With the latest tally of votes in Pima County, Congressman Ron Barber has taken the lead over GOP challenger Martha McSally.
Barber now leads by 582 votes, 118,546 to 117,964.
Yesterday, Barber trailed McSally by 426 votes.
There are a lot of votes to count, however. This race is far from finished.
This article appears in Nov 8-14, 2012.
This race is exactly finished, and Barber is the clear winner.
They just counted 8,000 or so votes today in Pima, and Barber got over 60% of them. I would assume that the rest of the early ballots will go about the same way. That’s going to give Barber an easy win, not even counting the 27K provisional ballots that probably skew even more towards Barber.
There are 14K votes left to count in Cochise, and even if McSally wins those with a large margin, it’s not going to happen. She would have to take those at a 80-90% clip. Good luck with that one.
At the current rate, when Pima’s all counted, Barber is going to gain another 12,000+ votes. I’d say he is on track to win by around 10,000 votes, or around a 3% margin. 51% to 48%. Not really even all that close.
I sure hope that Barber wins, and that this isn’t still another election won by laundered Koch brothers money.
Give me one reason Barber deserves to win. Not McSally is not a reason. Maybe letting McSally in will deliver you a real democrat next time around. Or you could prepetuate the lowest common denominator status quo, and settle for the guy who voted with McSally’s friends to gut a) the clean water act, b) unemployment insurance, c) food stamps. But if social security (or good bonuses for your banker) is all you care about, he’s probably your man. Go team!