In 2024, Donald Trump’s election night wins in the presidential battlegrounds of Georgia, North Carolina, Texas and Florida meant that most Americans went to bed on Tuesday with a good idea of the result of the election — and woke up to the networks having called enough states to declare Trump the president-elect.Two years later, control of Congress is at stake.
Republicans are trying to hang on to slim majorities in both chambers as Democrats try to wrest power in Washington for the final two years of Trump’s term.Democrats are heavily favored in public polling in the House and in a number of key Senate contests — and if those numbers prove accurate, it’s possible that NBC News could project control of both chambers on election night.But it’s more likely that determining the winners in important races will take time.Of course, no one, including the Decision Desk, will know what will unfold until election night, but we will have a good sense possibly early in the night of how the contests are trending.
The answer of when we could call control in both the House and Senate depends not only on how states count their votes, but on how close the races will be.When we could know Senate controlSenate control will likely come down to the eight races that NBC News rates as either toss-ups (Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Texas) or lean Democratic (Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire).Assuming that Democrats win the states NBC News currently rates as “Likely” Democratic (which includes flipping North Carolina’s Senate seat from red to blue, and keeping Georgia in their column), Democrats still need to win five of these eight contests.
Some of these states are quick to count their ballots, and others are perennially slow.If some of these Senate contests are as close as we expect, calling control of the Senate as a whole could take us into the early morning hours of Wednesday, regardless of who wins those individual races.
It is also a real possibility that America...