ABC News reports that Republican Nick Begich is projected to win Alaska's at-large U.S. House seat. The Last Frontier counted its last ballots yesterday, and Begich received 48.4% of the first-place votes, Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola received 46.4%, Alaska Independence Party candidate John Wayne Howe received 3.9%, and Democrat Eric Hafner received 1.0%.

However, because no candidate received a majority of first-place votes, ranked-choice voting was required to determine the winner. (In Alaska, voters can rank the four candidates on the ballot in order of preference.) Hafner was eliminated first because he got the fewest first-place votes, and his votes were redistributed to his voters' second choices. Then, Howe was eliminated, and the same thing happened to his voters. At that point, Begich had 51.3% of the vote and Peltola had 48.7%, making Begich the winner.

Begich's victory means that Republicans have won at least 219 House seats in the 2024 election, although the GOP caucus is temporarily down a member because former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who was reelected on Nov. 5, resigned on Nov. 13. Democrats, meanwhile, will have at least 213 seats. We're down to only three unprojected seats now!

P.S. Alaska being done counting also means that we have a final unofficial result for Ballot Measure 2, the initiative to repeal ranked-choice voting in the state. It's currently losing by just 664 votes. However, supporters of the measure are expected to request a recount, so the repeal effort hasn't definitively failed yet.

ABC News is reporting that Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur is projected to win reelection in Ohio's 9th District against Republican Derek Merrin. It was certainly a close-run thing for the incumbent, however: Kaptur leads by just over 0.6 points, 48.3% to 47.6%, which puts her lead a touch above the 0.5-point threshold necessary for a recount. With this projection, only four races have not yet been reported as projected: Alaska's at-large District, California's 13th District, California's 45th District and Iowa's 1st District. Chances are that Republicans will end up with somewhere between 220 and 222 seats, and Democrats will hold around 213 to 215 seats once all is said and done — nearly identical to the GOP's 221-214 edge entering the election.

Yesterday evening, California counties reported updated vote counts, which pushed the contest in the Central Valley-based 13th District to a nearly 50-50 split. Before the update, Republican Rep. John Duarte led Democrat Adam Gray by a touch over 1 point, 50.6% to 49.4%. But Gray's home base of Merced County added a little more than 11,000 votes to its tally that went for Gray 56% to 44%, while Stanislaus County added around 9,500 votes that broke about 54% to 46% for Gray. As a result, Duarte now leads by about 0.1 points, 50.06% to 49.94%.

The question naturally is how many votes are left, and my colleague Nathaniel estimated last night that roughly 6,500 remain, based on state and county reports regarding unprocessed ballots. In pure math terms, Duarte probably needs to garner at least 49% of those to retain the thinnest of leads, so he doesn't quite need a majority of what's left to win. But the good news for Gray is that about half of the outstanding votes are from Merced, where he holds a slight edge. Either way, this one is going to be so close that the trailing candidate will probably want a recount once the vote is certified. (California doesn't have automatic recounts; instead, any voter may file a recount request for a specified candidate.)

As more ballots have been counted in California, the AP has finally made a projection for the Proposition 32 election: It has failed, 51% to 49%. Had it passed, this ballot measure would have raised the minimum wage in California to $18 per hour, the highest in the nation.

Minimum wage increases are usually popular at the ballot box: This is the first time that a statewide ballot measure to raise the minimum wage has failed in any state since 1996. (From 1998 to 2022, they went 24-for-24.) Voters may have felt that the increase was unnecessary, since California's minimum wage is already $16 per hour (and $20 per hour for fast food workers).