NEW YORK — Democratic Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou faces long odds of overtaking attorney Dan Goldman in the tight Democratic primary for New York's 10th Congressional District even though thousands of absentee ballots remain untallied.
There are about 7,000 valid absentee ballots that were received by Tuesday out of about 21,000 requested by voters in the primary for the newly drawn district spanning lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, the Board of Elections says.
They won’t be tallied until next week at the earliest, when all the absentees are expected to be in.
That sounds like a whole lot of votes when Goldman holds a narrow lead of about 1,300 votes, or about 2%, over Niou in the crowded race.
But crunching the numbers even a bit yields bad news for Niou, who led a pack of progressive candidates who divided the vote against Goldman, a relative moderate.
There’s no way of knowing exactly how many absentee ballots will be returned or how many of those will be deemed valid.
The ugly math for Niou starts with the reality that at least half the absentee ballots were likely cast for other candidates like they were in the election day count, leaving far fewer available for her to pick up ground.
Worse still, there is no good reason to suspect Niou will even defeat Goldman in the absentee tally if anything, Goldman might be expected to overperform among older voters who tend to vote by absentee as well as wealthy second-home owners who may have been out of town for the August primary.
Goldman, an attorney who helped press the case against former President Donald Trump in the first impeachment trial, was projected the winner by The Associated Press after he won about 25% of the early and primary day votes.
Niou got about 23% in the district, which includes substantial Asian American communities in both Manhattan’s Chinatown and Brooklyn’s Sunset Park.
Niou has not conceded the race and called for all remaining votes to be counted. She is also reportedly considering contesting the general election on the Working Families Party line, a move that most political insiders believe would be fraught with myriad problems.
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