STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We're still waiting for the final count from some of the elections last week, including some elections that are crucial and where the margins are tiny. Among them is a potential Democratic flip of the Senate seat in Mississippi, which would add to Democrats' gains. Multiple states also saw their governors' offices and legislative chambers flip to Democratic control. NPR's Stephen Fowler has been tracking all of this. He joins us now. Hi there, Stephen.
STEPHEN FOWLER, BYLINE: Good morning.
INSKEEP: OK, let's work through some races that are too close to call.
FOWLER: I've got three buckets for you where we don't have a definitive answer on who wins until pretty much every single vote has been counted - which is a normal thing, by the way. Bucket one, you've got slow counting - mainly mail-in voting states, like several California House seats that are outstanding and the Alaska Senate race, where the Democrat Mary Peltola is leading. And that also could take longer because it could go to ranked-choice voting tabulation.
INSKEEP: Right.
FOWLER: Second bucket - contests in conservative-heavy areas where the race is separated by a few thousand or even a few hundred votes, in places like North Carolina. And then bucket three, Steve, I am making the Mississippi Senate race its own confusing, complicated bucket.
INSKEEP: OK. What do you mean by complicated?
FOWLER: Well, Democrat Scott Colom is leading by a few thousand votes over the incumbent, Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith. That's not complicated. It's also not likely to change once all the votes are counted. But here's the thing. We don't know how many votes are actually left to count.
INSKEEP: Oh, this is interesting. How would we not know, days later, how many people voted at least?
FOWLER: In some ways, Mississippi's election system is clear as mud, but let's walk through this. Tuesday is the deadline for counties to receive absentee ballots as long as they were postmarked by Election Day. It's also the deadline for voters to fix issues with their provisional ballots, called affidavit ballots, so they're counted. But the state doesn't know how many of these provisionals exist because counties don't have to send their election results to them until Friday, and many of these counties are not publicizing their numbers until they work their way through.
INSKEEP: OK. So it's going to be a few more days at a minimum before we know the final final results. But we do know a lot of Republicans lost in this campaign that you covered. What are you hearing from the losers?
FOWLER: On the Republican side, there's been talk of a generational wipeout of the party in places like Texas and Georgia and North Carolina. They lost pretty much everywhere. The data shows that a combination of Republican voters switched to support Democrats in key races, and they also stayed home in a large amount. And so pollsters, strategists, voters, they also say Trump's seeming indifference to the losses so far will continue to be a problem for them.
INSKEEP: OK. So what do Democrats say?
FOWLER: Well, here's two soundbites for you. One of them is Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin, who in many ways agreed with Republicans.
KEN MARTIN: I think this was bigger than politics and bigger than party, and I think people were sending a message. They clearly were sending a message not just to Republicans, who are the party in power, but to Democrats as well.
FOWLER: One of those messages is that there were specific issues that they wanted fixed, like affordability concerns, the war in Iran that people want stopped, immigration enforcement. But the main, big message is feeling like politics right now is more about the top versus the bottom rather than a left-right, Democrat-Republican thing.
That takes me to the second soundbite. I talked to Georgia Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock. He told me the election was about a repudiation of the last decade of politics, both Trumpism and, in many ways, how people responded to it.
RAPHAEL WARNOCK: We're at an inflection point. This is more than an election. It's a moral moment. And the central question is, what kind of nation do we want to be?
FOWLER: It is very early in the aftermath of the midterms, but you're getting a sense from a lot of Democrats that voters are handing them the keys to power, and they expect them to drive in a different direction than we're going now, but nobody really knows exactly where they want to go yet.
INSKEEP: Interesting to hear Democrats reflect that this election result might even be a warning for them as well as for Republicans, considering what they need to do next. Stephen, thanks so much.
FOWLER: Thank you.
INSKEEP: NPR's Stephen Fowler.
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