Primetime for NY-9: A Look Back at the Campaign

, head slung low in a self-flagellating press conference on June 16, the question on the minds of voters in New York’s Ninth District has been:

The answer will come Tuesday night as , and , wait for votes to be counted in Queens and Brooklyn.

Turner has run in NY-9 once before, in 2010, and lost to Weiner, a 12-year incumbent.

Weprin is familiar to voters in New York City, after serving eight years in the City Council and losing a bid for Comptroller last year.  

Now the two men are in a struggle for an oddly-shaped district that snakes from east-central Queens, through parts of the Rockaways and southern Brooklyn. Democrats have a strong registration advantage in an area that is filled with low-income and middle-class families, as well as large pockets of densely Jewish neighborhoods.

So far the race has focused largely on three things: the economy, Israel, and President Barack Obama.

Turner has strongly played up his business background, including his time as the President of Multimedia Entertainment, the company that launched He’s railed against what he believes is over-taxation and government spending, and spent weeks bashing his opponent (Weprin, in an interview with the New York Daily News, was off by roughly $10 trillion).

Weprin’s camp has. Early in the race he released a short small business rescue proposal that gained little traction. Since then, and assailed him for his corporate-friendly statements, including

Both candidates have tried to outdo one another in their support for Israel. Weprin, an Orthodox Jew,

Turner, on the other hand, has made hay out of Weprin’s “yes” vote in the state assembly on same-sex marriage, and has staked his place on the pro-Israel end of the spectrum by collecting an endorsement from Democratic Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind.

Ultimately, this race has been run by the Republican candidate as a referendum on the presidency of Barack Obama.

Throughout the campaign, however, Turner has run on promises of trying to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, fighting against asking Israel to negotiate land swaps from its pre-1967 borders and.

Meanwhile, Weprin has been forced to backpedal somewhat from some dearly-held Democratic ideals, giving a lukewarm defense of health care reform, openly disagreeing with the president on Israel and qualifying his support for gay marriage as a civil issue rather than a personal belief.

Numerous campaign mailings and robo-calls have featured Democratic heavyweights President Bill Clinton and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, but the president's name has rarely been uttered.

The ballots will be counted once the polls close at 9 p.m. and the House of Representatives will know the name of its most junior member. Until then, it’s in the hands of the voters in Brooklyn and Queens.