Text message received last night from Craig Benjamin:

I'm no longer nervous as fuck.

Benjamin has been involved in the campaign longer than his daughter has been alive. Where did he celebrate the latest returns? He texted back: "At home with my family."

Mike McGinn, who could be Seattle's next mayor, is curled up 'round the fire with his family and black labrador, and couldn't be reached. Campaign spokesman Aaron Pickus reacts to the latest results, which put McGinn 2,400 votes in the lead. "It’s a big jump, and we feel pretty good," Pickus says. "But there are a lot of ballots yet to be counted and the race isn’t over."

So... are you gonna win? "Obviously, what we are seeing the right now is the same trend as primary, where voters favored Mike. Right now we feel very good."

"I haven't talked to the team yet," says Charla Neuman, spokeswoman for mayoral candidate Joe Mallahan, "but I can tell you—uh, obviously this is not—it gets harder and harder to overcome these numbers. We're looking to see how many votes are left to be counted."

Is there any hope for Joe? "King County had another 30,000 votes dumped in today, which nobody would have expected—that's abnormally large," Neuman says. "We will wait and see, but it's not going in the right direction for us. We would have to see an immediate reversal in trend, I think, and an abnormally high one."

McGinn is now up by more than 2300 votes. That's outside the recount threshold and "Mallahan would now have to get about 54 percent of the remaining votes — a level he has never achieved in any of the vote counts," says the Seattle Times. The Times also called Mallahan's spokesperson and asked when the city can expect Mallahan to drive his concession forward. Her response is pretty desperate/hilarious:

"It'll be tough to overcome," she acknowledged. But she said a win is "still in the realm of possibility" and that the campaign wants to evaluate "oustanding factors."

For example, she said, there may have been some Seattle ballots in a vandalized ballot box in Tukwila.

* I added that "Right?" because I didn't want to jinx things.

Mayor

Mike McGinn 85416 50.31%
Joe Mallahan 83032 48.91%
Write-in 1328 0.78%

That's a 2,384-vote spread.

Reacting to the news that his lead in the mayor's race has grown both by number of votes and percentage of the vote, Mike McGinn says, “We were hopeful that the late ballots would trend our way like they did in the primary." McGinn believes that “the demographics of late voters were probably younger and more supportive of our campaign.” Indeed, records from King County Elections suggest that uncounted ballots may increasingly trend toward younger, McGinn supporters.

Is the race still too close to call? “Hey, we’re waiting to see what the next results show, but the trend looks positive for us now.” The next drop hits between 9:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m.

About 20,000 ballots just released by King County Elections show that Mike McGinn's advantage in the Seattle mayor's race is growing—slightly. McGinn had a 515-vote lead yesterday; now he leads Joe Mallahan by 1,209 votes. In terms of percentage of the vote, McGinn led by 0.4 percent yesterday, but he now has a 0.8 percent advantage.

Mayor

Mike McGinn 75,657 49.99%

Joe Mallahan 74,448 49.19%

Write-in 1240 0.82%

All the King County election results are here.

By comparing voter rolls to records of ballots received by the county, Mike McGinn's mayoral campaign found that uncounted votes include far more of the youngest demographic, which are McGinn's voters, than counted votes. In contrast, uncounted votes include about 50 percent fewer voters over 65 years old than the previous counted votes.

• King County Elections has counted 137,025 ballots from Seattle voters and the McGinn camp estimates the county has an additional 55,000 uncounted ballots on hand.

In a recent SurveyUSA poll, you can see that McGinn's base is among voters 18 to 34. In contrast, Joe Mallahan's base is older voters, especially voters over 65 years old. In other words: Uncounted ballots appear to represent younger voters—who are more likely to be McGinn supporters—than the votes already counted. This could mean that the next batch of votes puts McGinn over the edge.

Late voters could also be McGinn voters if they read The Stranger.

According to Google Analytics, the Stranger's bill of endorsements—which give a hearty endorsement to McGinn—was viewed by 43,933 unique individuals. Of those, about 18,500 people viewed our endorsements in the last three days before the election. (That's not even counting cheat-sheet downloads from the home page or three issues of the paper around town that had our endorsement cheat sheet.) So those are late voters, they're mostly likely young voters, they are probably mostly McGinn voters, and they are voters whose ballots may not have been counted yet.

Seattle is estimated to have 213,841 total ballots when it's all said and done.