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9:07 AM PT (Jeff Singer): Late Calls: On Thursday, Republican Paul Chabot conceded to Democrat Pete Aguilar in California's 31st District. This gives Democrats a rare, though expected, pickup. Also on Thursday, the race in Maryland's 6th District was called for Democratic Rep. John Delaney, who won an unexpectedly tight victory against Republican Dan Bongino.
9:18 AM PT (Jeff Singer): Uncalled Races: Several races remain uncalled as of Friday morning. We recently ran through them here and we have updates below for any contests where we have new details. You can check who has won each key race at our race tracker here, and you can also keep an eye on our continuously updated list of uncalled races. (We're relying on CNN's election results page for calls.)
• AZ-02: After 16,000 Pima County ballots were counted Thursday, Republican Martha McSally's lead over Democratic Rep. Ron Barber was reduced to 363 votes. At the moment no one is sure how many ballots are left. According to the Tucson Weekly there are 14,000 absentee and 10,000 provisional ballots in all of Pima County, but it is not clear how many are in the district. About 59 percent of Pima is in AZ-02. There are also 3,222 uncounted ballots in Cochise County, which is entirely contained in the 2nd District. Without knowing how many votes are left it's hard to know who is favored to come out ahead, but if Barber does as well with the last batch of Pima ballots as he did on Thursday he has a good shot to pull off a narrow win.
• CA-07: On Thursday, Republican Doug Ose's lead over Democratic Rep. Ami Bera was down to 2,183 votes. An extra 17,000 votes were counted, taking the number of uncounted ballots from 60,000 to about 43,000. Bera would need to win these by about 52.5 to 47.5 to pull ahead. Bera took the last batch with 52.4 percent, so a Democratic win looks plausible but far from assured.
• CA-16: Some Dude Republican Johnny Tacherra currently leads Democratic Rep. Jim Costa by 736 votes. No one is sure how many remaining ballots are left out, but Costa-friendly Fresno County is expected to count more on Friday afternoon, so we should have a better idea where things stand soon.
• CA-17: Rep. Mike Honda currently leads fellow Democrat Ro Khanna by 3,930 votes. Khanna has not conceded but there's no reason to think that these ballots will disproportionately favor him, especially since Honda gained in the last count. Honda is scheduled to hold a press conference this afternoon at 1 PM ET.
• CA-52: After trailing on Election Night, Democratic Rep. Scott Peters now holds a 861-vote lead over Republican Carl DeMaio. There are about 33,300 ballots left and as long as the remaining votes are anywhere near as disproportionately Democratic as late-counted ballots usually are in California, Peters should win. The next batch of votes is to be counted at 8 PM ET on Friday.
• NY-25: Democratic Rep. Louise Slaughter now has a 651 vote lead over Republican Mark Assini, up from 582 votes on Election Night. Slaughter has declared victory but Assini has not conceded. There are reportedly only 1,200 to 1,300 absentees left, but an unknown number of affidavit ballots. Everything should be counted next Wednesday, but there don't appear to be enough votes left for Assini to make up the ground he needs.
• WA-04: Dan Newhouse leads fellow Republican Clint Didier 51-49, down from his 52-48 Election Night total. There are reportedly 40,000 votes left, many of which will be counted on Friday.
• VA-Sen, AK-Sen, AK-Gov, VT-Gov, CA-09, CA-26, NY-25: As of this writing there are no new developments in the remaining uncalled races since our post on Thursday.
10:12 AM PT (Jeff Singer): VA-Sen: It's been clear since Tuesday night that Democratic Sen. Mark Warner's re-election victor, while very narrow, was a victory all the same. On Friday, Republican Ed Gillespie officially conceded, and the race has been called for Warner. Given how close Gillespie came to upsetting the popular Warner, it's a good bet we'll here from him again- possibly as soon as the 2017 gubernatorial race.
10:56 AM PT: DCCC, DSCC: After one successful cycle (2012) and one unsuccessful cycle (2014), Rep. Steve Israel is stepping down as chair of the DCCC, even though (he claims) Nancy Pelosi asked him to stay on. Top contenders to replace him are Jim Himes (CT-04), Donna Edwards (MD-06), and Jared Polis (CO-02). Other less-likely names include Joe Crowley (NY-14), Lois Frankel (FL-22), and Joseph P. Kennedy III (MA-04).
Meanwhile, Sen. Michael Bennet is coming off a brutal election year helming the DSCC, but he's unlikely to stay on at the job. That's not because of how Democrats performed, though: Bennet seems to be avoiding much of the blame while most fingers, rightly or wrongly, instead get pointed at Barack Obama. Rather, Bennet's up for re-election this cycle, so odds are, the chairmanship will fall to someone else.
Interestingly, Montana Sen. Jon Tester is reportedly considering the job, as is Delaware Sen. Chris Coons. Other possibilities include Cory Booker, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Amy Klobuchar. Three senators have already said no, though: Kirsten Gillibrand, Claire McCaskill, and Elizabeth Warren.
11:01 AM PT (Jeff Singer): DE-Gov: Democratic Gov. Jack Markell will be termed out in 2016, and the race to succeed him is already taking shape. On Thursday, Republican state Sen. Colin Bonini announced he was running. Bonini represents a district south of Dover that went for Romney by about 2 points. He lost the treasurer's race by 2 points in 2010, so he does have experience as a statewide contender.
On the Democratic side, outgoing Attorney General Beau Biden announced in April that he was running. However, since then he has had health problems, and there's a real possibility he won't enter the race after all. The Wilmington News Journal names a few other potential Democratic candidates. Rep. John Carney ran for the job in 2008 and only narrowly lost to Markell in the primary, and he may be interested in trying again. New Castle County Executive Tom Gordon is also a possible contender. Carney represents the entire state in the House and more than half the state lives in New Castle County, so neither man would struggle for name recognition.
In the red corner the the options are more limited besides Bonini. Treasurer-elect Ken Simpler won by 10 points on Tuesday and many Republicans would like to see him run, but he doesn't appear interested right now. Delaware is a solidly blue state and the last time Republicans won was 1988, when Mike Castle was re-elected in a landslide. However, as we saw in Tuesday in Illinois, Maryland, and Massachusetts, Republicans can definitely pick up blue state governor's mansions if the conditions are right.
11:32 AM PT (Jeff Singer): AZ-Sen: Good news... for John McCain! On Friday the longtime Republican senator publicly declared that he's "leaning toward" seeking re-election. McCain won't have a clear path to a sixth term if he does run though. Rep. David Schweikert is reportedly considering a primary challenge, and there are plenty of well-funded groups on the right that would support him. A March PPP survey found McCain's statewide approval in the dumps at 30-54; while Democrats have never given McCain a serious re-election challenge, those numbers are too enticing to ignore.
11:52 AM PT: House: Come the 114th Congress, just five Democrats are guaranteed to represent House districts carried by Mitt Romney, whose victory margin is in parentheses in the list below:
MN-07: Collin Peterson (54-44)
NE-02: Brad Ashford (53-46)
FL-02: Gwen Graham (52-47)
FL-18: Patrick Murphy (52-48)
AZ-01: Ann Kirkpatrick (50-48)
One more Democrat, Ron Barber (AZ-02; 50-48 Romney), currently trails but could wind up prevailing once late votes are tallied. Remarkably, two of the people on this list won on Tuesday night: Ashford and Graham, who beat a pair of incredibly flawed GOP incumbents in Lee Terry and Steve Southerland, respectively. How bad a Republican do you have to be to have lost in 2014? Pretty damn bad.
12:06 PM PT (Jeff Singer): NC-Gov: Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper has not officially announced whether or not he'll run against Republican Gov. Pat McCrory in 2016, but he's sure sounding like a candidate. On Wednesday, Cooper sent an email to supporters declaring that he will “take on the challenges that North Carolina will face and make sure we live in a place that values a quality education, clean water and air, and good paying jobs.” Cooper previously told reporters that he was "making plans" even though it was "too early to make a formal announcement."
Cooper has served as state attorney general since 2001 and he's won re-election with ease; in 2012 he did not even draw an opponent. Democrats worked hard to recruit him to run against Republican Sen. Richard Burr in 2010 but Cooper declined, which in retrospect was definitely the smart move. He's been a lot more interested in running against McCrory though, and early polls have hinted at a competitive race.
Cooper may be hoping to clear the Democratic field early. Back in September of 2013, former Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker began openly contemplating running. Meeker hasn't made much noise lately but if he ran he could give Cooper trouble in the primary. It's also not out of the realm of possibility that U.S. Secretary of Transportation and former Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx will run, especially since he doesn't seem interested in challenging Republican Sen. Richard Burr.
McCrory will not be an easy target to unseat. PPP recently pegged his approval rating at 40-42, though that was with the 2014 electorate, and his policies have generated plenty of backlash. However, McCrory has tons of wealthy allies who will spend whatever they need to keep him in office. As the 2014 Senate race demonstrated, North Carolina is a very polarized state, and both sides should prepare for a long, expensive, and close contest.
12:22 PM PT: CO State Senate: You have to look pretty far and wide to find any bright spots for Team Blue from Tuesday night, but here's one: The two Republicans who ousted Democratic state senators in Colorado last year in a pair of NRA-backed recall elections both lost their bids for a full term. In the 3rd District, Democrat Leroy Garcia beat Republican George Rivera 55-45, and in the 11th, Democrat Michael Merrifield defeated Republican Bernie Herpin by a similar 52-42 margin.
Both of these seats were quite blue on the presidential level, but during the low-turnout recalls, Democrats weren't able to muster their supporters, while Republicans were fueled with furor over new gun safety laws the legislature had recently passed. With more normal turnout, these seats reverted to form, in spite of the GOP wave. Unfortunately, despite these two wins, it looks probable that Democrats will lose the state Senate, but they'll have a good shot at getting it back in 2016.
12:58 PM PT (David Jarman): Data viz: One good thing about the aftermath of an election is that there's always lots of cool maps and other shiny interactive objects to look at. One particularly interesting one is Huffington Post Pollster's chart on the results in all the U.S. House races; not only do they have the percentages on all the races, but two very interesting graphics that you can mouse over.
One arranges all races from top to bottom in terms of D-vs.-R margin (one thing that lets you see is just how dominant Seth Moulton's MA-06 victory was, where he outpaced Dems like Nita Lowey, Alan Grayson, and Emanuel Cleaver). The other is a scatterplot that plots 2012 House results against 2014 results (where the biggest outliers on the pro-Dem side are WV-02, where Nick Casey almost won it, and FL-18, where Patrick Murphy crushed it after narrowly picking up the seat in 2012).
The New York Times shows what you can do when you have a big interactive graphics budget and a big staff that can vacuum up elections data quickly: they have amazing-looking zoomable red/blue maps that go all the way down to the precinct level on the Senate races in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, and Iowa. These are interesting not just for purposes of understanding the 2014 races, but also the general political lay-of-the-land in these states in a way that really only Dave's Redistricting App let you explore before.
And finally, WAMU has a similar precinct-level map of one of the night's interesting but overlooked races, the Washington D.C. mayor's race and marijuana legalization. The map shows not only how mayoral politics is correlated with the city's race and class divides, but, by keeping that correlation in mind, also where regentrification is on the march; the city's affluent west keeps advancing into the east, especially spilling east from Capitol Hill toward the Eastern Market. But on the other hand, pot legalization seemed to be correlated more with age than with race and class, at its weakest in some of the city's most impoverished southeastern areas and at its strongest around Adams Morgan and Mt. Pleasant.