But in essence the election was a tie.
Inaccuracies and errors are part of the nature and essence of election polling, it will be off almost as much as it's on.
And because it is, in essence, 28 national elections, it has more individual parties than any other, though the 751 MEPs sit in multinational groups.
The essence of the election, however, is not the individual but the means.
They offered competing views on the essence of the election: Mr. Christie characterized it as a contest between the Democratic incumbent's expansionist government and his more modest approach, that would tend mainly to the basics: health, safety and welfare.
American troops have driven peacefully into Sadr City to start working on infrastructure projects said to be worth $500m, whereas in previous weeks they would have had to fight their way in.No less important, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most influential of Iraq's Shia clerics, has in essence endorsed the election by telling people to register as voters when that process starts in November.
That is emerging as the essence of the Democrats' election strategy.If Mr Kerry's task was (like Reagan's) to erase doubts about his candidacy, Mr Bush's was to reassure voters worried about casualties in Iraq that he knows what he is doing there.
H.L. Mencken captured the essence of the 2016 election in the September 19, 1926 edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune.
In essence, Tuesday night's election result replaced one giant threat to Obamacare -- the prospect that the president's Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, would seek to repeal it -- with myriad smaller questions: Will the federal agencies tasked with writing the rules to implement it do their work quickly enough, and despite the lobbying by affected industries seeking favored treatment?
Transparently fair elections are the essence of democracy.
