Author: DavidNYC

A roundup of races that haven’t yet been decided:

AK-Sen: Will this race be finalized before Ted Stevens is carted off to the big house? Answer: Yes. Will it be over before the Senate has a chance to boot his sorry ass? Maybe not. While Unca Ted has a 3,300-vote lead, some 76,000 ballots remain to be counted. Supposedly, they need to be counted by Nov. 14th, but the “target date” for certification is not until Nov. 25th (PDF). And then, who knows – maybe we’ll have a recount.

P.S. More here from Mark Begich’s brother Tom.

CA-04: Conservative Icon™ Tom McClintock has a 451-vote lead with 100% of precincts counted. Absentees and provisional ballots need to be counted. But check this out:

If no candidate is more than ½ of 1 percentage point ahead in the semiofficial Election Day results, county election officials will automatically begin partial manual audits. After the counties deliver their totals to the secretary of state in December the candidates will have the option to ask for a recount. (Emphasis added.)

We could be waiting a long time on this one.

GA-Sen: This race will likely go to a run-off between Saxby Chambliss and Jim Martin. A run-off can’t formally be declared until the state certifies the election results next week, and outstanding votes could possibly tip the race to Chambliss. Nonetheless, both sides are in campaign mode. If there is a run-off, it will be held Dec. 2nd.

LA-04: This seat will also feature a run-off between Dem Paul Carmouche and Republican John Fleming. The date for that face-off is Dec. 6th.

MD-01: Dem Frank Kratovil is sitting on a 915-vote lead. But some 25,000 absentee ballots need to be counted. Results get certified Nov. 14th – not too bad, compared to some other states.

MN-Sen: An automatic recount seems certain here. Dickface Norm Coleman leads by a mind-boggling 475 votes out of 2.9 million cast. (Shades of WA-Gov 2004?) Oh, and here’s why I’m calling him a dickface. State law provides for an automatic recount if the margin is less than 0.5%. Yet this is what he’s said:

“Yesterday the voters spoke. We prevailed,” Coleman said Wednesday at a news conference. He noted Franken could opt to waive the recount.

“It’s up to him whether such a step is worth the tax dollars it will take to conduct,” Coleman said, telling reporters he would “step back” if he were in Franken’s position. Secretary of State Mark Ritchie said the recount would cost 3 cents per ballot, or almost $90,000.

What a chiseler – ninety-fucking-thousand dollars. That’s like one wealthy-donor-funded Nieman Marcus shopping spree for this douchenozzle. Anyhow, the same article says that a recount won’t begin until mid-November and could take “weeks.” Lawyers, ten-hut!

OH-15: As noted below, GOPer Steve “Steve” Stivers is ahead of Mary Jo Kilroy by just 321 votes. We may get final results in ten days, or maybe longer. If the final margin is under 0.5%, then there will be an automatic recount. We had one of those last time in this very same race – it took until mid-December to complete.

VA-05: Dem Tom Perriello is clinging to a 31-vote lead over incumbent Virgil Goode. Absentees need to be counted. This race will surely go to a recount. However, VA law does not provide for automatic recounts, and a candidate cannot request one until after the official canvas is complete. That isn’t until Nov. 24th, so sit tight.

WA-08: Good idea: Let’s allow everyone in Washington state to vote by mail! Bad idea: Let’s make the rule that you have to postmark your ballot by election day. In neighboring Oregon (the vote-by-mail pioneer), ballots sensibly have to be received by election day. But Washington has decided to do things the annoying way, so it’ll be a while before we get final results here – election officials say it’ll take a week to count all the ballots. (Though I don’t know if there is a drop-dead date by which ballots must be received.)

Anyhow, in the meantime, we know that GOPer Dave Reichert has about a 1,900-vote lead over Darcy Burner. The good news is that in 2006, Reichert won by 14.83% in Pierce County and 0.15% in King County. This time so far, he’s ahead by just 12.22% in Pierce and is behind 1.62% in King, which has 80% of the district’s population. My sense is that Burner probably has to start doing a little bit better in King to pull this one off.

UPDATE: Skywaker9 says that properly postmarked ballots have to be received within a week in WA.

LATE UPDATE (James): In the shocker race in California’s 44th District, where unheralded Dem challenger Bill Hedrick is trailing GOP scuzzbucket Rep. Ken Calvert by 4600 votes, neither side has declared victory yet.

It seems like ohio_anon and DCal in comments have figured out the mystery in OH-15. You’ve probably noticed by now that sites which rely on data from the AP (such as CNN) are reporting results that look like this:

Steve Stivers (R): 48% (146,907)

Mary Jo Kilroy (D): 43% (134,492)

Yet the race hasn’t been called, and news accounts say Stivers has just a 321-vote lead. So why is the AP data screwed up? Well, ohio_anon points out that in Ohio, the board of elections for the county with the greatest number of people in any given congressional district is responsible for reporting for all the counties covered by that CD. This means that the data on the Franklin County website includes the votes for much smaller Madison and Union Counties.

So the AP appears to be counting Madison and Union twice – once on their own, and once folded into the combined results reported by Franklin. (Stivers did much better in the two smaller counties, while Kilroy ran ahead in Franklin, so that’s why his lead is inflated.) Indeed, the math works out perfectly, as DCal observes – double Madison and Union and add them to the “Franklin” results, and you get those phony numbers listed in the blockquote above.

The AP needs to get its act together, but the bottom line is that due to the closeness of this race, we probably won’t know the final results for ten days.

Below is a list of key House, Senate, gubernatorial and state legislative races, arranged by poll closing times. (Asterisks indicate open seats.) A list of key ballot measures can be found here. States with multiple closing times are listed in order of their earliest closing, with the exception of Oregon (where the bulk of the state is in the Pacific time zone). Once again, all times are Eastern, not local.

This post summarizes James Hell’s amazing work since August tracking independent expenditures on House races. Note that this does not include direct expenditures by party committees (like we saw the other day from the DCCC in NJ-05 & FL-18) or electioneering communications by 527’s like Freedom’s Crotch (the FEC’s database is all but unnavigable).

We do, however, include spending by many third-party groups, not just the DCCC and NRCC. In fact, we’ve tracked spending by forty-six different organizations, some of which you’ve heard of, many of which are obscure. The list includes the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Safari Club, SEIU, the National Association of Realtors, the Michigan Republican Party and many, many more. (Scroll down to the key at the bottom for the complete list.)

And all of these groups made choices, whether to support Team Red or Team Blue. Some supported both. At the end of the day, though, Democrats completely and utterly swamped the field. Here’s a brief run-down of the sixty-nine districts which saw serious spending this cycle (note: we excluded a handful of districts where aggregate spending was under about $20K):

Total spending on Dem-held seats:

     Blue: $18,588,000

     Red: $6,035,000

Total spending on GOP-held seats:

     Blue: $66,849,000

     Red: $22,898,000

Total spending on all seats:

     Blue: $85,437,000

     Red: $28,933,000

Below the fold are two tables of district-by-district spending. The first lists Dem-held seats, the second lists GOP-held seats. Both are sorted by total amount spent in the district. Note that averages only take into account seats where a side actually spent money.

Spending in Dem-held seats:

The Siena College Research Institute has released a final batch of ten New York State Senate polls in the last few days. Here they are:

SD-03 (10/29-11/1, likely voters, 9/11-17 in parens):

Brian Foley (D): 56 (40)

Caesar Trunzo (R-inc): 34 (46)

(MoE: ±4.9)

SD-06 (10/29-11/1, likely voters, no trendlines):

Kristen McElroy (D): 30

Kemp Hannon (R-inc): 56

(MoE: ±4.8)

SD-07 (10/27-29, likely voters, 9/11-17 in parens):

Craig Johnson (D-inc): 50 (49)

Barbara Donno (R): 35 (25)

(MoE: ±4.8)

SD-15 (10/29-11/1, likely voters, 9/11-17 in parens):

Joseph Addabbo Jr. (D): 45 (42)

Serphin Maltese (R-inc): 43 (42)

(MoE: ±4.9)

SD-37: (10/27-29, likely voters, 9/30-10/05 in parens):

Suzi Oppenheimer (D-inc): 64 (61)

Liz Feld (R): 29 (24)

(MoE: ±4.8)

SD-48 (10/29-11/1, likely voters, 9/11-17 in parens):

Darrel Aubertine (D-inc): 49 (51)

David Renzi (R): 38 (31)

(MoE: ±4.6)

SD-56 (10/27-29, likely voters, 9/11-17 in parens):

Richard Dollinger (D): 39 (38)

Joe Robach (R-inc): 52 (49)

(MoE: ±4.6)

SD-58 (10/29-11/1, likely voters, 9/30-10/05 in parens):

William Stachowski (D-inc): 47 (36)

Dennis Delano (R): 43 (49)

(MoE: ±4.9)

SD-59 (10/27-29, likely voters, 9/30-10/5 in parens):

Kathy Konst (D): 39 (33)

Dale Volker (R-inc): 50 (50)

(MoE: ±4.9)

SD-61 (10/29-11/1, likely voters, 9/11-17 in parens):

Joseph Mesi (D): 42 (40)

Michael Ranzenhofer (R): 47 (38)

(MoE: ±4.9)

UPDATE by Crisitunity: If these predictions hold, this would see the Democrats picking up the New York State Senate by the barest majority, by gaining two seats (right now it’s 31-29 for the Republicans, with 2 vacancies which are split between the two parties and likely to remain that way). They would pick up the GOP seats of Caesar Trunzo in SD-03 in Long Island’s Suffolk County (who led Brian Foley by a decent margin in the last poll) and Serphin Maltese in SD-15 in Queens (who was tied with Joe Addabbo in the previous poll).

Much of rest of the action is in the Buffalo area: there’s at least one other possible pickup, SD-61, a Republican-held open seat where Joe Mesi led Michael Ranzenhofer previously but now trails by 5. Kathy Konst has made up a lot of ground in SD-59, but is still down by 11. The one seat where the Dems are engaged in a difficult defense is SD-58, where Dem incumbent William Stachowski was down by 13 against suspended Buffalo PD detective Dennis Delano, but now leads by 4. As you can see, there’s a lot of volatility, not just because we’re dealing with small sample sizes, but also the difficulty in general in polling state legislature races. But it looks like, after decades of futility, the Dems are in position to take over the New York state senate.

The Swing State Project is changing its ratings on two House races:

• NE-02: Lean Republican to Tossup
• TX-10: Likely Republican to Lean Republican

Look for our writeups to follow soon. Our full race ratings chart is available here.

UPDATE: One more change:

• NC-08: Tossup to Lean Democratic

SurveyUSA (10/29-11/01, likely voters, 10/18-20 in parens):

Lunsford (D): 45 (48)

McConnell (R-inc): 53 (48)

Undecided: 4

(MoE: 4%)

Very discouraging trendlines for Lunsford at this late date. The earlier SUSA poll which showed the race tied matched Lunsford’s best performance all cycle (apart from a Rasmussen outlier back in May). But the drift in just a couple of weeks has been pretty stark. Whites were +3 for McConnell in the last poll; they are now +13. Independents were +6 for Lunsford; now they are +6 for Mitch.

As exciting as this race has been for some time, the problem (as I allude above) is that Lunsford has never had a lead in this race. With the last batch of polls all showing him behind anywhere from two to eight points, Bruce has to pull a serious rabbit out of his hat if we’re going to paint KY blue.

UPDATE: A cause for optimism? ChadinFL points out the final SUSA poll (PDF) of KY-Sen in 2004 (Mongiardo v. Bunning) was 51R-42D. The actual result? A 51-49 Bunning heartbreaker. The big difference, though, is that Mongiardo had moved up five net points in that last poll, where here, Lunsford has dropped eight.

Star Tribune (10/29-31, likely voters, 10/16-17 in parens):

Franken (D): 42 (39)

Coleman (R-inc): 38 (36)

Barkley (I): 15 (18)

Other/Undecided: 4 (7)

(MoE: ±4.1%)

This has been one hell of a race and looks to be as tight as they come, with a very narrow lead for Franken in the Pollster average:

Election night should be pretty fun in Minnesota.

Markos has the Daily Kos polling firehose open at full blast. Here’s a quick roundup of this final set of R2K polls:

KY-Sen:

Lunsford (D): 44 (42)

McConnell (R-inc): 47 (46)

MN-Sen:

Franken (D): 40 (41)

Coleman (R-inc): 43 (39)

Barkley (I): 15 (18)

MS-Sen:

Musgrove (D): 44 (46)

Wicker (R-inc): 51 (47)

OR-Sen:

Merkley (D): 48 (47)

Smith (R-inc): 42 (41)

Bonus MN-Sen poll: An MPR/UMN poll (PDF) shows Franken leading 41-37-17. At the start of October, it was 36F-38C-14B.

This is starting to get a bit nuts. To recap:

1) Way back when, New York’s Working Families Party gave its ballot line to Jon Powers for the NY-26 congressional race.

2) Powers lost the Democratic primary to Alice Kryzan, but due to election laws had to remain on the WFP line unless he died, was nominated for a judgeship, or moved out of state. He accepted employment in DC and moved there, thus theoretically freeing up his line.

3) However, the state GOP sued, and a trial court-level state judge agreed that Powers had to stay on the line.

4) Dems appealed, and New York’s intermediate appellate court reversed the first judge, saying that Powers’s name should be removed from the WFP line and that Kryzan’s could be added.

5) Republicans then sought to take the case to NY’s highest-level appellate court, the Court of Appeals, but Chief Judge Judith Kaye declined to hear the matter.

6) So in a desperate last-second move, the GOP sued in federal court, seeking a restraining order to prevent Kryzan from getting on the WFP line. The judge granted the order late last night.

Kyrzan’s people say they plan on appealing this decision to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. With the election just days away, hopefully this newest decision will also be overturned. Stay tuned.