Yesterday, a top diary on the recommended-list captured the state of the recount in Minnesota. Essentially, Al Franken was over-performing the expectations of everyone from the AP to his own campaign. Today, that trend is continuing. What this means is that Al Franken's campaign seems to have chosen very wisely amongst the ballots to challenge. Talking Points Memo is keeping track through a livefeed and will be providing updates throughout the week. Join me below the fold to get an understanding of what this all means.
As of Monday, everyone from the Associated Press to Fivethirtyeight to the Franken campaign projected that Al Franken would win by less than 30 votes. Yesterday, the Star Tribune projected that Franken would win by about 170 if the trends hold up. Right now, the Star Tribune projects that Franken will unseat Norm Coleman by over 240 votes. As you have undoubtedly figured out, it's not a perfect science, but like polling, it can give us an idea of the trend. Coleman is only winning 41% of the challenges by Franken's campaign that are being counted today, which is absurdly low(usually it's much closer to 90-100%). Being out of about 340 ballots, that means Coleman lost 200 votes and, in some cases, Franken gained.
We still need to see more challenges by the Coleman camp and see how wisely they selected their challenges. It is quite possible that what we're seeing with the Franken challenges may cross over into the Coleman challenges, meaning that the Coleman camp was careful in choosing which ballots to challenge. However, Coleman is losing a lot of votes and a lot of ground. The fact that Al Franken is doing even better than everyone thought, including his own campaign, means that we will really have to bite our nails until the bitter end.