Abe Wieder and his voting bloc didn’t swing a congressional race, after all. The Kiryas Joel mayor certainly appeared to be the unlikely kingmaker last month when he threw hundreds of critical votes behind John Hall in Hall’s narrow victory over Rep. Sue Kelly in New York’s 19th Congressional District race.

Drama helped feed that conclusion. Here you had a Republican mayor, vigorously courted by both candidates and party bigwigs, who decides at the last minute to abandon the Republican incumbent and ride the Democratic tsunami.

It sounded good. But the counting of absentee ballots has since stretched the slender victory margin and made it harder to conclude that Wieder’s surprising endorsement swung the outcome.

When all five county election boards with a piece of the 19th District had certified their results by yesterday afternoon, Hall’s margin of victory stood at 4,760 votes.

He got almost 2,800 votes in Kiryas Joel — which actually was quite low, given that both Wieder and the village’s other major bloc — the Democratic-leaning Kiryas Joel Alliance — backed Hall. (Kiryas Joel has 6,100 registered voters; turnout on Nov. 7 was an unusually sluggish 60 percent.)

Kelly, meanwhile, had 470 Kiryas Joel votes, and 380 voters skipped that race. Some residents recoiled at Hall’s support for gay marriage and flouted their leaders’ endorsements.

Now, to calculate the impact of Wieder’s Hall endorsement, you double the number of Hall votes he generated, based on the assumption that those votes would otherwise have gone to Kelly.

But there is sharp disagreement — backed by dizzying, Talmudic reasoning — over how many Hall votes Wieder can claim, versus those of the alliance. Wieder’s supporters claim about 2,400, while the alliance puts the number closer to 1,600 (with 1,200 for themselves).

Only the higher number supports the “kingmaker” scenario — and just barely. Either way, what’s clear is that without Wieder’s Democratic conversion, the outcome would have been a squeaker.

ROL