The NRCC released a memo predicting victory in the NY-20 special election, and claiming a major defeat for the Obama agenda:
While the absentee and military vote count will not occur for several more days, we are confident that Jim Tedisco will ultimately become the next congressman from New York’s 20th Congressional District. While a “top White House official” (read: Rahm Emanuel) took time off from his busy schedule of dealing with the economic crisis, the G-20 Summit in London, and managing the day-to-day operations of General Motors to claim that the outstanding absentee count somehow favors the Democrats that sounds an awful lot like wishful thinking.
Both parties are publicly predicting that the absentees will favor their candidate. Obviously, one of them will be proven wrong — and quite frankly, it’s not implausible that both sides are engaged in wishful thinking to some degree.
Some more tidbits from the memo, after the jump.
The memo complains that the media doesn’t understand the facts here: “With that being said, there have been a few inaccurate and incomplete portrayals of this closely contested election by some news outlets, including Politico.com and the Washington Post.”
The memo also proclaims: “President Obama engaged in the race and couldn’t put his candidate over the top.” The NRCC is very quick to point out the great lengths that Democrats went to put Obama’s name into the race, including a DNC TV ad reminding voters that Obama had endorsed Murphy, a radio ad and a robocall with Joe Biden, and TV ads and mailers from both Murphy and labor unions that incorporated the Obama brand.
The memo claims that the Democratic stimulus bill — dubbed here the “AIG stimulus” — had gone from “being a net positive to a net negative in the wake of the AIG scandal.” Though even here, an asterisk of sorts is put in on account of the sheer closeness of this race: “If last night’s election was a referendum on President Obama’s stimulus bill, the results are inconclusive at best.”
