The latest numbers, as of late this afternoon, had either Murphy up by six votes or Tedisco up by 12, depending on which source you asked (see here for an explanation of the discrepancy). In other words, about as close as you can possibly get to not just a rough tie but a literal tie.
So to try to shed a little more light on the situation Eric Kleefeld (TPM’s resident analyst of ridiculously close elections) and TPM intern Versha Sharma canvassed the different counties in the district to get data on the number and the party affiliations of the absentee ballots that were actually returned — as opposed to those requested.
Obviously, reasoning from location and party affiliation only gets you so far. But using a conservative methodology and a minimum of debatable assumptions, you can make some rough approximations about who is in a better position. And after running the numbers through the Kleefeldizer that proved to have such a good track record in Minnesota and the absentee ballots point to … another statistical tie.
So this one might be going on for a while.
