Ted Stevens Re-elected to 7th Term

Bears and Ballots can now officially project that Senator Ted Stevens will win re-election over democratic challenger Mark Begich. With 99% of the precincts reporting, Ted Stevens has 106,351 votes to Mark Begich's 102,998. While there are tens of thousands of early votes and absentee votes still to be counted, it is unlikely that Mark Begich will be able to win a large enough margin of these votes to make up the current deficit.

This victory represents a stunning departure from what every pre-election poll had found. All polls conducted within four days of the election had Begich up by anywhere from 8 to 22 points. While some (such as myself) cautioned that they were probably inflating Begich's lead, and that this was a closer race than it appeared, no of us could have expected what happened last night.

Various factors that played into this shocker, foremost among them the social undesirability of admitting to a pollster that one is voting for a felon, lest one engender sanctimonious, incredulous questions. The truth is that outside of that theory, which has never accounted for a discrepancy this great in the polls (the original social desirability distortion--the Bradley effect--was probably around fewer than 6 points; Stevens over-performed his polling average by nearly 14 points) we really have no concrete ideas of why what happened happened. Begich ran a fairly lazy campaign, and Stevens fought hard for every inch.

In any case, we now turn our gaze to a Senatorial showdown. Will the Senate muster the two-thirds majority needed to expel one of their own members? How many Senators can Stevens and Daniel Inouye (D-HI) sway? How many more Senators owe Stevens favors, or, like Ted Kennedy, are genuine friends with him?

If he is expelled, there will be a runoff election between Mark Begich and, if I had to guess, either Sarah Palin or Lt. Governor Sean Parnell (who performed well in pre-election polls against Ethan Berkowitz in the House race, but lost his primary to Don Young by a few tenths of a percent). We'll have to see how the Republicans determine their nominee--maybe we'll be treated to a primary between the Governor and her Lieutenant?