And It Wasn’t Supposed to Be This Close

Yesterday, there was a Special Election to find Kirsten Gillibrand’s replacement for NY-20.  The vote was between Scott Murphy (D) and Jim Tedisco (R).  Tedisco had alot of advantages going in — not the least of which was that he is the current Minority Leader of the NYS Assembly and has been in office for 26 years.  Scott Murphy’s background includes long stints as an entrepreneur and as a venture capitalist.  (Interestingly, Tedisco sought to use Murphy’s business experience against him — as if spending all of one’s life in the NYS  Assembly is a major qualification for the House of Representatives.)

Murphy started out 20 points behind Tedisco — showing just how unknown he was in this district.  (Which is R+3, and went for Obama, and Gillibrand twice.)  By the time of the election, Scott was leading Tedisco in the polls by 4 points.  Scott survived the night with a very slim 65 vote lead.  There are about 5900 absentee ballots to count, so what is clear is that no one has won anything yet and probably won’t until mid April or so. But in line with the current repub tactic of suing everything in sight, Tedisco’s people filed an ex parte motion in court yesterday, in a pre-emptive move against a Murphy win. And that lawsuit effectively looks to slow down the counting of votes and the final certification. (so repubs are for trial lawyers after all?)

I don’t know what the absentee ballots will bring, but I do know that our media has gotten caught up in the brain dead narrative of this election being a referendum on Obama’s spending plans.  This is, of course, being pushed by the GOP who thought that they could nationalize this thing.  They failed at that (except for the media), while spending a ton of money (via the NRCC and their PACs) in order to have a district in a blue state that they could claim starts their taking back the House.  Shades of MA-5. Except this was a Republican District, with a large Republican registration advantage, with a Democratic party not paying much attention to either this race or to its unknown candidate. And the unknown Democratic candidate is currently ahead.

Whichever candidate wins (and it will be a slim win for either), the only thing that you will really know about this race is that NY-20 is definitely changing. And it is NOT getting more Republican. That won’t stop the wingnuts from spinning a Tedisco win (if his lawyers ever get out of the way) into a failsafe oracle of the Republican comeback. But they are hungrier for ant bit of good news and one more doof move interpreting data is something we’ve come to expect. And the so-called liberal media will certainly follow them there. But we should remind everyone that Murphy ran an extraordinary race here, with little National Dem help until this past week or so against someone who six weeks ago was supposed to cruise to a win. Considering the extent to which Murphy put up enough of a fight to cause the entire repub apparatus to pour their resources into this thing, he probably did win. But what we did see here is a single version of the fight that the GOP is likely to have in 2010 — in a year when they will still be defending even more seats. Then imagine if the NRCC has to do this just everywhere.