During a news conference this afternoon, Nevada’s Clark County registrar said more than 27,400 mail-in ballots had yet to be counted. Joe Gloria said he did not have an estimate for the number of ballots deposited yesterday in drop boxes throughout the county, which includes the highly populous Las Vegas, but said it was “a considerable amount.”

The long of the short of it is we might not know the results until next week. 

“Mail-in ballots can be delivered until Saturday, and issues with mail-in ballots can be corrected, a process called curing, until Monday,” as FiveThirtyEight explained. While Republican Senate candidate Adam Laxalt is marginally ahead of the Democratic incumbent, Catherine Cortez Masto, the sheer number of untabulated ballots could possibly work in her favor, both because Las Vegas and its metro area tend to lean blue and because Democrats are more likely to mail their ballots than Republicans, who generally prefer to vote in person.

One of the more striking — though far from unprecedented — findings from the 2022 exit polls was the difference in two-party vote share by education and wealth. Democrats won voters making under $50,000 and voters with a college or graduate school education. The splits were particularly stark at each end of the respective scales: Democrats won 54% of voters with household incomes under $30,000, but just 41% of those in households making over $200,000.

This split isn’t anything new, but it’s important data to keep in mind the next time you see a GOP lawmaker or a Fox News talking head whine about the “elites.” By any objective measure, in a capitalist society, a person making $200,000 a year is more “elite” than a person who survived eight college semesters. But it serves Republicans’ interests to muddy these distinctions of class — the better to falsely portray themselves as serving the people.

Veteran Latino political observer and Lincoln Project co-founder Mike Madrid made an interesting observation about national exit polls and Latino voters.

The official 2022 exit poll breakdown for overall Latino voters landed at 60% for Democrats and 39% for Republicans. Is this a “new national baseline”? The answer is not fully clear, if two data points are taken into account — first, the breakdown of the current Latino exit poll data and, second, the historical data from previous exit poll cycles.

The 60-39 overall split fluctuates among different subgroups under the Latino category. For young Latino voters between the ages of 18 and 29, Democratic support peaked at 68% and Republican support decreased to 30%. As the Latino respondents get older, the support for Democrats decreases, with 44% of Latinos ages 45 to 64 choosing Republicans. To avoid the “new national baseline,” Democrats need to lean in with younger Latino voters, who still represent the largest share of Latino voters overall. 

The same can be said of Latina women overall, with 66% supporting Democrats and 33% supporting the GOP, as opposed to Latino men, who went 53% for Democrats and 45% for Republicans. More Latinas running for Democratic office will very likely maintain that split. As for Latino men, there has yet to be a Latino male candidate who is capturing their imagination.

With that said, though, the 2018 national midterm exit polls had a 69-29 Democratic advantage with Latino voters, and in 2014, the national exit polls for the House showed 62% support for Democrats and 36% for Republicans. In the 2010 House exit polls, Latino support for Democrats was at 66% and Republicans at 34%.

In other words, support has fluctuated.

A simpler reason why it feels that there is more Latino voter support for Republicans has more to do with raw voting numbers. As Pew clearly noted, the share of eligible Latino voters keeps increasing. In 2022, the Latino share of eligible voters was 14.3%. It was 12.8% in 2018, and in 2000 that number was just 7.4%.

The bigger takeaway about the 34.5 million eligible Latino voters is not that there is a “new national baseline,” but that Latino voters are much more complex and more diverse and maybe cannot be viewed in generalized terms anymore.

Here’s hoping.

President Biden is giving his first press conference in the aftermath of Election Day, calling the apparent lack of a "red wave" a big win for decency and democracy.

“It was a good day, I think, for democracy," Biden said during his speech at the White House, adding: "Our democracy has been tested in recent years, but with their votes the American people have spoken and proven once again that democracy is who we are."

It bears repeating, of course, that the votes are still being tallied in some key races, and control of the House and Senate has not yet been determined.

Moving away from the obsession with Florida and Latino voters, it’s time to focus a bit more on New Mexico, the state with the largest share of eligible Latino voters in the country (44%), according to Pew. Granted, New Mexico’s total of 1.3 million registered voters pales in comparison with states like Florida, Texas, California, New York and Arizona (the five states with the largest number of Latino voters), but Democrats can use the New Mexico success as an extension of a Southwest strategy that can help neutralize Latino Republican success in a place like Florida.

Looking at the New Mexico electoral map this afternoon, and it is all blue. Two of the three House races were already called for Democrats. In the third race, Democrat Gabriel Vasquez is leading Republican incumbent Yvette Herrell by half a percentage point with 99% of the vote counted.

For state races, Democrats won all the major races. Democrat Michelle Lujan Grisham defeated Republican Mark Ronchetti for governor, Democratic incumbent Maggie Toulouse Oliver won the secretary of state race over 2020 election denier Audrey Trujillo, and Democrat Raúl Torrez took the attorney general’s race.

Having a solidly blue state in the Southwest is key for Democrats. Given that states like California and Colorado are also trending blue, ensuring that New Mexico remains in the same camp will help Democrats as they continue to move the needle in more purple states like Arizona and Nevada.

And of course, if the Southwest becomes more and more Democratic, it could lead to the elusive target that is Texas for future cycles.

Jason Miller, conservative political strategist and former senior adviser to Trump, just said on Newsmax that he advised Trump to hold off on the "big" Nov. 15 announcement Trump teased during a recent rally.

The official reasoning is to wait until after the Georgia Senate run-off race, where incumbent Democrat Raphael Walker and Republican Herschel Walker will go head-to-head on Dec. 6.

“Priorities A, B, and C need to be about Herschel right now,” Miller said.

However, this seems like a thinly-veiled way of buying the GOP some time to arrive at consensus regarding its presidential candidate and potentially reconfigure its plans after Trump had an embarrassing night with many of his candidates losing elections across the country.

While control of the House and the Senate is still in the air, the fact that it wasn’t a resounding “red tsunami” makes the election historic. (Statistically, the president’s party hardly ever performs well in the midterms — between 1934 and 2018 said party has only won both chambers of Congress twice.)

Many political experts have noted today that Trump has never been weaker politically. And Trump is flailing (even attempting to blame his poor performance on his wife, Melania), which suggests he knows this, too. Miller’s advice to the former president might be a bellwether of shifting tides: The GOP may finally be ending its codependent relationship with its partner in crime, so to say.

Vox writer Zack Beauchamp pulled this interesting tidbit out from yesterday’s NBC News Exit Poll:

That goes against what you’d expect but makes sense when you consider the myriad number of reasons why a voter might “slightly disapprove” of Biden’s performance. Like I noted earlier this year when railing against the perennial polling question asking whether America is “on the right track or wrong track,” two people could give the same answer for very different reasons. If you have a voter that slightly disapproves of Biden because inflation is too high and one who thinks that Biden hasn’t done enough to counter the GOP’s assault on immigrants in the country, only one of those would potentially support a Republican candidate.

In other words, what we’re seeing is a case where a lot of folks telling Biden “do better” didn’t see any alternative candidate on the ballot who would actually, well, do better.