BPR Elections Coverage

Republicans outperformed the polls up and down the ballot in the 2020 election, to the surprise even of many Republican political operatives and survey researchers.

To be clear, Democrat Joe Biden defeated President Trump; Democrats will still control the House and still have a chance of picking up the Senate.

A couple of weeks ago, House Republicans were in the minority and forecasts showed that they could lose even more seats in a Democratic wave.

That's not what happened.

Although results continue to trickle in, the Democrats still hold the House majority, but Republicans managed to win back some competitive seats and hold on to some that they had feared losing.

President-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday called President Trump's refusal to concede the election "an embarrassment" but said it hasn't yet been a hindrance to his team moving forward with the transition process.

"We're well underway," Biden told reporters following remarks in Wilmington, Del. "The ability for the administration in any way by failure to recognize our win does not change the dynamic at all of what we're able to do."

Updated at 6 p.m.

Democrat Cal Cunningham conceded to incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis in North Carolina on Tuesday, saying “the voters have spoken” and it was clear Tillis had won.

With Cunningham’s concession, all eyes turned to Georgia, where two U.S. Senate runoff races in January are likely to determine the balance of the upper chamber.

Despite Joe Biden's victory, congressional Democrats are upset.

Bolstered by President Trump's unpopularity and the pandemic, polls had showed Democrats possibly taking control of the Senate, expanding their majority in the House of Representatives and Biden winning convincingly in several swing states.

But Democrats didn't gain a majority in the Senate. They lost a handful of seats in the House. And though Biden won the popular vote, it was a close contest in several battleground states.

As president-elect, Joe Biden should start receiving the same daily intelligence briefing as the one prepared for President Trump.

But so far, this hasn't happened, and it's not clear when the daily briefings will begin, according to intelligence officials.

Trump has not accepted the election results, and his administration has not yet authorized Biden and his team to start receiving government resources that range from the mundane — like office space and desks — to the highly sensitive, like top-secret intelligence briefings.

Updated at 9:45 p.m. ET

California Sen. Kamala Harris will become the next vice president of the United States, shattering another racial and gender barrier in American politics, at the end of a bruising presidential race that further exposed a bitterly divided electorate.

Updated at 1:54 p.m. ET

Former Vice President Joe Biden has been elected the 46th president of the United States, narrowly emerging victorious from a contentious White House campaign that stretched days past election night, as vote tallies in several swing states were slowed by an unprecedented surge in mail-in ballots.

12:00 AM – Wednesday November 4, 2020

While many races in North Carolina - including the presidency - seem too close to call, North Carolinians can hold onto their reputation of a battleground state. Republicans won big in Western North Carolina as reported by BPR's Lilly Knoepp and Cory Vaillancourt was on hand to cover the #NC11 win by Madison Cawthron.  

BPR News is gearing up for a full day of reporting from Western North Carolina and providing you with local, state and national coverage on-air, on BPR's online streams and on our free BPR mobile app. 

WINSTON-SALEM — An unidentified person who attended a campaign rally for Republican candidate for governor Dan Forest tested positive for COVID-19, North Carolina health officials confirmed Wednesday.

The N.C. Department of Health and Human Services said it’s aware of one case involving a person who attended a rally for the lieutenant governor in Burnsville on Oct. 15, spokeswoman Kelly Haight Connor said. No further details were available.

A scathing public letter signed by more than 150 of Madison Cawthorn’s former schoolmates at Patrick Henry College alleges that the Republican candidate engaged in “sexually predatory behavior,” vandalism and lying as a student and is unfit for congress or as a representative of the conservative Christian school.

President Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden are holding a final debate Thursday in Nashville, with Kristen Welker of NBC News moderating. After a haphazard first debate, and a canceled second one, this final debate has new rules established by the Commission on Presidential Debates. 

Even before the coronavirus pandemic, Tina Barton knew counting mail ballots would become a problem.

Updated 6:57 p.m. ET

Despite reports of the Trump campaign canceling TV advertising in Ohio and Iowa, it turns out the campaign has $11 million still reserved for ads in the states, according to the latest spending data provided to NPR by the ad-tracking firm Advertising Analytics.

Soon after being discharged from the hospital for treatment for COVID-19, President Trump tweeted the slur "Chinese virus" to refer to the coronavirus, something he's often repeated during the pandemic.

It's the latest example of Trump's alarming language that critics charge is xenophobic, discriminatory and even white supremacist. While Trump denies those labels, he has increasingly returned to the issue of race in the runup to the November election.

Updated at 8:31 p.m. ET

President Trump's campaign is calling for next week's presidential debate to be held in person in Miami, despite the organizing commission's decision to hold it virtually.

Campaign manager Bill Stepien said Thursday night there is "no medical reason" why the debate should be shifted virtually. He cited a memo from White House physician Sean Conley, who said Trump would be safe for public events by Saturday.

RALEIGH — A race in North Carolina critical to control of the U.S. Senate has been thrown into turmoil over allegations of personal misconduct by Democrat Cal Cunningham, a married man who had an extramarital relationship with a consultant.

Previously undisclosed text messages obtained by The Associated Press and additional interviews show that the relationship extended beyond suggestive texts to an intimate encounter as recently as July.

Many people who live in nursing homes or assisted living facilities have health conditions that prevent them from leaving the site to vote in person. That means absentee by-mail voting is common enough that those facilities have some special rules about how to vote by mail in North Carolina.