Bishop likely wins this in the end, the absentee breakout advantage for the GOP is less than the registration advantage for the district. Taking into consideration the likely higher turnout on Election Day itself the gap between Election Day turnout and absentees is likely even larger. Also heaviest concentration of the absentees is of course the Hamptons, which is a strong area for Bishop.
I haven't seen anything but confusion on the part of the NY political blogs, what makes you so sure, out of interest? Is there an article somewhere that explains? Seems like this could be the closest race in the country, hard to see which way it'll fall.
Article from Newsday is below. It also seems like the AD-1 race was impacted by this and had a 900 vote swing to the GOP (that was the race that had the 1 point margin at one point, which was recently 40)
http://mobile.newsday.com/inf/infomo;JSESSIONID=139B03B30314715682AD.2971?site=newsday&view=politics_item&feed:a=newsday_1min&feed:c=politics&feed:i=1.2432925Anyway if you take a look at the active voter rolls for the district, the GOP has a 5.97% registration advantage. Granted you have no real way of telling, but chances are Election Day turnout was stronger for the GOP than the Dems, so the GOP advantage with registered voters that turned out on Election Day was probably a few points larger for the GOP than the 5.97% district wide numbers.
So it wouldn't surprise me if the GOP had a registration advantage of 8-9 points on Election Day. The absentees, the GOP has a registration advantage of 3.45%, though more still may come in so the final registration advantage will likely differ from that, but its still likely to be a smaller advantage for the GOP than district wide registration. Also according to Swing State the heaviest concentration of absentees are in the 1st & 2nd A.D, the 2nd covers the Hamptons. Taking a look at Hamptons voting habits, its a bit more Democratic than voter registration suggests.
