The Election Lives!

By GAIL COLLINS
NYT

Americans are going through election withdrawal, trying to adjust to life without poll numbers. Really, we’ve heard quite a bit of whining on this subject lately.

But there’s still Minnesota! The U.S. Senate race there is up in the air. You may want to consider becoming totally obsessed with it, jumping out of bed every morning and racing to the computer to check for the latest vote count.

Or perhaps not. Still, it’s something to hang on to.

There are actually three Senate races that are undecided, and if the Democrats won them all, they’d hit the magic filibuster-proof number of 60. Alaska, determined to continue in its role as the vortex of all things politically strange, still hasn’t counted tens of thousands of ballots. Georgia has a Senate runoff Dec. 2, and the Democrats have dispatched tons of canvassers to help their candidate, Jim Martin. Martin is a long shot, but we should all be grateful that they’ve found something to do with the Obama campaign workers, who would otherwise have been set loose to wander the country, muttering about change and attempting to register household pets to vote.

But we digress. About Minnesota. Right now, the incumbent Republican, Norm Coleman, is about 200 votes ahead of the Democratic challenger, the former comedian Al Franken. In a race where 2.9 million votes were cast, Coleman is leading 41.99 percent to 41.98 percent.

(More here.)