NY-01: Bishop Says He’s Re-Taken the Lead – by 15 Votes

Hot damn, this one is tight:

At the end of Day Four of counting, Bishop took the lead from his GOP challenger, Randy Altschuler, despite what Schneider described as the Republican businessman’s “aggressive ballot challenge strategy designed to suppress Bishop’s momentum.” Despite initially trailing by 383 votes, Bishop now has a lead of 15 votes.

Altschuler has challenged 212 more voters than Bishop. Schneider predicted many of those challenges will be dismissed, which will ultimately bolster the incumbent congressman’s lead even further.

The Bishop campaign has sounded confident for a while now, and they’re basically predicting victory at this point. Counting is complete everywhere except for Brookhaven, where only about one in seven precincts have have been canvassed. Brookhaven went narrowly for Obama (see p. 34), 109,665 to 98,024.

69 thoughts on “NY-01: Bishop Says He’s Re-Taken the Lead – by 15 Votes”

  1. Brookhaven did narrowly go to Obama, and it was also slightly larger than the district’s margin for Obama.  5.55% in Brookhaven to 3.83% for the district as a whole.

    Also Bishop did win Brookhaven narrowly on election day (0.29%).  No way of knowing what districts in Brookhaven were counted, and how they compare to the districts not counted.   However, considering the ground Bishop picked up outside of Brookhaven (which was slightly worse for him on Election Day than Brookhaven) things look very good for Bishop.

  2. Wow!  It looks like it will go down to the disputed ballots.  If Altschuler is in fact challenging more ballots, he will lose votes when those challenges are ruled on.  It probably would make sense to double check everything in a race so tight, especially since there already was one large error.

    I live in Minnesota, where the Republicans are going forward with a recount when the margin is 8755 votes.  They’ve gone to court to get ballots thrown out (because they say the precincts didn’t properly reconcile ballots with signatures and walk-in registrations) and insist on recounting every one of 2.1 million ballots.  If the margin were 875 or even three or four thousand, I would understand.  

    It looks like the final House margin will be 242-193, considering that on election night that count was 239-183, the Democrats have to be happy what has happened after the clock ran out.  

  8. This is now looking more interesting now that Kamala Harris (D) has opened up a roughly 43,000-vote lead over Steve Cooley (R) in the California Attorney General race.

    Maffei, however, doesn’t seem as lucky.

  9. Seems like Maffei is gone…his best county has reported and with only Wayne left where Buerkle won easily…btw Maffei was also much more aggressive challenging absentee ballots especially in the GOP leaning counties…most were counted but he gave it the college try at least.

  10. a time honored tradition to drag the process out, but it only prolongs the inevitable, and makes you look foolish when in the end you lose by a lot more than everyone expects.

  11. “Brookhaven” is a county subdivision known as a “town” in New York and New England. On Long Island, “towns” often contain dozens of incorporated communities known as “villages”.  The “town” of Hempstead, in Nassau County (I think mostly in Peter King’s district) has more people than Buffalo, the second largest “city” in New York.  Buffalo is the largest object in its class, though, because New York City is a special city under New York’s constitution.

  13. Before Thanksgiving?  What are the recount rules?

    I chuckled when I read the Maffei thread which said that it is futile to fight a 500-600 vote deficit.  I live in Minnesota where the Republican is trailing by over 1000 per Congressional District and he is still proceeding with the recount.

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