Sen. Bill Nelson conceded late into the night on Election Day. The next day, the Florida Democrat woke up ready for a recount.
State law triggers an automatic recount whenever the difference in the race is less than half a percent. And by early Wednesday morning, according to unofficial ballot returns posted by the Florida Division of Elections, Nelson trailed outgoing Republican Gov. Scott Nelson by 30,239 votes or 0.38 percent.
But don’t expect the hanging-chad and butterfly-ballot madness of the 2000 presidential election. Even though partisan armies of lawyers are marching to the sea and platoons of journalists are parachuting into the Panhandle, little is likely to change.
The really ugly recounts happen when the margins are much smaller than this. Former President George W. Bush won the presidency over then-Vice President Al Gore after weeks of hysteria, a Supreme Court ruling, and a vote margin of 537 votes. As FiveThirtyEight pointed out, this isn’t all that odd either.
Generally, recounts move the needle at the margins without actually overturning the results. Between 2000 and 2015, there were 4,687 statewide general elections. Of those, only 27 ended up in a recount, and only three of the recounts changed the result. The last Senate recount that mattered was in 2008, when Minnesota decided, by just 312 votes, to send a comedian named Al Franken to the Senate, where he found new celebrity and then disgrace.
State law might be on Nelson’s side, but the history and the math are not. He would have to net more than 30,000 votes in a hurry, a little less than the population of Panama City. Unless a “blue wave” has been overlooked in some uncounted absentee ballots, it doesn’t look like this election breaks for Nelson.
After nearly two decades in the Senate, it might be better for an exhausted nation if Nelson finally exited.
