the Dems are +6 so far (NH, VA, NC, NM, CO, OR). If they were in the BCS, they’d be bowl-eligible.
In MN, Franken’s a few hundred votes behind, out of a few million, pending a recount. Not good, but also not over.
In AK, Begich is a few thousand votes behind, with an indeterminate number of votes, probably in the upper five figures, still uncounted. A lot of these are early ballots which would probably skew Dem. A lot of them are absentee ballots, which would probably skew GOP. And a number of them may be provisional ballots, which would probably skew Dem, but ‘provisional’ means that they need to be checked to verify their validity, and not all of them will be valid. So who knows?
In GA, Jim Martin will go up against Saxby Chambliss in a runoff on December 2. The absence of a conservative third-party candidate favors Chambliss; the fact that it’s a special election favors whoever can get their supporters more fired up (and ready to go), which probably means the Dems. Obama staffers were already booking travel to GA on Tuesday.
So the Dems could wind up anywhere from +6 to +9. Should be interesting.
Another factor in Chambliss’s favor is the question of whether without Obama at the top of the ballot the Dems be able to turn out the black vote the way they did during the main election.
The WaPo’s Derek Kravitz notes that"This is especially odd given that Alaska’s Board of Elections saw a 12.4 percent hike in turnout for the August primaries, before Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was selected as the Republican Party’s vice presidential nominee."
You’d think that, one way or the other, there’d be anecdotal stories from polling places, giving some clue whether people were voting in droves, or staying away in droves.
But with Palin on the ballot, and hotly contested races for Senate and House, a big drop in turnout makes no sense at all. I don’t believe it.
I have my doubts whether folks in Georgia will turn out to vote for Jim Martin. First of all, he’s just not a very charismatic candidate. Secondly, a lot of new voters showed up on the 4th specifically to vote for Obama. Martin was an afterthought.
The only hope is if Obama can get his turnout machine in gear to get out the vote for Martin. Martin has little or no such machinery of his own.
Obama’s turnout machine was very much in place until just a few days ago, so if his campaign has any money left over, they can keep it in place for another three and a half weeks.
Oh I’m well aware of Obama’s machinery, having seen it up close. I expect Obama will do his best to stir voters to action. That is Martin’s best hope. But even with that assist, I don’t know if voters will turn out (certainly not with the sense of purpose they had on the 4th).
I’ll say this, though: If Martin wins, he owes his seat to Obama, and Obama would surely have a loyal ally.
In Georgia, the runoff campaign’s already underway.
In Minnesota, the unofficial (and still changing) tally currently has Coleman leading by 206. But you should really read “More Minnesota Madness” by Nate Silver to hear about those 34,916 Senate undervotes, how they might be distributed, and how that would affect things. He thinks Franken’s the slight favorite to be the ultimate winner. And FWIW, apparently the swing of over 500 votes, net, between the initial unofficial count, and the present version, is pretty small potatoes by MN standards.
In Alaska, this Anchorage Daily News story muses about the low turnout, and notes that a large number of ballots are yet uncounted:
And then goes on to point out what small potatoes the Murkowski-Knowles race was, next to the 2008 menu.
They’ve also got a good map of the election results by voting district, which will be useful in gauging Begich’s chances for overtaking Stevens if we should learn where all the early votes, absentee ballots, and questioned ballots are from.
Georgia’s vote total was lower this year than in '04 as well, in spite of all the excitement and all the newly-registered voters.
Georgia had an anti-gay-marriage amendment on the ballot in '04, which I suspect is what drove turnout that year. That mechanism was used by Republicans in several states that year, as I recall. (Wonder if Alaska had anything similar?)
Another possibility is that conservative voters were just disspirited and unenthusiastic this year, resulting in lower turnouts in generally conservative states like Alaska and Georgia.
Either way, I am not prepared to call shenanigans just because Alaska has a lower-than-expected turnout.
I’m also not prepared to call shenanigans on Minnesota’s undervoting. If I understand the term correctly, that means there are fewer votes for Senator than the overall number of voters. That shouldn’t be surprising, since a lot of people registered this year for the sole purpose of voting in the presidential race. I know that in the precinct where I was working in Georgia, there were a lot more votes in the Presidential race than in the Senatorial race.
Me either, yet - but the lack of questions about it is disturbing to me. If nobody asks what’s going on, then you never find out whether there were shenanigans or not.
I don’t think anyone’s even suggesting there might be. That’s more a question of, did people do things like put an ‘X’ through one place where they’d filled in the wrong circle on the optical-scan form, then fill in another dot? Or did someone circle a name on the ballot, rather than fill in the circle on the optical-scan form? That’s the sort of thing you find in a manual recount of undervotes.
Nothing shady about it - just that the scanner treats either of those as a ‘no vote,’ and that’s how it’s counted unless the election is close enough to go back and look at that sort of thing. Which this one is.
The Minnesota GOP has started a blog, http://minnesotarecount.com/, to supposedly “keep a watchful eye on Minnesota’s Senate recount.”
It doesn’t actually seem to be doing any of that, though. Instead, it’s just reprinting the gossip of wingnut ignoramuses about the certification and recount: RedState, Townhall, Powerline, “Minnesota Democrats Exposed,” Fox and the WSJ of course, plus some chatter from the mainstream media.
But nothing that could be described as adding to what people know about the recount.
That’s 90,635 actual and potential ballots, which gets us within a few thousand of the 2004 total. Glad to see it.
The PDF breaks them down by district, which would be helpful if I had the time to correlate those counts with the voting totals so far in the different districts. Maybe later.
b) (PDF) 54,051 of the absentee and early ballots in 33 districts where the duplicate voter check is complete are supposed to be counted today. Since Alaska is west of the contiguous U.S., that means late tonight, for those of us on the East Coast. I think I’ll see what’s up with the counts in the morning.
As Kos points out, the remaining 7 districts are all Begich territory, so while he needs to close the gap somewhat today, he certainly doesn’t need to pull ahead yet.
How the hell is it taking them this long to count the votes?! It’s been a week, and they’ve barely done anything! I’d think that they’d be done in Alaska, at least, seeing as how they have so many fewer ballots to look at.
Good thing, too, because that’s no longer possible in Alaska. There has to be a special election, ever since Gov. Frank Murkowski named his daughter to the position.
