The latest on the 2022 midterm election

Pima County will report a new batch of around 10,000 votes to the Arizona Secretary of State’s office around 8 p.m. ET, county elections officials said Thursday. 

As of Thursday, about 52,692 ballots had been processed by Pima County recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly’s office and sent to Pima County elections director Constance Hargrove.

Cázares-Kelly said her office has another approximately 53,773 ballots awaiting processing, which will be sent to the elections office and reported to the state in the coming days. 

Responding to criticism from some campaigns that vote counting is taking too long, Cázares-Kelly said local officials were on a schedule in line with past elections and suggested counting could be done by Monday.  

“Looking at our numbers, we’re going to be finished up pretty soon,” she said. “Monday is a really good goal. We’ve been able to transfer over 52,000 ballots over to the election department; that’s kind of phenomenal.”

She added there are about 1,000 ballots that need additional information like signature verification from voters who dropped them off. The county has contacted voters with these ballots, and the public has until Nov. 16 to cure their ballots, Cázares-Kelly said. 

“We’re doing everything we can, recognizing how eager the public is to hear from our offices,” she added. 

Doug Mastriano speaks onstage during an election night party in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on November 8.

Retiring Republican Sen. Pat Toomey was sharply critical of Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano on Thursday, blaming him for dragging down the candidacy of Mehmet Oz in the race to replace Toomey in the Senate.

The outgoing senator made the remarks in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett.

Toomey started by saying that he thought Oz “ran a very good campaign.”

“So the question that I think arises is, ‘Why did a good candidate, running a good race, in what should be a very good environment, not prevail in a state like Pennsylvania — which is very, very competitive?” Toomey said.

Toomey said it’s “very, very hard” for a Republican down-ballot to win with someone so unpopular at the top of the ticket. He pointed out that Oz’s loss to Democrat John Fetterman was relatively narrow when compared with Mastriano’s margin against Democratic candidate Josh Shapiro.

Toomey, who has been sharply critical of former President Donald Trump and the Republican party’s shift under his leadership, blamed the former president for involving himself in the selection of candidates across the country.

“This is a huge problem, and I think my party needs to face the fact that if fealty to Donald Trump is the primary criteria for selecting candidates, we’re probably not going to do really well,” he told Burnett.

Some background: The Trump-endorsed Mastriano came to national attention for his vehement election denialism and his presence in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.

As the election went on, he did little to hedge his far-right positions or reach out to groups beyond his base of supporters, CNN’s Chris Cillizza wrote.

Oz, meanwhile, focused on bringing “balance” to the Senate in the final days of the race – casting himself a moderate voice who could navigate between extremes within the two parties.

Ballots are processed by election workers at the Clark County Election Department on November 10 in North Las Vegas.

As of Thursday evening, CNN is yet to project which party will win the House and the Senate as several key races are too early to call — some of that is because of the election processes in many West Coast states.

The two Senate races for which there is no projection are in Arizona and Nevada. There is no winner in Georgia’s Senate race, but CNN has projected it will proceed to a runoff in December.

Here’s a look at the 34 House races that still have not been projected:

Two additional outstanding House races are in Alaska and Maine, where determining the winner in a ranked-choice voting system takes longer. Plus, there’s one remaining House race in both New York and Maryland. 

The benefit of knowing who won on Election Day is arguably outweighed by allowing more people access to the vote and the cost savings of not having to staff so many polling places.

In Arizona, mail-in ballots that were dropped off right before and on Tuesday don’t even start the important process of signature verification until the Wednesday after Election Day, according to Bill Gates, the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.

Most states have some sort of signature verification system for their absentee and mail-in ballots, according to a tally from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

While Arizona still has a lot of in-person voting on Election Day, other states have moved to an entirely vote-by-mail system, like California. The West Coast has been taking a long time to count these votes for years, but the process is getting added scrutiny this year because those unprojected races will determine who controls the chambers of Congress.

Nevada also transitioned to an all-mail-in system in 2022. That means ballots that were postmarked by Tuesday can be received by election officials until Saturday and still be counted. It’s not actually known how many ballots will trickle in because every registered voter in Nevada was mailed a ballot.

Rep. Lauren Boebert and her husband campaign during an election day rally in Grand Junction, Colorado, on November 8.

Colorado GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert, who is locked in an extremely tight reelection race, suggested that a lack of voter enthusiasm for her party’s candidates for governor and Senate caused her race to be much closer than anticipated.

She noted that the Democratic governor, Jared Polis, and incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, both skated to reelection. 

“I think Polis and Bennet definitely carried the ticket for the Democrat Party,” she told CNN. 

CNN projects Bennet beat Republican Joe O’Dea, the CEO of a construction company, by winning more than 54% of the vote while Polis defeated Republican Heidi Ganahl by gaining more than 57% of the ballots.

Boebert added, “I don’t know if there wasn’t enough enthusiasm for our top ticket candidates for governor and Senate or what happened there. But there was a lot of shifting of the votes there.”

With 98% of the vote counted, Boebert holds a 794-vote lead over Democrat Adam Frisch in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District.

Boebert still expressed confidence she would eke out a victory. “Of course, I expect to win.”

But Republicans say she didn’t do enough to insulate herself from backlash from voters in her district. Indeed, a GOP source says she was advised to spend more of her campaign cash late in the cycle. 

Asked if she believes Republican leaders gave her enough support, Boebert said: “I am my support.”

Rep. Scott Perry is seen after a meeting in Washington, DC, on July 13.

GOP Rep. Scott Perry, who chairs the pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus, said members are looking for a speaker who is “interested in more fairness for members and a more member-driven conference, as opposed to a leadership-driven, top-down strategy.” 

Asked by CNN if this included House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, he said, “yes, of course.”

However, he also told reporters that he tried to call McCarthy yesterday and “didn’t get an opportunity to talk with him.” 

Later Thursday night, the group will hear from Fox News Host Tucker Carlson, who is the keynote speaker at its dinner reception.

Some context: Although many races are still too early to call, the Republican Party is inching toward gaining a slim majority in the House – and McCarthy, the House GOP Leader, has been moving swiftly to lock down the votes to claim the speaker’s gavel, according to multiple GOP sources.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison participates in a debate with Jim Schultz on October 14 in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, the progressive Democrat whose office prosecuted George Floyd’s killer, will overcome a tough challenge to win a second term, CNN projects.  

Ellison will defeat Republican Jim Schultz, who characterized him as extreme in a race that focused largely on police reform efforts in the wake of Floyd’s killing.  

Looming over the contest was the police killing of Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020.  

Ellison’s office successfully prosecuted Floyd’s killer, Derek Chauvin. But the killing and protests over racial injustice in its aftermath touched off a debate over policing that reverberated in this year’s midterm elections.  

Last year, Ellison was among the progressive supporters of a ballot measure in Minneapolis that would have replaced the city’s police department with a new Department of Public Safety — in the process, eliminating a requirement that the city have a minimum number of police officers tied to its population and shifting its oversight from the mayor and police chief to the city council.  

But in November 2021, Minneapolis voters rejected that measure, dealing a blow to police reform efforts nationwide.  

Schultz, who was endorsed by Minnesota’s largest police union, had lambasted Ellison over rising crime rates in the state and accused him of advancing anti-police ideology.  

He blamed Ellison and other Democratic leaders for their response to property damage and crime during the summer 2020 protests over Floyd’s killing.  

Ellison, meanwhile, sought to shift the race’s focus to abortion rights. He and his supporters pointed to Schultz’s former role on the board of a conservative anti-abortion group. The Democratic attorney general has also said he would fight against other states’ laws that impose criminal penalties on those who travel for abortions to states— like Minnesota —where the procedure is legal. 

Rep. Joe Neguse listens during a news conference at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, on August 31.

Democratic Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado has announced he is running for the position of Democratic Caucus Chair. Neguse currently serves as the co-chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee. 

The current chair of the Democratic caucus, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, is term limited in his position. 

Democrats are holding their leadership elections Nov. 30, even though the current Democratic leadership, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn has not announced publicly and definitively if they intend to run again.

CNN is yet to project which party will win the House.

Punchbowl News was first to report. 

President Joe Biden gestures to the crowd as he leaves after speaking at Howard Theatre in Washington, DC, on Thursday.

Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, said on Thursday he feels “great” about the election outcome so far, compared to how he felt last week going into the midterms. And with three key US Senate seats still undecided, he said he likes Democrats’ odds.

Asked what he would attribute the election results to, Warner said he believes a lot of it came down to democracy. 

“You can argue the Democrats’ message wasn’t perfect,” he said. “It was a lot better than the media thought it was. And the one thing that’s absolutely clear was that for a lot of the Republican messaging, which was all about relitigating a 2020 election or denying the validity of our democracy, that is not what the American people wanted to hear. So, I think that is probably bigger than any other item.”

He continued to say he thinks some of the extreme viewpoints being embraced by some candidates made voters “uncomfortable.” 

“I think that views that are so far out of the mainstream that either political party 10 years ago, eight years ago, they would have been viewed as ludicrous had an effect that one of the two political parties in had a lot of candidates that embraced from election denial to QAnon to, you know, re-litigation of the 2020 presidential election I think make folks uncomfortable,” he said.

On how the midterm election poised President Biden for reelection, Warner said Biden’s coming out “stronger.”

“He’s obviously coming out of this midterm stronger,” he said. “He seemed like, with the little bit I saw yesterday, he was having a good time with the press corp. If you can do that in these kinds of jobs, that’s a good place to be.”

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greg Casar wave to a crowd at a campaign rally in Austin, Texas, on February 13.

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says the informal group of Democratic House progressives known as “The Squad” is adding two new members: Reps.-elect Summer Lee of Pennsylvania and Greg Casar of Texas.

Summer Lee speaks to reporters alongside Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey after voting in the primary election on May 17 in Pittsburgh.

She also extended an invitation to “anyone else who wants to join too.”

“The Squad” first drew attention following the 2018 election, after Ocasio-Cortez posted a photo of herself with other incoming freshman lawmakers Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, with the term as a caption.

The group expanded to include Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri, after they were elected in 2020.

The latest results coming out of Yavapai County, Arizona, are comprised entirely of early ballots. According to Chief Deputy Recorder Karen McKracken, these early ballots are a combination of drop boxes, vote centers on Election Night and the mail.

The county has about 9,900 early ballots remaining to process:

Overall, so far, Yavapai has tabulated 105,734 ballots. There are 608 provisional ballots that they are verifying right now. Officials said they hope to be done verifying tomorrow so they can begin tabulation.

They don’t know when the tabulation will be complete, as they are beginning a hand count on Saturday that will be an all-hands-on-deck effort.

Foreign operatives could use the days and week between Election Day and when votes are certified — including the lead-up to a contentious Senate runoff in Georgia — to further amplify disinformation about voting and sow discord among Americans, a top US cybersecurity official said Thursday. 

The Georgia runoff between Republican Herschel Walker and Democrat Raphael Warnock will occur Dec. 6 after neither reached a 50% threshold needed for victory. 

There were only handful of documented cyberattacks aimed at election-related infrastructure on Election Day, but nothing that kept people from casting their vote, according to US officials. But foreign influence activity — the use of social media or other means to sway voters — is harder to measure.

US officials are particularly concerned about any foreign efforts to amplify disinformation and any violent online rhetoric in Georgia and Arizona, where vote tallies are still coming in.

Asked about foreign influence operations on Election Day, Easterly said “there was nothing that came in that caught my attention in a significant way.” 

Russian state media made an eleventh-hour push to cast baseless doubts on the integrity of US elections with multiple misleading or false articles about the midterms in the last 24 hours, according to independent research and a CNN review of Russian media. 

The propaganda blitz came after Kremlin-linked oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin said that Russia has interfered, is interfering and will continue to interfere in the US democratic process. 

An election worker prepares ballots to be processed at the Clark County Election Department in North Las Vegas on November 9.

There are more than 50,000 ballots that need to be counted in Clark County, Nevada, which are in “various stages in the process of validation,” county registrar Joe Gloria said in a Thursday update.

Clark County is home to Las Vegas, is the most populous county in the state, and contains the bulk of the statewide electorate.

A day earlier, Gloria said county officials received more than 12,700 ballots from the USPS on Wednesday and collected roughly 56,900 mail ballots from Election Day drop boxes. 

On Thursday, election officials received another 626 ballots from the postal service, Gloria said. The county will continue to receive ballots from the postal service through Saturday, as long as they were postmarked by Nov. 8. 

Election officials will continue “curing” mail ballots through Monday. “Curing” is when election officials contact voters to fix mistakes on their ballots, like if information is missing.

On Thursday, Gloria said there were more than 7,100 that have not been “cured.”

There are also roughly 5,555 provisional ballots from in-person Election Day voting in Clark County, Gloria has said. Officials won’t be able to count those ballots until next week.

Gloria expects the majority of the county’s ballots to be reported on by Saturday, with the exception of ballots that need to be cured and provisional ballots.

“People have been processing ballots here in Clark County for about 18 days. We’re working all of the hours that we can work,” he added. “We can’t move any faster than what the law currently allows us to do.”

Clark County officials told CNN’s Gary Tuchman that they do expect a large update in vote totals tonight. They did not provide a time for the update, however. 

What is at stake in Nevada: A crucial Senate race between Republican nominee Adam Laxalt and Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto has not been called. The contest could help determine which party controls the Senate.

An election worker removes tabulated ballots from the machine inside the Maricopa County Recorders Office on Thursday, November 10, in Phoenix.

Maricopa County — the most populous county in Arizona — said it will release more election results at 10 p.m. ET tonight. 

County officials are holding a news conference at 6 p,m. ET, but results are not expected to be released then.

Why is the vote count taking so long? The biggest reason for the delay is the way that each state handles the ballots outside of those cast at polling places on Election Day, including both early votes and mail-in ballots.

In Arizona, there are still roughly 600,000 ballots to be counted. The majority of those, about 400,000 ballots, are in Maricopa County.

Of those ballots, about 290,000 were dropped off at vote centers on Election Day, Bill Gates, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors chairman, said on CNN Thursday. Those ballots have to be processed before they can be counted, leading to a lag time in tabulating.

In addition, Maricopa County has about 17,000 ballots that were attempted to be counted on Election Day but were not read by the tabulator because of a printer error, and those ballots still need to be counted, too.

Why Arizona is key: The race between Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly and Republican nominee Blake Masters — one of the contests that could help determine which party controls the Senate — is yet to be called in the state.

As Clark County, Nevada, continued to count votes on Thursday, the county registrar rejected former President Donald Trump’s latest effort to raise suspicions about its elections — saying Trump is obviously “misinformed.”

Trump falsely claimed on his social media platform on Thursday that Clark County “has a corrupt voting system,” warning Republican Senate candidate Adam Laxalt to “be careful.”

There is simply no basis for Trump’s claim. And the claim followed Trump’s numerous false allegations about the 2020 election in Clark County, a Democratic stronghold that is home to Las Vegas.

Gloria explained that state law requires counties to receive mail-in ballots until Saturday (if they were postmarked by Election Day) and gives voters until Monday to fix issues with their signatures. He also noted that the county isn’t yet allowed to process provisional ballots.

“My staff has been working very diligently, we’ve been here from early in the morning until late at night, we’ve been fully staffed, we’re working as hard as we possibly can in order to get the ballots counted,” Gloria said. “But whether we like it or not, there’s no way that we can move any faster than we’re currently moving.”

Nevada has tight races for the US Senate, governor and other offices.

President Joe Biden, with first lady Jill Biden and second gentleman Doug Emhoff, speaks at an event hosted by the Democratic National Committee to thank campaign workers at Howard Theatre in Washington, DC, on November 10.

In remarks Thursday at a DNC event, President Joe Biden reiterated that Election Day was a “good day for America” and “a strong night for Democrats.”

“Tuesday was a good day for America, a good day for democracy. And it was a strong night for Democrats,” Biden said, speaking to a room of DNC campaign workers and volunteers in Washington, DC. He thanked them for believing in the country and for fighting to make sure there was a “free and fair election.”

CNN is yet to project which party will win the House and the Senate as several key races are too early to call.

The president noted polls predicting big losses for his party before the election, saying, “folks that didn’t happen,” touting the success of Democrats holding on to House seats and winning governorships across the country.

“It was the first national election since Jan. 6 and there were a lot of concerns about if democracy would meet the test — it did, it did, it did,” he said referring to the 2021 insurrection at the Capitol. The future of democracy itself was a common message for Biden on the campaign trail ahead of Election Day.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who was also speaking at the event, echoed the president’s message, saying “as we gather here votes are still being counted, but it is clear your work sent a message to the entire world: democracy is intact.”

She said some Democrats and some Republicans won and “that’s what happens” when millions of people vote in “free and fair elections”

The vice president said voters across our country knew what they stood for, so they knew what to fight for, pointing to states where voters approved ballot measures aimed at protecting abortion.

Harris argued that people do not need to abandon their beliefs to agree that “the government should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,” she said.

“This president understands democracy is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it,” Harris said, adding that what they saw this week is that “when we fight, we win.”

Coconino County, Arizona, has about 14,896 ballots left to process and count, county recorder Patty Hansen told CNN Thursday. Coconino is in the north-central part of Arizona.

Here’s how that breaks down:

Why Arizona is key: The race between Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly an Republican nominee Blake Masters — which could help determine the balance of the Senate — is yet to be called in Arizona. It is also too early to call the gubernatorial race between Democratic nominee Katie Hobbs and Republican nominee Kari Lake.

Kevin McCarthy walks into a House Republicans party at the Westin Hotel in Washington, DC, on November 9.

Rep. Bob Good, a member of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, told reporters that House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy “has not done anything to earn my vote” for speaker.

The Virginia Republican also predicted that “there will be a challenge to (McCarthy) as a speaker candidate,” a possibility that CNN first reported was under consideration by the group.

Such a challenge would be more of a protest candidate than a serious one. It would be an attempt to show McCarthy during next week’s internal GOP leadership elections that he doesn’t have the floor votes for speaker, in hopes of forcing him to the negotiating table.

Meanwhile, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas told reporters that “no one currently has 218” votes for speaker, which is the magic number McCarthy would need to secure the speaker’s gavel on the House floor in January.

The House Freedom Caucus has been meeting all day for its new member orientation, where their strategy in the leadership fight has come up, according to a source familiar with the conversations.

McCarthy has spent the last two days working the phones and has been hearing out potential holdouts and critics, but so far not making promises or caving into their hardline demands, sources said.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger speaks during a press conference in Atlanta on November 9.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger picked his own race as the focus of a required statewide audit for 2022 election results.

Raffensperger, a Republican who refused former President Donald Trump’s request to “find” votes needed to overturn his 2020 loss in the Peach State, defeated the Democratic nominee this week.

A Georgia law passed in 2019 requires the secretary of state to choose one race every two years to conduct a risk-limiting audit of the results. 

Georgia election officials estimate that 5 to 7% of ballots from the secretary of state race will be recounted for the audit. They say the results will prove “statistical confidence” that the election’s outcome is correct.  

How the audit works: Georgia’s 159 counties will be required to conduct a hand recount of a batch of results from the race.

On Nov. 16, election officials will roll a twenty-sided dice to determine which random batches of ballots will be counted and then each county election office will start their hand-counting on Nov. 17. They are expected to share the results by the following day.     

Blake Evans, the elections director with the secretary of state’s office, will spearhead the audit.

State leaders said they also chose the race to try to ease the burden on busy county election workers: The large margin of victory for Raffensperger makes the audit easier to conduct. That’s important, given the impending Senate runoff that will keep them busy.

Raffensperger’s only function in the audit is to select the race which will be examined, according to his office.

US Sen. Raphael Warnock speaks to supporters on Thursday.

Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock kicked off his runoff campaign against Republican Herschel Walker on Thursday in Atlanta, arguing his second runoff Senate election in as many years is about “competence and character.”

Remember: CNN projected on Wednesday that the hotly contested Senate contest in Georgia will advance to a runoff between Warnock and Walker on Dec. 6. Depending on how Senate races in Arizona and Nevada are decided, the race could be determinative in control of the currently evenly divided Senate.

Warnock looked to avoid this scenario in the final weeks of the campaign, running ads warning Georgians that all the attack ads they have seen for months would continue through Thanksgiving if the state had a runoff.

“Now, you have to admit that I did warn you all that we might be spending Thanksgiving together,” Warnock said. “And here we are. So, I am going to need you to stick with me for four more weeks. Can we do that? Because we’ve got some unfinished business.”

Warnock only glancingly acknowledged the potential national ramifications of the race – “I need you to fight like the future of Georgia and the future of America depends on it, because it does,” he said – and instead used his speech to speak directly to the Georgians who didn’t vote for him on Tuesday night.

“For those of you who made a different choice this time, whether for Herschel Walker or someone else, I want to speak directly to you: Over the next four weeks, I hope you will give me the opportunity to earn your vote,” the Democratic senator said. “Every day I have served in the Senate, I have been thinking about the people of Georgia and that is what I will do the next six years.”

A voter drops off a ballot Tuesday outside the Maricopa County Recorders Office in Phoenix.

Arizona’s Maricopa County has not started counting 290,000 ballots that were dropped off at voting sites on election day — a critical batch of ballots that could help determine who wins the uncalled Senate and governor’s races in the state, Bill Gates, chairman of the Maricopa County board of supervisors, told CNN Thursday.

Maricopa County has about 400,000 ballots left to count, and 290,000 of those are early ballots that were dropped off at voting sites Tuesday, Gates told CNN’s Sara Sidner.

The 290,000 ballots that were dropped off on election day “was a record,” he said.

About 70% more people chose to vote by dropping off their early ballots on election day than they have at any point in the past, breaking the previous record, Gates said. 

Those ballots must have signature verification review before they can be counted he told CNN.

“If you drop off an early ballot, it means it has to come in on Wednesday and start the process of being signature verified,” Gates said, which is a process that takes longer than voting in person on election day and having your vote counted through the tabulator immediately.

Maricopa County had “big voter turnout” throughout the whole election, with about 230,000 people voting in person on election day, in addition to the ballots that were dropped off, Bill Gates, Chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors said. 

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy speaks at an election night event in Washington, DC.

House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy is moving swiftly to lock down the votes to claim the speaker’s gavel as a hard-right faction of his conference discusses whether to mount a long-shot challenge to complicate his bid and force concessions in the process, according to multiple GOP sources.

McCarthy privately spoke to his closest advisers and confidantes in a Wednesday morning phone call just hours after his party appeared on track to take the House but fell short of their bullish expectations of a massive GOP landslide. The California Republican tapped a group of members to be on his whip team that will help him secure the 218 votes in order to win the speakership in January, with GOP lawmakers on the call promising to “work hard to get him elected,” according to a source familiar with the matter. And several allies were seen popping in and out of McCarthy’s office on Wednesday as they started to hash out and execute their game plan.

“Yes,” McCarthy said confidently Wednesday night as he left the Capitol and was asked if he had the votes to assume the speakership.

McCarthy, who sent a letter to the conference Wednesday afternoon officially declaring his bid for the speakership and asking members for their support, spoke with some potential GOP holdouts behind closed doors throughout the day, including Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the controversial conservative who was booted from her committee assignments by Democrats – and a number of Republicans – over her past incendiary rhetoric. Greene has pushed for a spot on the powerful House Oversight Committee in a GOP majority.

Leaving McCarthy’s office, Greene would not say if she’d get what she’s been seeking.

Next week’s leadership election is just the first step in the process. McCarthy would need to win a majority of his conference’s support next week to be nominated for speaker before a January vote when he would need 218 votes of the full House to win the gavel.

An election worker arrives with ballots Wednesday inside the Maricopa County Recorders Office in Phoenix.

Key races to determine control of the Senate in Arizona and Nevada have yet to be called as both states race to count hundreds of thousands of ballots that have yet to be processed.

It still may be hours – or days – before enough ballots are counted in those states to determine who won the Senate. There are also many uncalled congressional races that will determine what the House looks like when the new Congress is seated.

The unofficial results – and lingering uncertainty about who will control Congress next year – hasn’t prevented Republican apprehension about the election results, where an expected Republican wave never materialized. 

Here’s what you should know as the counting continues:

Where things stand in Arizona and Nevada — and why it’s taking so long to count ballots: The biggest reason for the delay is the way that each state handles the ballots outside of those cast at polling places on Election Day, including both early votes and mail-in ballots.

In Arizona, for instance, there are still roughly 600,000 ballots to be counted. The majority of those, about 400,000 ballots, are in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous county that includes Phoenix.

Of those ballots, about 290,000 were dropped off at vote centers on Election Day, Bill Gates, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors chairman, said on CNN Thursday. Those ballots have to be processed before they can be counted, leading to a lag time in tabulating.

In addition, the county has about 17,000 ballots that were attempted to be counted on Election Day but were not read by the tabulator because of a printer error, and those ballots still need to be counted, too.

In Nevada, state law allows mail-in ballots to be received through Saturday, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day. That means counties are still receiving ballots to be counted.

Clark County, the state’s largest that includes Las Vegas, received more than 12,000 postmarked ballots from the post office on Wednesday, Clark County registrar Joe Gloria said.

In addition, counties in Nevada have tens of thousands of mail-in ballots that were dropped off on Election Day in drop boxes located at polling places. Clark County said that its Election Day drop boxes contained nearly 57,000 mail ballots.

Trump vs. DeSantis: The lackluster performance of several candidates endorsed by former President Donald Trump has cast new doubts on his expected 2024 campaign.

At the same time, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ resounding reelection victory is fueling calls for him to capitalize on his momentum and challenge Trump for the 2024 nomination.

The Trump-DeSantis showdown has been simmering for months now, but it could burst into the open as the primary season officially gets underway.

After “red wave” washes out, McCarthy faces tougher path: Republicans are still closing in on a majority in the House, even after Democrats had a better-than-expected night Tuesday.

House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy is moving swiftly to lock down votes needed to claim the speaker’s gavel in the next Congress. CNN has not yet projected a Republican takeover of the chamber.

But the ultimate size of a Republican majority could determine how difficult it will be for McCarty to become speaker, as a narrow majority could prompt the pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus to stand in the way of McCarthy’s leadership ambitions.

A source familiar with the House Freedom Caucus’ deliberations told CNN on Wednesday morning there are around two dozen current and incoming members willing to vote against McCarthy if he doesn’t offer them concessions.

CNN’s Ellie Kaufmann, Bob Ortega, Gary Tuchman, Paul Vercammen, Kristen Holmes, Gabby Orr, Manu Raju and Melanie Zanona contributed to this report.

White House communications director Kate Bedingfield told CNN that President Biden will do “whatever is helpful” to assist Georgia Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock as his midterm race is projected to head to a runoff against Republican Hershel Walker this December.  

Following Biden’s Wednesday evening call with Kevin McCarthy — the House minority leader running to be the next House Speaker should Republicans take the majority — Bedingfield reiterated the president’s efforts to work across the aisle. 

Bedingfield said that “the intent of speaking with Kevin McCarthy … (was) to continue to build a relationship should we need to work together which, you know as the President has said, he is certainly open to.” 

“He’s shown he’s been able to do it. The purpose of the conversation was to continue that open line of communication but in terms of sharing details of their private discussion, and I’ll leave their private discussion private,” she added. 

Ballots are still being counted in Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert’s Colorado district, where she is in a tight race against Democrat Adam Frisch.

CNN has not made a projection in the race yet, but Frisch was ahead of Boebert by just 386 as of 12: 30 p.m. ET Thursday.

The boundaries of the 3rd Congressional District shifted after Colorado added a new district because the 2020 Census showed population growth, with the state’s independent redistricting commission creating a map that added an eighth seat in the northern suburbs of Denver. 

Encompassing the western and southern portions of the state that includes Grand Junction, the majority of residents living in Boebert’s district are White and many residents have traditionally registered as Republican. 

As of Sept. 1, nearly 31% of registered voters were Republican, nearly 24% were Democrat and 44% were unaffiliated with a political party, according to the state’s independent redistricting commissions.

Boebert won the county in the 2020 election with 51.4% of the vote, defeating Democrat Diane Mitsch Bush who had 45.2%. Under the new redrawn district, former President Donald Trump would’ve won the district by nearly 8 percentage points but would’ve won by about 5.5 percentage points under the older map.

On Wednesday night, Pueblo County Clerk and Recorder Gilbert Ortiz told CNN that Pueblo County, another county in Boebert’s district, was expected to post more votes that night and they would pick back up tomorrow morning at 11 a.m ET (9 a.m local time)

Here is what the state’s map looked like before and after redistricting:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was in Egypt on Thursday attending the COP27 climate conference.

House Democratic leadership elections have been officially announced for Nov. 30.

Speculation over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s future atop the House Democratic caucus has intensified in the aftermath of the midterm elections. CNN has not yet projected which party will control the House, but Republicans appear to be inching toward picking up the number of seats needed to win back the majority.

CNN reported in September that in interviews with more than two dozen House Democrats, a consensus began to emerge: If Democrats lose the majority, there would be overwhelming pressure for Pelosi to go, a prospect that Democratic sources said the powerful House speaker is keenly aware of.

Pelosi recently told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in an interview that the violent attack on her husband Paul would have an impact on her decision making over her political future, though she did not say what the decision will be.

The elections will be secret ballot using a web-based application.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell would not directly answer when asked by CNN if he blamed former President Donald Trump for the less-than-robust results for Republicans on Election Day. 

Remember: CNN has not yet projected which party will control the House or the Senate. Republicans appear to be slowly inching toward winning back the majority in the chamber, but many races are still too early to call, and the GOP fell short of what many expected to be a “red wave” of victories in Tuesday’s midterms.

As McConnell entered his US Capitol office, he also declined to answer if he was confident he will be the majority leader in the new Congress. 

In the past, McConnell has raised concerns about “candidate quality,” in reference to some of the candidates Trump backed for the Senate who struggled to gain wide support.  

Election officials sort mail-in ballots Tuesday at the Washoe County Registrar of Voters Office in Reno, Nevada.

Washoe County — Nevada’s second most populous county which encompasses Reno — still has about 20,000 ballots that it still needs to process. 

The outstanding ballots include both mail-in ballots and ballots that were dropped off on Election Day. 

Like all counties in Nevada, Washoe is likely to receive more ballots by mail today, after receiving 4,000 yesterday. Ballots that arrive by Saturday will be counted as long as they are postmarked by Election Day.

The pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus is currently meeting near Capitol Hill for their new member orientation.

Heading into the meeting, GOP Rep. Morgan Griffith of Virginia told CNN, “we’re working on it” when asked whether he’ll support House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy for speaker. Most other members declined to comment.

Their strategy in the speaker’s race – including what demands they will try to extract and where they will draw hard lines – is expected to come into sharper focus today and tomorrow.

Later Thursday night, the group will hear from Fox News Host Tucker Carlson, who is the keynote speaker at their dinner reception.

US Rep. Jahana Hayes speaks to supporters at her election night event in Waterbury, Connecticut.

Incumbent Democratic Rep. Jahana Hayes will win in Connecticut’s 5th District, CNN projects, and defeat Republican George Logan.  

This is a Democratic hold.

Here’s where things stand in the House:

John Fetterman waves as he arrives on stage at his election night watch party in Pittsburgh.

Democrat John Fetterman’s victory over Trump-backed Republican Mehmet Oz, the cardiothoracic surgeon turned TV doctor, was the culmination of his own political journey, from big, brash small town mayor in Western Pennsylvania to the cusp of membership in one of the country’s most traditionally genteel political institutions. 

In the primary, Fetterman, without a patron or validator, delivered a resounding victory by winning all 67 counties, often by overwhelming margins what ended up being a four-candidate race. He even came away on top in Philadelphia, with nearly 37% of the vote. Fetterman also swept the collar counties around the city, which would become a key focus for him and his opponent in the fall, prevailing in each by an average of almost 25 percentage points.

But his triumph was tempered after he revealed in a statement that he had suffered a stroke. The following two months — which Fetterman spent much of at home recuperating — ended up being the most critical period of the Democrat’s campaign. Unable to do in-person events, the campaign leaned into a hyperactive social media presence, all directed at defining Oz as an out-of-state elitist by using a mix of memes, pithy tweets and, at times, the help of famous celebrities.

The success of the messaging even surprised Fetterman’s top aides. The stickiness of the attacks also struck Republicans.

The race grew more competitive after Labor Day, as more voters tuned in to the race and tens of millions of dollars from outside groups like the GOP’s Senate Leadership Fund and others led to ads blanketing the airwaves. Questions about Fetterman’s heath dominated coverage of the campaign.

In a debate with Oz, Fetterman struggled as many expected. But the Fetterman campaign moved quickly to shift the narrative, seizing on one debate line from Oz, and they announced a new ad hammering Oz over his suggestion that “local political leaders” should have a hand, along with women and doctors, in the process.

The final weeks of the campaign were a nerve-rattling, expensive whirlwind. Former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden appeared for rallies with him across Philadelphia. Aides also pointed to a late endorsement — delivered with no warning, a few days before the presidential cavalry arrived — from Oprah Winfrey, who helped launch Oz’s TV career.

Just days later, Calvello watched silently as Fetterman took the stage on Election Night and immediately touted his campaign’s work in typically red enclaves.

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Democrat Wes Moore said becoming the first Black governor of Maryland — and only the third Black person elected governor in US history — “means a great deal” to him.

“I know the history of my state. This is a state that is a place, a birthplace and home place of Frederick Douglass and Thurgood Marshall and Harriet Tubman. But it is also the birthplace of the red line. It is the birthplace of some of the most historically discriminatory policies, the most creative discriminatory policies that we’ve seen in this country,” Moore told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday.

When asked about current GOP Gov. Larry Hogan, who has been popular in a largely blue state, Moore expressed appreciation for Hogan tackling more extreme members of his party — including Moore’s Republican gubernatorial opponent Dan Cox, who has questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election. 

“I appreciate the current governor for calling out these MAGA Republicans early,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash. 

Moore tied stumping throughout the state as key to his election victory.

“You go to their territories and you make your pitch. If you show up, you will see exactly what we saw here in the state of Maryland yesterday. We won, not just Democrats, not just Independents, but we took a large swath of Republicans. That is why I think we saw the numbers and the margins that we saw in the state of Maryland,” he told CNN’s Abby Philip.

A Republican-led Arizona county plans to appeal a court ruling that blocked its planned hand count audit of ballots cast in this year’s consequential midterm elections.

The Cochise County Board of Supervisors voted 2-1 Wednesday to lodge the appeal. 

The decision comes as key races in Arizona – including contests for governor and a US Senate seat – remain too close to call.

And the action underscores how much distrust of electronic vote-tallying machines has taken root in parts of the country, following the 2020 presidential election and false claims that widespread fraud contributed to former President Donald Trump’s loss in the state.

Superior Court Judge Casey McGinley had blocked the county’s plan earlier this week, ruling that undertaking a broad hand count as a way to check the accuracy of those machines violates state law – which he said permits election officials to audit only a small percentage of ballots by hand.

The proponents of the hand count argued that it “would help ameliorate fears that the electronic count was incorrect,” McGinley wrote in his 12-page opinion. “However, there is no evidence before this Court that electronic tabulation is inaccurate in the first instance, or more importantly, that the audit system established by law is insufficient to detect any inaccuracy it may possess.”

It is unclear how consequential the appeal will be to the overall certification of the vote in Arizona.

A brief submitted on behalf of Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat running for governor, argued that hand counting — if not completed quickly — could potentially delay the certification of election results.

Her brief noted the statutory deadlines that election officials face for certifying the results, which include a deadline for the county to canvass the results by 20 days after the election and a deadline for the secretary to then complete the statewide canvass by the fourth Monday after election day.

Arizona counties must certify their election results by Nov. 28. The state’s certification deadline is Dec. 5.

There are more than 80,000 registered voters in Cochise County, which lies in the southeastern corner of the state and includes the city of Bisbee.

New York Representative-elect Michael Lawler appears on CNN on Thursday morning.

New York Republican Representative-elect Michael Lawler told CNN that he wants the Republican Party to “move forward” from former President Donald Trump.

Lawler added, “I think moving in a different direction as we move forward is a good thing, not a bad thing. But ultimately, look, the voters will decide what they want to do, and the former president will decide what he wants to do.” 

Lawler was asked if he is interested in focusing any time on investigations and potential impeachments of this administration.

“I think the top priority is to deal with inflation and the cost of living. That is what I ran on and that is what my focus will be … I don’t want to see is what we saw during the Trump administration where Democrats just went after the president and the administration incessantly,” he said. “I don’t want to go from one issue to the next without dealing with the issues that got me elected in the first place.”

Boxes of scanned ballots sit on a pallet Wednesday at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center in Phoenix.

There are about 400,000 to 410,000 ballots left to count in Maricopa County, the most populous county in Arizona, Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chair Bill Gates told “CNN This Morning” on Thursday. 

Out of the 400,000 to 410,000 left to count, about 290,000 of those ballots were dropped off on Election Day at voting places, Gates said. 

Out of the remaining 110,000, about 90,000 ballots were received before Election Day. 

About 17,000 of the remaining 110,000 are ballots that were attempted to be counted on Election Day but were not read by the tabulator because of a printer error. These are referred to as “Box 3” ballots, Gates said.

Gates said he could not predict which votes would be counted first out of the remaining votes to be counted, but he said the ones they received earlier would likely be counted first.

“We can’t really zero in on that with specificity, but they would tend to be those we received earlier first, and then as we move on we’re getting more into those Election Day mail-in ballots that we received on Election Day,” Gates said.

Maricopa County is expected to report more results tonight. 

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine talks to CNN on Thursday.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who is projected to win reelection in the midterms, said a number of voters told him they could not vote for him due to his stance on abortion.

To these voters, abortion “was a defining issue,” he added. “They simply would not vote for me because of the fact that they disagreed with me on the issue.”

However, DeWine said he also met people who voted Republican because they liked his accomplishments in office so far. 

“We also, though, had a lot of people who came up to me and said, ‘I don’t really vote for Republicans, but I like what you’ve done in regard to job training,’ or ‘I like what you’ve done in regard to mental health and I’m going to vote for you,” he said.

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Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar said Republicans underperformed in the 2022 midterms because of many reasons, including Democrats’ candidate quality, the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion and voter response to former President Donald Trump’s role in the party.

“We had some incredible candidates in the Senate and the House,” she said on “CNN This Morning.” “No. 2, when you have a situation that defies the tides of history, it’s got to be something monumental going on and in this case, it was a rejection of the orthodoxy of the Republican’s position. You have so many of their candidates, basically, wanting an abortion ban put in place.”

She also said a major priority for her and her colleagues is to pass the Electoral Count Act during the lame-duck session. 

“In Washington, we have a bunch of things on our plate, including getting the defense bill done with Ukraine right before us and the strides that [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky is making against [Russia President] Vladimir Putin. On our plate is the end-of-the-year budget bill to make sure we get that right. As you know, the Electoral Count Act, an effort that I’m leading with Susan Collins and Joe Manchin and others, so we don’t have Jan. 6 happen again. All of that is immediately when we get back.”

Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis celebrates onstage during his 2022 U.S. midterm elections night party in Tampa, Florida, on November 8.

Republican Georgia Lt. Gov Geoff Duncan told CNN that after Tuesday night’s election results, former President Donald Trump was fired by Republicans.  

Duncan also said that Georgia’s Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker needs to make three important phone calls to win the runoff. 

“Make three successful phone calls. One is to tell Donald Trump to stay out of Georgia for four weeks. He is toxic, he would do nothing to help the ticket. Secondly, I would pick up the phone and call Brian Kemp and ask him for his help. Apologize for not endorsing him during the primary against David Perdue. And third, I would call Ron DeSantis and ask him to come to Georgia as often as he possibly can the next four weeks. That would be a winning recipe for Herschel Walker,” Duncan told CNN.

Watch here for more:

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Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker

With the Georgia runoff campaign between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker already underway, money is pouring into the state as the parties and interest groups seek to shape its outcome. 

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee announced a $7 million field organizing investment to boost Warnock. 

The DSCC has made investments in field organizing programs a top priority, spending more on direct voter contact programs this cycle than in the Independent Expenditure for the first time in recent history. 

An anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and its partner group, Women Speak Out PAC, announced it will spend at least $1 million in the race to attack Warnock’s position on abortion.

“Walker’s support for compassionate limits on abortion aligns with the people of Georgia and the overwhelming majority of Americans, in stark contrast to ‘activist pastor’ Warnock’s radical position of abortion on demand until birth, paid for by taxpayers. Our ground team will continue to visit voters at their homes to expose Warnock’s extremism and urge them to elect Walker as their champion in the U.S. Senate,” said SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser in a statement.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the COP27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on November 10.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi acknowledged Thursday that after the midterm elections, Democrats will need to partner with Republicans on taking steps to fight climate change, even as she cast doubt on the opposing party’s willingness to take action.

“It’s hard to speak in terms of the midterm elections in this subject because we have had, shall we say, a disagreement on the subject,” Pelosi said during an event at the COP27 conference being held in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

Pelosi is leading a congressional delegation to the climate summit comprised only of Democrats. A separate group of House Republicans representing the Conservative Climate Caucus is also present.

Pelosi didn’t respond to questions about whether Democrats can retain a majority at the end of her event.

"I Voted" stickers are separated for voters on Tuesday morning, November 8, at the downtown Siouxland Public Library branch in Sioux Falls, S.D.

Voters in several states have approved progressive measures that could not get through a Democratic-led Congress or Republican-dominated statehouses. More low-income South Dakota residents will have access to Medicaid, and Arizona residents with medical debt will get more protections. Minimum wage workers in Nebraska will get a boost in pay.

Here’s a sampling of the ballot measures:

South Dakota will expand Medicaid in 2023

The measure passed 56% to 44%, according to South Dakota Secretary of State data, broadening Medicaid to roughly 42,500 low-income residents starting in mid-2023. It will open up coverage to adults making less than roughly $19,000 a year. Currently, childless adults are not eligible for Medicaid in South Dakota, and parents must have very low incomes to qualify – about $1,000 a month for a family of four.

Many Republican officials opposed the measure, citing its potential future costs. States are responsible for picking up 10% of the health care tab of the expansion enrollees. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, did not support the initiative. An expansion bill failed in a state Senate vote earlier this year.

The minimum wage will rise in Nebraska

Nebraska’s minimum wage will increase to $15 an hour by 2026, up from the current $9 an hour. The vote was 58% to 42% in favor, according to Nebraska Secretary of State data. It is expected to benefit about 150,000 workers, according to the National Employment Law Project and the Economic Policy Institute, which are both left-leaning groups. Opponents, however, said that the initiative would hurt businesses in the state and reduce employment opportunities for youth.

Medical debt measures approved in Arizona

Proposition 209 passed overwhelmingly by a 72% to 28% vote, according to Arizona Secretary of State data. It will cap the interest rate on medical debt at 3% and limit wage garnishment for medical debt to a maximum of 30% of earnings. The measure will not forgive any medical debt, McLeod said.

Opponents argued the initiative will make it harder for Arizonans to obtain credit and for businesses in the state to collect on debt, as well as increase interest rates on consumer debt.

US Sen. Mark Kelly, left, and Blake Masters

Control of the US Senate could hinge on Nevada and Arizona, two states where GOP victories could elevate some of the most prominent election deniers in the country even after other nominees who had amplified former President Donald Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election were rejected by voters in Tuesday’s midterm elections.

Those two western states – perpetual battlegrounds in presidential years – were still too early to call as of early Thursday morning, while a third Democratic-held seat, Georgia, will advance to a December runoff, CNN projects.

Republicans need to pick off two Democratic seats to win the majority. As ballots continue to be counted across the country, Republicans appear to be slowly inching toward the 218 seats that would deliver them a House majority, albeit one that’s much narrower than they’d hoped.

The struggle for the Senate, however, is still full of unknowns – including whether it will all come down once again to Georgia after the Peach State delivered Democrats the majority in 2021 with victories in twin runoffs. It’s Nevada and Arizona that will determine how pivotal Georgia becomes.

Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly was maintaining an edge over Republican Blake Masters as of early Thursday morning, while Nevada Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto was trailing Republican Adam Laxalt. CNN had estimated late Wednesday that about 600,000 votes remained to be counted across the Grand Canyon State and about 160,000 votes remained to be counted in Nevada.

Laxalt, Nevada’s former attorney general, was a co-chairman of Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign in the state and filed lawsuits attempting to overturn Nevada’s results in that election, which he said was “rigged.” Cortez Masto had argued that the lies and election conspiracies theories embraced by Trump and allies like Laxalt led to the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Masters, a venture capitalist and first-time candidate, released a campaign video as he was competing for the GOP nomination in which he said he believed Trump had won the 2020 election. Masters, like Laxalt, clinched Trump’s endorsement.

After winning the Arizona Senate primary, Masters briefly appeared to back away from some of that extreme rhetoric – scrubbing his website, for example, of language that included the false claim that the election was stolen. In a debate with Kelly, he also conceded that he had not seen evidence of fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election. But the Republican nominee seemed to reverse course after receiving a phone call from Trump urging him to “go stronger” on election denialism, a conversation that was captured in a Fox documentary.

Keep reading here.

Reports of alleged intimidation or harassment of Arizona voters continued to flow into the Secretary of State’s office in the runup to Election Day, with state officials forwarding a total of 21 complaints – including one threatening government officials — to federal and state law enforcement, according to information released Wednesday.

None of the reports involve physical violence, but they do describe voters feeling uncomfortable or nervous as people surveilled drop boxes. 

In one complaint lodged this week, a voter in Surprise, Arizona, a community northwest of Phoenix, recounted dropping off a completed ballot Monday at city hall and encountering four individuals, including one wearing a “MAGA” shirt, sitting nearby.

The voter said the men had no identifying credentials.

The names of people making the complaints are redacted in the documents the secretary of state’s office has publicly released. 

One of the 21 complaints involved a threat against government officials. The Oct. 22 email, which said it was a warning to “Corrupt and Treasonous Government Officials”, mentioned the violence of the French Revolution and promised to use property tax records to find workers’ homes. The Secretary of State’s office has referred it to the FBI. 

All of the complaints forwarded to federal and state law enforcement so far involve reports of alleged intimidation before Election Day.

Earlier this month, a federal judge blocked members of a right-wing group from openly carrying guns or wearing body armor within 250 feet of drop boxes in Arizona or from speaking to or yelling at voters dropping off their ballots.

President Joe Biden speaks in the State Dining Room of the White House on Wednesday, November 9.

In his first speech since polls closed around the country Tuesday night, President Biden called out detractors who he said doubted his “incessant optimism” about Democrats’ ability to stave off resounding Republican wins in the midterm elections – even as his presidency is now likely entering a new period of divided government.

The results, he said during a press conference at the White House Wednesday, are a sign American democracy is intact, despite coming under threat over the past several years.

“We had an election yesterday,” Biden said. “And it was a good day, I think, for democracy.”

The results were neither the “thumping” George W. Bush described during his own post-midterms press conference in 2006 nor the “shellacking’” Barack Obama said Democrats endured in 2010.

Instead, the failure of a so-called “red wave” to materialize Tuesday night had Biden appearing confident, reflecting the mood of Democrats, including those inside the White House, who are feeling enthused and vindicated following an election season where the president’s political aptitude was questioned. At the time of Biden’s remarks, CNN has not been able to project the future majorities of the House or the Senate.

Read the full story here.

If Georgia voters were hoping to avoid talking politics at Thanksgiving, the state’s tightly contested Senate race has other plans.

Neither Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock nor Republican challenger Herschel Walker surpassed the 50% threshold needed to win the race outright Tuesday evening, CNN projects, forcing a runoff election set for Dec. 6.

But what exactly does that mean? And how will the runoff election work?

Here’s what you need to know:

What is a runoff and how does it work? A runoff is an additional election used to determine the winner of a certain race when neither candidate earns the required threshold for victory – in this case, 50%.

In Georgia, runoffs are more straightforward than general elections in that the candidate with the most votes wins regardless of whether they reach 50% or not.

Georgia’s top elections official, Brad Raffensperger, said counties are already preparing for the Dec. 6 election, and voters can request absentee ballots starting Wednesday through November 28 via the state’s online portal.

Early voting must begin by November 28 in all counties, but Raffensperger said his office anticipates some counties could have early voting on Saturday, November 26 or Sunday, Nov. 27. “We are working with the counties to find out what their plans are on this front,” he said.

Notably, the logistics of the 2022 runoff will be different than in years passed. The 2021 Georgia law that cut the length of runoffs from nine weeks to four means that the deadline for a new voter to register for the runoff election has already passed.

What is at stake? Put simply, a lot.

Depending on the outcome of Senate races in Arizona and Nevada, voters in Georgia could then – for the second consecutive election cycle – have the Senate majority in their hands.

Top officials from the Democratic and Republican parties told CNN they intend to double down on their significant investments in Georgia, with an increasing assumption that control of the Senate could hinge on the outcome of the runoff.