The final result of the special election in NY-20 has been posted. Not suprisingly, the great majority of the challenged ballots went for Scott Murphy, providing him with a "landslide" margin of nearly a half a percent (write-ins, and votes for the libertarian candidate on absentee ballots on which his name appeared, are not factored into this result).
Please see below for a post mortem observation and comment on this race.
Scott Murphy certainly deserves credit for defeating an established, high-profile politician who started off with an overwhelming advantage in name recognition, at least a 12 point lead in independent polling (an early internal repub poll showed Tedisco up by 21) and a 70,000 disadvantage in party registration within the district.
That said, Murphy almost blew the election, and did lose a chance to win clearly on election night or within a few days thereafter, by making a bad tactical error in the closing days of the campaign.
Keep in mind that the week before the election, Siena showed Murphy had pulled ahead by 4 points. At the same time as that poll was conducted, Tedisco claims his own polling showed him 6 points back. What led to the result that caused us all to have to wait weeks for the eventual good news?
I am quite sure it was Murphy's failure to respond quickly and strongly to Tedisco's claim that the stimulus that Murphy had supported was responsible for the AIG bonuses. While that claim was an obvious crock, it nevertheless did seem to help boost Tedisco's standing in the closing days, and as far as I can tell, Murphy did not respond directly to the attack until the day before the election, and even then, not very strongly.
The stimulus-AIG bonus connection was by no means the only negative attack Tedisco made against Murphy during the campaign. He also attacked him on having outsourced jobs to India, on having been born and raised in the midwest and therefore being a "carpet bagger," on being a Wall Street huckster, on having no government experience. These lines of attack and others were also carried out by a variety of independent groups targeting the election, but during the final days, while the independent ads continued to attack Murphy on a variety of issues, Tedisco's own campaign came to focus sharply on tying the AIG bonuses to the stimulus and Murphy's support of that legislation.
The fact that Tedisco's campaign was focusing so sharply and frequently on that point during the final week indicated to me that they had reliable evidence that these attacks were proving effective. My concern was affirmed on the day before the election when I saw a Murphy TV spot that talked about Tedisco's opposition to the stimulus, his decadance and corruption as an Albany politician, and, finally, the fact that Tedisco was lying about Murphy supporting the AIG bonuses. "Scott Murphy opposes the AIG bonuses, and Jim Tedisco knows it" the ad claimed, but it was too little too late, at least to prevent the election from becoming a virtual deadlock that required protracted contestation to win.
I strongly believe that an earlier, more direct response to Tedisco's baseless attacks linking Murphy's stimulus support to the AIG bonuses would have resulted in a clearer, though not overwhelming, win for Murphy. Let's hope Scott Murphy, his campaign people, and other democratic office seekers have heeded the lesson.