Late Night Strike...Wow, That's Close

I've been refreshing the real-time results from the AP for about two hours. After teetering back and forth, Democrat Scott Murphy has a 65 vote lead over Republican Jim Tedisco out of about 125000 votes cast with all precincts reporting. That's about .004 of a percent.

First, let's take advantage of this as a learning experience. NEVER skip an election because you think your vote doesn't matter! That goes for you, Skidmore students.

Now to the race itself. There are 5900 outstanding absentee ballots, so the extremely narrow Murphy lead is not final. Absentee ballots tend to go Republican, so I'm not getting my hopes up. But who knows what the absentee voting population was like in this election? It could be old, bitter, lazy O'Reilly Factor viewers who don't want to leave their house, or they could be working class men and women who couldn't get time off to go to the polls. Tedisco will need to win about 51.1% of the absentee ballots to overcome the small deficit.

The one thing we do know is that the side stories of this race will probably be pretty muted. Because we don't have a definitive winner tonight, no party can crow about "capturing momentum" or "repudiating the President's agenda." At the end of the day, the winner will either make the already large Democratic majority slightly bigger, or the diminutive Republican minority slightly less pathetic.