An update on New York’s 24th:

Arcuri’s race also becomes one for the records
Democrat holding on by narrowest margin among incumbents in his party.
Monday, November 10, 2008
By Glenn Coin
Staff writer

U.S. Rep. Michael Arcuri’s apparent win over a political unknown was the narrowest margin of victory by any of the 223 incumbent House Democrats re-elected on Tuesday.

Arcuri, D-Utica, leads Richard Hanna, who had never run for any office before and self-financed most of his campaign, by a margin of 51.4 percent to 48.6 percent in the 24th Congressional District race.

The narrow lead by Arcuri, who spent nearly twice as much as Hanna, stands in contrast to the blue wave that swept across the country on Tuesday. Democrats picked up 19 seats in the House and six in the Senate on the coattails of Sen. Barack Obama’s successful bid for the White House. Many Democrats carried more than 80 percent of the vote against their Republican challengers.

This in a district that has nearly 40,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats…a fact that did not go unnoticed by Arcuri’s hometown paper, the Utica Observer-Dispatch:

. . . the slim margin indicates that nearly half of the voters in his district aren’t happy with his performance. That’s not surprising, considering that the 24th district is predominantly Republican and has always been a more moderate region.

His predecessor, Sherwood Boehlert, understood that. But a congressman who votes 97.5 percent of the time with the Democratic Party — as a Washington Post database reports on Arcuri — is not truly representing such a district.

That’s quite a bit of circular logic there. Did Arcuri garner a slim majority of the votes in a predominantly Republican district because, although he is a member of the Democratic Blue Dog Coalition, he voted with the Party far more often than not? Did Republican voters not have a reason to turn out in higher numbers because there wasn’t that much to object to?