NY-20: County Benchmarks

As you probably know, it’s Election Day in the NY-20, where there’s a special election afoot to replace Kirsten Gillibrand. The most recent public poll gave a small lead to Democrat Scott Murphy, but this is a low-turnout special election in a district with a large GOP enrollment advantage, and ground game is going to make or break it for both parties.

Jim Tedisco actually pulled an all-nighter last night, glad-handing graveyard shift workers and convenience store clerks, but back in DC, John Boehner sounded a cautious, expectations-dampening note:

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said the outcome of the election shouldn’t be seen as a referendum on the GOP leadership in Congress.

“It’s between those two candidates in New York,” Boehner explained to reporters. “I hope Jim Tedisco wins.”

Before the November election, I put together some benchmarks to meet in major counties of what the minimum expectation in each county would be to get the Democratic candidate over the 50% mark. Thanks to our New York pres-by-congressional district database, we can perform the same sort of analysis for tonight. Barack Obama won NY-20 in November by a 51-48 margin, so we barely even need to adjust the numbers to find one potential route to victory for Murphy (assuming the counties vote in the same proportions they did in November):

County % of 2008
districtwide vote		 What we need to
break 50% districtwide		 2008 Pres.
Districtwide 100.0 50/49 51/48
Saratoga (pt.) 32.3 50/49 51/48
Dutchess (pt.) 15.0 52/47 53/46
Rennselaer (pt.) 9.8 48/51 49/50
Warren 9.7 50/49 51/48
Columbia 9.5 55/44 56/43
Washington 7.8 49/50 50/49
Greene 6.7 43/55 44/54
Delaware (pt.) 5.5 46/52 47/51
Essex (pt.) 2.0 54/44 55/43
Otsego (pt.) 1.7 47/52 48/51

Bear in mind, though, that these candidates have regional connections, so the actual numbers may vary a bit. For instance, Murphy is from Glens Falls in Warren County, and seems well-connected in the communities there (in fact, his gigantic extended family may make up several percent of the electorate there). Siena broke results down by region and showed Murphy polling well ahead of these benchmarks in Warren and Washington Counties (at 58%)… but the flipside is that he was lagging in Saratoga and Rennselaer Counties (at 43%). Saratoga (Albany’s northern suburbs) is the most populous part of the district, and it’s also Tedisco’s base. (Tedisco can’t actually vote for himself, being from Schenectady, but he represents part of Saratoga County in the Assembly.)

So, when watching results tonight, you may want to mentally adjust those counties accordingly. The real swing counties, and the ones requiring no adjustment, may be the ones further south in Hudson Valley (Columbia and Dutchess). Here’s a district map, for a bit more context:

75 thoughts on “NY-20: County Benchmarks”

  2. is a little strange. How can a district that borders Vermont and Massachusetts still be so favorable to Republicans? Perhaps it’s following the New Hampshire path.

  3. no one listened to him,

    There is a special election in the 20th congressional district of New York tonight. I hope the Democrat, Scott Murphy, wins. However, I am also frustrated that Murphy has received nearly $360,000 on Act Blue from around 2,000 donors. Given that Murphy has made it clear that he will attempt to join the Blue Dogs if he wins the election, the progressive small donor world should not have given him a single dime.

    Unfortunately, in Scott Murphy’s case, small online donors raised over $300,000 for him even after Murphy had stated he was applying to join the Blue Dogs. That has to stop. Before we raise money for other congressional candidates in 2009-2010, we have to extract promises from those candidates that they won’t join either the Blue Dogs (for House candidates) or Evan Bayh’s groups (for Senate candidates).

  4. …how might we redistrict here to either shore up Murphy (and hopefully give him some leeway to more more liberal) or make Tedisco more vulnerable, depending on tonight’s (and November’s) results?

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