Six Things to Watch on Election Day: Four Seats Decide Each Chamber, Early Clues Come From Florida and Virginia — and About 1,000 Justice Department Monitors Fan Out
Reuters' Election Day watch list is a numbers story first: a net gain of four seats flips the House, four flips the Senate. New Jersey's 7th District is inside that math.
The whole midterm turns on a small number, and Reuters put it at the top of its Election Day watch list: four. Democrats need a net gain of four seats in the House to overturn a Republican majority of 218 to 214, and a net gain of four in the Senate to overturn a 53-to-47 Republican majority. Tuesday's vote decides control of Congress for the final two years of President Donald Trump's term — and serves, in Reuters' framing, as the first nationwide verdict on his presidency.
The earliest clues will not come from the closest races. Reuters points to early results from Republican-held House seats in Florida and Virginia as the first indication of the size of any Democratic gains — the canary districts whose margins, long before the swing seats are called, tell the country which kind of night it is having. New Jersey's own contribution to the four-seat question is the 7th District, a swing seat that could help decide the House.
The last items on the list are about the counting itself. Election officials have warned that close races could spark disputes over voter eligibility, ballot counting and certification, and the Justice Department plans to deploy about 1,000 monitors nationwide on Election Day — roughly triple the number used in the last midterms. Attorney General Todd Blanche, on October 22, declined to rule out department intervention in state certifications in what he called extreme circumstances. The vote is Tuesday; the argument over the vote, Reuters is warning, may run longer.
