Tallying Starts in New York 23 Contest

Upstate New York voters finally got their chance Tuesday to weigh in on a special election race dominated over the past month by national political disputes.

The scheduled poll-closing time in New York's 23rd Congressional District passed at 9 p.m. Eastern (local) time. And the vote count will soon reveal whether conservative activists scored a successful election coup by rallying behind accountant Doug Hoffman, the nominee of New York's Conservative Party, and forcing state Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, the moderate Republican nominee, out of the race the weekend before Election Day -- or whether they heightened a major rift within GOP ranks that helped elect Democrat Bill Owens, a lawyer whose party already holds a near-monopoly on New York's congressional seats.

The unexpectedly tumultuous race to replace nine-term Republican Rep. John M. McHugh, a relatively centrist Republican who vacated the seat to become secretary of the Army, is already being parsed for implications far beyond the borders of the traditionally Republican but increasingly competitive 23rd District.

Hoffman had a narrow lead in the polls over the roller-coaster final weekend of the race. But regardless of outcome, the race is likely to say more about the Republican Party than about Democrats.

Republicans enjoy a 46,000-person registration advantage in the district and had a hold on most of the territory that makes up the current 23rd District for more than a century. McHugh was a easy winner there throughout his House career. But district voters narrowly favored Democrat Barack Obama for president last year.

Most of the drama in the three-candidate House special played out on the GOP end of the spectrum, with a brutal ideological battle between Hoffman and Scozzafava. Though she had been hand-picked as the nominee by local Republican officials, Scozzafava came under attack by conservative activists over her support for abortion rights and same-sex marriage and her sympathies toward labor unions. Prominent national conservative figures such as 2008 vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin and former House Majority Leader Dick Armey added to her woes by publicly proclaiming their support for Hoffman.

After stunning the local political scene Oct. 31 by withdrawing from the race, Scozzafava went further and endorsed Owens on Nov. 1. She told the Syracuse Post-Standard in remarks published Tuesday that she had been the subject of "a full frontal assault" by conservatives "personally and politically" because of her moderate political views.

Owens, for his part, mainly laid low, staying far away from divisive social issues and sticking almost exclusively to a job-creation message.

That's not to say the Democrats did not invest heavily in the race. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent more than $1 million on independent campaign activities backing Owens. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. campaigned with Owens in the district on Monday, while President Obama held a New York City fundraiser with the Plattsburgh attorney earlier in the campaign.

An Owens loss to Hoffman, a committed fiscal conservative, would serve to underscore the increasingly energized backlash to Obama's agenda, particularly on government spending.

But a win by Hoffman, even though he has pledged to caucus with the Republicans in the House if elected, would be somewhat hollow for the GOP leadership, given the fact that they were only recently converts to his campaign.

The Republican National Committee; its House campaign arm, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC); and House Republican leaders all initially backed Scozzafava, who was nominated in a vote by the 11 county party chairmen in the district. The NRCC made nearly $900,000 in independent expenditures to boost her campaign.

It was the Club for Growth, an anti-tax national conservative group, that tallied more than $1 million in advertising, mail and bundled donations as the main surrogate for Conservative Party nominee Hoffman. Only after Scozzafava dropped out did the national Republican hierarchy reverse itself and endorse Hoffman.

At a breakfast with reporters last week, Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said the election was a manifestation of the "fight that's going on within the Republican Party nationally, between those who believe the Republican Party is not ideologically pure enough yet ... and those who believe there should be greater pragmatism and greater breadth of opinion within the Republican Party." And he concluded that so far, the "extreme voices are prevailing in that debate."

But Ken Spain, the NRCC's communications director, dismissed the idea of the "so-called 'GOP Civil War,' " a recurring theme in the media coverage of the race, in a Tuesday morning memo to reporters.

And he pushed back against the notion that the intensity among the conservative base seen in the special election could present a problem for Republicans in 2010, citing examples of the same sort of rowdy left-wing battles with establishment Democrats in Washington leading up to the 2006 election.

Win or lose, the conservative groups who backed Hoffman from the beginning say they hope his unexpected competitiveness in the race serves as a lesson to the national party. Hoffman supporters are "not all angry, they're just hungry for a candidate who expresses their values," said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List, which normally backs Republican women candidates who oppose abortion but campaigned for Hoffman. Dannenfelser said that party leaders who say it is more important to have a "big tent" and put pragmatism over ideology are "missing a huge lesson" and run the risk that "the same mistake will get repeated" in 2010.