good evening once again. i am stephanie ruhle. get excited, boys and girls. we ve got breaking news tonight. nbc news projected mark kelly, the winner of his arizona senate race against republican challenger blake masters. we now have a tie in the senate, 49 democrats and 49 republicans. control of both the house and the senate, still up for grabs. and now, all eyes are turning to one state, nevada. let s go right to steve kornacki, of course. he s at the big wall with the latest on where things stand. steve, give us an update. yeah, we just had a pretty meaningful last couple of hours here, as you say, in arizona, we ve got the call in the senate race. it goes to mark kelly, a democrat, the incumbent, defeating blake masters. the key to all of this was maricopa county, it always is in arizona. and if you ve been following this drama all week, we were talking about there is a very particular type of ballot in maricopa county, we were all
waiting on it. it was the ballots that were hand delivered by voters to polling places on election day. there s a whole bunch of maricopa county, there s almost 300,000 of. the republicans have been pinning their hopes on that type of ballot. they were saying, it s a very republican-leaning voter, who tends to do that, who takes their ballot in person to the pole places on election day. that it happened in 2020, they said it was gonna happen again in 2022, and it was blake masters was gonna go past mark kelly. we got a big batch of about 75,000 votes, many of them, that exact same type of ballot on describing, and not only did blake masters not do as well as expected, mark kelly actually carried them. mark kelly actually won more votes, significantly more votes from that batch then blake masters did. so, with that, he just do not see a path for blake masters to catch up in the senate race. so, mark kelly holds on to the senate race. as significantly, potentially, in arizona, where i ju
which will still take place on december 6th, would only be to decide whether democrats have 50, or 51 seats. but control, then, in that scenario, would not be an issue. it will be icing on the cake. it all means those, steve, that you, my friend, are going to be working tomorrow. steve kornacki, thank you. i want to bring in our lead off panel tonight. johnathan allen joins us. senior national politics reporter for nbc news. jon ralston is here, ceo of the nevada independent, covering politics and that state for more than 33 years, 30 years. he s also an msnbc political analyst. greg bluestein is here, a political reporter for the atlanta journal-constitution, and an msnbc political contributor. he is also the author of flipped, how georgia turned purple and broke the monopoly on republican power. and nbc s vaughn hillyard is here. he is from phoenix, arizona. he joins us tonight, wearing a b. o. l. o. tie, honoring his state with that look. vaughn, what a night for arizona, mark kel
those conservatives, reticent to trumpism, would they be able to stop voting for democrats for third cycle in a row? and what the results here tell us tonight is the answer is yes. arizona is a legitimately purple state now. donald trump was not on the ballot here. it was at the time while inflation was high, and immigration was at the forefront, a record number of migrants crossing the sheer. republicans truly believed that they had, a national race here, they had everything they needed to pull off a win and again this republican seat. but that s not the reality here. and then, if you shift and look at the governor s race here right now, i just got to be frank. this turned pretty much everybody s heads here, but also, with the kari lake campaign, the katie hobbs campaign here. to give you an idea of what this batch was comprised of, just 13.5% of this ballot drop where the mail early votes from monday that skewed heavily towards katie hobbs, mark kelly,
smaller margin, about 80,000 fewer votes than mark kelly. and we have been looking at this race and saying, well, that giant batch of votes in maricopa county, if it is a republican batch of votes, it may not be enough for blake masters to overtake mark kelly. but it certainly could be enough for kari lake to overtake katie hobbs, with the numbers we saw from that batch of vote tonight, we saw hobbs get more votes out of it than kari lake. so, it raises the possibility that it is a giant batch of votes in maricopa, the ones that were dropped off at polling places on election day, may not even be enough to lift kari lake past katie hobbs. this race is far from being called. but i think there was a lot of thought that this lead from katie hobbs may not hold. it s still may not. but the possibility that it does is now very real, as a result of what we saw come out of maricopa county tonight. and in addition to that, the secretary of state s race in arizona was also called, mark finchem, t