NY State/Local Primaries: Live Results Commentary
Welcome. I’ll be keeping an eye on various races as they play out tonight. Polls closed at 9 p.m.; results should start rolling in around 9:45 or 10:00.
10:00 update: First returns have rolled in, and with them the first surprise: Saland leads DiCarlo only 56-44 with about 20% of precincts reporting. We’ll see if it stays that close throughout the night, but I fully expected a bigger margin there. Much bigger.
10:10 update: Katz is cruising as expected in the 94th – rolling up a 2:1 margin over Dario Gristina in the Putnam portion of the district. Oddly, Saland is actually faring a bit better in Putnam (59%) than in his home county of Dutchess. I can’t imagine this will last. In the other Marriage Wars, Grisanti is comfortably ahead in western NY’s 60th in both primaries (Rep and Indy). McDonald’s ahead in the Capital Region’s 43rd, but he’s not out of the woods yet: 52%-48% with 30% of precincts reporting.
10:15 update: All of Putnam’s precincts in the Saland-DiCarlo races have now reported. Saland only carried the county 52-48. We could expect some difficulty as that’s all new territory for him, but that’s a much stronger showing for DiCarlo than anticipated. But Dutchess is not coming through in great numbers for Saland either – it’s a 51-49 race overall right now, according to YNN’s numbers – which are further along than the AP results.
10:20 update: Katz is in like flint; 65-35% w/ 81% reporting. That’s the last I need to check in there. We now have signs of life in the GOP’s 105th AD primary: Kieran Lalor is up big over Manning, 54%-27%, with Wager trailing at 19%. I thought Lalor could pull it out with his dogged ground game, but not by this margin. Crazy night in Dutchess County.
10:26 update: DiCarlo’s not quite going to get over the top. I’ve got two differing sets of totals to work with. According to the individual county websites, with only 9 EDs left to report in Dutchess, Saland leads by 38 votes there plus a 29-vote lead in Putnam. The YNN aggregate shows a more comfortable Saland lead of 98 votes. With such low turnout, I think Saland survives. But I’m eating plenty of crow. Never did I think the homophobes had this much strength with in the Dutchess Republican party.
10:30 update: Up in the 43rd, McDonald’s lead is down to 77 votes. It looks like Saland is going to win the machine county tonight, but the question on everyone’s mind is how many absentees are out there. Probably not many, considering how low machine turnout was – clearly voters were not terribly engaged here.
10:37 update: Out in Erie County, Grisanti is comfortably ahead in the GOP primary. On the Dem side, the race has been called for Mike Amodeo, meaning that Dems will have an actual Dem, rather than rogue operator Chuck Swanick, as their nominee. But Swanick remains in the race on the Conservative line. That’s going to be a hard race to call come November: where do the Stocker voters go? Grisanti (to avoid a Dem winning)? Swanick (over the marriage vote)?
10:40 update: All EDs have reported in the 105th. Lalor wins the GOP nomination going away. There are a huge number of write-in votes on the Conservative line, so perhaps Lalor has united the belts and will have all three lines (Rep/Con/Ind). But will voters prefer the moderate Democrat over the volatile Republican in this red-leaning district?
10:45 update: All EDs have no reported in the 41st. Saland carried Dutchess by 13 votes and Putnam by 29. There’s 45 write-ins, which could be for either candidate or neither. And then absentees. This one’s headed to the courts.
10:57 update: In the Albany-Troy 44th, Neil Breslin is dispatching his latest primary challenger with ease: 74%-26%. I thought Morse had more juice, but I was wrong. McDonald’s lead is now up to 102 votes in the 43rd. In the Kingston-to-Amsterdam 46th, Cecelia Tkaczyk is comfortably ahead, 54%-31% so Dems appear likely to get their strongest nominee in that one.
11:00 update: So of the races I’m focusing on, two are too close to call right now. In the Saland-DiCarlo race, we await recanvass, write-ins and absentees. In the McDonald-Marchione race, we await the actual, you know, results. Things are moving slowly in Renny and CoCo tonight.
11:05 update: It took a while to get new numbers out of the 43rd, but when they came, they were awfully good to Marchione. She now leads by 75 votes with about 74% of precincts reporting.
11:10 update: Marchione doubled her lead with the addition of a few more precincts. Up by 150 votes with 76% of EDs in.
11:20 update: There’s been an adjustment to YNN’s numbers in the 43rd: same number of precincts/EDs reporting, but only a 134-vote lead for Marchione. By the way, she easily won the Con primary, so no matter what happens here, she’s on the ballot in November.
11:27 update: The Poughkeepsie Journal reports that there are 553 absentee ballots to be counted in Dutchess County for the Saland-DiCarlo race. Typically, these follow the machine count, but if a good number of tonight’s write-ins were for DiCarlo, the race may essentially be tied rather than the 42-vote margin we’re seeing right now. One thing is certain: Saland will have an ace legal team. The Senate GOP has been through plenty of close counts in recent years…though usually not in September. Elsewhere, Marchione’s lead has expanded to 198 votes with 82% of precincts in. It’s getting harder to see a path for McDonald. Is Robin Andrews ready to rumble? She’s the first-term supervisor in the Town of Claverack, and the Dem candidate for this seat. She’s probably still better known than Marchione or McDonald in her base of Columbia County, but can she scale up to a district-wide fight?
11:48 update: The great result out of NYC tonight is that the corrupt Shirley Huntley of Queens, charged with helping relatives to steal taxpayer funds and steering them toward the nonprofit she runs, is going down in defeat. James Sanders leads 55%-42%. Always good when Dems take out the trash. Sadly, they have to do it a couple times a year with their city caucuses. Sadly, Assemblyman William Boyland of Brooklyn, who gets charged with bribery every few months or so, is surviving. He only has 36% of the vote but that’s plenty against a split field of six challenger who couldn’t figure out how these things work: don’t divide the vote against an incumbent!
11:50 update: Also in NYC, challenger Mark Gjonaj leads Assemblywoman Naomi Rivera by 137 votes. Rivera is another one accused of misusing taxpayer funds. I’ve been ready to see her gone for years.
12:15 update: Two precincts still outstanding, and a 138-vote lead for Marchione. She’ll have two ballot lines in November, with one for McDonald and one for Andrews.
Within the Margin 
Thanks for this analysis. It is really remarkable and sad that so many Republicans are obsessed with gays. To put their obsession into context: more than a year has already passed since gay marriage became legal. These GOP voters already know from personal experience that it doesn’t impact them one iota. And none of the challengers – Marchione, DiCarlo, or Stocker – even claim that they would make any attempt to repeal it. So “gay marriage” is an issue that doesn’t affect them and on which none of the candidates is going to take any further action. Yet this is what they vote on, over and above everything else.
Pathetic.
Thanks Dan. You’re right: these challengers know perfectly well that they can’t repeal marriage equality. Their candidacies were largely symbolic: “Yeah, we hate gay marriage! Nothing we can do about it, but vote for me anyway!” But along the way, it does seem that DiCarlo and Marchione have also tapped into a sentiment that views the marriage vote as a proxy for their opponents’ having been in Albany too long. Odd that 2010 was not “too long” but suddenly 2012 is.
It isn’t just that the challengers know that. It is that the challengers openly state that. Marchione said in an interview that she won’t do anything to repeal the law. Ditto for Stocker. So no one can accuse them of misleading these GOP voters. The GOP voters know that this is a dead issue and one that has had zero impact on their lives, but it continues to enjoy high salience with them. That’s an obsession. Or hatred. Or both.
Also, on Saland, I don’t think we can say with any confidence that it is headed to the courts. That should only happen if there are enough absentees to actually make a difference in the outcome and there is some legal basis to challenge the absentee ballots. If either of those 2 elements fails to materialize, DiCarlo won’t litigate simply because the result was close. Cost is also a big deterrent, esp. for someone like DiCarlo, who has little cash. Take a look at the post-election legal expenditures for Storobin and Fidler.
553 absentees in Dutchess. If it’s actually a 42-vote margin, you’re right, DiCarlo will just let all the absentees be counted and hope for the best. But if the write-ins narrow the margin – which is conceivable, as write-ins are counted even if the candidate they’re for appears on the ballot – then we’re getting into interesting territory.
Re: 11:27 update – McDonald holds the Independence line. I am no expert on the 43rd, but it would seem reasonable to me that a guy who just got 1/2 the GOP primary vote and who enjoys a lot of respect from Dems could pull it out as an Independent. I hope he can.
Maybe. If you believe in the significance of ballot layout, it’s still a tough road for McDonald. Indy Line is down to Row E now. Marchione will appear twice (Rows B and C) before voters get down to him. Will the Senate GOP continue to support him financially or accept Marchione as the choice of local voters? Will Bloomberg hook him up?
Fair point, but OTOH, everyone knows McDonald, so that may counteract his being down on Row E. Maybe. This is unknown territory.
As to who would support him, the gays have 2 new PACs set up. They are both sitting on decent chunks of money and neither has contributed directly to McDonald or anyone else yet, as those contributions would have shown up in pre-primary or 24 hour reports. So I think that money is available for this very eventuality. If Saland ultimately wins his primary, he won’t need help for the general. So Independence Party candidate McDonald likely would become the chief beneficiary of these PACs. Grisanti could also see some largesse, but now that his all of the anti-SSM candidates have been defeated, it is possible that the gays may conclude that they have made their point in the 60th and abjure further contributions.
If at the end of the day, they keep Saland in, McDonald in via the IP, and see the 60th choose b/t 2 pro-SSM candidates, they would call that a win.