2022 midterm election results

Voters in Montana rejected on Tuesday a ballot referendum that would have imposed criminal penalties on health care providers who do not act to preserve the life of infants born during the course of an abortion, CNN projects. 

Democrat Eric Sorensen will win in Illinois’ 17th Congressional District, CNN projects.  

This is a Democratic hold.

Sorensen will be the first out gay person elected to Congress from Illinois, CNN projects. Sorensen, a former Rockford and Quad Cities meteorologist, will defeat Republican Esther Joy King in the race to succeed retiring Democratic Rep. Cheri Bustos. 

Where things stand in the House: Democrats now have 188 out of 218 seats needed to control the House, CNN projects.

More votes are expected to be posted from Colorado's Pueblo County at 9 p.m. ET, Gilbert Ortiz, the county's clerk and recorder, told CNN — they then will call it a night and pick back up tomorrow morning at 11 a.m. ET.

Why this county is key: The county is located in GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert's district, where she is facing a very tight race against Democrat Adam Frisch.

The county is at approximately 57,000 votes right now out of a total of about 61,000 (Note: the numbers are subject to change a little because some votes are being cured, and there’s eight days to do that after Election Day in Colorado).

At 9 p.m. ET, the county is expected to post approximately 2,000 more votes which would get them to about 59,000 out of the roughly 61,000 total. 

A Democratic Senate campaign aide involved in strategy for the likely Georgia runoff says the attacks raising questions about GOP candidate Herschel Walker’s character are expected to remain front and center ahead of voting on Dec. 6.

There will also be a continuation of a massive field effort in urban areas like Atlanta and the Atlanta suburbs and direct voter contact in other areas across the state.

Other Democratic strategists say the ground game will be pivotal. 

Some background: CNN projects the hotly contested Senate contest between Walker and Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock will face a runoff on Dec. 6.

Neither candidate surpassed the 50% threshold to win the race outright on Tuesday. 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.

President Joe Biden spoke by phone this evening with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, according to the media pool.

The White House offered no other details on the call.

For background: Biden said earlier Wednesday he planned to speak with McCarthy, who could be poised to become the next House speaker. CNN has not yet made a call on GOP control of the House. 

Asked to describe his relationship with McCarthy, who is moving swiftly to lock down the votes to claim the speaker’s gavel, Biden offered minimal detail, saying:

During the 2022 primary season, Democrats actively meddled in a number of Republican races – hoping to boost GOP candidates who they viewed as too extreme (especially on the issue of election denialism) to win general elections.

All told, Democrats spent millions of dollars interfering in Republican primaries for Senate, House and governor around the country.

The debate at the time was whether this was dirty pool by Democrats. After all, they – and President Joe Biden in particular – had made the defense of democracy from those who would question it the centerpiece of the 2020 campaign and beyond.

If Democrats truly believed that sowing doubt about free and fair elections was a deep and serious threat to democracy, then how could they justify spending money to elevate candidates who espoused those very views?

That remains a worthwhile debate. But what is beyond debate is that Democratic meddling in Republican primaries was very effective.

To read more, click here.

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Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell told CNN on Wednesday that he doesn't believe he ever predicted a red wave would happen this midterm cycle.

"Yeah, I don't believe I ever predicted that," McConnell said as he was leaving the US Capitol when asked his response to the so-called red wave that was expected by some this election. 

On whether he has any insights into the remaining votes in Senate races in Arizona and Nevada, he said: "Well, like everybody else, I'm watching them count votes."

And when asked if he thinks inflation was as big of an issue as he expected it to be with voters, he responded as the elevator doors were closing: 

"We're all waiting for December the 6," an apparent reference to the runoff election for the Georgia Senate seat between GOP candidate Herschel Walker and Sen. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic incumbent.

Republican Marc Molinaro will defeat Democrat Josh Riley in New York's 19th Congressional District race, CNN projects.

This is a Republican pickup.

Where things stand in the House: Republicans now have 207 out of 218 seats needed to control the House, CNN projects.

Not much can grow naturally in the barren desert landscape of Arizona’s Maricopa County, but given its pivotal role in shaping national politics, it’s fertile ground for conspiracy theories to take root.

“We’ve anticipated legitimate mistakes and issues with election infrastructure being reframed as fraud,” Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington who studies the spread of disinformation, explained to CNN.

That appears to be what precisely played out in Maricopa County on Election Day.

The right-wing personalities, who have spent the past two years convincing millions of Americans not to trust their democracy, pointed to this Election Day’s problem with printers at some Maricopa polling locations as proof that everything they had said was right. The printer issue was not a mistake, they suggested – fraud was afoot.

The reality of any Election Day in the United States is that issues are going to arise at the polls. We can argue whether that is unacceptable or inevitable, the result of incompetence or aging infrastructure. But it is another thing entirely to suggest, without evidence, that these issues are the result of a nefarious and sophisticated effort to “steal” an election.

Election deniers in 2020 attributed malice to the mundane, repeatedly claiming videos showed poll workers stealing the election, when in fact the videos showed them doing their jobs. Having studied this, Starbird and her colleagues at the University of Washington and the Stanford Internet Observatory published a report last month looking at “implied intentionality.”

“In elections, honest human errors can be opportunistically exploited to imply intentionality and to support unfounded narratives of intentional, widespread fraud, undermining the legitimacy of electoral outcomes. However, as research shows, election fraud is exceedingly rare and such mistakes are unlikely to impact election outcomes,” they wrote.

It all began early this Election Day when a Republican activist posted a video to Twitter showing a Maricopa poll worker explaining there was a problem that could cause delays.

For those who had been waiting to claim the election was a fraud, it was a gift and it could hardly have come from anywhere better.

To read more on the election conspiracies in Maricopa County, click here.