NY-20: Nate Silver Says 'No Apparent Path' To Tedisco Win

by: phillip anderson

Mon Apr 20, 2009 at 09:18:44 AM EDT

Based on challenged ballot counts provided by FiveThirtyEight by the Scott Murphy for Congress campaign, it appears that the majority of ballot challenges in the special election in New York's 20th Congressional District were made by the Republican Candidate, Jim Tedisco. As these changes are resolved by election officials, Murphy, the Democrat, will almost certainly add to his current 273-vote lead. He appears bound for a narrow, but relatively unambiguous, victory.

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At this point, Jim Tedisco's best strategy is to do whatever he needs to do to improve his chances in 2010 and beyond, something that probably requires the right combination of aggrievedness and graciousness. Barring an unanticipated legal intervention, he has almost no chance of winning this election.

It's over, Jim. The people of the 20th have been without their full complement of representation in DC for almost 3 months now. They deserve an end to this.

NY-20: Nate Silver predicts an easy Murphy victory (& other updates)

by: Hudson

Wed Apr 15, 2009 at 11:28:56 AM EDT

The justifiably celebrated Nate Silver of 538.com predicts that Scott Murphy will win the hotly-contested race for New York 20th Congressional Distict handily, by "500-600" votes.

(How cool would it be if Murphy won by 538 votes exactly?)

Silver, for those who just bought their first computer, is the baseball statistics genius who very precisely predicted the outcomes of both the 2008 Democratic primaries and the general election. If anything, he says, he may be underestimating Murphy's margin, given Jimmy Disco's Colemanesque strategery:

More teabag tax day updates below the fold...

NY-20: Nate Silver: Tedisco 'Bound For Defeat'

by: phillip anderson

Wed Apr 15, 2009 at 11:23:57 AM EDT

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.

NY-20: Two Analyses, One Conclusion: Absentee Distribution Favors Murphy

by: phillip anderson

Tue Apr 07, 2009 at 10:43:34 AM EDT

NY-20: Absentee Ballot Distribution Appears to Favor Murphy (D)

One thing that seems fairly clear is that there tend to be a relatively higher proportion of absentee ballots returned in counties where Murphy performed well on election night. For example, Columbia County, where Murphy won 56.3 percent of the of the vote last week, accounted for 9.8 percent of ballots on election night, but accounts for 15.3 percent of absentees. Conversely, Saratoga County, which is a Tedisco stronghold, represented 36 percent of ballots on election night but only 27.2 percent of absentees:

If I simply apportion the absentee ballots based on the distribution of the election day vote in each county, I show Murphy gaining a net of 173 ballots during the absentee counting phase. In addition, as Michael Barone has noted, although a plurality of the absentee ballot returns are Republican, they are somewhat less Republican than registration in the district as a whole.

And some more from Campaign Diaries:

1. 3107 (45,8%) ballots have been returned from registered Republicans and 2383 (35,1%) from registered Democrats. Among the entire electorate, the gap between the share of registered Republicans and of registered Democrats is 15%. That means that the pool of absentee voters is significantly Republican than the electorate at large.

2. Counties where Murphy performed well are dramatically over-represented in the pool of (uncounted) absentee ballots:

   * Columbia County, which gave the Democrat 56% of the vote, cast 9.8% of the district's votes last Tuesday; but 15,3% of the absentee ballots come from there!

   * Two other counties that gave Murphy 56% are over-represented. Warren County and Washington County represented 10% and 8,1% of last Tuesday's districtwide, respectively; but they make up 15% and 9,2% of the incoming absentee ballots!

   * Inversely, Saratoga County, which saved Tedisco's candidacy by giving him 54% of the vote, represented 36% of the districtwide vote last Tuesday. Now, only 27% of absentee ballots come from Saratoga - a sharp drop.

Let's put this otherwise: Murphy is winning Columbia County and Warren County by 12%; he is losing Saratoga by 8%. Last Tuesday, Columbia and Warren combined made up 20% of the districtwide vote, while Saratoga made up 36%. Now, there are more absentee ballots from Warren and Columbia combined than from Saratoga. That does not bode well for Tedisco.

While these analyses do indeed look good for Murphy, do keep in mind that the Tedisco campaign has brought in the Sith Lord of GOP vote counting dirty pool, Roger Stone. All the more reason to drop a few nickels in the Protect NY-20 cup.