Hillarysworld

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January 15, 2010, 6:59 pm

From Bay State to Red State?

By TOBIN HARSHAW

Strike One: “The mission in Afghanistan was to go in because we believed that the Taliban was giving harbor to terrorists … They’re gone. They’re not there anymore.”

Strike Two: “As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?”

Strike Three: “You can have religious freedom but you probably shouldn’t work in the emergency room.”

Will there be joy in Beantown if Mighty Coakley strikes out? Or, having been born on third base (thanks to the Kennedy clan), will she be able to steal home?

We’re talking about Martha Coakley, the attorney general of Massachusetts and one-time shoo-in to inherit Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat and, most assumed, to seal the deal on President Obama’s health care reform bill. After all, in bluer-than-blue Massachusetts, what threat was any Republican challenger, much less a lowly state senator known primarily for an old Cosmo centerfold and a daughter who was deemed “pretty good” by Simon Cowell?

What a difference a few gaffes can make:

“Riding a wave of opposition to Democratic health-care reform, GOP upstart Scott Brown is leading in the U.S. Senate race, raising the odds of a historic upset that would reverberate all the way to the White House, a new poll shows,” reports Jessica van Sack of the Boston Herald.”The poll shows Brown, a state senator from Wrentham, besting Coakley, the state’s attorney general, by 50 percent to 46 percent, the first major survey to show Brown in the lead. Unenrolled long-shot Joseph L. Kennedy, an information technology executive with no relation to the famous family, gets 3 percent of the vote. Only 1 percent of voters were undecided.”

Could this possibly be for real? Let’s beseech the oracle, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver:

Earlier today I tweeted about how there wasn’t enough evidence to describe the Massachusetts special election as a “toss-up”, as some other forecasters have done, based on the information available to us at that time. Well, now there’s some new evidence. And it isn’t good for Martha Coakley. In particular, the evidence is a Suffolk University poll that shows the Republican, Scott Brown, ahead by 4 points, 50-46.

Suffolk is a fairly average pollster, and I’m sure if we looked long and hard enough, we could develop some critiques of the poll. But there are no particular red flags and … c’mon, let’s not be silly, because there are a lot of other polls that you’d also have to critique in order to discredit the notion that the race is too close to call, including the PPP poll that showed Brown up by one point a week ago (since which time he’s almost certainly gained ground), the Rasmussen poll that showed a 2-point race for Coakley, and Coakley’s internals, which reportedly have shown her ahead by just 2-5 points.

So, what happened? Let’s start with those three quotes above. The first, from a Jan. 11 debate in which Coakley called for a withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, was defended by the folks at MediaMatters, who feel that she was not talking about the Taliban but only Osama bin Laden’s minions: “In the next sentences …

Coakley made clear she was referring to Al Qaeda: ‘They’re in, apparently Yemen, they’re in Pakistan. Let’s focus our efforts on where Al Qaeda is and not always decide that we need to …’ ” True, she may well have been making that specific distinction between terrorist groups — but given that an Al Qaeda double agent had killed seven C.I.A. officers in Afghanistan less than a fortnight earlier, voters might be excused for failing to give her a break.

The Fenway Park comment came in an interview with The Boston Globe in which she bristled “at the suggestion that, with so little time left, in an election with such high stakes, she is being too passive” and mocked a video of Brown glad-handing in the shadow of the Green Monster. This may seem insignificant to those who’ve never visited Red Sox Nation, but as any New York Yankee could have told Coakley, you really don’t want to anger this guy.

The final unforced error came on Thursday in a radio interview with the self-described voice of reason, Ken Pittman, responding to a question about medical workers who object to dispersing contraceptives on religious grounds. Carol Platt Liebau of TownHall thinks this may play worse in liberal Boston than outsiders would expect: “This is a statement that deserves as much attention as it is likely to get. It may well to have quite a severe impact on Coakley, especially in Boston — as it should. That’s because,I was at school in Cambridge, I was shocked to realize how many Bostonians are still actively aware of their Irish ancestors confronting prejudice in their early years here, complete with signs stating that ‘No Irish Need Apply.’ How will they feel about Coakley’s apparent willingness to hang a sign on the doors of emergency rooms around the country stating, ‘No Catholics Need Apply’?”

O.K., that’s all part of the fun give-and-take of any tight election (and we haven’t even mentioned strikes four and five). Obviously, there’s something larger going on here, and it’s hard not to see the race as a referendum on three separate issues: health care reform; the Democratic Party heading into the 2012 midterms; and (the suddenly vulnerable) President Obama himself. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson lays out the stakes:

Brown’s victory would give Republicans 41 seats in the Senate, enough to break the Democrats’ filibuster-proof margin by a single vote. In other words, Tuesday’s impact would extend beyond health care. It would hurt the Democrats chances to pass a jobs bill, which is already suffering in the Senate; a financial regulation bill which already receive zero Republican support; a cap and trade with dwindling prospects even though there are some Republicans like Lindsay Graham who have expressed interest in working with Democrats on climate change legislation; and immigration reform …

That said, health care reform might be safe — for a while. The interim senator Paul Kirk is a Democrat who has promised to vote for health care if he isn’t displaced first. Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin has signaled that a final winner from Tuesday’s vote could take more than a week to determine, because a federal vote allows for 10 extra days for military and absentee ballots to come in. Another source told the Boston Herald that the vote might not be certified until February 20. If that’s true, it gives the Democrats a lot of time to hammer out the final details.

That may be true, but according to Byron York of the Washington Examiner, many Democrats are preparing to avoid the collateral damage of a Coakley loss:

Some Democrats, eager to distance Obama from any electoral failure, are beginning to compare Coakley to Creigh Deeds, the losing Democratic candidate in the Virginia governor’s race last year. Deeds ran such a lackluster campaign, Democrats say, that his defeat could be solely attributed to his own shortcomings, and should not be seen as a referendum on President Obama’s policies or those of the national Democratic party.

The same sort of thinking is emerging in Massachusetts. “This is a Creigh Deeds situation,” the Democrat says. “I don’t think it says that the Obama agenda is a problem. I think it says, 1) that she’s a terrible candidate, 2) that she ran a terrible campaign, 3) that the climate is difficult but she should have been able to overcome it, and 4) that Democrats beware — you better run good campaigns, or you’re going to lose.”

Thompson, too, envisions the Democrats’ worst nightmare:

But here’s the X-factor. If Coakley loses, recriminations follow. Pundits would break down the defeat along various lines: 1) She was a horrible candidate. 2) Democrats didn’t show up at the polls because they assumed victory. 3) Health care reform’s growing unpopularity and the Democrats’ perceived dithering and weakness contributed to Coakley’s erosion. 4) “The Tea Parties Win! In the very state where colonists first rose up against the tyranny of the Old World, the American People took a stand against the Leftist Agenda and dumped the tea of tyrannical over-reach into the Bay of Oblivion…” The first two will be liberal explanations. The third will be the centrist read. And that last one is made ready-to-order for Glenn Beck and his ilk.

Brown’s victory would represent both a tactical blow to the filibuster-proof majority and a mojo killer, which could make liberal Democrats start to wonder whether they could be Coakleyed in November. That would tie huge anchors to the Democrats already plodding economic agenda. Stay tuned. Tuesday is huge.

So how are liberal bloggers dealing with the drama? Steve Kornacki has an unusual scapegoat: John McCain. He explains:

This actually makes the point I was arguing last week — that the election of a Democratic president and robust Democratic congressional majorities in 2008 essentially ruined a playbook that had worked brilliantly for the party in blue states for the last decade-and-a-half — even more true … Had John McCain been elected last year, then all of the above could still be true — and Coakley would be winning by 30 points. But with Republicans locked out power in Washington, swing voters in Massachusetts — and every other blue state — are, for the first time since 1994, ready to blame their problems on Democrats and use the GOP as a protest vehicle. And with 10 percent unemployment, voters have a lot of anger to vent.

Steve M. at No More Mr. Nice Blog, however, cites Massachusetts’s longstanding reactionary bias:

I should point out that there were hints of an anti-Democrat backlash in Massachusetts even before Obama was elected. In the fall of 2007, Nikki Tsongas, Paul Tsongas’s widow, ran for his House seat in the state’s 5th district — and barely eked out a win against Republican Jim Ogonowski, the brother of a 9/11 pilot. That race was also the focus of right-wing attention; wingnut writing on the race reads just like what’s being written about Coakley-Brown.

What was that a backlash against? Democrats weren’t even running anything. Oh, yeah — they’d controlled Congress for, oh, about ten months.

Well, that’s enough for the right to gin up a backlash. That’s because the right is always promulgating and nurturing its ongoing narrative of the evil nature of liberals and Democrats. That’s a 24/7/365 operation. And so, as soon as there’s a contest, right-wingers and swing voters have already heard plenty about the evils of, say, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

Not sure what he thinks liberals are up to 24/7/365 — singing the praises of Mitch McConnell? — but he’s right that the Tsongas race (her first name is actually Niki), which seemed like such an anomaly at the time, now seems more like a portent. So how are Massachusetts voters dealing with the changed landscape? Ann Althouse has a few good questions, if no satisfactory answers: “When everyone knows turnout is important, how do polls affect what people do? Why do people lose ‘intensity’ when they think their candidate is likely to lose? Do people lapse into the passive observation of what seems to be destiny — and forget that they are voters? Or is there something particular about the Coakley/Brown race, in that people assumed Coakley should easily win and never thought too much about her, never bonded with her or worked for her? Now that Scott Brown is surging, they are inert and fatalistic?”

Well, there’s no inertia at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. “President Barack Obama will campaign for Massachusetts Senate candidate Martha Coakley on Sunday … a sign that Democrats believe the seat remains winnable enough that it’s worth risking the president’s prestige,” reported Politico’s Ben Smith. “The move to put the Obama’s brand on the line is not one that this White House ever takes lightly - and in this case, it carries great risk should the Republican, state Sen. Scott Brown, defeat Coakley.”

Well, that should have Team Brown running scared, right? Nope, says Hotline’s Reid Wilson:

In reality, the situation is a lot worse for Dems than it appears. According to strategists familiar with internal polls conducted for Coakley’s campaign, the consequences of Obama’s visit could produce a net-negative effect on Coakley’s campaign. Obama has a net favorable rating in MA, according to public and private polls. A Suffolk Univ. poll out today shows 55% of MA voters viewing him favorably, while just 35% see him unfavorably. But the intensity of voters who view him unfavorably, or who disapprove of his job performance, is so high that an appearance with Coakley could bring out more GOPers ready to vote for Brown than it could Dems set on their nominee.

“Obama is radioactive in polls,” said one senior Dem operative who has seen the campaign’s internal numbers. “Every time they dropped his name in a poll, it was awful. So you just can’t take those kinds of chances.”

So, if the Obama magic isn’t up to snuff, what’s a Dem to do about health care? “Finish up the House-Senate negotiations quickly and hold a vote before Scott Brown is seated,” suggests Jonathan Chait at the New Republic. “Republicans will scream, but how could they scream any louder? It’s a process argument of murky merits that will be long forgotten by November.” He has some follow-up moves as well:  [snip]

More . . .

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Very good read.