Posted on 01/15/2010 7:06:37 PM PST by SeekAndFind
A special Senate election is being held next Tuesday in Massachusetts to finish Edward Kennedy’s term. The candidates are Martha Coakley (D), and State Senator Scott P. Brown (R).
The election is particularly noteworthy for a number of reasons. First, recent polls show Brown matching or even exceeding Coakley’s electoral support, in one of the most liberal states in the entire country (and one that hasn’t elected a Republican in four decades). See Pollster.com’s aggregation of polls here, and Intrade’s political market for the election here. Second, the consequences of a Brown victory could be the derailment of the Democratic health care reform proposal, if all Senate Republicans maintain party unity.
To my mind, the election is fascinating for another reason. Brown is attracting very positive national and state Republican and conservative attention. On the other hand, State Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava attracted very negative attention from conservatives in her special election campaign for the 23rd Congressional District of New York.
Brown is actually a liberal Republican who is to be found to the left of Dede Scozzafava! So why, then, the enthusiasm gap in support for the two? This post documents this assertion, and then answers this puzzle.
Citing my ongoing research on ideology in state legislatures in an earlier blog post, I made some waves by arguing that Scozzafava was actually a conservative Republican in a particular context. That context was the New York State legislature, where Republicans are exceedingly liberal relative to the rest of the country. In fact, she was actually located slightly to the right of the average Republican in the legislature. Despite this, there was a firestorm of opposition to her, leading to an insurgent challenge by Doug Hoffman under the Conservative Party label and her subsequent withdrawal from the campaign.
What about Scott Brown? How liberal or conservative is he? We have evidence from multiple sources. The Boston Globe, in its editorial endorsing Coakley, called Brown “in the mode of the national GOP.” Liberal bloggers have tried to tie him to the Tea Party movement, making him out to be very conservative. Chuck Shumer called him “far-right.”
In 2002, he filled out a Votesmart survey on his policy positions in the context of running for the State Senate. Looking through the answers doesn’t reveal too much beyond that he is a pro-choice, anti-tax, pro-gun Republican. His interest group ratings are all over the map. Business and gun rights groups typically rate him very highly, labor and and environmental groups have rated him both middling and high over time. The teacher’s union rated him low in 2001, and high in 2005.
All in all, a very confusing assessment, and quite imprecise. So how do we compare Brown to other state legislators, or more generally to other politicians across the country? My research, along with Princeton’s Nolan McCarty, allows us to make precisely these comparisons. Essentially, I use the entirety of state legislative voting records across the country, and I make them comparable by calibrating them through Project Votesmart’s candidate surveys.
By doing so, I can estimate Brown’s ideological score very precisely. It turns out that his score is –0.17, compared with her score of 0.02. Liberals have lower scores; conservatives higher ones.
Brown’s score puts him at the 34th percentile of his party in Massachusetts over the 1995-2006 time period. In other words, two thirds of other Massachusetts Republican state legislators were more conservative than he was. This is evidence for my claim that he’s a liberal even in his own party. What’s remarkable about this is the fact that Massachusetts Republicans are the most, or nearly the most, liberal Republicans in the entire country!
Of course, while the Republicans here are liberal, Democrats are incredibly liberal. In comparison to them, Brown is a conservative. He was also the most conservative of the tiny handful of Republican State Senators.
Perhaps the most important context in which Brown can be considered a conservative is the electoral one. We’re talking about Massachusetts here, one of the most liberal states in the country, delivering 62% of the vote for Barack Obama, in comparison to 36% of the vote for John McCain. And as liberal as Brown may be, he’d be far more conservative than Edward Kennedy (-.92), or Martha Coakley (no score as she has never been a legislator, nor has she filled out the Votesmart survey – but ACORN has given her its top rating). And the third party candidate here, Libertarian Joseph L. Kennedy (no relation to the famous ones), is not a viable candidate nor is he palatable to mainstream conservatives relative to Brown.
In other words, what began as a puzzle turns out not to be much of oneat all. It makes perfect sense that Scott Brown, a liberal Massachusetts Republican, has attracted Republican and conservative support. He’s perfectly suited for his liberal state electorate. Dede Scozzafava, in fact considerably more conservative than Scott Brown was not nearly so well matched to her intended constituency, the relatively conservative 23rd District that had returned moderate conservative John McHugh since the 1992 election.
What this shows, however, is that the conservative base in the United States, far from dragging their party moblike into an unelectable extreme, has made the decentralized decision to support the realistically best candidate they can relative to the context in which he’s being elected. The 23rd special district election can also be seen in this light; throwing Scozzafava overboard made far more sense in the context of that electorate.
Because he knows how to spell the name of the state?
Or perhaps they just wanna see a dem in a key state get trounced.
Because he’s at least more freakin conservative than Coakley, can you understand that.
Because he will cast the one needed vote against healthcare so the dims won’t have 60 votes. The healthcare bill needs to be defeated at all costs.
Uh, because he’s not a total idiot like Coakley.
Get Brown in now, let him be the 41st vote to block Healt Takeover, then we can deal with the RINOs in November.
You think it’d be better to have Martha Coakley in there?
At this point, I don’t even care that he is not a TRUE Conservative. Who cares, he can kill ObamaCare, that is all that matters to me
Who’s more conservative, him or Coakley? Nuff said. ;-)
He is not the Dem machine politics candidate that is why.
Would you rather have the looney lib sock puppet of Obama’s?
Let me just hazard a wild a$$ guess:
Two choices, Coakley and Brown.
Coakley is a flaming little leftist Nazi who loves killing babies and locking up innocent citizens for 18 years. She never saw a tax she didn’t like, she is an arrogant, elitist B**ch.
Brown is a Republican, Lieutenant Colonel in the National Guard. Promises to vote against Obamacare.
Which one to choose? Which one to choose? I just don’t know.
Because he’s in MA and she isn’t? Just a thought.
Well, he recognizes there are terrorist in Afghanistan.
There was a better option in the NY race than Dede. In this case Scott Brown is the only option. Also one more vote in the Senate is a bigger deal than one more in the house.
So says some guy with a blog.. From everything I can see, while Brown isn’t perfect, he is well to the Right of Scuzzy.
Also, there isn’t a more Conservative candidate in that race, unlike Scuzzy’s race.
Precisely.
This election is not multiple-choice.
Another Losertarian extremist seeking to impose communism thorugh electing Democrats to spite republicans.
In other words, what began as a puzzle turns out not to be much of oneat all. It makes perfect sense that Scott Brown, a liberal Massachusetts Republican, has attracted Republican and conservative support. He’s perfectly suited for his liberal state electorate. Dede Scozzafava, in fact considerably more conservative than Scott Brown was not nearly so well matched to her intended constituency, the relatively conservative 23rd District that had returned moderate conservative John McHugh since the 1992 election.What this shows, however, is that the conservative base in the United States, far from dragging their party moblike into an unelectable extreme, has made the decentralized decision to support the realistically best candidate they can relative to the context in which he’s being elected. The 23rd special district election can also be seen in this light; throwing Scozzafava overboard made far more sense in the context of that electorate.
Yeah?
Does Scott Brown support ACORN and, Card Check?
Sure Scott Brown is nowhere near as conservative as I'd want, but this is bluest of the blue Massachusetts, and right now, all I am interested in, is someone that will stop the Democratic Party super majority in the Senate. As long as he is going to vote against 0bamacare and help to stop 0bozo’s communist agenda, I am gonna back him for now.
Not to mention Scott Brown actually won his primaries, while Scozzafava was selected in smoke filled backrooms. Plus Massachusetts is very liberal, while NY23 was a safe conservative seat, yet the local Republican Party idiots chose the biggest liberal they could find anyway.
Why do conservatives support him? Because his election could stop the Obamacare and may scare Democrats into backing off the advancement of a far-left agenda.
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