By now those of us masochistic enough to follow special congressional elections in Upstate New York (or at least “upstate” by a Manhattan-centric view of the world) are aware that Democrat Scott Murphy leads Republican Jim Tedisco by a mere 13 votes with 6000+ absentee and overseas military ballots still to be counted. Despite the fact that there are 798 more registered Republicans than Democrats in the absentee voting pool, the useful idiots at MSNBC (including the emasculated beta-spouse of Jim Webb’s chief flack Kristin Denny Todd) are breathlessly repeating the White House spin that the Democrat model shows that Murphy will win by 210 votes.
I spoke to a source close to the Tedisco campaign last night who told me that this report was utter nonsense for two reasons. First, because absentee voters tend to be the most ideologically committed voters and almost never stray from their party affilliation. The past three election cycles have revealed that such voters stray from their designated party less than 5% of the time. The Democrat model being pushed by the White House only works if you assume that 33% of these most committed Repbulicans are going to jump ship and vote for an uber-liberal like Murphy and that no conservative Democrats in the pool are going to vote for the well-known, long serving assemblyman Jim Tedisco. Second, overseas military ballots will continue to be accepted and counted until April 13. Based on requests, there should be something like 300 overseas military ballots. Even in the diasterous years of 2006 and 2008, these ballots broke 4 to 1 for Republicans. Couple that fact with the fact that the effette Murphy is one of the most anti-military congressional candidates in recent history (he pushed to have ROTC banned at Harvard and has a personal history replete with juicy quotations denouncing the military) and the Tedisco people are expecting a greater than 5 to 1 break for Tedisco among overseas military voters.
So why the noise from the White House? The Tedisco people are expecting (and prepared for) a massive Democrat lawyer drop into the NY-20th and trench warfare with respect to the counting of the absentee ballots. The thinking in the Tedisco camp is that the Democrats and their media organs will continue to trumpet the “we’re winning/we will win” narrative and hope they can disqualify enough votes to hold onto the win or, alternatively, keep it close enough so that when they lose they can create a narrative that Tedisco “stole” the election so they can fire up an increasingly apathetic base for a 2010 rematch.
Whatever the case, the Tedisco people are ready for pretty much anything and remain certain that when the absentee votes are counted their guy will prevail by somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000 votes.
Filed under: 2009 Elections, National Politics
[...] report that the “models” are pointing to a Murphy victory, Rittinger at Virtucon brings us some ground-truth. I spoke to a source close to the Tedisco campaign last night who told me that this report was [...]