“Too close to call” doesn’t even come close:
With just a handful of votes separating them, the candidates in a New York congressional race that focused on President Barack Obama’s economic policies say they know the race isn’t over.
With all 610 voting precincts in the 20th Congressional District reporting, Democrat Scott Murphy leads Republican Jim Tedisco by just 65 votes out of more than 154,000 cast. The two are vying to replace Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand, who was appointed to the U.S. Senate to succeed Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
There are more than 10,000 absentee ballots still to be counted.
Tedisco says he thinks he’ll eventually have a “tremendous victory.” Murphy says his campaign, win or lose, proved the naysayers in Washington wrong.
Republicans have filed a lawsuit requiring all paper ballots be impounded.
That last bit is because we are becoming wise to Democratic methods of manufacturing votes. With 10,000 votes to be counted and Republicans usually doing well among absentee voters, the likely outcome of a fair count is a GOP victory…unless Democrats “find” votes like they did in Washington in 2004 and Minnesota in 2008. So, the GOP is just making certain that the only votes counted are those which were actually cast.
That aside, it is a tremendous thing even to be in a de-facto tie at the moment – Obama carried the district with 61% of the vote in November which means that either Obama voters are dispirited, or a lot of them switched to voting GOP. In either case, no Democrat can be pleased with the outcome, even if Murphy does squeeze out a win.
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