Senate Outcomes, and the Mystery of the Missing Column

Things are still up in the air in some places, but so far I look reasonably good in my "toss-up state" Senate predictions:

• Fetterman beat Oz in Pennslyvania, as I predicted.
• Johnson beat Barnes in Wisconsin, as I predicted.
• Georgia looks like it's headed to a runoff, as I predicted.
• Nevada still "too close to call," but there are more than 230,000 votes left to be counted in Democrat-leaning Clark and Washoe Counties only about 33,000 votes left to be counted in the Republican-leaning rural counties, with Republican Adam Laxalt only leading incumbent Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto by by about 23,000 votes. I predicted a Cortez Masto win.
• The situation is similar in Arizona. Incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly leads Republican Blake Masters by more than 100,00 votes, with about 785,000 votes left to count in Democratic-leaning areas and only 34,000 votes left to count in Republican-leaning areas. I predicted a Kelly win.

In order to pick up a Senate majority, the Republicans needed to win three of those five races. It looks like the Democrats will win three of the five, picking up rather than losing a seat.

And then there's Georgia. Assuming it does go to a runoff, I can't see the Republicans investing a lot of money in trying to save Herschel Walker. If him winning or losing made the difference to a GOP Senate majority, yes. But right now it looks like all a Walker win would accomplish would be leaving the GOP in the Senate minority and saddling them with Walker's scandals/antics for the next six years. So I think they'll mostly write it off and hope for a better candidate next time around.

So, I did not write a Garrison Center column yesterday. I'm genuinely sorry about that. I experienced a confluence of intervening events that included very little sleep (my family was traveling; I waited up for them Monday night and they arrived home about 11:30pm instead of the expected 9pm) and then some kind of bug, which I'm not yet over, along these lines:

Combined with Election Day overshadowing everything and leaving me without good "news hooks," everything just screamed "take a day off." So I did. And instead of making it up today, I'll be doing the tropical storm (or maybe even hurricane) prep bit and shooting for getting back on schedule tomorrow.