Republican Congressman Ben Quayle's time in Congress officially has an expiration date.
Quayle broke the news to his supporters in Scottsdale at 10 p.m., announcing that he'd just conceded the primary race to fellow freshman Congressman David Schweikert.
Quayle stopped by the Scottsdale Plaza Resort for no more than five minutes and spoke to his supporters for just a fraction of that.
"I am very grateful for the thousands of Arizonans who voted for us tonight," Quayle said. "This has been a hard-fought race. We fought for the right principles, and we fought each day with honesty, integrity, and honor."
After the tabulation of the early-voting ballots was released shortly after 8 p.m. -- with Schweikert leading by around 4,000 votes -- it was pretty clear that Quayle had a lot of ground to cover.
According to our back-of-the-envelope calculation, the low turnout for people voting in-person today meant Quayle would've had to score the vote of somewhere in the neighborhood of three-quarters of people who showed up to the ballot box to catch Schweikert.
That didn't happen.
At the time of this post, Quayle was down about 3,500 votes, with 90 percent of the precincts in. By percent, Schweikert was up 53-47.
