Today is the third “day after” the 2012 gen­er­al elec­tion. Bal­lot count­ing con­tin­ues in most of Wash­ing­ton’s thir­ty-nine coun­ties, as coun­ty elec­tions offi­cials open mail, ver­i­fy sig­na­tures, and tab­u­late votes. In the mean­time, the out­come of sev­er­al races remains uncer­tain (par­tic­u­lar­ly the con­test for Sec­re­tary of State).

The guber­na­to­r­i­al race is not as close as many pun­dits had expect­ed it to be. Still, Rob McKen­na is refus­ing to con­cede. His team is hold­ing out hope that he will over­come Jay Inslee’s lead to become Wash­ing­ton’s next gov­er­nor. McKen­na’s camp entered Elec­tion Night seem­ing­ly pre­pared for a long haul.

Randy Pep­ple, McKen­na’s cam­paign man­ag­er, even went to the trou­ble of releas­ing a memo to “inter­est­ed par­ties” out­lin­ing what to expect on Elec­tion Night. This memo has since been pub­lished on McKen­na’s cam­paign website.

In it, Pep­ple writes:

Giv­en the appar­ent advan­tage among ear­ly vot­ers, and the trend from our own track­ing sur­veys which showed that advan­tage reversed by the end of last week, the McKen­na cam­paign thinks it both like­ly that the returns count­ed on elec­tion night will favor Con­gress­man Inslee, and that the final vote tal­ly will ulti­mate­ly be in McKenna’s favor. Once again it appears that elec­tion night in Wash­ing­ton State will not pro­duce a defin­i­tive win­ner in our mar­quee statewide contest.

We can see from look­ing at the graph below why McKen­na’s camp believes there is rea­son for opti­mism: Since Elec­tion Night, McKen­na has been chip­ping away at Inslee’s per­cent­age of the total vote. That trend may con­tin­ue today.

A chart show­ing the evo­lu­tion of results in Wash­ing­ton’s 2012 guber­na­to­r­i­al race. Jay Inslee has main­tained a lead over Rob McKen­na since late on Elec­tion Night.

But he is still more than fifty thou­sand votes behind Inslee, and we just don’t see him mak­ing up the dif­fer­ence. More than three quar­ters of a mil­lion bal­lots remain to be count­ed statewide, so a McKen­na vic­to­ry is still with­in the realm of pos­si­bil­i­ty. How­ev­er, a very large chunk of those bal­lots are King Coun­ty bal­lots. And McKen­na is get­ting trounced in heav­i­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic King County.

Inslee’s per­cent­age of the vote in King Coun­ty has not changed too much.

On Elec­tion Night, it was 63.01%. On Wednes­day, it declined slight­ly to 62.69%. And yes­ter­day, it stood at 62.16%.

Inslee may be los­ing ground per­cent­age-wise, but he isn’t los­ing much. And there’s no guar­an­tee the cur­rent trend (which favors McKen­na) is going to con­tin­ue. Even if it does, the data we have so far indi­cates Inslee will still be ahead a few days from now, when the pool of out­stand­ing bal­lots has sub­stan­tial­ly dwindled.

McKen­na needs to get above the forty per­cent mark in King Coun­ty to have a chance of win­ning this race. If he does­n’t make up sig­nif­i­cant ground today, it will be a clear sign that the McKen­na cam­p’s faith in a come­back is misplaced.

Team Inslee, in part­ner­ship with the Wash­ing­ton State Democ­rats, released a memo of their own today which asserts that Jay will hold onto his lead.

Con­sis­tent with pro­jec­tions fol­low­ing Elec­tion Night returns, analy­sis of updat­ed results con­tin­ues to indi­cate a near cer­tain win for Inslee. With over 75% of all expect­ed bal­lots count­ed, the Inslee lead has expand­ed to more than 56,000 votes statewide, fur­ther dimin­ish­ing the math­e­mat­i­cal prob­a­bil­i­ty of an out­come in McKenna’s favor.

Of the bal­lots remain­ing to be count­ed, 51.45% reside in King, Thurston, Sno­homish, and What­com coun­ties where Inslee is cur­rent­ly receiv­ing 58.23% of the votes to McKenna’s 41.77%. Con­verse­ly, only 12.01% of remain­ing bal­lots reside in coun­ties from which the major­i­ty of the McKen­na statewide vote total is derived — Ben­ton, Clark, Spokane, and Yaki­ma. In these coun­ties McKen­na is cur­rent­ly only receiv­ing 57.08% of votes to Inslee’s 42.92%. Thus, fol­low­ing the his­toric trend of Demo­c­ra­t­ic gains beyond Elec­tion Day, the Inslee advan­tage will con­tin­ue to increase as the remain­ing bal­lots are counted.

We con­cur with this analysis.

If Rob McKen­na’s cam­paign is will­ing to share the mod­els or sim­u­la­tions they’re using to project an even­tu­al McKen­na vic­to­ry, we’d be hap­py to take a look at what they have. But our sus­pi­cion is they’ll keep all of that private.