Minnesota stays blue amid a convincing Biden victory, though its Dem-led delegation flipped to the GOP. Tina Smith wins her first proper election to retain her US Senate seat. In the House, MN-8 went Republican for the first time in 7 decades. MN-2 still too close to call. Longtime conservative Dem in MN-7 Collin Peterson loses to his GOP challenger. MN-3 Dem challenger Dean Phillips wins a seat flip, as MN-5 was easily defended by Ilhan Omar. MN-1 is still up in the air. MN-4 and MN-6 went as expected for their Dem and GOP candidates, respectively.

As the country agonizes over the final chapter of the 2020 election, some fast facts:

(1) After six years of Republican rule, Democrats are hoping to take back control of the Senate, but Republicans have narrowed their path. Republicans have so far thwarted well-funded Democratic bids in Iowa, South Carolina, Kansas, Texas and Montana and taken back a Democratic seat in Alabama. Democrats have captured a seat in Colorado, and have their sights set on several other Republican senators.

(2) As of 5 a.m. ET on Wednesday, CNN had not projected winners in Arizona, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. Alaska was also too early to call. According to CNN’s projections, Biden has won 224 electoral votes to Trump’s 213.

(3) In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, Trump called for legitimate vote-counting to be halted, declaring victory with millions of votes outstanding in several swing states and falsely claiming that Democrats were trying to “steal the election.”

Biden sees an 8 point lead in early battlegrounds.

Joe Biden’s campaign said Tuesday that it believes it has at least an 8-point advantage in battleground states after analyzing the nearly 100 million ballots that were cast early. The campaign is arguing that it will be mathematically difficult for President Trump to close the gap with in-person voting on Election Day, and it’s working to create the impression that a Biden victory is most likely. The Biden camp also believes the former vice president can win 270 electoral votes even without Florida and Pennsylvania

Stats for Minnesota on Election Day: 1,839,710 absentee ballots accepted. 297,482 requested absentee ballots remained outstanding.

To ensure all goes smoothly, federal agents will be on hand to make sure voting rights don’t get disrupted. COVID-19 precautions also will be in place. Minneapolis voters also have until 3 p.m. Tuesday to drop off mail ballots at one of 13 drop-off locations, she said. The U.S. Justice Department announced Monday that federal officials are being sent to monitor for potential election law violations in Minneapolis as part of an 18-state Election Day operation.

It’s Tuesday, November 3. Election Day in America. We’ve made it. Here are the states which allow voters to register same day.

The states where you can go in person to both register to vote and cast your ballot on Election Day, which if you didn’t read the first sentence is today, include: Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

There’s an excellent treatment in the Strib on how politics and political “competition” bewteen neighboring states (MN and WI) led to the latter neighbor’s exponential growth of positive COVID-19 cases over the former’s more measured approach to prevention of spread. Minnesota is surrounded – literally – by 4 states whose percent positivity rates are among the top ten in the nation, and its current standing in comparison to the COVID surges in the Dakotas, Iowa, and Wisconsin may provide insight into how its response is a reflection of the politics of the pandemic. Wisconsin is billed in the piece as a “cautionary tale” for its more earnest neighbor the west – though cases here continue to surge in a similar, but lagging, trajectory – as the novel coronavirus knows no political boundaries.

GOP activists lose again.

A federal judge on Monday rejected a Republican request to invalidate 127,000 ballots that had already been cast via drive-through voting stations across Harris County, Texas. The ruling comes one day after the Texas Supreme Court denied a nearly identical effort by Republicans in Harris County.

FINAL CRYSTAL BALL RATINGS – THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

Biden 321, Trump 217

Biden restores some of the Dem Midwest strength and breaks new ground in Sun Belt pic.twitter.com/i5KIbGMVZX

— Kyle Kondik (@kkondik) November 2, 2020

Quinnipiac:
FLORIDA: Biden 47%, Trump 42%
OHIO: Biden 47%, Trump 43%
NBC/Marist:
ARIZONA: Biden 48%, Trump 48%
PENNSYLVANIA: Biden 51%, Trump 46%

POTUS won a group of swing states in 2016 by a combined 2 percentage points. But, as this poll shows, there does not appear to a late shift to POTUS.

More numbers:

PPP: IOWA: Biden 49%, Trump 48%

Research & Co.:
MICHIGAN: Biden 50%, Trump 43%
MINNESOTA: Biden 52%, Trump 43%
OHIO: Biden 47%, Trump 47%
PENNSYLVANIA: Biden 50%, Trump 44%
WISCONSIN: Biden 50%, Trump 42%

Frederick:
FLORIDA: Biden 51%, Trump 49%
NORTH CAROLINA: Biden 51%, Trump 49%
PENNSYLVANIA: Biden 52%, Trump 48%

Ever wonder about which media outlets to trust on election night? Fret no more.

Twitter provided more details about its policies around tweets that declare election results, and named the seven outlets it will lean on to help it determine whether a race is officially called.

The list includes ABC News, AP, CNN, CBS News, Decision Desk HQ, Fox News and NBC News — all outlets that experts agree have verified, unbiased decision desks calling elections.

The final WSJ/NBC poll:

President Trump trails by 10 percentage points among voters nationally in the final days of his re-election campaign, facing substantial public anxiety over the coronavirus pandemic but with broad approval of his management of the economy, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.

Former Vice President Joe Biden leads Mr. Trump, 52% to 42%, in the poll’s final reading of voter opinion before Election Day, essentially unchanged from Mr. Biden’s 11-point advantage in mid-October. In particular, women and seniors have turned against the president, the poll finds, with both groups favoring Mr. Biden by double-digit margins.

However, the survey finds the race tightening when the landscape is narrowed to a set of 12 battleground states. Mr. Biden holds a 6-point lead across those states, 51% to 45%, compared with a 10-point lead last month.