Stevens trailing in Senate race

Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich (D) on Wednesday jumped ahead
of Ted Stevens in the cliffhanger race for an Alaska Senate seat.

At the end of a day of counting early and absentee
ballots, Begich jumped ahead by 814 votes, maintaining a 0.39 percent lead over
Stevens, a political icon in the state who last month was convicted of felonies
for failing to publicly disclose gifts he received from an oil contractor.
Stevens, the longest-serving Republican senator in history, had led by a few
thousand votes heading into Wednesday.

{mosads}The race is still far from being decided, with thousands
of uncounted ballots still looming. At the beginning of the week, 90,635
ballots still had to be counted, and state officials set a goal of counting
nearly 60,000 ballots on Wednesday. If the margin between the two candidates is
less than 0.5 percent, the state would conduct a recount if one is requested.
The state would have 10 days to complete the recount.

Begich said he remains “cautiously optimistic.”

“As I’ve said before, we ran an aggressive campaign,
especially when it came to early voting and absentee,” Begich said in a
statement.

A Stevens loss would spare Republicans a tough decision
on how to handle the senator, who is a legend in the Senate but is now a
convicted felon. His GOP colleagues may vote next Tuesday on whether to kick
him out of their conference. A two-thirds vote in the Senate would be required
to remove him from the upper chamber altogether. 

His loss also would give Democrats at least 58 seats in
the upper chamber.

“If he actually wins the election, then you have to expel
him twice. And so it’s probably better to let Alaska — it’s probably going to
take a while to count all the votes up there — let that take place, then after
the first of the year deal with it,” Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) said Wednesday,
according to the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution. 

The paper also quoted Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), who
is facing a Dec. 2 runoff in his Senate race, calling for Stevens’s expulsion.