the electorates and the other in the list vote? In order to get more members elected than they would otherwise on the list ‘rebalancing’ calculations

  14. Interesting to see that they start counting the prepoll votes at 7am when polls open – so we now have 27% of the votes counted half an hour after polls close! So Democrats lead early – a different scenario to so many races in 2020 where the prepolls kicked in later

  15. Appears to belittle change in the district by district comparison between the runoff and 4 weeks ago.

    Nate Cohn atNYTimes forecasting Dem+1

  19. Indeed they are jt – comparisons with the same booth/county as last time is an indicator of swing or not. And turnout is always a key variable in the US

    But a long way to go

  25. A couple of days old now, but there’s been an Ipsos poll on the question of support for a united Ireland. The poll was taken in both Northern Ireland and Ireland. The results in Northern Ireland were:

    Yes: 26 percent

    No: 50 percent

    Don’t know/undecided: 19 percent

    Won’t vote: 5 percent

    In Ireland, support was at 66 percent, no 16 percent.

    While the margin in this poll was larger than in some others, I think it is clear that Northern Ireland’s status is not changing for a long, long time. It is also worth noting that in this poll, 21 percent of Catholics stated they would vote to remain in the UK, with 54 percent supporting a united Ireland; so the assumption that demographics would bring about a united Ireland has been well and truly overstated.

  27. Late Riser at 12.13 pm

    See DeKalb County in Atlanta: Warnock has 88% there with only 5% counted so far.

    NYT Warnock win probability now up to 77%.

  28. NYT very close to giving the Georgia Senate race away. The needle now has Warnock at 80% likelihood of winning, probably by a margin of around 2.5%. The needle has been moving steadily towards the Dem for the last half hour, and there are still a lot of votes to come from Atlanta and other Democratic strongholds, so it can’t be long till this race gets called for Warnock.

  29. Looking at the numbers coming in it looks like Walker needed to be way ahead with the country counties before the big Atlanta ones came in….the fact that he is behind before the wave of Atlanta hits points to a Warnock win

  31. GOP standard recipe has been to maxmise turnout in as much of their heartland, namely the smaller rural counties in the north and south of the state. Whilst Democrat strength was confined to:
    – inner Atlanta (Fulton county),
    – the southern Atlanta suburbs (De Kalb/Clayton counties)
    – second tier cities such as Augusta, Savannah, Macon
    – “Black Belt” around Columbus
    – Athens (home of University of Georgia)
    this was sufficient. The key game changer has been the northern Atlanta suburbs (Cobb and Gwinnett counties) have changed political colour over the past decade and even some of the exurbs are not as deep Red as before.

    As a result, GOP no longer has any of the biggest counties delivering major majorities. Therefore, its a case of “goosing” one’s own vote to the maximum whilst trying to depress the vote in the largest counties as efficiently (but subtly) as possible. It’s becoming harder to achieve in national contests and is only succeeding with state contests due to ticket splitting.

  32. Warnock 51% to 49% Walker, with 55% of votes in. Doesn’t that mean that 45% of votes are still to be counted? I’m more puzzled than ever. How can Warnock be 66% of winning? There’s only 31,000 votes in it at the moment.

    What is that “percentage of votes in” a percentage of?

  34. LR – because there a still a large number of votes still be counted from Atlanta and other Democratic strongholds, while the equivalent Republican bastions have largely been all counted already.

  38. jt1983 says:
    Wednesday, December 7, 2022 at 12:42 pm

    Walker ahead is fine at this point, with a massive number of votes out in Atlanta.
    中华人民共和国
    Agree. Like Australian Elections where the small conservative booths report quickly.

  40. MSNBC showing the blue hearts on sleeves, but doing quite an entertaining coverage.

    As Yogi Beara predicted , referring to the turnout in the big Atlanta counties, it’s deja vu all over again.

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