A few scattered observations on last night's result in the Bay State:
- The biggest reason Scott Brown is the next Senator from Massachusetts is because he was a good candidate and Martha Coakley was not. He tried hard; she did not. And this has a lot to do with the general idiocy of the Democratic party in Massachusetts, which manages to very frequently blow elections in one of the bluest states in America, by fighting contentious primaries and nominating weak candidates. There's a reason they got they got Republican Govs. William Weld, Paul Cellucci, Jane Swift and Mitt Romney, all in a row. (The DFL in Minnesota does this often as well- remember the John Marty, Ann Wynia, and Roger Moe campaigns?)
- A few things to keep in mind: The Democrats had 60 Senate votes; now they have 59. They didn't lose the majority. And as someone pointed out this week, the "Supermajority" barely existed at all- there were only 60 Democratic votes since Al Franken was seated, in the summer, and Robert Byrd has usually been too sick to vote anyway. In fact, Obama was inaugurated with 58 Democrats in the Senate. Now there are 59.
Best headline goes to the Village Voice: Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate
- The other thing about Brown- he isn't nuts. If the Republicans ran 200 Scott Browns, they'd have a better chance of getting Congress back than if they ran 200 Michele Bachmanns.
- Remember when Curt Schilling was going to run? The Republicans should be happy he didn't.
- Should the Democrats still pass health care? Absolutely. They should pursue the House passing the Senate bill. There's absolutely nothing illegal, immoral, or unprecedented about doing it.
That said, how much of a repudiation to Obama is this? It vindicates the GOP strategy of 1) fight Obama on everything, and 2) Lie through your teeth about everything he says and does.
The best analysis of the situation? CQ Politics, for sure.
Posted by Stephen Silver at January 20, 2010 02:15 PM"And this has a lot to do with the general idiocy of the Democratic party in Massachusetts, which manages to very frequently blow elections in one of the bluest states in America, by fighting contentious primaries and nominating weak candidates."
Agreed, though in this case a more contentious primary might have helped - the compressed primary season gave Coakley an advantage b/c she was the only one of the candidates who had run statewide before (albeit in a barely contested race - when she ran for AG in 2006, Coakley was unopposed in the primary and faced only token opposition in the general). The others were also reluctant to go after her too strongly b/c they didn't want to be tarred and feathered for going negative and out of fear that they'd suffer a backlash for attacking a female candidate. If the other candidates had been more aggressive (and if they had had more time), the result might have been different.
Of course, one could make a case that the primary was over-contested in the sense that opposition to Coakley was divided among three candidates. Coakley won the primary with 47% of the vote vs. 28% for Capuano, who came in second. I suspect that Capuano would have beat Coakley in a two-person race, as most of the voters who backed the other candidates wouldn't have supported Coakley in any event (why else would they have backed unknowns like Khazei and Pagliuca?).
Another sense in which the MA Dem Party blew it was in passing the 2004 Senate succession law that made all of this possible - the law was intended to help Dems by preventing Mitt Romney from naming a successor to John Kerry, and it ends up giving the GOP a Senate seat it never would have had if Deval Patrick had been able to appoint a Dem who would have held office until 2012 (rather than a temporary placeholder like Paul Kirk).
Posted by: Joe at January 21, 2010 10:55 PMShe called Curt Schilling a Yankees fan. She deserved to lose.
Posted by: LiLB at January 22, 2010 11:13 AM