Mark Begich wins!
AP has called the Alaska Senate race for Mark Begich. Senator Ted Stevens has lost and this is a GREAT thing.
From TPM: The Associated Press has projected that GOP Senator and convicted felon Ted Stevens has lost re-election, with the final major batch of absentee ballots giving Democratic challenger Mark Begich an insurmountable lead.
The current vote count: Begich 150,728 votes, Stevens 147,004 votes. Begich’s lead of 3,724 votes is greater than the roughly 2,500 outstanding ballots. By percentage, the 1.18% lead is beyond the 0.5% threshold that would have entitled Stevens to a state-funded recount.
Even if every last single outstanding ballot went to Stevens — an unlikely scenario, to say the least — he would still lose, and even if they broke for Stevens by a strong margin it would still likely be outside of the state-paid recount threshold.
Somewhere, Sarah Palin is kicking her dog.