It’s damn tough to be a Republican in New York these days. 
First the party lost a slew of Congressional seats in 2006. Then they surrendered control of the State Senate for the first time in two generations. This past winter they failed to regain the “most Republican” House seat in the state. And now this: President Obama has picked one of New York’s last three Republican Congressmen to be Secretary of the Army.
John McHugh has represented much of the northern third of the state since 1992 but has accepted Obama’s …

The daily dribble of news upstate in the 20th district recount “drama” brings two interesting posts. Nate Silver at 538 does one of his masterful number-crunching jobs to predict that Democrat Scott Murphy will eventually prevail by about 540 votes over Republican Jim Tedisco. What’s really interesting there though is Nate’s take on the Republican’s jaw-dropping challenge of Kirsten Gillibrand’s absentee ballot. He thinks it will make it harder for Tedisco to mount a rematch if Murphy wins. Maybe but Nate may be getting ahead of himself on this one.
You’ll …

So it’s those city folks, huh? They’re the ones trying to steal this election from a good Republican. That’s the claim Republicans supporting Congressional candidate Jim Tedisco are making as the results of the first special election since Barack Obama became President enter their second week of counting.
As Jimmy Vielkind at Politicker and Leigh Hornbeck at Capitol Confidential report in their excellent posts about the verrrry slow hand counting of absentee ballots in Columbia County, Republicans are objecting to nearly every ballot sent to addresses in New York City arguing …

There a few things more certain in life than this: Hyper-partisans (left and right) will twist everything and anything to fit their worldview. Today’s case in point comes courtesy of Red State and a contributor who speculates that the Somali pirates who have attacked and apparently captured an American-flagged cargo vessel did so because they know Barack Obama is a wuss.
While the author is correct no U.S. flagged vessel has been successfully attacked by pirates to this point it’s worth noting how few American-flagged vessels there are any more. The …

 
So the first special election of the new year has come and gone and like so many elections nowadays, it’s too close to call. With all the regular votes counted across 10 upstate New York counties Democrat Scott Murphy leads Republican Jim Tedisco by 59 votes out of the almost 145 thousand cast. We should have a winner, with any luck, in a few weeks…or months.
In the meantime there are a few things we now know that we could only guess at before the voters spoke:

In claiming that this would …

What happens this coming Tuesday in towns like Claverack and Surprise and Truthville is going to set insider Washington abuzz. That’s when voters in those and a few hundred other towns and villages in the 20th Congressional district of New York decide whether a Republican or Democrat replaces Kirsten Gillibrand as their Congressperson.
Special elections always give Beltway insiders something to talk about outside the proper campaign season and this one is especially rich, coming just 10 weeks (really!) after Barack Obama took office with sky-high public approval ratings. Everybody is …