Posted on 01/19/2010 11:41:35 AM PST by goldstategop
Recent historical precedents for a Scott Brown win are obiously few, since the Bay State hasn't elected a Republican to the Senate since the Eisenhower administration. In an excellent piece, Steve Kornacki diagrams the victory strategies of Massachusetts's three most recent GOP statewide office-holders, all of them governors.
Unfortunately, none are strict analogues for Brown's situation. Republican governors William Weld and Paul Celluci, who ran Massachusetts in the 1990s, faced Democratic opponents that were odious to progressives (Weld's opponent John Silber) and unions (Celluci's opponent Harshbarger) on policy grounds. Coakley may have run an awful campaign but, aside from the suggestion that Catholics don't belong in emergency rooms, she hasn't really run afoul of Democrats on their bread-and-butter issues. (Though, as Brown's chief strategist tells Bob Costa at Bay State Report, voters across the spectrum seem to be fired-up about national security, which would definitely break for Brown)
Brown's best bet is probably to emulate Mitt Romney's 2002 gubernatorial run, in which Romney pitched himself as a counterweight to unchecked Democratic power. Like Romney, Brown will have to rack up large margins of victory around Boston’s I-495 beltway, home to independents and recent arrivals from out of state. He is already polling well in three historical bellwethers in the area, and dominates independents across the board.
But in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans three to one, there is no question Brown will have also have to win a non-trivial number of them to his cause to win. There is some evidence that he is doing that: last week’s Suffolk poll showed Brown with at 53/45 lead among voters in union households. As Politico notes, the answer to whether Brown can hold these voters will come from working-class Irish Catholic towns along the South Shore, places like Braintree and Quincy where Obama faired worse than Kerry.
On the other side of the ledger, Coakley will need big urban turnout and at least a 65,000–80,000 edge over Brown in Boston/Cambridge to win. And it wouldn't hurt if the electorate that shows up to vote is both skewed female (she holds an 4–5 point advantage among women) and credulous enough to believe the rape attack ads against Brown.
Turnout is expected to be inordinately high for a special election, with predictions — including from the secretary of the commonwealth — cohering around the 40–50 percent and 2–2.2 million marks.
The last minute get-out-the-vote effort by Coakley has been massive, employing a battalion of as many as 3,500 volunteers, many dispatched by the AFL-CIO and SEIU, to take to the fields and man phone banks. (By contrast, a Brown official has said the campaign had only about 500 volunteers as of the weekend).
But anecdotal evidence, here and elsewhere, suggests that turnout is especially high in the suburbs — Scott Brown strongholds.
There is, of course, still another model Scott Brown could follow to victory. Namely, the Scott Brown model. What we are seeing today is no less than unprecedented, and so historical antecedents are of limited use. As the Brown strategist told Bob, you might as well "throw out the rule book" and wait for the tabulations.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find only things evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelogus
A poll worker will “discover” 30,000 votes (all for Coakley) in the back of her Prius...
First off the last time we elected a Republican to the Senate was 1972. We lost the seat in 1980. I haven’t read the rest of this article but it is not off to a good start.
>>the Bay State hasn’t elected a Republican to the Senate since the Eisenhower administration.
Eisenhower was President in 1966? 1972? Again we forget that Edward Brooke was Senator from early 1967 till early 1979. He was liberal on some issues but he was a Republican.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Brooke
>>Edward William Brooke, III (born October 26, 1919), is an American politician and was the first African American to be elected by popular vote to the United States Senate when he was elected as a Republican from Massachusetts in 1966, defeating his Democratic opponent, Endicott Peabody, 58%–42%. He was also the first African American elected to the Senate since the 19th century, and would remain the only person of African heritage sent to the Senate in the 20th century until Democrat Carol Moseley Braun in 1993. He remains, as of 2009, the last Republican senator from Massachusetts, and the last elected African American member of the U.S. Senate to come from the Republican Party.
MA Senators
1)
1960—Ben Smith placeholder, D
1962—Ted Kennedy D SPECIAL ELECTION (Ted turned 30)
1964—Ted Kennedy D
1970—Ted Kennedy D
1976—Ted Kennedy D
1982—Ted Kennedy D
1988—Ted Kennedy D
1994—Ted Kennedy D (vs. Mitt Romney)
2000—Ted Kennedy D
2006—Ted Kennedy D
Ted died in ‘09, Paul Kirk temp. appointment D
today we hope to elect Scott Brown
2)
1945—Leverett Saltonstall wins special election —R
1966/67 Ed Brooke R
1972 Ed Brooke R
1978 (Brooke beaten by) Paul Tsongas D
1984 John Kerry D(Tsongas retired due to non Hodgkins lymphoma)
1990 John Kerry D
1996 John Kerry D(faced Bill Weld)
2002 John Kerry D
2008 John Kerry D
Per the polling, let’s say Scott gets 65% of the indie vote. Assuming equal participation of D-R-I, that’s 34% right there. Another 10 percentage points for picking up almost all of the GOP vote.
I figure Kennedy will get just north of 1% of the vote, so Scott will need a tad less than 50% to win. If RATS are 37% of the voting electorate, he won’t need all that many of their votes to win. He’s already polling at > 20% of the RAT vote.
In terms of their prospects for this November, I believe that Dems’ worst nightmare is not a Brown victory but rather a Brown loss by a few thousand votes. For at that point more than a few people who were merely pissed become (like me) altogether unhinged.
Don’t get me wrong, we need to elect Brown in order to put an end to the disastrous policies this Administration is putting forward. But anything shy of a clear and clean win by Coakley spells certain doom for the Dems in November.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.