SARANC LAKE, N.Y. – The mood is getting darker at NY-23 Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman’s election party. Results from Jefferson County–Republican territory that John McCain carried–show Owens in the lead. And the Syracuse suburbs–Madison, Oswego, and Oneida County–are not showing the blowouts that early polling suggested. The first results from Oswego show Hoffman at 2800, Owens at 2000, and Scozzafava at 324. The final Siena poll had Hoffman leading Democrat Bill Owens by a margin of 51 percent to 28 percent in this region.
I asked Hoffman’s spokesman Rob Ryan for a reaction, and he suggested that it was hard to know the trends without knowing which wards the votes were coming from. That’s true, but it’s significantly less optimism than Ryan was projecting earlier tonight.