Coleman-Like Tactics Won't Swing NY Race

Jim Tedisco is doing everything in the book to try to drag out the race to replace Kirsten Gillibrand in Congress—including challenging the new US senator's own ballot—but he's doomed to failure, writes Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com. Democrat Scott Murphy has received 53% of the absentee ballots counted so far, and he's drawing more support among absentees than he did among general voters. Using regressive analysis, Silver puts Tedisco's odds of victory at 500-1.

But that hasn’t stopped Tedisco from taking a page out of Norm Coleman’s playbook and challenging "a ridiculously high fraction of ballots," Silver writes. That may let him take a brief paper lead, but it won’t help in the PR war. Challenging Gillibrand’s ballot was particularly dumb. “Let my vote and every vote be counted,” the senator rails in the Huffington Post. “Republicans are trying to turn the 20th District of New York into the next Minnesota. It is wrong.” (More Kirsten Gillibrand stories.)