Dead heat in key midterm election races, 43 million votes already cast

Of the truly wacky characters trying to convince voters to let them run future elections, Kristina Karamo is truly a special case. Karamo — who is the Republican candidate to be secretary of state in Michigan — filed a lawsuit last week that asked the court to block officials from counting thousands of mail-in ballots from Detroit voters (and only Detroit voters). Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Timothy Kenny was clear in his ruling on Monday: Absolutely not.

MSNBC election expert Steve Kornacki predicts historic voter turnout during the midterm elections this year, with possibly 120 million or more voters. By comparison, 85 million people voted in the 2014 midterms.

"That's how much interest in politics has risen over the last decade," Kornacki said. "To be at a level that high, it would have been unthinkable before. And so it sort of is the ultimate variable: Are we at a point in these midterm elections where Democrats may get voters motivated who in the past wouldn't have been?"

More than 43 million people have already cast their ballots this election cycle.

Trump lawyer Christina Bobb, a fervent 2020 election denier, is trying to set the stage for another wave of denialism through patently absurd disinformation. Speaking on Monday on the Right Side Broadcasting Network, a pro-Trump media network, Bobb said: “I expect to know who won by like the middle of the night, maybe very, very early Wednesday morning. If we don’t, and if Democrats try to extend the vote, I think they’re going to have a very, very hard time doing it with any level of credibility.”

She then rehashed fabricated claims about Democratic “ballot harvesting” in 2020 and warned that areas that don’t have a final result by early morning this time around will look “very suspicious.”

It’s difficult to overstate the cynicism of these operators. Republicans, including Bobb, knew that in 2020 the early results would look more promising for Republicans earlier in the night because Democrats were voting by mail-in ballots in far greater numbers and because some states don’t start counting mail-in ballots until Election Day itself. Republicans also know that dynamic is set to play out again, due to mail-in ballot voting patterns and practices. Of course varying and sometimes protracted vote count times are routine and never an inherent sign of foul play — one needs evidence to make the claim that they are. 

But Bobb and her allies have zero interest in evidence. All they’re trying to do is maximize their capacity to claim the election results are fraudulent if they end up looking better for Democrats than Republicans.

During a rally in Ohio to boost GOP candidate J.D. Vance, Trump did nothing to lower the temperature amid rising partisan tensions.

After describing MS-13 gang members as "animals," he said he also considers Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi an "animal," claiming he's justified in calling her that because "she impeached me twice."

His comment comes roughly nine days after Pelosi's husband, Paul Pelosi, was attacked by an assailant in the couple's San Francisco home. The suspect allegedly told police that he saw Nancy Pelosi as the "leader" of "Democratic lies" and wanted to break her kneecaps if she "lied" to him.

Officials, including President Biden, have warned of the threat of political violence leading up to Election Day.

"You see what the reaction is on the other side to this, to make a joke of it, and really that is traumatizing too,” Pelosi told CNN of some Republicans' response to the attack.

“In our democracy there is one party that is doubting the outcome of the election, feeding that flame, and mocking any violence that happens," she added. "That has to stop."

We've all been there: You think you filled out a form correctly, only to find out we forgot to check a box here or initial there. Normally, the consequences are minimal, but when it comes to voting, a mismatched signature or missing date could invalidate your ballot entirely.

The good news is more than a dozen states — including battlegrounds like Georgia, Florida, Nevada and Wisconsin — allow voters to "cure" their ballots within a specific time frame. Not surprisingly, Republicans in many places have sought to limit ballot curing laws in the courts, but with only limited success. The most complicated case is Pennsylvania: The Keystone State has no statewide ballot curing law, but the state supreme court has ruled that counties can cure ballots. Allegheny County and Philadelphia, among others, have taken to posting lists of erroneous ballots received, in hopes that those voters can cast a replacement ballot or correct their error.

Regardless of where you live, be sure to check your state and local elections websites so you know how officials will contact you in case your ballot needs to be cured.

MSNBC Daily columnist Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI official, warned that law enforcement keeping an eye out for potential Election Day violence must stay vigilant in the days and weeks that follow.

"My main concern is whether or not local and county and state law enforcement is prepared not just for tomorrow, which would be the obvious thing ... but rather I think there are so many contests that could go into overtime," Figliuzzi told MSNBC's "Deadline: White House."

"Don't breathe that sigh of relief if after tomorrow you get through it and there's no major incident," he added.

How does NBC News call elections before every single vote is counted? Welcome to the Decision Desk, the election brain trust led by Director of Elections John Lapinski. Lapinski and crew analyze reams of different kinds of data, and only call a race once they are 99.5% positive of the outcome. Learn more in this sneak peek from Stay Tuned below:

Nashville election officials now say that they’ve discovered more than 430 ballots that were cast in the wrong race during early voting, the AP reported on Monday night. Voters who submitted an incorrect ballot “may be able to enter a provisional ballot on Election Day at the county election office if they submitted an incorrect ballot during the early voting period," although any "provisional ballots will only be opened if the election is contested,” the AP added.

So why the mixup in the first place? Republican state lawmakers opted to crack Nashville — formerly in a solidly blue district — and divide it into three separate districts earlier this year. And some people may argue that this gerrymandering, which gives the GOP a better chance than it’s had in years of picking up a seat held by the retiring Democrat Jim Cooper, is to blame for this confusion. (That includes me, I would say this.)

Former Trump aide Stephen Miller may no longer have a job in the White House, but he's still wielding influence as the president of the America First Legal Foundation. The foundation is behind a series of eleventh-hour midterm ads that accuse President Joe Biden and Democrats of “anti-white bigotry.” 

According to MSNBC columnist Jesse J. Holland, the ads are wildly incorrect. But their goal is to inflame racial tensions, not inform voters.

"Why do political strategists believe that such nakedly racist ads, ads that prompt white voters to see forward movement for other groups as a backward step for them, will appeal to enough white Americans to matter? Probably because polling suggests it could," he writes.

Read Jesse's full story below:

Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel unveiled a jaw-dropping new rhetorical tactic today in an attempt to rebuff the “election denier” label. 

“They keep using this ‘denier’ phrase,” McDaniel said on Fox News, referring to how Democrats call Republicans election deniers. “Listen, the Democrats have been inflation deniers, they have been crime deniers, border deniers, fentanyl deniers, education deniers."

In other words, she equated the Trump-induced GOP trend of rejecting the legitimacy of the 2020 election with Democrats’ differences in opinion on issues like economic policy, immigration policy and Covid-19 safety protocols in schools. 

One of these things is not like the other. Democrats and Republicans have long diverged on what smart and ethical policy looks like. But election denialism is something else altogether. It’s a refusal to accept empirical reality, insofar as there is no evidence of fraud that could have overturned the 2020 election. And it constitutes a hostility toward democratic politics, in that despite a lack of evidence, many MAGA Republicans are now refusing to say whether they’ll accept their own election losses and creating new institutions and laws designed to discourage people from voting. 

It seems the GOP’s anti-democracy messaging is getting more dangerous by the day.

Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano has been struggling to explain away several instances of antisemitism on the campaign trail. His Democratic opponent, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro is Jewish and between Mastriano’s attacks on Shapiro sending his kids to a Jewish day school, his wife defending him by saying that they “love Israel more than a lot of Jews,” and the outright Christian nationalist rhetoric he and his supporters have espoused, it would take a lot to repair the damage to the state’s Jewish community.

But don’t worry, a woman at a Mastriano rally in Bucks County has found a way to bridge that divide: Take the lyrics of a classic musical about Jewish resilience and make it all about Mastriano winning. Problem solved!

A Georgia judge has extended the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots in Cobb County to Nov. 14, after the county failed to mail over 1,000 absentee ballots to people who had requested them.

The county election director reportedly attributed the failure to “human error” and noted that a striking 38% of their staff were new to their jobs. She also said that many staff members had quit because, among other things, there was “too much pressure” on them.

While details are still coming out, some electoral experts are saying that this fumble is the product of a climate of hostility toward election workers. University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald tweeted: “This was the plan all along of the election deniers. Step 1: Abuse election officials until they quit. Step 2: Lose institutional memory so elections don’t work as well as they should.”

The GOP has made some pretty concerning promises in the lead-up to Election Day about what its members will do if they win control of Congress.

Steve Benen put together a handy list for MaddowBlog breaking down what Americans should expect Republicans to do if handed more power during the midterms. That lists includes potentially crashing the economy and helping Russia. More from Steve:

"I suspect many voters haven’t considered this in much detail, and even those who’ve imagined the prospect of a Democratic White House working alongside a Republican majority on Capitol Hill have probably made some modest assumptions about legislative gridlock, a handful of culture war disputes, and more frequent use of the presidential veto pen. But this dramatically understates matters. The next two years will be vastly worse if voters rally behind GOP candidates tomorrow."

Read Steve's full story below.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has been struggling to convince advertisers that Twitter isn’t going to become an extremist, disinformation-filled hellscape. But that hasn’t prevented him from calling for American voters to elect Republicans to Congress. 

As I wrote in a piece today, Musk’s putative reasoning — to put a check on excess from one party — revealed a strange and shallow analysis of today’s political moment given the GOP’s extremist tendencies. However, it’s also possible that he wanted to mask his rightward drift in language that sounded nonpartisan at a time when Twitter is hemorrhaging advertising revenue.

And in what seemed to be another attempt to convince the public that he is high-minded, he tweeted later in the day that he used to always vote Democratic until this year, and that he is “open to the idea of voting Democrat again in the future.”

Musk seems to be backing himself into a strange corner. He desperately wants to influence American political life, yet he knows that the louder he is, the more difficult it will be for Twitter to be a profitable and credible platform.

In a tweet sent earlier tonight, Sen. Raphael Warnock made a very personal plea to Georgia voters:

Like many Democrats, Warnock is hoping that the debate over abortion rights may be a deciding factor in this midterms cycle. His GOP challenger, Herschel Walker, has been plagued by a series of scandals involving women who say the anti-abortion candidate paid for their abortions. (Walker has denied the allegations.)

But it remains to be seen how much reproductive freedom will influence voters at the ballot box this year, if at all. The final national NBC News poll of the 2022 midterms suggested abortion is a topic many voters care about, though it may not be the most important one to them.

Sure, some people may see the midterm elections as a high-stakes, democracy-defining event. And they absolutely are. But no one can explain exactly what is happening on Election Day better than MSNBC's very own khaki-wearing elections expert, Steve Kornacki, and his beloved "Big Board."

The well wishes are rolling in on Twitter and, honestly, it's a nice break from doom-scrolling.

At the Houston Astros’ World Series victory parade today, Sen. Ted Cruz was struck with a beer can while riding on a float, according to police.

Houston police tweeted that the Texas Republican did not require medical attention.

The person who threw the can, whom police identified only as a 33-year-old man, was charged with assault.

Officials have warned about the potential for political violence ahead of Election Day. Late last month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, was attacked by an assailant in the couple’s San Francisco home.

If you had any lingering doubt about whether the GOP is a party largely centered around white, racial grievances — first of all, how? And secondly, the past couple weeks should be proof.

Just last week, I wrote about Republican nominees Sarah Palin of Alaska, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, and Dan Bolduc of New Hampshire all winding down their campaigns with talking points that align closely to the racist “replacement theory,” which baselessly alleges shadowy liberal figures are aiming to alter the United States’ demographic makeup and way of life. 

Former Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller was even less subtle with his interpretation of the GOP’s closing message for conservative voters, as my MSNBC colleague Steve Benen noted last week. Miller’s legal organization has been taking out ads on television and in local radio falsely accusing liberals of discriminating against white people.

The television ads are especially pitiful, as it literally includes white tears (that is, crying white folks) in order to garner votes. The group has also sent out mailers to Asian American voters intent on stoking fears about Black racism toward white people and Asians. It’s a familiar strategy. Republicans have sworn they’d have no problem running against President Joe Biden and his record this election cycle. But the proof is in the pudding. By retreating to the well of racial grievance, they’re showing how weak their hand truly is. 

LGBTQ Americans and their allies, rejoice! Without a doubt, democracy is being put to the test this election cycle, but there's some good news to latch onto already: For the first time, LGBTQ Americans will be on the ballot in all 50 states.

A record 678 LGBTQ candidates will appear on the ballot tomorrow, according to a recent report from political action committee LGBTQ Victory Fund.

“Bigots want us to stay home and stay quiet," said the group's president, Annise Parker, "but their attacks are backfiring and instead have motivated a new wave of LGBTQ leaders to run for office.”

The Justice Department announced today that its civil rights division will monitor polls in 64 jurisdictions in 24 states, including Alaska, Florida, Georgia and Nevada — battleground states that could determine congressional control.

Though the DOJ has monitored elections for decades, it’s expanding its operations in Arizona and Texas, where ballot drop boxes have been the focal point of voter intimidation reports and lawsuits.

The elephant in the room is Republican-led voter suppression. And it’s casting a pall over this year’s midterms. 

These are not going to be legitimate gauges of the public’s wants and wishes, because Republicans have deliberately prevented us from getting that, using threats of violence, gerrymandering and a raft of laws meant to curb voter participation, including in potential battleground states such as Texas, Florida, Georgia and Arizona. 

I say this to make the point that, until we have a fully enfranchised public — or, at minimum, don’t have millions of people actively being disenfranchised – we should temper post-election coverage about so-called rebukes of the Biden administration. Or any administration. 

The GOP has placed its thumb on the scale. As I’ve written previously, the mere fact that people turn out to vote — perhaps, even to the extent Democrats retain the House and the Senate — doesn’t discount the existence of voter suppression.

Two of the most high profile Senate races in the county this election cycle are taking place in the neighboring states of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Even though Democrat Tim Ryan has run a spirited race against the GOP candidate J.D. Vance, and Republican Mehmet Oz has come back from a double-digit polling deficit to Democrat John Fetterman, I’m bearish on both candidate’s chances of winning. The reason has less to do with them than it does their ticket mates.

In Ohio, Democrat Nan Whaley is trailing incumbent Gov. Mike DeWine by as much as 20 percentage points in recent polls. In Pennsylvania, Republican Doug Mastriano has run one of the worst campaigns this cycle and is also trailing his Democratic opponent, Josh Shapiro by double digits, according to some polls. For Ryan and Oz to win, they would need to outrun Whaley and Mastriano by double digit margins. That is possible, but it’s highly unlikely.

Past precedent gives a slightly bigger boost to Ryan’s hopes. In 2018, DeWine won his first term by 3.7 percentage points, while Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown won re-election by 6.8 percentage points — that’s a gap of 10.5 points.  The problem for Ryan is that DeWine is likely to win by a far larger margin this time, and while J.D. Vance is a notably weak candidate, Ryan does not have the same statewide reputation as an incumbent like Brown. 

In Pennsylvania, things might be even tougher for Oz even though the polls suggest a toss-up. Pennsylvania is generally considered to be a swing state, but recent electoral outcomes suggest that it’s, for the most part, a blue-leaning state. Only one Republican candidate has gotten more than 51% of the vote in any election since 2004. For Republicans to win, the stars need to be aligned in their favor. Oz, however, has two major hurdles — Mastriano and his unfavorability numbers. In the most recent Marist poll of the race, Oz favorabiities are 35/52 (in contrast Fetterman is at 45/43). Those numbers are consistent with other recent polling. For Oz to win, he would need to outpoll Mastriano by double digits and also weather the headwind of favorability numbers that are 19 points worse than his opponent. 

In addition, there is significantly less ticket-splitting in American politics these days. In 2020, only one Senate candidate won in a state that the presidential candidate of the other party won (Susan Collins in Maine). This is a by-product of the nation’s increasingly intense political polarization. 

Because of the weakness of various candidates this cycle we are likely to see far more ticket-splitting than usual. In Arizona, Georgia and Nevada there is a reasonable chance that candidates of different parties win gubernatorial and Senate races. But for it happen in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Oz and Ryan would need to vastly overperform their ticketmates and that feels like a major stretch.

The Pittsburgh Steelers — at least, traditionally — have been an archetype for blue collar toughness. And, more importantly, they’re located in Western Pennsylvania, a region that typically favors Republicans but a place where Fetterman is hoping his familiarity with Pennsylvania will help him cut into votes for Oz.

So, of course, the Steelers are having an outsize role in the dialogue as we head into Election Day.

A 2016 video of Fetterman recreating the iconic Coca-Cola ad from 1979 with “Mean” Joe Greene is going viral, with some on the right mocking Fetterman for reviving the classic. 

On the other hand, he’d probably prefer that to being Oz, who on Saturday advised people at a Pittsburgh rally to tell other people to vote before the Steelers game on Sunday. (There wasn't a Steelers game on Sunday.)

Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes’ bid to dethrone Republican Sen. Ron Johnson in Wisconsin isn’t looking promising according to the polls, but he certainly has a real chance.

The contest is a test of whether a deeply progressive candidate like Barnes, who supports policies like Medicare-for-all and sweeping criminal justice reform, can take out a right-wing populist in a purple state.

Johnson has twice defeated a bold progressive — former Sen. Russ Feingold — and he’s trying to maintain that winning streak. Johnson’s secret weapon on the campaign trial this year? Being on the radio all time.  

One post I’d like to signal boost ahead of Election Day is this AZCentral.com report on the Arizona Republican Party's embrace of Turning Point USA, the extremist-friendly organization geared toward young people.

I wrote about the Phoenix-based organization last year in this post. They are a Trump-centric, illiberal organization that espouses fundamentalist Christian beliefs. They’ve been embraced by Trump, Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, and virtually any other conservative who makes their way through Arizona. And they co-run at least one K-12 school in the state. 

There’s often an assumption that youth connotes progressivism. But if you want a prime example of how the GOP intends to radicalize young people to embrace hyper-conservatism, TPUSA is the prime example. Democrats should take heed.

Keep your eyes on Republican Kari Lake, a former TV anchor, vs. Democrat Katie Hobson, Arizona's secretary of state, in their race for Arizona governor. Lake is arguably the most polished, telegenic MAGA politician in America right now, and if she enters the governor’s mansion she’ll be well-positioned to pursue a hard-core Trumpian policy regime, meddle with the legitimacy of the 2024 election in a battleground state, and help popularize a more refined version of Trumpism nationwide.

Ever since the Sen. Raphael Warnock vs. Herschel Walker face-off began, I’ve viewed it as an extremely racialized campaign despite the fact both candidates are Black. 

I think the explanation is simple: Warnock and Walker represent two distinct visions for what it means to be free and Black in America. 

Warnock is not only erudite — he is inquisitive, empathetic, well-spoken and audacious enough to believe the government can systematically help the marginalized, particularly Black people who have long suffered under it. 

Walker is none of those things. And that’s a major reason why the GOP loves him.

My eyes are on Arizona’s U.S. Senate race between incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly and Republican Blake Masters. 

I thought President Barack Obama was spot-on when he said this of Masters during a rally last week: “If you were trying to create in a lab a wacky Republican politician, it’d look a lot like this guy.”

Masters is, to borrow from Obama’s metaphor, an amalgamation of the worst aspects of  conservatism. In some ways, he’s a classic conservative who thinks the benefits of modern society should be concentrated among the white and wealthy. But he’s also a Peter Thiel-inspired technocrat cut from a younger, crueler conservative movement obsessed with wielding modern technology against their enemies — be it social media platforms rife with deceptive information or gun-ready drones patrolling the border.

We’ve talked a lot about the election deniers who are on the ballot this year, but what about the people who were actually in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021?

Some of the most prominent Jan. 6 rallygoers have been knocked out of the running (see: Michigan’s Ryan Kelley, who was arrested and charged before losing the GOP gubernatorial primary to Tudor Dixon). But CBS News pulled together a list of 10 people who were in the country’s capital that day and are looking to either join Congress or hold leadership positions in their state.

After Kansas voters turned out to support abortion rights this summer, activists are hoping for a repeat victory in Michigan on Tuesday, where Proposal 3 would enshrine abortion rights to the state’s constitution. It’s been a struggle to get the initiative before voters at all, with a Republican effort to block it from the ballot ultimately losing out at the Michigan Supreme Court.

In the most recent polling out of the state, 59% of respondents supported the proposal versus 40% opposed. That has to be heartening for Democrats in the state — including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — given that 43% of respondents in the same poll said that abortion rights was the main issue that influenced their choice in the gubernatorial race.

One of the marquee races of the midterms is the contest over Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat. Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman is currently locked in a dead heat with celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz in the polls.

They represent starkly different visions for the country, with Fetterman leaning populist progressive on many issues — he endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont for president in 2016 — while Oz has the backing of Trump and has fixated on crime and immigration during his campaign. Their race is one of a handful that could determine whether Democrats can cling to control of the Senate.