As Tuesday turned into Wednesday, the election results in Connecticut -- even with possibly the highest voter turnout in decades -- appeared to be much more clear than the national electoral picture. Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee for president, is projected by NBC News to win the state, defeating President Donald Trump in Connecticut.
Nationally, there are still a number of swing states to be called. With eight states still yet to be called, neither President Donald Trump nor former Vice President Joe Biden has the 270 electoral votes needed to win.
In Connecticut, with 59% of the precincts reporting as of 10 a.m. Wednesday, Biden held a lead of 59% to 39% with just under 200,000 votes separating the candidates.
"We do have clarity here in terms of Connecticut," Gov. Ned Lamont said at a news conference Wednesday morning. "I think that the vote yesterday happened peacefully. No intimidation, no questions, no people refusing to wear masks. People voted, they voted in extraordinarily great numbers which I’m thankful, they voted safely."
“The last thing this country needed is the confusion you see with an absolutely deadlocked 50-50 race. The only advice I have is give it a couple days, we’re gonna work through this," Lamont added.
In the races for the U.S. House of Representatives. NBC News projects that all five incumbents - John Larson, Joe Courtney, Rosa DeLauro, Jahana Hayes and Jim Hines - will win re-election and return to Washington.
"I'm very excited to learn I have secured my first re-election," a smiling Hayes said Wednesday afternoon. She said her opponent, David Sullivan, called her earlier in the day to concede.
Hayes has 55 percent of the vote, but she tweeted overnight saying she was going to wait until all of the votes are tallied.
"Last night we were getting the numbers and I felt comfortable that we were in a good place, but my campaign spent a lot of time over the last two months encouraging people to vote early, to mail in their absentee ballots and all of those votes are important and I wanted to wait for all of those votes to be counted," she said.
Hayes said she had to rely more on her supporters than she expected after she came down with COVID-19 during the campaign.
“This has been just an incredibly, just a crazy, first term in Congress,” Hayes said Wednesday. "Even campaigning in the middle of a pandemic, I could have never imagined it, but people really stood up and they voted, they participated and I am just am so incredibly thankful for that."
The Democrats are expected to retain control of the House, according to NBC News.
Absentee Ballots in Connecticut
Approximately 659,000 people in Connecticut tried absentee voting this election, many for the first time, due to the pandemic.
Election officials said for the most part, it went off without a hitch.
While some locations, like Hartford, got its absentee ballot counting done election night, a number of towns and cities will come back Wednesday for more processing and tabulating, including Waterbury, New Britain, Stamford, and West Hartford.
"Our country did the right thing by having these absentee ballots, just like we did here in the state of Connecticut," Lamont said. "Our country did the right thing by in the middle of this pandemic not forcing older people -- or those with preexisting conditions or those most at risk or those feeling they were most at risk -- they were still allowed to vote by absentee ballot. Give them the right to have their vote counted. Give them a couple of extra days to have their vote counted."
