Democrats Win Maryland Senate Race—and Say Goodbye to Larry Hogan

In one of the most expensive Senate races in the country, Democrat Angela Alsobrooks prevailed and won Maryland’s open seat, defeating former Republican Governor Larry Hogan by a nine-point margin.

The Associated Press called for the race for Alsobrooks on Tuesday evening, with Alsobrooks leading Hogan 54.6 percent to 43.3 percent, with 52 percent of votes reported.

Alsobrooks defeated the moderate Hogan, who ran as an anti-Trump (but not pro-Harris) Republican and who enjoyed widespread popularity in Maryland during his two terms as governor despite the state being solidly Democratic in presidential elections. Alsobrooks is the county executive of Prince George’s County in Maryland near Washington, D.C., and will be Maryland’s first Black senator.

Over $105 million was spent by both candidates in the race, making it the fourth-most-expensive Senate race in the 2024 election cycle, according to nonpartisan organization OpenSecrets. In contrast, the previous holder of the seat, retiring Democrat Ben Cardin, spent only $5.1 million in his 2018 reelection effort.

Hogan’s entry in the race in February made what was considered a reliable Democratic Senate seat competitive and seemingly put Democrats’ plans to retain control of the chamber in jeopardy. Republican megadonors poured money into Hogan’s campaign, with one conservative super PAC flooding Maryland’s airwaves with attack ads against Alsobrooks. In the end, it wasn’t enough, as Alsobrooks was able to overcome the onslaught much like her victory over another well-funded candidate in the state’s Democratic primary, Representative David Trone.

Ultimately, Hogan’s war chest was not enough to overcome Alsobrooks’s advantage in the polls and Democrats’ counter-fundraising. The fact that he publicly criticized Donald Trump and admitted that he wouldn’t vote for the former president didn’t win him enough Democrats or independents to carry the state. Democrats can breathe a sigh of relief that they’ve held onto the Senate seat, which will bolster their efforts to retain control of the Senate. As it stands, they hold a 10-seat deficit, with 18 Senate races still to be called.

Despite losing his state’s gubernatorial race by a landslide, North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson isn’t ready to acknowledge his campaign’s shortcomings.

In his closing remarks Tuesday night, Robinson claimed that he was satisfied with his run for the highest seat in the state’s executive branch since he “ran a race where I did not have to lie.” But that, in and of itself, appears to be a lie.

The 56-year-old self-described Nazi was caught red-handed in October when CNN published a sprawling investigation about his pre-politics proclivities, connecting Robinson to a flurry of comments on online pornographic forums via a “litany” of common biographical details and a shared email address. The comments revealed Robinson as a man who had, at least once, desired to own slaves, peeped in women’s locker rooms, and enjoyed transgender porn.

But the kicker that eventually led to a mass exodus of his top staffers came when Robinson rejected legal aid as well as several external offers to help him track down the original source of the comments, instead opting to vehemently claim—without evidence—that the CNN report was incorrect.

Weeks later, at a sparsely attended news conference, Robinson and his attorney Jesse Binnall announced their intention to sue the “left-wing” news outlet for defamation, seeking $50 million in damages for “reputational harm” over what he described as a “high-tech lynching.” But weeks later, Robinson quietly tweaked that number, amending the lawsuit to instead seek just over $25,000 in damages.

Even Donald Trump’s campaign had seemingly pulled their support from Robinson, reportedly telling the Hitler-quoting, gay-bashing, conspiracy-flouting antisemite that he was no longer welcome to attend rallies for either candidate on the Republican presidential ticket, according to an anonymous source that spoke with the Carolina Journal in September. Local Republican strategists had also reportedly called on Robinson to exit the gubernatorial race in order to save Trump’s chances in the battleground state.

Delaware Democrat Sarah McBride has made history by becoming the first transgender person elected to Congress.

McBride was elected by more than 15 percent  by Delaware voters in the state’s only congressional district, according to the Associated Press, which called the race on Tuesday evening. In her race, she beat out Republican John Whalen, a retired police officer.

Though McBride has tried to lead with her policy rather than her identity as a transgender woman, her Republican opponent made an effort to publicly endorse the Heritage Foundation’s radical agenda Project 2025, which classifies “transgender ideology” as equivalent to pornography.

“There are a lot of people right now in this country who don’t see themselves reflected in government, and they deserve to see that,” says McBride about her gender identity. “But on a day-to-day basis, it’s not what I’m talking about or thinking about. It’s not what voters are talking to me about.”

At the age of 34, McBride has already made waves in her political career. In 2016, at age 25, she became the first openly transgender person to address a major U.S. political convention when she spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. And in 2020, she was elected to represent Delaware’s 1st Senate district, becoming the first openly transgender state senator.

During her time in office, McBride helped to pass universal paid family and medical leave. Most recently, she introduced successful legislation to generate more than $100 million in new Medicaid funding for Delaware. Her efforts are in part to honor her late husband, who died of cancer in 2014. In Congress she hopes to “shift our health care system from a sickness system to an actual health and wellness system,” she told The 19th.

But in Congress, she’ll be met with Republicans who have banked their political careers on opposing the bogeyman of “transgender health care.” According to the Trans Legislation Tracker, a staggering 662 anti-trans bills have been introduced across the country this year, 80 of those on the federal level. That makes this the fifth year in a row that a record-breaking number of bills targeting transgender people have made it to politicians’ desks.

With McBride in the House of Representatives, both transgender people and Delawareans will have another voice advocating for them. “I’m running to make historic progress for Delawareans,” said McBride. “I’m not running to make history.”

Donald Trump won an overwhelming victory in Florida Tuesday, including in the state’s lone bellwether county that could signal trouble for Kamala Harris.

Miami-Dade, Florida’s most populous county, was solidly Democratic between 2008 and 2016, when Hillary Clinton won by 30 points.

In 2020, however, President Joe Biden won the county by only seven points. It seems that Miami-Dade’s rightward trend has continued.

On Tuesday, Trump became the first Republican candidate to win Miami-Dade County since George H.W. Bush captured the county in 1988.

Harris’s inability to capture Miami-Dade could potentially signal that she is underperforming among Latino voters (of which the county is home to nearly two million), which could be a sign of trouble for her performance nationally, according to Beacon Policy Advisors.

However, not everyone is convinced Harris losing Miami-Dade is the warning sign some analysts believed.

Joshua Cohen, The Nation’s resident policy wonk, said that Florida’s results were not likely to be indicative of larger national trends.

“In 2020, it was one of the few states that swung out right towards Trump. That seemed to be a sign that he was doing well nationally. It was more of a sign that he was doing well in states like Florida—[and there] are practically no other states in the country that are like Florida,” Cohen wrote.

Floridians failed to enshrine abortion access in the state constitution Tuesday, with the majority of the population still failing to clear the 60 percent supermajority requirement for the ballot measure.

The Amendment to Limit Government Interference With Abortion sought to protect an individual’s right to an abortion up to the point of viability, which typically occurs between 23 and 24 weeks of pregnancy. The measure also would have safeguarded the right to an abortion in the event that the procedure is deemed medically necessary in order to preserve a pregnant person’s health.

But the initiative faced dire odds: In order to be amended into the state constitution, it needed more than a simple majority of voters in order to succeed, effectively handing the minority of Floridians the ability to decide the fate of women in the conservative hub.

More than 5,600,000 Floridians voted in favor of Amendment 4—approximately 57.2 percent—with 82 percent of the expected votes in, according to a projection by NBC News.

Just one week out from Election Day, pollsters predicted that the abortion rights effort would go south. A survey from St. Pete Polls of 1,227 likely Florida general election voters, conducted for FloridaPolitics.com, suggested that the measure would fall just shy of its goal with 54 percent of the vote.

Florida has one of the most prohibitive abortion policies in the nation, restricting access after just six weeks. That law, signed by Governor Ron DeSantis during his campaign for president, went into effect in May. DeSantis’s decision was viewed as a strategic move that could have proved popular with some voters in swing states such as Iowa, but that bid fell apart when DeSantis announced in January that he would be withdrawing from the presidential race—leaving Floridians holding the bag.

Florida’s law prohibits abortions well before a lot of people even realize they’re pregnant, and just one week before drugstore pregnancy tests can detect pregnancy hormones in their earliest, and least reliable, window. It has also forced some patients in need of the procedure to seek treatment outside the state—such as in North Carolina, where abortion is banned after 12 weeks—or even further afield.

In the two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion efforts have won in every state where the issue has appeared on the ballot. Florida is one of 10 states that put that metric to the test this year, though it is the only state that requires more than a simple majority to pass.

North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein has won the governor’s seat in the Tar Heel State, securing more than 105,000 votes Tuesday night.

As polls had predicted, Stein swept the state, clinching a 15-point lead over his Republican opponent, North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, according to a polling average by The Hill/Decision Desk HQ.

Stein ran a relatively quiet campaign against Robinson, sticking to core policy points that he believed would win over North Carolinians: economic equity, investments in the state’s school system, health care, abortion, and community safety.

But the waning days of the race focused less on policy and more on a sudden mass turn in opinion on Robinson, with voters framing the race as a choice between “someone with decency” and a “frightening, horrifying” candidate.

Despite spending the better part of the last year spewing disturbing and outlandish rhetoric disparaging women and minority groups, Robinson was swept by an October surprise when CNN published a sprawling investigation about his pre-politics proclivities.

CNN connected Robinson to a flurry of comments on online pornographic forums via a “litany” of common biographical details and a shared email address. The comments revealed Robinson as a man who had, at least once, desired to own slaves, peeped in women’s locker rooms, and enjoyed transgender porn.

Robinson subsequently rejected legal aid and several offers to help him track down the original source of the comments, leading to a mass exodus by members of his top staff in the final stretch of the race.

Weeks later, at a sparsely attended news conference, Robinson and his attorney Jesse Binnall announced their intention to sue the “left-wing” news outlet for defamation, seeking $50 million in damages for “reputational harm” over what he described as a “high-tech lynching.” Two weeks ago, Robinson tweaked that number, quietly amending the lawsuit to instead seek just over $25,000 in damages.

Even Donald Trump’s campaign had seemingly pulled their support from Robinson, reportedly telling the Hitler-quoting, gay-bashing, conspiracy-flouting antisemite September that he was no longer welcome to attend rallies for either candidate on the Republican presidential ticket, according to an anonymous source that spoke with the Carolina Journal. Local Republican strategists had also reportedly called on Robinson to exit the gubernatorial race in order to save Trump’s chances in the battleground state.

But, as Stein argued, Robinson was “unfit to be governor before that story even broke.”

The exceedingly controversial politico has had near countless headline-grabbing scandals based on his disturbing online history, which included posts in which he minimized the horrors of the Holocaust, claimed a “satanic marxist” had made the movie Black Panther to pull “shekels” out of Black audiences, likened women getting abortions to murderers (despite admitting that his wife had an abortion), and derided gay people as “filth” and “maggots.” Robinson has also expressed archaic views about women’s role in society, telling a Charlotte-area church in 2022 that Christians are “called to be led by men.”

Robinson had also suggested that “schools wouldn’t be getting shot up” if Christian teachings were forced into the classroom, and told a congregation at Asbury Baptist Church that public schools had taken a “nosedive” since mandatory prayer had been excised from curriculums.

But Robinson rejected the mounting pressure to exit the race, even as his campaign seemed like a surefire loss for Republicans in battleground state.

Extreme wait times to vote in a Pennsylvania county couldn’t sway a judge to extend voting hours on Tuesday.

Despite reports that lines near Lehigh University in Bethlehem had estimated wait times longer than six hours, a judge in Northampton County refused to locally extend the state’s 8:00 p.m. poll closing time. Bethlehem stretches across the boundaries of Northampton and Lehigh Counties, both of which sided with President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

Voters in line before the 8 p.m. deadline will still be permitted to vote, according to the ACLU of Pennsylvania.

The Keystone State is expected to be a pivotal battleground race in the 2024 election. Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are projected to be neck and neck in Pennsylvania, with the Democratic presidential nominee just a smidge ahead of her Republican opponent at 47.9 percent to Trump’s 47.7 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s aggregated polling.

Donald Trump has claimed Indiana, winning 11 electoral votes over Vice President Kamala Harris, according to the Associated Press. It’s the third time that Trump has won the historically conservative state.

While Harris was never projected to win the Hoosier State, one early bellwether of the national results did look up for the Democratic presidential nominee, however. Hamilton County, a suburb that Trump won by seven percentage points in 2020, sided with Harris on Tuesday, giving the Democrat a 1.2 percent lead with 65 percent of the vote tabulated, according to The New York Times.

Right-wing conspiracy theories began circulating Tuesday evening after election officials in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, announced that they would need to recount approximately 31,000 ballots.

Several hours into counting votes, election officials realized that some of the doors on the tabulation machines “were not fully secured” by senior election officials, according to a statement from the Milwaukee Election Commission.

“In order to eliminate any doubt and be fully transparent, the MEC has decided to start the tabulation process over for all ballots at Central Count,” accounting for approximately 31,000 votes, the statement said.

The recount will significantly delay results out of Wisconsin, which was previously expected to give partial results Tuesday night. In 2020, President Joe Biden won Milwaukee County.

Republican National Committee co-chair and Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump posted about the issue on X Tuesday evening, claiming that her team had been “monitoring slow ballot counting in Milwaukee” and had learned that the “counting took place in unsecured conditions.”

“This is an unacceptable example of incompetent election administration in a key swing state: voters deserve better and we are unambiguously calling on Milwaukee’s officials to DO THEIR JOBS and count ballots quickly and effectively. Anything less undermines voter confidence,” she wrote.

Her post was shared by RNC co-Chair Michael Whatley and Trump campaign adviser Alex Bruesewitz. Earlier Tuesday, Lara Trump had stoked concerns over voting in Pennsylvania, another key swing state.

It seems that undermining voter confidence has already taken root. CNN’s report on the issue in Milwaukee was shared by hatemongering X account LibsofTikTok, which regularly promotes misinformation and extremist conspiracy theories, sparking right-wing speculation that something more sinister was afoot.

Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist who was charged with drumming up Donald Trump’s ground game, seemed disturbed over low voter turnout on Election Day.

“Turnout is mixed and not where we want it to be. We need more people to vote. We can’t let turnout flatline,” Kirk wrote in a post on X Tuesday afternoon. “Text everyone you know. Make more noise. We need more.”

Turning Point USA, Kirk’s conservative youth organization, was tapped by Trump earlier this year to handle his get-out-the-vote efforts alongside Elon Musk’s America PAC. So if voters don’t show up for Trump, it will be at least 50 percent Kirk’s fault.

Kirk’s desperate message came as multiple states reported high voter turnout, including key swing states Trump needs to win if he wants a shot at the White House.

Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that his state is on course to surpass five million ballots cast, exceeding its record turnout from 2020. In North Carolina, Democratic Governor Roy Cooper reportedly said that suburban and female voter turnout in his state had been higher than expected.

Hours later, Kirk posted again, now claiming that the tides had changed.

“Huge after work surge happening right now in GA, NC, PA. Wow,” he wrote. “The men are arriving. Turnout is SURGING. STAY IN LINE!”