Tuesday, March 31, 2009

NY-20: Does a Tie Mean the Nation is Brutally Divided?

If a Tedisco win meant the beginning of a Republican comeback nationally and a Murphy win meant the nation is on-board with the Obama administration, what does a 65 vote margin with 610 of 610 precincts reporting (and a few thousand absentee ballots to be counted) mean?

[Click for Election Results via The Saratogian]

There's only one answer to that: elections are fun!

UPDATE: As per Jack, via The Saratoagian, it's now down to a 25 vote Murphy edge in NY-20.
[Click to Enlarge]


Recent Posts:
All Eyes on NY-20

Public Financing, Dead?

Florida in 2012: A Companion Bill

7 comments:

Jack said...

Why is everyone talking about ties? Not just you, but Andrew Gelman and Nate Silver threw out that word. It's not like it's a three-vote margin. We've seen so many close elections that 65 votes seems like a landslide.

If any election deserved that appellation, it's the 7th House District in Alaska. On election day, Republican Mike Kelly led Democrat Karl Kassel 5000 votes to 4999. A recount left Kelly ahead by a decisive 5024-5020 margin.

I will never understand people who are not completely apathetic not voting.

Josh Putnam said...

Well, when you account for the number of votes cast in both of those cases (NY-20, AK-7), we're talking about the same thing. Both votes were within less than .05%, which while technically not a tie, is a tie.

Obviously, this post was in jest; poking fun at the pre-election over-extrapolation of the potential results in this race. The media wanted one of the two narratives I mentioned, but we got something else entirely. All of that hyping and neither side can really claim a victory.

Of course, as Nate mentioned, this was basically a status quo decision and while neither side can really claim victory in this race, the status quo favors the Democrats.

Jack said...

Yes, I knew it was in jest.

And apparently some recanvassing has brought it down to a 25 vote margin.

Elections are fun, indeed.

Jack said...

I'm sure you've been following this, but I couldn't resist posting because your title became literally true for a little while. Apparently it was temporarily tied, though TPM is now claiming a 198 vote lead for Murphy.

Josh Putnam said...

I actually haven't. I've been swamped since Tuesday and haven't been able to follow this as much as I would have liked.

Very interesting. Too bad the window of time that it was tied was so small.

Jack said...

I don't know. The NYS board of elections still shows a tie and aside from a couple of left-leaning sites — and I'm sure they've done their factchecking — I've only seen one other site corroborate the 198-vote Murphy lead. Perhaps because they know that the 198-vote lead will evaporate, but that hasn't stopped other media from reporting other changes. Perhaps they can't get verification of the 198. And perhaps it's because a tie is a better story.

Jack said...

Tedisco, 76,914 to 76,817.