Posts Tagged ‘NY 20’

On March 31, there was a special election in NY-20 to fill the vacancy created by Kirsten Gillibrand’s appointment to the Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton.

On election night, it was essentially a tie, and we faced weeks of counting to determine the winner.  Back then I predicted that the Republican, Jim Tedisco, would come out on top.  I was wrong.

Tedisco conceded yesterday when it became apparent that he could not make up the few hundred voted difference with few ballots remaining to count.

The closeness of this race likely means there will be a rematch in the fall of 2010.  While this gives the Democrats some bragging rights, it remained close enough that Republicans can find the silver lining.

Here is what I wrote the day before the election:

This is an absolute must-win for the Democrats – because it will be seen as a litmus test on the Democrat Congress and on President Obama.  If the Democrat candidate, Scott Murphy, doesn’t get elected, the shockwaves will be felt from San Francisco to New York to D.C. and everywhere in between.

In some ways, the Republicans couldn’t be in a better spot.  If Republican Jim Tedisco wins, the momentum will have shifted less than 100-days into Obama’s administration.  If Tedisco loses, but keeps it close (within 5 points) it will still have a lasting impact on the way the Democrats in the House and President Obama play their cards (including “card check”) going into 2010.  For Republicans, this is a win-win, as long as a “loss” is close.

Tedisco kept it plenty close enough to have an impact.  Since I wrote that on March 30, we have seen the top two Democrat priorities – cap and trade and card check – take on water and there is a virtual certainty that both are dead this year.

So, I was wrong about predicting Tedisco’s win, but I remain convinced that the close loss has helped Republicans.

Republican candidate Jim Tedisco has taken that lead in race for the NY-20 Congressional seat.  On election night, Democrat Scott Murphy led by 59 votes.  After two days of recanvassing in some of the counties, Tedisco has picked up enough votes to now lead by 12 votes.

Once the thousands of absentee ballots start to be counted, Tedisco will increase his margin and ultimately be the winner.  Count on it.

As to the universal spin from Democrats that this is a “Republican seat” because Republicans have a big registration advantage, the column below by Stuart Rothenberg has an excellent analysis.

People get hung up on registration differences way too much, in my opinion.  I have never paid as much attention to registration as candidate performance.  In fact, Stephen Shadegg, Barry Goldwater’s campaign manager in every one of his Senate campaigns and the guy who wrote the book (literally) about how to win elections, said that voter registration was the least consistent indicator of voter behavior. 

New York’s 20th: It Is a Little Like Kissing Your Sister

April 2, 2009
By Stuart Rothenberg
Roll Call Contributing Writer

 

It’s overtime in New York’s 20th, where Democrat Scott Murphy’s lead over Republican Jim Tedisco is so small that absentee ballots will determine the district’s next Congressman.

But in some respects it doesn’t matter who wins the seat. The results tell us something about the public mood, the district and the art of running Congressional elections. And while both sides have reasons to feel good about the results, Tuesday night offered Republicans a small but important bit of evidence that they have turned the corner.

Both parties’ Congressional campaign committees and the Democratic National Committee sent out press releases moments after all the votes were counted Tuesday night. The Democratic releases were nearly identical talking points.

Democrats cited the GOP registration edge, argued Murphy had stormed back from more than 20 points down and asserted that they are confident that Murphy will expand his lead. Let’s look at the points one by one.

Much has been made of the Republican registration — far too much, even by those of us who should know better. You don’t need a doctorate in political science to know that registration is a lagging indicator and that what is important is how people usually vote.

Polling in the special election conducted for the National Republican Congressional Committee’s independent expenditure arm asked party ID in two different ways, and the results are eye-opening.

When asked how they were registered, 30 percent of district respondents said that they were registered as Democrats, 23 percent said that they were registered independents and 44 percent said that they were registered Republicans — a 14-point GOP advantage.

But when those same respondents were asked how they usually vote, 28 percent said they usually or always vote Democratic, 34 percent responded that they were ticket-splitters, and 34 percent said that they usually or always vote Republican — a much smaller 6-point GOP edge.

People in this district may be registered as Republicans, but many simply haven’t been voting that way. The district is competitive. President Barack Obama won it (51 percent to 48 percent), now-Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D) was elected to represent the district twice (with 53 percent and 62 percent) and President George W. Bush won it with only 54 percent in 2004. Bush won a very similarly configured district (then the 22nd) with just 50 percent in 2000. Democrats Eliot Spitzer and Hillary Rodham Clinton carried this district in 2006, and Sen. Charles Schumer (D) won it two years earlier.

What does this mean? It means much, though not all, of this talk about the huge Republican nature of the district is baloney.

Second, talk of a stunning Murphy surge from far back is ridiculous and ignores normal campaign dynamics.

True, Murphy started behind Tedisco in initial ballot tests, but that was almost entirely because district voters knew Tedisco, a state legislator, but had never heard of political neophyte Murphy, who lived in Missouri until 2006.

The early deficit was entirely name ID. I’ve seen hundreds of races like this one, where an unknown candidate spends heavily and moves up in polls. That’s why, when my newsletter first rated the special election on Feb. 20, we rated it as Tossup/Tilt Republican. It looked competitive from the start.

Given both parties’ spending, the personal appeal and profile of Murphy, the excellent Democratic advertising and the fundamental competitiveness of the district — to say nothing of the popularity of both Obama and Gillibrand, and Gov. David Paterson’s (D) delay in declaring the seat’s vacancy — it isn’t surprising that Murphy started behind but closed the gap in the race.

Third, I can’t see why Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Chris Van Hollen (Md.) and DNC Chairman Tim Kaine would be confident that Murphy will expand his lead. I don’t know who will eventually win, but more Republican than Democratic absentee ballots have been received, according to GOP sources.

Finally, the returns have something bigger to say about the political environment, and both parties have reason to take away something positive from the dead heat.

Often, special elections are opportunities to send a message to the sitting president — a message of restraint and caution. We don’t trust you completely, so we are sending someone of the opposition to Congress to keep an eye on you, is how I’d put it.

No matter who ends up winning this race, that didn’t happen in the 20th district. The president remains very popular in the district, and even some Republicans believe that voters there backed Murphy as a way of indicating their support for Obama and their willingness to give him more time.

While Murphy and the DNC injected the president heavily into this race (through advertising) and said the contest was a referendum on the president’s economic agenda, there is little evidence of a strong anti-Obama vote. On the other hand, a tie isn’t a huge vote of confidence for the president’s economic agenda, either.

The worry for Democrats is that the president’s numbers are so high that they have nowhere to go but down. And if that happens, districts like this will be harder to hold in 2010.

More importantly, think what this election would have been like for Republicans if it had occurred last November. Murphy would have buried Tedisco by 6, 8 or maybe 10 points.

The absence of George W. Bush as a factor in this race helped Tedisco, and it suggests that while Republicans certainly haven’t turned the page on the past eight years and still have plenty of damage to repair, they have hit the bottom and are starting to bounce back. That is good news for the GOP.

Stuart Rothenberg is editor of the Rothenberg Political Report.

The special election in NY-20 will hinge on the estimated 10,000 absentee ballots that will be counted over the next two weeks.   Election day voting had Democrat Scott Murphy leading Republican Jim Tedisco by a mere 65 votes out of 154,000 cast.  Given that a large number of the 10,000 to be counted are military voters, it is very likely that Tedisco will end up the winner.

This is a huge, huge victory for Republicans.  Democrats were unified in their message that they won a moral victory with Murphy being ahead and keeping it very close, but that spin belies the facts of recent history.  Now-Senator Kristin Gillibrand won the 2008 election by double digits despite the Republican spending $6 million trying to unseat her.  Obama carried the district by three points in the last election, and in previous elections, Democrats Elliot Spitzer and Sens. Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton did as well.  This was the Democrats to lose, and lose they will.

This sends a shot across the bow of President Obama and Congressional Democrats, because this race was in essence a referendum on the young Presidency of Obama and on the Democrat Congress.

The most instructive quote of the night came from NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions:

“Less than 150 days ago, President Obama carried New York’s 20th District, and former Congresswoman Gillibrand was handily reelected in this district by a margin of 62-38 percent, despite the fact that her Republican opponent spent $6 million trying to defeat her.  For the first time in a long time, a Republican candidate went toe-to-toe with a Democrat in a hard-fought battle over independent voters. This was hardly a common phenomenon in 2008, particularly in the Northeast.”

History of Recent Elections in NY-20:

•    President Obama carried the district by a margin of 51%-48% in 2008.
•    Kirsten Gillibrand won re-election in 2008 by a margin of 62%-38% against a challenger who spent $6 million.
•    Eliot Spitzer carried the district by a margin of 57%-36% in 2006.
•    Chuck Schumer carried the district in 2004, as did Hillary Clinton in 2006.

Tuesday, March 31 is a big, big day in politics this year.  Why, you ask? It is the special election for Rep. Kristin Gillibrand’s seat that she vacated to ascend to Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat in New York.

“NY-20” is going to be a critical touchstone for months to come as we go into next year’s mid-term elections.  This is a Democrat seat, and the Democrat’s have pulled out all the stops to keep it in their column.  President Barack Obama has now weighed in, and both parties have major get-out-the-vote operations in place, with phone banks both in New York and D.C., and even some remote volunteer phone banks in other states.

This is an absolute must-win for the Democrats – because it will be seen as a litmus test on the Democrat Congress and on President Obama.  If the Democrat candidate, Scott Murphy, doesn’t get elected, the shockwaves will be felt from San Francisco to New York to D.C. and everywhere in between.

In some ways, the Republicans couldn’t be in a better spot.  If Republican Jim Tedisco wins, the momentum will have shifted less than 100-days into Obama’s administration.  If Tedisco loses, but keeps it close (within 5 points) it will still have a lasting impact on the way the Democrats in the House and President Obama play their cards (including “card check”) going into 2010.  For Republicans, this is a win-win, as long as a “loss” is close.

Murphy has some problems that are unique to this time – he’s been a lobbyist for Wall Street and he was an executive with an internet company that lost millions of dollars and later approved big bonuses for executives (sound familiar?).  AIG is a central issue in this campaign.  Here is how the NRCC has framed the issue:

This will be one of the biggest elections this year – it may be even more important than the Virginia’s Governor’s election this fall.  One thing for sure, the Democrats know the risk of losing, and they have doubled-down.

The Republican National Committee outraised the Democrat National Committee for the month of February, $5.1 million to $3.26 million according to Politico’s The Scorecard.

Currently, the DNC is sitting on $8.6 million in cash, but has $6.9 million in debt.  The RNC has more than $24 million in cash.

This is a good start for the opposition party.  Yes, the Obama machine has not yet been geared up, but there is a lot of Democrat money that is being diverted to outside groups who will be spending a ton of money pushing Obama’s agenda from the outside on the issues of Climate Change (Cap and Trade), Card Check (the Union’s #1 priority) and health care reform.

Now is the time to watch the trends going into the 2010 election cycle.  Cash on hand by the committees is one important indicator.  A more important test comes at the end of March when the special election in NY-20 is held to replace Kristin Gillibrand, who was appointed to the U.S. Senate to fill the vacancy left by Hillary Clinton.

Polls show it very close, and the national committees will be spending heavily in the first race of the cycle to claim the inside track going into 2010.