What’s Happening in Washington?

The Washington State GOP declared John McCain the winner last night by a 26-24% margin with 87% of the precincts reporting, but this is a little funny with such a narrow margin and has raised a few eyebrows, including my own and Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

As you know, John McCain lost two of the three contests yesterday. He was losing narrowly in Washington state and then pulled ahead by a narrow margin (less than two points) toward the end. But then with 87% of the returns counted, the Washington state GOP, which runs the caucuses stopped releasing results. That left us and a lot of other news organizations in a bit of a quandary last night since it looked like McCain was going to pull it off. But as late as 1:30 AM on the east coast promised new results kept failing to materialize.

Then over night the Washington state GOP put out a press release announcing McCain the winner based on the 87% returns. Now, I think it would be borderline for a media organization to declare one candidate a winner when the margin separating first and second was 1.8% with 13% of the results still uncounted. But for the officials holding the election to declare the result on that basis is simply bizarre. But that’s what they did.

The release says final results are not expected to be available until Monday.

UPDATE: The Washington GOP graciously has decided to count another 6.1% of the vote. The results show a slight tightening of the race from a 1.8% John McCain to a 1.6% lead. 25.4%-23.8%. We’ll be waiting on pins and needled for the 6.7% to be counted.

UPDATE II: The Washington GOP explains its decision process:

Esser said their last county report on Saturday came shortly before 10:15 p.m., at which point they had 87.2 percent of precincts reporting. That’s when they did an analysis, saying: “Let’s take every county where Huckabee is beating McCain, and double the margin of victory,” Esser said. “And then take every county where McCain is winning and cut in half that margin of victory. Even if you assume that, Sen. McCain still holds on.

“That’s when we said we’re confident that Sen. McCain’s lead was going to hold up,” Esser said. “I would have done the same for Gov. Huckabee if he had the same margin and the same underlying dynamics as Sen. McCain.”

This is probably a matter of stupidity (or poor judgment as the Huckabee camp put it.) Just because you may not have any results for the rest of the night doesn’t mean it’s the job of a party chairman to project a winner. Your job is to tell the media, “Sorry, folks, we’ll have the rest of the results by Monday.” It’s simple, count the votes. Don’t project them.  Even if the chairman was right, he was wrong.