Update, 6:56 – Wisconsin has now flipped to Biden, but only by 13,000 votes. Michigan stayed red all night; Trump leads by 64,000 votes, while John James pulled the upset and won by 70,000 in the Senate race there. One thing’s for sure — the Senate is staying Republican. Well, almost sure; things could still change in North Carolina and in the runoff for the special election in Loeffler’s seat.

Update, 12:15 – Just to make it official … an even split so far among my states:

FNC just called IOWA FOR TRUMP. It's just 6 votes but it's HUGE. Great indicator where WI and MI will go.

I think the needle on Trump's re-election just went over the 50% mark.

— Michael Koolidge (@koolidge) November 4, 2020

WASHINGTON (AP) — Joe Biden wins Minnesota.

— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) November 4, 2020

Update, 12:05 am ET – Clearly we will not get a decision tonight, but Team Trump has to be pretty happy with the map thus far. The only state they appear to have outright lost is Arizona, although it’s not going to be over in some of the other states for a few days. It doesn’t look like they came close to flipping Minnesota, which I sort of thought would be the case, but they’re up 5 in Wisconsin, 7 in Iowa, and almost 10 in Michigan.

That’s a heck of a lot better than polling led us to believe. We’ll have much more tomorrow.

Update, 11:43 – I’ve been mistaken — Detroit and Wayne County have been reporting. About a third of the precincts are reporting, and Biden’s winning it but only 56/43. John James is doing just about the same.

Update, 11:32 – Trump’s making a late run in Minnesota too, but still trails by 12, 55/43. Lewis is back nine points from Smith, 51/42. There are only around 60% of precincts reporting, so keep an eye there. Ramsey County still hasn’t reported.

Update, 11:29 – Here we go — Iowa has now flipped to the GOP, 50/48, with 75% or so reporting. Expect that to grow. Joni Ernst leads 49/48, too.

Update, 11:20 – Big move in Iowa, where Trump now only trails by less than three.

Update, 11:17 – Not much change in any of these states. We won’t know about Michigan until Detroit starts reporting. Biden went back in the lead in Rhode Island too, but by less than a percentage point.

Update, 11:01 – Minnesota still shows a 19-point lead for Biden, but bear in mind that we only have about 40% of precincts reporting, and Hennepin (Minneapolis) has fully reported. The bad news: we haven’t yet heard from Ramsey. Smith leads Lewis by 15 points, so Lewis is outperforming Trump thus far.

Also, Iowa’s mostly reporting from the Des Moines and Cedar Rapids area. It will take a while to get the reports from other parts of the state.

Update, 10:54 – Iowa’s looking kinda sketchy at the moment. Biden is leading 58/39 with 40% reporting.

Update, 10:40 – Has anyone noticed that Trump has a seven-point lead in Rhode Island? It’s only reporting ~45% of its precincts, but Trump is up 53/46.

Update, 10:32 – Wisconsin’s tightening as more of Dane and Milwaukee come in, but not by as much as you’d think. Trump still has a two-point lead there.

Update, 10:18 – Iowa’s now coming in with its early vote, and it favors Biden by a little over 2:1. We’ve seen this pattern before; expect it to come back down to earth shortly. Meanwhile, we still haven’t seen Detroit report in Michigan, but Trump’s maintaining a lead in Wisconsin despite Dane being about 60% reported and Milwaukee about 40%.

Update, 10:04 – Someone’s anxious to take a victory lap, and it ain’t Trump:

Just checked in with @RobertCahaly of Traflagar:

“Everything is kind of unfolding the way we figured right now”

— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) November 4, 2020

Update, 10:00 – In Minnesota, Biden leads 64/34, but that’s almost all from Hennepin (Minneapolis). Surprisingly, Jason Lewis is outperforming Trump at this early stage, with Tina Smith leading in the Senate race by only 59/34.

Update, 9:59 – Michigan is still showing red on the map with Trump ahead 55/43, but we have not heard from Detroit yet at all. John James has an almost identical lead over Gary Peters in the Senate race, 55/42.

Update, 9:53 – Wisconsin really does look like it’s in play. Biden’s holding onto a two-point lead but Dane and Milwaukee are rolling up the score for him. When the rest of the state starts reporting, watch out.

Update, 9:43 – Not too many updates yet, but when Minnesota starts to report, it should move rapidly.

Update, 9:35 – Wisconsin fixed their numbers; Milwaukee is only 30% reported, and the state now has Trump in the lead, narrowly.

Update, 9:33 — Minnesota’s early vote is coming in with Biden way ahead, but its all from Hennepin County.

Update 9:30 – Well, that didn’t last long. Wisconsin now has Biden up 74/25 on the strength of early voting — but almost all of that is coming from Milwaukee and Dane counties, too. Milwaukee has almost fully reported, but there’s a long way to go in Dane.

Update, 9:20 – Wisconsin’s coming in with a very narrow edge to Biden, 50/48.

Update, 9:00 – Polls closing in Minnesota and Wisconsin now. We should start getting data soon on both. Watch out for the “blue mirage” of early-vote counts.

Update, 8:52 – Things still looking good in Michigan,  where Trump has a 60/38 head start off the early count. Nothing yet from Detroit, of course, but this is still a pretty good head start with ~700K votes tabulated.

Update, 8:40 – And now Trump’s up 20 with 10% of precincts counted in Michigan. That state will be a roller coaster. I would have expected the early vote to be a lot more blue, but this is coming mainly from non-urban counties.

Update, 8:29 – Not sure what changed, but the vote total has turned significantly in favor of Trump in Michigan. 57/43, but still only about 5% counted.

Update, 8:20 – And now it’s only down to an eight point lead for Biden in Michigan on the early vote.

Update, 8:16 – The early vote in Michigan has Democrats up about 20 points (59/39), but it’s only a small part of the early voting. It’s the first data on this set of four states.

Update, 8:02 – Consider the source on this, but if true, this would be stunning:

Biden camp sharing with reporters they're worried about Minnesota, a state that hasn't gone GOP in a prez race since 1972, & that @realDonaldTrump only lost by 1.5% in 2016

Long ways to go, but if we win MN a big reason will be @EricTrump, who has been a tireless advocate there!

— Jason Miller (@JasonMillerinDC) November 4, 2020

Update, 7:52 – Rick Gates is very bullish on Florida and Georgia. Ohio as well, where he says the Trump campaign is most confident. We’re still more than an hour away from any polls closing on my states, but stay tuned to Salem Radio for the latest on all the states.

Update, 7:27 – NYT’s Peter Baker explained to Hugh and me that the exit polling has been in process for a couple of weeks. They are trying to capture early voters in these surveys. I’d still not put a lot of stock in them, but the numbers do reflect a wider pool than just the same-day turnout.

Update, 7:20 – I know it’s not my state but Florida looks interesting. Trump is only trailing in Miami-Dade by nine points. Hmmmmm.

Update 6:40: Dr. Seb Gorka told us that Democrats have had to make emergency organizing calls in Minnesota to boost turnout here. That may well be why Ellison was trolling Twitter to get voters here out to the polls.

Update 6:29 – Megyn tells us that Joe Trippi is not concerned about the disparity in ground games between Republicans and Democrats. He’s predicting a Biden landslide of 368 EC votes. I have a sneaking suspicion that is more wishcasting than reality, but it’s worth noting. Great talking with Megyn, and be sure to sign up for her podcast!

Update 6:18 – I’ll be talking with Megyn Kelly next on the Hugh Hewitt show!

Update 6:16: Polls will close in these states at 9 pm ET (MI, MN, WI) and 10 pm ET (IA).

Update, 6:15 pm ET: I’m still a bit skeptical about Trump’s ability to win Minnesota, but this looks rather interesting:

If you’ve voted, great! Can you please call a friend? Spend a little time getting friends, fams, and folks out to the polls. We don’t have all of the votes we need quite yet. So, help a friend (even a brand new friend) vote. Right now would be awesome.

— Keith Ellison (@keithellison) November 3, 2020

There’s nothing improper about this, and it might just be a standard Election Day riff. However, it might be that Democrats don’t like what they see so far in MN, too.

Original post follows …

========

Welcome to Election Night 2020, when it might be 2021 before we get all the results. Kidding! I’ll be live-blogging developments from four key Upper Midwest states in this election — Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa. We can probably expect final-ish results in two of the four states, Minnesota and Wisconsin, as they will count all ballots from early voting today as well as the live walk-in vote. Michigan and Iowa will take longer, FiveThirtyEight warns, as they will still be receiving early-vote mail-in ballots for the next few days.

If you want to track results, be sure to use our widgets on the main page, courtesy of our friends and partners at Decision Desk HQ! That’s how I will be tracking the action tonight. Open up a few tabs and follow along on all of our live blogging, too.

We won’t just be covering the presidential race, either. Three of these four states have close Senate races, too. Can Jason Lewis and John James score upsets against Democratic incumbents in Minnesota and Michigan? Will Joni Ernst hang on in Iowa?

The RCP average for the Trump-Biden contest in each state suggests a close outcome, which means we might wait for a long while even in the two states projected to produce final outcomes:

• Iowa: Trump +2.0
• Michigan: Biden +4.2
• Minnesota: Biden +4.3
• Wisconsin: Biden +6.7

Iowa’s big swing among multiple pollsters has all of us wondering whether there’s been a late break for Trump across the country. If you’ve been following the “shy Trump voter” pollsters, they seem more inclined to think so. Robert Cahaly thinks a momentum shift came in the second and final debate, but not so much about oil. Instead, voters might be coalescing behind Trump on COVID-19 policy:

While Cahaly said he expected an October surprise–style scandal could shake the confidence he had in his predictions, nothing in the same vein as the Billy Bush Access Hollywood tapes from 2016 have come up to introduce brand-new vulnerabilities to Trump’s campaign. Instead, the final presidential debate on October 22 emphasized what he said many of the voters he’s spoken with identify as the most important issue heading into the election: the possibility of another economic shutdown.

Trump, who has touted the success of the economy before the coronavirus pandemic necessitated shutdowns across the country this year, has repeatedly said he does not want any more closures. Meanwhile, Biden has indicated he is open to additional shutdowns if they are deemed necessary to stifle the virus’s spread.

“Even [voters] that don’t like Trump, they’re like, ‘I don’t like Trump, but we can’t have another shutdown.’ Because the economy has always trumped—pardon the expression,” Cahaly said. “The economy has always been more important.”

Those voter sentiments didn’t mean they weren’t concerned about the virus, Cahaly said. It just meant that when it came to weighing “acceptable risk versus non-acceptable risk,” voters told him it was an “easy choice” for them to make.

As James Carville famously remarked, “It’s the economy, stupid.” If that’s the case, perhaps we’ll see more voters making that same risk assessment than previously considered. There is at least some indirect data in Wisconsin that suggests that Trump might be driving a new turnout model, too:

Wisconsin Early Return Ballots:1,525,415 44% R / 36% D / 20% NP
A: 18-29 3% / 30-39 7% / 40-49 10% / 50-64 26% / 65+ 36%
Asian 1.6% / White 77% / Hispanic 3% / AfAm 3%
HS Diploma 21% / Bach Degree 23% / Grad Degree+ 12%
1st Time Voting/New Regs: 7.6% https://t.co/Zwc2KpkpU2 pic.twitter.com/5vJjgLwynY

— L2 Data (@L2political) November 1, 2020

As of Monday morning, the day after in-person early voting concluded in Wisconsin, the 12 Democrat counties–Ashland, Bayfield, Dane, Douglas, Eau Claire, Green, Iowa, La Crosse, Menominee, Milwaukee, Portage, and Rock–accounted for a total of 743,829 votes; 39.4 percent of the 1,886,533 cast statewide. In 2016, those 12 counties accounted for 50.4 percent of the statewide early vote (336,533 cast out of 666,846 total early votes).

Dane and Milwaukee Counties–Wisconsin’s most populous and most overwhelmingly Democratic–account for 29.8 percent of the 2020 early vote total, down a full percentage point from the 30.9 percent share of Wisconsin’s early vote in 2016.

This indicates that voters in the 60 counties President Trump won in 2016 en route to winning an upset victory in Wisconsin are dramatically overperforming in the state’s early vote this year. Based on this, L2 Data is projecting that President Trump may well be leading Wisconsin’s early vote.

Significant? We’ll sooon see! (By the way, L2 partnered with me for my research while writing my book Going Red.) We’ll be following all of this carefully in live updates on this post. I will also be on the air tonight with Hugh Hewitt on Salem Radio Network from six pm ET to midnight, covering all of the developments. Tune in on your AM radio dial or sign up for the video stream at The Hughniverse!

Updates will come at the top in reverse chronological order, with the most recent update at the top.