| There are two new analyses of the absentee ballot count this morning and both of them reach the same conclusion, namely that Jim Tedisco's Assembly Escape Plan is doomed.
The first comes from Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight. Silver notices what should be readily apparent to anyone paying attention to the recount thus far: Murphy is overperforming his election day results with the absentees. He also predicts that Tedisco is "bound for defeat" and has roughly a 1 in 500 chance of fleeing Albany for DC.
Although Republican candidate Jim Tedisco is leaving no stone unturned in the special election in New York's 20th Congressional District -- including objecting to the ballot of Kirsten Gillibrand, the woman whom he hopes to replace in the Congress -- the results tallied so far suggest that he is bound for defeat.
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What this means is that Murphy is in fact overperforming among absentee ballots, as we and other observers anticipated that he might. In fact, the pattern has been rather predictable. Take a look at the following table:
Four counties -- Greene, Rensselaer, Delaware, and Essex -- have completed processing their absentee ballots. In each of those counties, Murphy received between 2.7 percent and 3.4 percent more of the vote among absentees than he did on Election Day. Although the pattern is a bit more irregular in counties that are only partially done with their count, we feel safe in saying that Murphy has some systematic advantage here.
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We project Murphy to pick up roughly 500 additional votes once all absentee ballots have been counted. That would give him an overall win by somewhere between 500 and 600 votes.
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This version of the model posits a larger gain for Tedisco in Saratoga County -- a net of 132 votes rather than 33 as projected by the algebraic analysis. On the other hand, it projects a much larger gain for Murphy in Columbia County, where the absentee returns were disproportionately Democratic and where he has received more than two-thirds of the absentee ballots processed thus far. Overall, the "advanced" model projects almost exactly the same result -- about a 500-vote gain, and 550-vote win, for Murphy.
I am candidly a bit unsure about how to calculate the standard error for a forecast such as this one, but it appears to be, using conservative assumptions, roughly +/- 190 net votes. That would imply a 95 percent confidence interval of between Murphy +173 and Murphy +913, and that Tedisco has only about a 1-in-500 chance of prevailing.
As I said last night, it's pretty obvious what Tedisco's challenge every ballot startegy is all about. He's falling behind with every new count, so he's trying to keep as many votes out of the tallies as possible to make the race appear to be artificially closer than it really is. When those challenged ballots are ruled valid, and the vast majority of them will be, he and the rest of the GOP will complain that a judge or ACORN or the tooth Fairy or George Soros stole the election. Bank on it.
The second analysis comes from the folks at at Campaign Diaries and it very much echoes Silver's findings.
Now, remember what I calculated last week: Counties where Murphy performed well are dramatically over-represented in the absentee ballot count. If every county's absentee ballot count is exactly the same as the Election Day count, Murphy would net a decisive number of votes. Put otherwise: Since Murphy's strongholds make up a disproportionate share of absentee ballots, Murphy needs to do nothing else than secure the same percentage among absentee ballots as he did on Election Day in each county, while Tedisco needs to over-perform to offset the absentee ballots' unfavorable geographical distribution.
And yet, we now learn that not only is Tedisco not improving his score - but that it is Murphy who is drawing better results than he was Election Night! Sure, we should not draw any conclusions before we get a sense of the trend in Saratoga: if Tedisco overperforms among absentee ballots in the district's biggest county, he could make up for losses elsewhere. But he would have to do so decisively considering that Saratoga only represents 27% of the total number of absentee ballots - compared to 36% of the ballots cast on Election Day. In short: Murphy has every reason to be (cautiously) optimistic.
All this adds up to bad news for Tedisco and I'm not sure his campaign can withstand much more of it. The move to challenge Senator Gillibrand's ballot was beyond stupid, both tactically and strategically. After days of Democrats and other observers raising the alarm about hundreds of frivolous ballot challenges from Tedisco's lawyers, the Tedisco camp handed the press a perfect example with which to run. This will be referenced over and over as Team Tedisco moves into the "they stole it" phase over the next 10 days or so.
As a reporter emailed me yesterday, "Things don't seem to be breaking well for JT."
You can say that again.
On the web: Protect NY-20. |
