Eleven days after Election Day, eleven House races remain uncalled. In one California district, Democrats already know they’ve won. In Louisiana, voters in two districts have to go back to the polls. And in Alaska, a candidate for governor leads his nearest rival by more than 20 points and is still waiting for a call.
Control of Congress was settled days ago. Democrats have won 256 House seats, well past the 218 needed for a majority, and secured at least 55 seats in the Senate. What’s unusual about the races still on the board is how few of them fit the familiar picture of two candidates separated by a handful of ballots, explained Yahoo News.
Alaska has perhaps the oddest pair of results. With about 88 percent of the vote counted, Democrat Mary Peltola led Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan by roughly 5,800 votes. On the same ballot, Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins had 50.2 percent of first-choice votes for governor. His closest rival, Republican Bernadette Wilson, had roughly 29 percent. The Associated Press had yet to call either race.
For Kreiss-Tomkins, the figure to watch is his own. He was just two-tenths of a percentage point above the majority he needs to win outright. If the remaining ballots pull him below 50 percent, voters’ lower-ranked choices come into play despite his wide lead over Wilson. The same majority threshold applies in the Senate race, where ranked-choice counting could push the decision to November 18 or later.
North Carolina has four of the eleven outstanding House contests, more than any other state, and the leads split evenly. Democrats were ahead by roughly 300 votes in each of the 3rd and 5th districts, while Republicans led in the 7th and 10th. Democrats held similarly narrow leads in Tennessee’s 4th and Minnesota’s 1st, where a recount is likely. Republicans were ahead in California’s 23rd and Alaska’s at-large district as mail ballots continued to be processed.
That leaves three House races where the wait has little to do with a razor-thin margin. Both candidates in California’s 4th District are Democrats, so the count will decide which Democrat goes to Washington. Louisiana’s 5th and 6th districts each have a Democrat and a Republican headed to a December 12 runoff. By the time those voters choose their representatives, the rest of the country will have known for more than a month which party holds the gavel.
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