Democrat William Owens of Plattsburgh must have awakened last Saturday morning believing he'd be the next congressman from the 23rd District. By noon, he must have wondered if his plans had collapsed.

Republican Dierdre Scozzafava Saturday morning left the race, leaving two contenders: Owens and Conservative Douglas Hoffman. Instead of the prospect of Hoffman and Scozzafava splitting the Republican/Conservative vote, Owens was now in a showdown with only one opponent, Hoffman, who had just inherited Scozzafava's votes, as well as having built up a considerable tally on his own. Or had he?

Who exactly was the beneficiary of Scozzafava's departure?

That was the big question Tuesday, Election Day: Would Scozzafava's Republicans feel a greater kinship with the liberal Owens or with the Conservative Hoffman? And, when Scozzafava later that weekend endorsed Owens instead of Hoffman, how resentful would her Republican followers be? Since she endorsed Owens, would they gravitate to Hoffman just out of spite? Party leaders in the 11 counties made clear that Hoffman was their new man.

Republicans are generally more conservative than Democrats — closer to Hoffman's views against abortion and gay-rights views than to Scozzafava's liberal views on those issues, you'd think. But, lately, the Republican Party has been having an ideological crisis, of a sort. One wing wants to become more conservative in reaction against President Obama; the other wants to stay closer to the center to attract more numbers. It may be a question of whether the Grand Old Party is trying to become a Grand New Party.

The numbers told a story, but it was hard to tell exactly what that story was: Throughout the district, there were 167,365 registered Republicans, 121,627 Democrats, 20,160 independents and only 5,611 Conservatives. How many of those Republicans would prefer to be aligned with the more liberal Democrats, and how many would prefer the Conservatives? And how would the independents line up? If most of the disaffected Scozzafava voters leaned the liberal way, Owens was a shoo-in; if they favored the conservative, Hoffman would surely be our next congressman.

The answer to this most vexing question of which way voters landed was not definitively answered as of midnight, the witching hour for editorials crowding a deadline for getting the press moving in order to have the papers delivered on time. Owens had started out with a slim lead after the polls closed at 9 p.m. and retained it as returns kept trickling in.

By midnight, 85 percent of the vote had been counted, and Owens held about a 4,000-vote lead, roughly 49 percent of the vote to 46 percent. It was too close to call a winner, and certainly too close to draw any conclusions about the political future of this district.

One thing was for sure — this was the closest the Democrats had been to this seat in many decades. Whether the Republicans would be undergoing a conversion was not yet known.