Although most of the contests of Election 2008 have been resolved, there are a few contests still outstanding, most notably a set of three US Senate races that could decide both whether the Democrats will hit 60 seats and what happens to Joe Lieberman in January. While I am hardly an expert, I thought I’d offer a quick overview of where the races stand and what should happen in the end.
The contests will be listed in alphabetical order, just to avoid any partisan bias.
Alaska: Perhaps the biggest surprise of the year is that incumbent Ted Stevens (R) is not already packing his bags for home. Despite being the center of scandal for a year (and being convicted of bribery days before the election) he is still ahead in his bid for re-election.
The latest numbers show Republican Stevens leading Democrat Mark Begich by a margin of 106,594 to 103,337 or about 3,200 votes. There are still about 82,000 absentee, early and questioned ballots to be counted plus the military still has some time to get their mail in ballots to the Secretary of State so this contest is far from over.
Some analysis on FiveThirtyEight.com suggests that Begich could pull this out and win by about the same 3,000 vote edge, but I think at this point it is tough to decide which way things will go. There is no way to know how the pending ballots will work out since, especially with the early votes, we have no way of knowing when they were cast.
If Stevens wins, of course, there will be a special election at some point.
Right now I have to call this 50/50, it could go either way.
Georgia: This contest pitted incumbent Saxby Chambliss (R) against Jim Martin (D) and Allen Buckley (L). With nearly all the ballots counted, Chambliss leads by a comfortable margin of 110,000 votes but, under Georgia law, he needed to reach 50% of the vote to avoid a runoff. At this point he has 49.8% to 46.8% for Martin and 3.4% for Buckley. It seems very unlikely at this point he will make 50%.
This means that there will be a special runoff vote on December 2nd between Chambliss and Martin. On the surface, the situation would seem to favor Chambliss since he would need to gain only a few votes from the Buckley supporters to top out over 50%. But runoff elections are notorious for being unpredictable and nobody can say what will happen.
This situation mirrors one in 1992 when then-incumbent Wyche Fowler (D) was forced into a runoff with Paul Coverdell (R). Like this year, the incumbent Fowler led the popular vote on Election Day and, like this year, we had a newly elected Democratic President. In that year, President-Elect Clinton came to Georgia to campaign for Fowler and the incumbent lost the race.
However I do not think that this is what will happen this year. Part of the reason Fowler lost was because of a feeling among voters that we needed a check on the new power in Washington, so they voted against the Democrat. I suspect a similar trend may follow this year. In addition, Fowler was hurt by lower turnout in Democratic areas and that may also happen this year. Part of the reason the race was so close this time was because of massive turnout for Obama, and I am not sure it will happen in the runoff.
Indeed, the reported reluctance of Obama to campaign for Martin may be a bad sign for his contest as he may not want to be tied to a possible losing contest.
At this point I would say about 2-1 odds in favor of Chambliss but Martin does have a shot.
Minnesota
This is by far the closest contest of the year with incumbent Norm Coleman (R) leading challenger Al Franken (D) by just 200 or so votes out of nearly 4 million cast. Third party candidate Dean Barkley took nearly 440,000 votes and probably prevented a clearer outcome.
While at this point Coleman is ahead, I do not think he will win. While I am not going to outwardly call fraud in this contest there has been a suspiciously pro-Franken trend in the counting so far. Since Election Day, virtually every new vote found has favored the Democrat and that is kind of odd given a fairly-even race. Perhaps the fact that newer voters might favor Franken would give him a slight edge but a nearly 100% advantage is odd.
If Coleman can manage to stay ahead until the initial vote is certified, then I think he has a chance of surviving the recount as recounts seldom shift votes very much. But if Franken pulls ahead, then I think he pulls it out. This contest resembles the 2004 Governor’s race in Washington where a Republican led on Election Day but Democratic election officials managed to find enough votes to switch the outcome.
Right now I’d call it 2-1 in favor of Franken.
So if the contests pan out the way I expect, we have at least 57 Democrats (counting Sanders) and at least 41 Republicans with Lieberman and the Alaska race as tossups. One open question there is whether or not Reid and Obama push Joe out to the Republican side of the aisle.