Key races to determine control of the Senate in Arizona and Nevada have yet to be contested as both states scramble to count hundreds of thousands of ballots that have yet to be processed.
It could still be hours – or days – before enough ballots are counted in those states to determine who won the Senate and the caucuses in both states. There are also several key congressional races undecided in California and Colorado that will determine what the House looks like when the new Congress is installed in January.
The unofficial results — and lingering uncertainty about who will control Congress next year — didn’t stop Republicans from worrying about the results of the election, where an expected Republican surge never materialized. The lackluster GOP results have raised new questions about House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy’s path to the speech and added a new layer to the looming 2024 showdown between former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Here’s what you need to know as the countdown continues:
The biggest reason for the delay is how each state handles ballots other than those cast at the polls on Election Day, including both early voting and mail-in ballots.
In Arizona, for example, CNN’s polling office estimates there are about 675,000 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 rejected at the polls on Election Day, Bill Gates, the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, told CNN on Thursday. These ballots must be processed before they can be counted, which results in a delay in ranking.
“Now we’re getting into what we call late-early, so these are early votes that we would have received over the weekend or, specifically, 290,000 that were filed on Election Day at our polling places,” Gates said.
The total was “a record”, he added.
In addition, Maricopa County has approximately 17,000 ballots that were attempted to be counted on Election Day but were not read by the ballot table due to a printer error, and those ballots must also be counted.
The county has not yet begun counting the 290,000 ballots cast on Election Day, Gates said Thursday. Officials in Maricopa County said they expect to announce additional vote counts later Thursday afternoon, which will include ballots taken Saturday night, Sunday and most of Monday.
In Pima County, Arizona’s second most populous county, officials said about 159,000 ballots remained to be counted as of Wednesday afternoon, and the county does not expect to finish counting until Nov. 14 or 15.
Uncounted ballots include more than 54,000 early ballots still being processed by the registrar’s office. The county expects to count about 20,000 ballots a day and will release the results at 6 p.m. local time every day.
In Nevada, state law allows mail-in ballots to be received until Saturday as long as they are mailed on Election Day, meaning counties are still receiving ballots for counting.
Clark County, the state’s largest county that includes Las Vegas, received more than 12,000 postmarked ballots from the post office Wednesday, Clark County Clerk Joe Gloria said. However, the number dropped significantly Thursday as the county received another 626 ballots from the Postal Service.
Additionally, counties in Nevada have tens of thousands of ballots mailed on Election Day to ballots located at polling places. Clark County said its Election Day ballots included nearly 57,000 mail-in ballots.
In all, there are more than 50,000 ballots to be counted in Clark County that are in “various stages in the validation process,” Gloria said in a Thursday briefing.
Washoe County, which includes Reno, received nearly 18,500 ballots Tuesday from polling places and the mail, and about 4,000 additional ballots by mail Wednesday, according to Jamie Rodriguez, the county’s interim clerk of voters.
Bethany Drysdale, a county spokeswoman, told CNN Thursday that there were still about 20,000 ballots to be counted. “More mail in ballots will arrive today, but we can’t estimate how many,” he said.
Rodriguez told reporters at a press conference Wednesday that the county was still adjusting to using mail-in ballots and got more than during the primary earlier this year.
“Not that we didn’t expect a large number of ballots to come in — to see two racks full of ballots, though, is a little more than we expected and I think it’s a little more difficult for us now than it was in the primaries,” Rodriguez said. . .
The poor performance of several Trump-endorsed candidates in battleground states has raised new doubts about Trump’s potential 2024 campaign launch, which is expected at an event scheduled for Tuesday.
At the same time, DeSantis’ resounding Florida election victory is fueling calls for him to build on his momentum and challenge Trump for the 2024 nomination.
The beginning of presidential jockeying right after the end of a term is nothing new, but the potential battle in the GOP looking to 2024 is especially notable after Trump blurted out the night before the election that he would make an announcement at a rally in Florida . next Tuesday.
The Trump-DeSantis showdown has been simmering for months, but it could explode as the 2024 primary season officially begins. A Trump adviser told CNN on Wednesday that DeSantis was “already having a moment, but the spotlight just quadrupled in tension” after Tuesday’s election.
McCarthy is moving quickly to narrow the votes needed to claim the speaker’s gavel in the next Congress as Republicans continue to close in on a majority in the House, even as Democrats had a better-than-expected night on Tuesday. CNN has yet to predict a Republican takeover of the chamber.
But the sheer size of the Republican majority could determine how difficult it will be for McCarthy to become speaker, as a narrow majority could prompt the pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus to stand in the way of McCarthy’s leadership aspirations.
A source familiar with the House Freedom Caucus’s deliberations told CNN Wednesday morning that there are about two dozen current and incoming members who are willing to vote against McCarthy if he doesn’t offer them concessions. They are actively discussing fielding a nominal challenger to face McCarthy in next week’s leadership election in an effort to force the GOP leader to give them more influence over how the House is run, the source said.
Rep. Bob Goode of Virginia, a member of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, told reporters Thursday that McCarthy “has done nothing to earn my vote” for speaker, predicting a challenge to McCarthy for the role .
This story has been updated with additional developments on Thursday.
