Let the counting commence! At the time of this posting, Senator Patty Murray appears to be in a position to win a 4th term. The
Secretary of State's office has current election results, and shows Murray with 50.84% of the vote, compared to Rossi's 49.16%. These numbers will change tonight as the individual county offices report their next batches of ballots counted.
Interesting of note is that Dino Rossi has not taken the lead at any time in this race. Conventional wisdom is that with so many votes left to count in King County, he would have had to hold the lead by now to offset certain gains that will be made by Murray as King County continues to report. While it is also true that the general trend in Washington State is for late ballots to trend Republican, we'll have to wait and see how the results turn out over the next several days. One thing is certain, as we had previously suspected, this race was not decided on Election Night.
The
Seattle Times notes that there are several hundred thousand votes left to be counted, but the early ballots are certainly trending in Murray's favor. A review of the results show that Rossi gained 38% of the votes in King County (Washington State's most populous county) initially, and that the later trend showed him receiving only 33% of the votes in King County. As one political scientist noted in the article, this is "devastating" to Rossi's chances of winning.
Also interesting of note is that Dino Rossi is leading in 30 of 39 Washington Counties, including every single county east of the Cascades. Murray's
campaign manager noted today that in areas where Murray leads, there are approximately 523,000 ballots left to be counted, while there are 440,000 ballots left to be counted in areas where Dino Rossi leads. If this is true, it is certainly going to come down to the strength with which each candidate leads in their respective counties. Based on this interpretation, we can probably assume that Murray is pretty happy with the results.
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