After the latest posting of the ballot count, polling experts say Carl DeMaio might need a final wave of votes greater than he’s ever had to win the 52nd District Congressional seat over U.S. Rep. Scott Peters. NBC 7’s Gene Cubbison reports.
Highly anticipated new numbers show U.S. Rep. Scott Peters has a 4,491-vote lead over challenger Carl DeMaio Friday afternoon, after a late-week shakeup in the race for the 52nd Congressional District.
“We are thrilled with today’s vote update, particularly given the tough Election Night Democrats had across the country," said Peters' Campaign Manager MaryAnne Pintar in a statement. "This lead reflects the support Rep. Peters received from across the political spectrum and the tremendous Get Out the Vote effort by our field staff and hundreds of volunteers over the weekend and on Election Day."
NBC 7 has reached out to the DeMaio campaign and is waiting for a response.
Given Friday's vote-count posting in the hot-tempered 52nd Congressional District race, it seems oddsmakers would have to favor Peters, the first-term Democratic incumbent, to finish in the winner’s circle.
Polling experts say GOP challenger Carl DeMaio might need a final surge greater than his highest margins in the early going.
What could be keeping DeMaio and/or his backers awake at night is the scenario he suffered in the 2012 mayor's race: leading early in the vote count, only to have Bob Filner blast by him at the end.
Can he overtake Peters, with the decreasing number of ballots left to tabulate?
"Let us look forward to the counting of all votes,” DeMaio told a gathering of enthusiastic supporters on Election Night. “I am very confident we will have that great opportunity to take our 'New Generation' ideals to Washington."
That confidence on Tuesday morphed into concern by Thursday evening.
Momentum had turned against Team DeMaio -- and toward Team Peters, as did the momentum in Peters’ 2012 victory over three-term Republican incumbent Rep. Brian Bilbray.
This time, Peters is leading in a race where GOP voters showed up in force as they always do for mid-term elections.
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"And what's really interesting about the 52nd race is that those voters didn't go for Carl DeMaio,” says Scott Lewis, editor-in-chief of Voice of San Diego.
“In large part, for some of the east-of-15, some parts of Point Loma -- some of the Republican strangleholds -- there was a very pronounced over-performance for Scott Peters in those districts,” Lewis added in a recording session for Sunday’s edition of NBC 7’s “Politically Speaking” program. “Which means that Republicans -- in a wave of Republican enthusiasm across the country -- voted for Scott Peters more than you might imagine."
Political strategists doubt that the sexual harassment allegations against DeMaio, coming late in the campaign, had great impact on the numbers.
Nor do they see major fallout from the bizarre caper involving a break-in at DeMaio’s campaign headquarters, with a stolen strategy binder winding up in the hands of Peters’ staff.
But they think the opposition’s strategy of depicting DeMaio as a tool of the Tea Party did take a toll.
"Across the country, the polls have shown that the name 'Tea Party' is really venomous, it really kills things,” says Republican political consultant John Dadian. “ Which is why the (Peters) campaign did their due diligence and put their money into several ads that emphasized the Tea Party. That was one of the major points that the Peters campaign knew was going to work."
There's also a school of thought that DeMaio shouldn't have chosen a different campaign team for his Congressional race than the one he had for his mayoral race.
“He surrounded himself with people who would take his orders, basically,” says Lewis. "He didn’t have a campaign manager or campaign consultant. He made a point of saying ‘This is the best campaign team I’ve ever had. But the fact is, they under-performed the entire country.”
Either way, DeMaio is playing catch-up now.
And he’s feverishly soliciting money to bankroll ballot-counting observers and a potential recount, if a final margin of defeat is small enough to make the effort cost-effective.
“I need your help,” DeMaio said in an email sent to campaign supporters Thursday evening. “We have hired a team of observers to monitor the counting process. We did not plan on this in the budget.”
