By Adam Pagnucco.
The Congressional District 6 race between Democratic Congressman David Trone and Republican Delegate Neil Parrott has come down to the counting of mail and provisional ballots. As of this moment, Parrott has a lead of 4,547 votes, or 2.3% over Trone. Will that lead hold up as counting proceeds?
Before we answer that question, I have the following statement for Parrott, Trone, their respective staffers and their supporters: I understand how you feel! I worked for Montgomery County Executive candidate David Blair in the primary. Our election came down to weeks of nail biting mail ballot counting. It is a truly awful feeling to work for a candidate for more than a year only to have the race come down to factors you can’t control… and then there is the waiting. Want to run one more TV commercial? Send out one more mailer? Knock on a couple thousand more doors? Forget about it. Those days are over, at least for now.
Now to the ballots. As of this writing, the table below shows the current status of the race by county.
At this moment, Parrott has double digit leads in dark red Allegany, Garrett and Washington counties, a tiny lead in purple Frederick County and is far behind in blue Montgomery County. That’s to be expected considering the partisan structure of these counties. Congressional District 6 is designed to offset the red west with blue areas in the east to give Democrats a chance to win.
The interesting thing about the above results is that in all four counties in which mail ballots have been counted (excluding only Garrett), Trone has big leads in mail ballots. This is the case even in dark red Allegany and Washington counties. In fact, Trone has won 75% of the mail ballots already cast in the district. That is a KEY statistic in this analysis.
There are many more mail ballots to be counted. The table below shows their current status. As of this writing, just 13,203 mail ballots have been counted so far. But 72,025 have been sent to voters and 47,940 have been returned. That means the range of mail ballots remaining to be counted is between 34,737 and 58,822. Note also that 60% of these ballots belong to Democrats.
So how well must Trone do in the remaining mail ballots to pass Parrott? That depends on how many more get counted. The table below shows Parrott’s current lead, Trone’s current percentage among already counted mail ballots (75%) and the percentage he needs in two scenarios: only ballots already received are counted and all ballots sent wind up being counted. In truth, the ultimate outcome will be somewhere between those two scenarios.
The bottom line is that while Trone has won 75% of mail ballots already cast, he only needs to win between 54% and 57% of remaining mail ballots to overtake Parrott. If you want to be conservative, add a point or two to account for provisional ballots, which may resemble in-person results favoring Parrott. Let’s remember that 60% of these mail ballots belong to Democrats.
It’s way too early to call this race and I will provide periodic updates. But at this moment, based on mathematics alone, I would be rather be in the position of Team Trone than Team Parrott.