UPDATE: 11:02PM Sunday, Jan. 4: CNN is reporting that the Minnesota State Canvassing Board will certify Al Franken the winner of the 2008 statewide election to United States Senate, defeating incumbent Norm Coleman. Mr. Coleman is widely expected to formally challenge the result in court, about which much more below:
=============
Norm Coleman and his campaign lawyers are nothing if not doggedly persistent. Over the past two weeks, ever since Al Franken took the lead in the recount for Minnesota's 2008 Senate race,t they've tried floating a specious story about Franken votes being found in somebody's trunk, they've tried claiming that 110 or so ballots were actually counted twice, they've tried objecting to the counting of 1,350 absentee ballots that the county election officials felt had been improperly rejected the first time around, and, finally, they tried to have those 1,350 ballots supplemented with nearly 700 additional absentee ballots that a grand-total of nobody else on earth thought should be included. The bad news is that these antics are par for the course with Republicans; the good news is that they haven't gotten away with it.
Today, as a blizzard loomed with ominously impeccable dramatic timing, the Secretary of State of Minnesota opened the 955 ballots that had survived a preposterous "everyone must agree" standard, out of the 1,350 that seem to have been improperly rejected, and at the end of that count Al Franken had widened his lead to 225 votes. As small as this margin is, the significance of the number cannot be over-stated, since it reduces to zero the possibility that Mr. Coleman could reverse his deficit if he prevailed on both court challenges pertaining to the supposed double-voting and the supposedly "found" ballots. It also reduces to very nearly zero the possibility that Senator Coleman could reverse the deficit with the inclusion of all 700 of the ballots that he preposterously claims for inclusion, since even those are sure to contain a significant tally for Franken. At this point, the only remaining path for Coleman is to challenge the election in court--but in the absence of a clear and substantial case of either negligence or malfeasance by the state canvassing board, the likelihood of a court overturn of this result is very, very small indeed.
What happens next is anyone's guess: Mr. Coleman is within his rights to challenge a significant number of the ballots that were informally tallied for Franken this afternoon, when they are formally added to the count at Monday's meeting of the canvassing board. He is within his right to make further "emergency" appeals on further, specific procedural grounds, to the Minnesota state supreme court. He is also within his right to challenge. Another possibility is that Mr. Coleman could concede the outcome, based on today's results (which were far more conclusively pro-Franken than even the most optimistic projections that had been reported before the absentee ballots were opened). It would seem that whether Coleman chooses to fight on or concede will come down to how today's events are relayed to him by his closest advisers. If they report the matter as a 90-10 proposition, knowing Mr. Coleman personally as I am unfortunate enough to do, it seems unlikely that he will choose to concede. If they report the current state of the matter as a 99-1 proposition, he may need another day.
If I learned one thing from a seven-and-a-half year stint in economic development in the state of Minnesota, it's that assuming Norm Coleman will show even the tiniest scrap of dignity or class is a sucker bet. But on the other hand, George Allen didn't show a lot of class when he called a reporter "macaca," either, and after an understandably protracted interval of self-reflection and personal anguish, he eventually emerged from his home in Virginia and did the right thing by conceding his 2006 senate contest to Jim Webb. If the pattern holds, Mr. Coleman has for himself the perfect opening to find that same shred of career-salvaging graciousness, both in today's result and in its timing: He can spend all day tomorrow very conspicuously saying nothing public to anyone, and then on Monday he can concede.
Stranger things have happened. Indeed, stranger things have happened in this election.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Showing posts with label Franken. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Franken. Show all posts
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Breaking News: Franken Team May Fumble
For several days now, the only way that the Al Franken campaign could lose the Minnesota Senate Race has been if they beat themselves. With a 46-vote lead after all challenged ballots had been reviewed by the state canvassing board, and a State Supreme Court decision rejecting the Coleman campaign's preposterous allegation that there were over 100 double-counted ballots, all that has remained is a pile of approximately 1,600 absentee ballots which may or may not have been improperly rejected. Since before the holidays these have been the only ballots left on the table: Once those ballots had been accounted for, there wouldn't be anything left to count. Unfortunately for Mr. Franken, the Supreme Court ruled that, for each of these 1,600 ballots, both campaigns and the relevant county administration must agree to count it, and that if any one of those three parties didn't agree, the voter in question would be notified and would have to appeal the rejection of his ballot, in writing. And why is that bad news for Franken?
Because the disaggregation of the review process means that the Franken people are uncoordinated in their approach to challenging or allowing ballots. In Republican-leaning areas, at least so far yesterday and today, the Franken campaign has approved essentially all of the absentee ballots, in keeping with Franken's very consistent message that every vote should be counted. In Democratic strongholds, by contrast, the Coleman people are under no such obligation to principles or ethics, and as such they have no particular incentive to allow any absentee ballots at all. In consequence, what may very well happen is that the Franken campaign, striving for a consistent, politically salable, and above all correct position in the matter, could end up giving away its roughly 50-vote lead. It could well end up that only absentee ballots cast in Republican areas of the state ever get counted at all, and that these could very well reverse Mr. Franken's lead.
The one ray of sunlight in this matter is that most of the 1,600 absentees are located in Democratic areas, anyway, and even in Republican-leaning parts of the state, the absentees seem to be slightly favoring Mr. Franken. The Uptake is covering the story live, including simulcasts of all press conferences, etc., and including the absentees that have already been agreed upon by all three necessary entities, at the moment Mr. Franken's lead is unofficially at fifty votes--up four from the start of this process. Still, there have been 18 ballots presented in Republican-leaning Sherburne County, and 15 of those have been agreed upon by all three entities. That's an awfully small sample to work with, but it does raise some grave concerns about the extent to which Mr. Franken's principled stand could cost him the whole race.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Because the disaggregation of the review process means that the Franken people are uncoordinated in their approach to challenging or allowing ballots. In Republican-leaning areas, at least so far yesterday and today, the Franken campaign has approved essentially all of the absentee ballots, in keeping with Franken's very consistent message that every vote should be counted. In Democratic strongholds, by contrast, the Coleman people are under no such obligation to principles or ethics, and as such they have no particular incentive to allow any absentee ballots at all. In consequence, what may very well happen is that the Franken campaign, striving for a consistent, politically salable, and above all correct position in the matter, could end up giving away its roughly 50-vote lead. It could well end up that only absentee ballots cast in Republican areas of the state ever get counted at all, and that these could very well reverse Mr. Franken's lead.
The one ray of sunlight in this matter is that most of the 1,600 absentees are located in Democratic areas, anyway, and even in Republican-leaning parts of the state, the absentees seem to be slightly favoring Mr. Franken. The Uptake is covering the story live, including simulcasts of all press conferences, etc., and including the absentees that have already been agreed upon by all three necessary entities, at the moment Mr. Franken's lead is unofficially at fifty votes--up four from the start of this process. Still, there have been 18 ballots presented in Republican-leaning Sherburne County, and 15 of those have been agreed upon by all three entities. That's an awfully small sample to work with, but it does raise some grave concerns about the extent to which Mr. Franken's principled stand could cost him the whole race.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Some Voters More Equal Than Others UPDATED
(UPDATE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE FULL POST) If you're a big-enough political news junkie to have been following this column, then you surely know the broad outlines of the situation in the Minnesota Senate race. What you may not know is just how preposterous the Coleman campaign's position has gotten over the past few days, culminating with today--December 23rd.
First, permit me to level the playing field with a brief review. Unlike Florida, Minnesota has a very explicit recount procedure with very explicit guidelines for the process of determining the intent of a voter. With paper ballots featuring those horrid bubble-in circles invented in the 1950s, the state is left in a close election with a pile of questionable ballots that could mean the difference in the outcome--ballots that weren't read by the machines but only because the clear intent of the voter was subverted by the lack of flexibility in the technology's ability to intuit that voter's wishes. A bubble which was checked instead of filled-in, for example, represents a clear preference for one candidate over another, but won't be read by the machines as a vote for that candidate. Therefore, when the race is close enough, the state of Minnesota carries out a hand recount of all ballots to determine if the counting of such ballots are sufficient to change the outcome.
It should be said in fairness that there is an obvious beef with such a practice--namely, that individuals who fail to complete their ballot in a manner that is sufficiently proper to be counted by the machine, have failed to follow the directions and should not have their votes counted. The problem with making such an argument is that the law of the state of Minnesota has already been crafted with the contrary opinion in mind: voters who clearly preferred one candidate over the other should not be disenfranchised because, for example, their bubble didn't stay inside the lines.
Since most of these ballots tend to favor Democrats, it would be the job of the Republican in any disputed recount to make this argument--and it's no small comment on the inherent fairness and validity of Minnesota law that the Coleman campaign has made no such effort. They've argued several other points of law, about which much more anon, but they have filed no brief, in any court, anywhere, claiming that the very idea of a hand-recount of improperly bubbled-in ballots is a violation of their constitutional right to equal protection (which was the argument by which the Bush campaign successfully halted the hand-recount of all the ballots in Florida in 2000).
The difference comes down, improbably, to a question of state's rights vs. equal protection--neither of which would seem to have anything to do with tabulating the results of an election. In Florida, when the State Supreme Court ordered that all the ballots be re-counted by hand, there was no existing law or even a set of accepted clerical procedures, for doing so, and as such the Bush campaign could argue that the hand re-count would be tantamount to re-writing the law of an election, after the fact, to change its outcome. Indeed it's worth noting that the Bush people freely and explicitly acknowledged that the hand-recount in Florida would have reversed their win, and in fact argued that it was for this reason that the US Supreme Court should stop the process before a positive margin for Vice President Gore became widely accepted among the general public.
In Minnesota, by contrast, the law for hand-recounting ballots--down to its specific clerical procedures--has existed ever since the early days of optical-scan ballots, and as such the US Supreme Court would have to impinge the right of the state of Minnesota to carry out its elections however it wants. This is, as the Coleman people must surely have known all along, a much steeper hill to climb, and in the end would almost certainly have resulted in a ruling against them, rather than for.
Failing this argument, the Coleman campaign has been left to the piecemeal business of trying to preserve the fragile lead they had at the beginning of the hand-recount through individual challenges of ballots as true representations of the intent of a voter to cast his or her vote for Mr. Franken. By initially challenging a large number of such ballots, the Coleman operation created the illusion that their lead was widening during the hand recount, but the Franken people quickly wised-up and retaliated, leading to a mini-tsunami of frivolous challenges, the bulk of which were subsequently and unilaterally withdrawn by each of the two campaigns before they could incur the disfavor of the State Canvassing Board. With the bulk of the remaining challenged ballots ruled upon by that Board yesterday, the 22nd, Mr. Franken had reversed the initial margin against him. Unofficial tallies from a variety of sources showed him with a 48-vote lead.
It's difficult to overstate the desperation of such a moment for the Coleman campaign. Knowing that the majority of the remaining un-counted ballots--most of them absentee ballots that were initially disallowed for clerical reasons not the fault of the voter--will favor Mr. Franken if counted, the Coleman people couldn't base their hopes on arguing to have those votes counted or disallowed, since a closure of the matter today would certify a 48-vote Franken victory. He couldn't make back his deficit from further counting in pro-Democratic constituencies, and he was at a deficit, at that moment. The only viable path left for Mr. Coleman was to find technicalities on which to strip some votes that have already been logged for Franken.
And here at last we come to the point of today's column: There are, it happens, a series of so-called "duplicate ballots" that the Coleman campaign will argue (hasn't yet, as these words are being written) were actually counted twice. If Coleman could prevail in this argument and have those votes taken down, it's plausible (though, interestingly, not automatic) that he could recover a very slim lead. As to whether or not that will happen, semantics play a big part in one's perception of Coleman's chances for success here.
The term "duplicate ballot" in this context is just about the least fortunate figure of speech in the history of colloquial conversations about matters of law. Under some circumstances in Minnesota a voter is allowed to cast their vote in a format that doesn't read in the machines--such as a ballot cast by e-mail. In these cases, the relevant county clerk generates a paper ballot that will read in the machines, and reads that ballot into the machines. Hence the term "duplicate ballot." The Coleman campaign will argue that over 100 of these ballots--all of them in profoundly Democratic-leaning Hennepin County--were actually counted twice--once in their original form, and a second time after the duplicate had been generated by the country clerk.
I won't leave you hanging in suspense any longer; the argument is pure rubbish on any number of grounds. To begin with, a county's only reason for generating a duplicate ballot is if the original ballot won't read in the machines. There's no way for both ballots to be counted, or else there wouldn't be two ballots in the first place. Second, the Hennepin County clerk has an excellent brief, laying out point-by-point the errors in the Coleman campaign's reasoning and indeed even reconciling their own tabulation against the specific claims being made in the Coleman brief, with no change in their count. Third, and certainly most ironically, it was the Franken campaign that initially planned to challenge duplicate ballots--and found themselves shouted-down by the Coleman campaign for their inability to recognize the folly of such a challenge.
At the end of the day, win or lose, the Coleman campaign has officially turned to forced disenfranchisement as its only remaining path to victory. My own personal guess is that the State Supreme Court will find no compelling arguments in the Coleman brief, and will rule in favor of the current tally. There are approximately 1,600 absentee ballots for which the two campaigns have been ordered by that same State Supreme Court to determine a mutually acceptable process of tabulation--and there is no apparent scenario by which the Coleman campaign can prevail when held to a reasonable standard of integrity by the other side like this. Either the two sides will fail to agree and none of the 1,600 ballots will be counted (in which case Franken is the winner), the two sides will fail to agree and all of the 1,600 ballots will be counted (in which case Franken is the winner), or the two sides will come to some improbable agreement about how to count the 1,600 ballots (which wouldn't happen unless it ensured that Franken will emerge the winner, since otherwise he wouldn't agree).
It's been a long road for Franken--to say nothing of those of you who've bothered to read this recap of the situation, here--but the long and the short of things at this hour seems to be that Al Franken is the next Senator from the great state of Minnesota.
UPDATE: The process by which the 1,600 un-counted absentee ballots will be reviewed has been publicized, and it does leave a glimmer of hope for Coleman. As ordered by the State Supreme Court, each of the 1,600 sealed envelopes containing uncounted absentee ballots must be reviewed by all three of, (1) a representative of the Coleman campaign, (2) a representative of the Franken campaign, and (3) a representative of the county that initially rejected the ballot. It is still the case where all three entities must agree a ballot is improperly rejected before it is opened. The county official, Franken and Coleman. If any one of the three disagrees they must fill out a form on WHY it was properly rejected. That reason is then sent to the voter and the voter then has recourse in the court system.
What this implies, presumably, is that Coleman could argue in writing why every apparent Democratic-leaning absentee ballot should not be opened, gambling that (a) many of those Democrats would not appeal their ballot rejections, and (b) the Franken campaign wouldn't retaliate by challenging every single Republican-leaning absentee ballot. These two things, added together, aren't as unlikely as they first sound: Coleman could easily fan a credulous media into believing that Franken's objections are pure-retaliatory, cowing his team into backing off--and the Democrats whose ballots are challenged will only have any initiative to fight their ballot rejections if Franken hasn't been bullied into conceding, before they even get their day in court. It's a longshot sequence of events, to be sure, but it's plausible enough to render my earlier confidence in the final outcome a bit premature.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
First, permit me to level the playing field with a brief review. Unlike Florida, Minnesota has a very explicit recount procedure with very explicit guidelines for the process of determining the intent of a voter. With paper ballots featuring those horrid bubble-in circles invented in the 1950s, the state is left in a close election with a pile of questionable ballots that could mean the difference in the outcome--ballots that weren't read by the machines but only because the clear intent of the voter was subverted by the lack of flexibility in the technology's ability to intuit that voter's wishes. A bubble which was checked instead of filled-in, for example, represents a clear preference for one candidate over another, but won't be read by the machines as a vote for that candidate. Therefore, when the race is close enough, the state of Minnesota carries out a hand recount of all ballots to determine if the counting of such ballots are sufficient to change the outcome.
It should be said in fairness that there is an obvious beef with such a practice--namely, that individuals who fail to complete their ballot in a manner that is sufficiently proper to be counted by the machine, have failed to follow the directions and should not have their votes counted. The problem with making such an argument is that the law of the state of Minnesota has already been crafted with the contrary opinion in mind: voters who clearly preferred one candidate over the other should not be disenfranchised because, for example, their bubble didn't stay inside the lines.
Since most of these ballots tend to favor Democrats, it would be the job of the Republican in any disputed recount to make this argument--and it's no small comment on the inherent fairness and validity of Minnesota law that the Coleman campaign has made no such effort. They've argued several other points of law, about which much more anon, but they have filed no brief, in any court, anywhere, claiming that the very idea of a hand-recount of improperly bubbled-in ballots is a violation of their constitutional right to equal protection (which was the argument by which the Bush campaign successfully halted the hand-recount of all the ballots in Florida in 2000).
The difference comes down, improbably, to a question of state's rights vs. equal protection--neither of which would seem to have anything to do with tabulating the results of an election. In Florida, when the State Supreme Court ordered that all the ballots be re-counted by hand, there was no existing law or even a set of accepted clerical procedures, for doing so, and as such the Bush campaign could argue that the hand re-count would be tantamount to re-writing the law of an election, after the fact, to change its outcome. Indeed it's worth noting that the Bush people freely and explicitly acknowledged that the hand-recount in Florida would have reversed their win, and in fact argued that it was for this reason that the US Supreme Court should stop the process before a positive margin for Vice President Gore became widely accepted among the general public.
In Minnesota, by contrast, the law for hand-recounting ballots--down to its specific clerical procedures--has existed ever since the early days of optical-scan ballots, and as such the US Supreme Court would have to impinge the right of the state of Minnesota to carry out its elections however it wants. This is, as the Coleman people must surely have known all along, a much steeper hill to climb, and in the end would almost certainly have resulted in a ruling against them, rather than for.
Failing this argument, the Coleman campaign has been left to the piecemeal business of trying to preserve the fragile lead they had at the beginning of the hand-recount through individual challenges of ballots as true representations of the intent of a voter to cast his or her vote for Mr. Franken. By initially challenging a large number of such ballots, the Coleman operation created the illusion that their lead was widening during the hand recount, but the Franken people quickly wised-up and retaliated, leading to a mini-tsunami of frivolous challenges, the bulk of which were subsequently and unilaterally withdrawn by each of the two campaigns before they could incur the disfavor of the State Canvassing Board. With the bulk of the remaining challenged ballots ruled upon by that Board yesterday, the 22nd, Mr. Franken had reversed the initial margin against him. Unofficial tallies from a variety of sources showed him with a 48-vote lead.
It's difficult to overstate the desperation of such a moment for the Coleman campaign. Knowing that the majority of the remaining un-counted ballots--most of them absentee ballots that were initially disallowed for clerical reasons not the fault of the voter--will favor Mr. Franken if counted, the Coleman people couldn't base their hopes on arguing to have those votes counted or disallowed, since a closure of the matter today would certify a 48-vote Franken victory. He couldn't make back his deficit from further counting in pro-Democratic constituencies, and he was at a deficit, at that moment. The only viable path left for Mr. Coleman was to find technicalities on which to strip some votes that have already been logged for Franken.
And here at last we come to the point of today's column: There are, it happens, a series of so-called "duplicate ballots" that the Coleman campaign will argue (hasn't yet, as these words are being written) were actually counted twice. If Coleman could prevail in this argument and have those votes taken down, it's plausible (though, interestingly, not automatic) that he could recover a very slim lead. As to whether or not that will happen, semantics play a big part in one's perception of Coleman's chances for success here.
The term "duplicate ballot" in this context is just about the least fortunate figure of speech in the history of colloquial conversations about matters of law. Under some circumstances in Minnesota a voter is allowed to cast their vote in a format that doesn't read in the machines--such as a ballot cast by e-mail. In these cases, the relevant county clerk generates a paper ballot that will read in the machines, and reads that ballot into the machines. Hence the term "duplicate ballot." The Coleman campaign will argue that over 100 of these ballots--all of them in profoundly Democratic-leaning Hennepin County--were actually counted twice--once in their original form, and a second time after the duplicate had been generated by the country clerk.
I won't leave you hanging in suspense any longer; the argument is pure rubbish on any number of grounds. To begin with, a county's only reason for generating a duplicate ballot is if the original ballot won't read in the machines. There's no way for both ballots to be counted, or else there wouldn't be two ballots in the first place. Second, the Hennepin County clerk has an excellent brief, laying out point-by-point the errors in the Coleman campaign's reasoning and indeed even reconciling their own tabulation against the specific claims being made in the Coleman brief, with no change in their count. Third, and certainly most ironically, it was the Franken campaign that initially planned to challenge duplicate ballots--and found themselves shouted-down by the Coleman campaign for their inability to recognize the folly of such a challenge.
At the end of the day, win or lose, the Coleman campaign has officially turned to forced disenfranchisement as its only remaining path to victory. My own personal guess is that the State Supreme Court will find no compelling arguments in the Coleman brief, and will rule in favor of the current tally. There are approximately 1,600 absentee ballots for which the two campaigns have been ordered by that same State Supreme Court to determine a mutually acceptable process of tabulation--and there is no apparent scenario by which the Coleman campaign can prevail when held to a reasonable standard of integrity by the other side like this. Either the two sides will fail to agree and none of the 1,600 ballots will be counted (in which case Franken is the winner), the two sides will fail to agree and all of the 1,600 ballots will be counted (in which case Franken is the winner), or the two sides will come to some improbable agreement about how to count the 1,600 ballots (which wouldn't happen unless it ensured that Franken will emerge the winner, since otherwise he wouldn't agree).
It's been a long road for Franken--to say nothing of those of you who've bothered to read this recap of the situation, here--but the long and the short of things at this hour seems to be that Al Franken is the next Senator from the great state of Minnesota.
UPDATE: The process by which the 1,600 un-counted absentee ballots will be reviewed has been publicized, and it does leave a glimmer of hope for Coleman. As ordered by the State Supreme Court, each of the 1,600 sealed envelopes containing uncounted absentee ballots must be reviewed by all three of, (1) a representative of the Coleman campaign, (2) a representative of the Franken campaign, and (3) a representative of the county that initially rejected the ballot. It is still the case where all three entities must agree a ballot is improperly rejected before it is opened. The county official, Franken and Coleman. If any one of the three disagrees they must fill out a form on WHY it was properly rejected. That reason is then sent to the voter and the voter then has recourse in the court system.
What this implies, presumably, is that Coleman could argue in writing why every apparent Democratic-leaning absentee ballot should not be opened, gambling that (a) many of those Democrats would not appeal their ballot rejections, and (b) the Franken campaign wouldn't retaliate by challenging every single Republican-leaning absentee ballot. These two things, added together, aren't as unlikely as they first sound: Coleman could easily fan a credulous media into believing that Franken's objections are pure-retaliatory, cowing his team into backing off--and the Democrats whose ballots are challenged will only have any initiative to fight their ballot rejections if Franken hasn't been bullied into conceding, before they even get their day in court. It's a longshot sequence of events, to be sure, but it's plausible enough to render my earlier confidence in the final outcome a bit premature.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
Click Here to Read More...
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Mark Begich Wins!
After waiting more than two weeks for the early votes to be properly counted (and entirely by the way, can we just pause to savor the irony in that little sentence-fragment?), Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich has been declared the winner of the United States Senate seat currently occupied by convicted felon Ted Stevens. Mr. Begich becomes the fifty-eighth member of the Democratic caucus in the Senate (now that we can all go back to thinking about everything else besides the fate of Joe Lieberman) and the only Senator who does not possess a college degree. One other interesting tidbit: Alaska's house race was also just conceded within the past day or so, securing a nineteenth term for Republican Don Young--whose first victory in 1972 was won when the airplane in which the Democratic incumbent was traveling, disappeared. The Democrat in that race? It was Mark Begich's father, Nick.
Many major news outlets have not yet called the race, despite the fact that the number of remaining uncounted absentee ballots is smaller than Begich's current margin. There's actually a pretty good (if somewhat tortuous) explanation for the media reticence, if only in this case: Should the absentee ballots close Begich's margin to within 0.5%, the state must automatically hold a recount. Trouble is, recounts always favor democrats, and with so few ballots actually cast the likelihood of making up a 0.5% margin is considerably smaller than it would be if Stevens could hang his hat on the prospect of 50,000 presumably staunch supporters showing up as undervotes in suburban Minneapolis. Stevens can also pay for a recount out of his own pocket if the margin is larger than 0.5%, but with senior members of his own party calling for his expulsion from their caucus, it seems more likely that Mr. Stevens will take a page from the George Allen playbook, letting the sting of defeat die down a little before quietly conceding.
As the Alsaka race fades from prominence, along comes the beginning of the much-anticipated Minnesota recount, to captivate our attentions for the next few news cycles. As your intrepid columnist has stated with rather foolish confidence on several occasions before, the fact that Mr. Coleman is presently ahead by about 200 votes is utterly irrelevant to the relative prospects of victory for each of the two candidates in that race: Recounts always favor Democrats, and with this many undervotes in profoundly pro-Democratic areas of the state, I should think it a stunning upset if Mr. Franken does not prevail. (At all events, he's in Washington attending freshman orientation, presumably under the same set of assumptions.)
Which leaves only Georgia--where early voting is already underway in the runoff between Republican incumbent Saxbe Chambliss and his Democratic challenger, Jim Martin. Martin's runoff strategy has been considerably more aggressive at highlighting Mr. Chambliss' shortcomings on domestic policy (which are manifold), and with some big Democratic guns fanning the Atlanta base, anything is possible. The Key Grip remains, however, less than persuaded by the media's portrayal of an ultimate, Alamo-style showdown for the life and death of the Republican party.
As the friend of a man who owns vacation property in North Carolina, I've criss-crossed the State of Adventure more often in the past two years than Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton combined, and I can tell you that outside of a handful of royal-blue enclaves scattered around the state, Georgia is exactly the sort of place that Ricahrd Pryor had in mind when he said, of the south, "They've got white folks down there that scare white folks." Surely if the polarizing and suddenly dated-seeming Atwater playbook is going to work anywhere, it's in Georgia. Besides, the Georgia Republican base won't mind the extra attention as the bearers of such grim responsibility, and will happily turn out in massive numbers to stop those icky Democrats from making their decidedly un-magic "magic number" of 60 Senate seats. For all of these reasons, smart money is still on Chambliss.
With the election and its associated after-dramas winding down, your columnist lightly turns his attentions to thoughts of travel, and of movies--a promise he's made more than once before, if you're keeping score at home, and hasn't yet quite managed the courage to try out on an audience of five hard-boiled political junkies. Will Cinema Democratica survive its transition to a three-topic column? Will the comment field be peppered with angry feedback from jilted news hounds? Will the vote to chew up bandwidth with non-political posts come down to a razor-thin margin and, most importantly, who will pay for the manual recount, and who gets the money when they do?
Hey, we've gotta have some drama in our lives, now, don't we.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
Many major news outlets have not yet called the race, despite the fact that the number of remaining uncounted absentee ballots is smaller than Begich's current margin. There's actually a pretty good (if somewhat tortuous) explanation for the media reticence, if only in this case: Should the absentee ballots close Begich's margin to within 0.5%, the state must automatically hold a recount. Trouble is, recounts always favor democrats, and with so few ballots actually cast the likelihood of making up a 0.5% margin is considerably smaller than it would be if Stevens could hang his hat on the prospect of 50,000 presumably staunch supporters showing up as undervotes in suburban Minneapolis. Stevens can also pay for a recount out of his own pocket if the margin is larger than 0.5%, but with senior members of his own party calling for his expulsion from their caucus, it seems more likely that Mr. Stevens will take a page from the George Allen playbook, letting the sting of defeat die down a little before quietly conceding.
As the Alsaka race fades from prominence, along comes the beginning of the much-anticipated Minnesota recount, to captivate our attentions for the next few news cycles. As your intrepid columnist has stated with rather foolish confidence on several occasions before, the fact that Mr. Coleman is presently ahead by about 200 votes is utterly irrelevant to the relative prospects of victory for each of the two candidates in that race: Recounts always favor Democrats, and with this many undervotes in profoundly pro-Democratic areas of the state, I should think it a stunning upset if Mr. Franken does not prevail. (At all events, he's in Washington attending freshman orientation, presumably under the same set of assumptions.)
Which leaves only Georgia--where early voting is already underway in the runoff between Republican incumbent Saxbe Chambliss and his Democratic challenger, Jim Martin. Martin's runoff strategy has been considerably more aggressive at highlighting Mr. Chambliss' shortcomings on domestic policy (which are manifold), and with some big Democratic guns fanning the Atlanta base, anything is possible. The Key Grip remains, however, less than persuaded by the media's portrayal of an ultimate, Alamo-style showdown for the life and death of the Republican party.
As the friend of a man who owns vacation property in North Carolina, I've criss-crossed the State of Adventure more often in the past two years than Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton combined, and I can tell you that outside of a handful of royal-blue enclaves scattered around the state, Georgia is exactly the sort of place that Ricahrd Pryor had in mind when he said, of the south, "They've got white folks down there that scare white folks." Surely if the polarizing and suddenly dated-seeming Atwater playbook is going to work anywhere, it's in Georgia. Besides, the Georgia Republican base won't mind the extra attention as the bearers of such grim responsibility, and will happily turn out in massive numbers to stop those icky Democrats from making their decidedly un-magic "magic number" of 60 Senate seats. For all of these reasons, smart money is still on Chambliss.
With the election and its associated after-dramas winding down, your columnist lightly turns his attentions to thoughts of travel, and of movies--a promise he's made more than once before, if you're keeping score at home, and hasn't yet quite managed the courage to try out on an audience of five hard-boiled political junkies. Will Cinema Democratica survive its transition to a three-topic column? Will the comment field be peppered with angry feedback from jilted news hounds? Will the vote to chew up bandwidth with non-political posts come down to a razor-thin margin and, most importantly, who will pay for the manual recount, and who gets the money when they do?
Hey, we've gotta have some drama in our lives, now, don't we.
Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...
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