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Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.
* The vote tally in Nevada’s U.S. Senate race took a little while, but incumbent Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen prevailed over Republican challenger Sam Brown, despite the fact that Donald Trump was the first GOP presidential candidate to win in Nevada in 20 years.
* On a related note, the Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman noted that Rosen will likely end up with fewer votes than Kamala Harris in Nevada. So how did the senator win while Harris lost in the state? Because tens of thousands of Trump voters “didn’t bother” to also vote for Brown on their ballots.
* With Trump winning Arizona, every state has now been called, and the Republican president-elect will end up with 312 electoral votes — six more than he received in his successful 2016 campaign.
* Speaking of the Grand Canyon State, a Republican state legislator named Justin Heap was elected last week to oversee the elections process in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous county. That wouldn’t be especially notable were it not for the fact that Heap is a far-right election conspiracy theorist who has spent years claiming that Trump secretly won in 2020.
* In Pennsylvania’s closely watched U.S. Senate race, Republican Dave McCormick appears to have ousted incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, but there are roughly 122,000 ballots that haven’t yet been counted, and McCormick’s current lead is just over 40,000 votes.
* And with Republican Sen. JD Vance poised to become the vice president, it will fall to Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, to choose someone to fill the Senate vacancy. A special election will follow in 2026.