Merkley vs. Smith: follow who's winning

In Oregon the biggest remaining election question mark is the U.S. Senator race between Jeff Merkley and Gordon Smith. Votes are still being counted.

Here's how to track them, in order of my political junkie preference:

(1) Over at Blue Oregon, Kari Chisholm is doing a great job analyzing which counties haven't fully reported yet, and what this means. He's updating this post regularly. Currently Smith is up by almost 8000 votes, but Kari is projecting a 32,000 vote Merkley win after Multnomah and other Merkley-leaning counties completely come in.

(2) The Daily Kos Electoral Scorecard features a map that's a lot of fun to play around with. Click on "Senate," then Oregon, and you can see how many precincts have reported in each county. There were some glitches in this AP-based map earlier (Multnomah was incorrectly shown as 100%), but hopefully they've been fixed.

(3) KGW is keeping track on how the Senate race is going. No analysis, but the numbers change frequently. It looks like they're using the AP figures in (2), so far as I can tell.

Update: Jack Bogdanski also is analyzing how the returns are going. He's not quite as optimistic as Kari, but still projects a Merkley win by around 15,000 votes.

Comments

[torridjoe]

I think they're both lowballing. Merkley should reap 70,000-80,000 from Multno and Lane alone, and there's still some left in Washington that I essentially write off as cancelling out the smatterings of red county votes left to tabulate.

I'd say his ending gap should be at least 50K. We're following it too at LoadedO...