Robert David Sullivan 2

Massachusetts takes the president down a peg

Everyone has opinions about Scott Brown's upset in yesterday's special US Senate election in Massachusetts. I expect it to be the No. 1 topic even on the sports talk shows today. I'll have more to say about the political geography as we get closer to another statewide election (yes, just 10 months away!), but the Electoral Map has already beaten me to the punch by putting yesterday's results into the context of the "10 Regions of Massachusetts Politics," noting that Brown appears to have won six of them. Biggest surprise may be that Martha Coakley seems to have won affluent, suburban Shopper's World (west of Boston), but it didn't come close to saving her, thanks to Brown's overwhelming strength in middle-class suburbs farther out from the state's urban core.

As for the policy implications, I've already likened the selection of Brown to voters using the "nuclear option," but that imagery may not be correct, given that Brown is essentially being sent to Washington to vote "no" on big, dramatic plans. The consensus is that voters are frustrated with the state of the economy, but Brown and the GOP are counseling us to sit tight and ride things out without another stimulus plan or any kind of sweeping regulatory reform. (There is talk of tax cuts, but that seems unrealistic, given that the Republicans have shown no appetite to significantly cut government spending.)

Scott Brown, the primal scream, and the nuclear option

Has there ever been a more important special congressional election than the Senate race in Massachusetts on Tuesday? I honestly can't think of one.

Hub Blog has a great roundup of coverage, including a lot of agonized comments about how they want their votes to be interpreted by the political punditry. One reader: "Let me say emphatically that my vote for [Republican Scott] Brown isn't a vote against Obama." Good luck with that. The Globe's Jeff Jacoby has already written the national spin:  

A year ago, Americans were enchanted with their new president. Today they are suffering from severe buyer’s remorse. Massachusetts may be the bluest state, but voters here are fed up too.

The Globe's Joan Vennochi dissents by saying that voters may punish Democratic nominee Martha Coakley because they're dissatisfied with local Democratic pols like Deval Patrick and Sal DiMasi. (Maybe so, but Jacoby's spin is what will play in Washington.)

If I had to predict, I'd say Coakley will pull out a win, but only because a Brown victory would be such a jolt -- like NASCAR eclipsing the Boston Red Sox in this state, or chitterlings becoming more popular than clam chowder. 

Andrew Sullivan calls the surge for Brown the manifestation of a "nihilist, populist, primal scream." I think of it as another example of a "nuclear option" (a term first coined here) in its extreme political effects. What could they be?

Brown takes lead, universal health care takes a dive

Contradicting a Boston Globe poll of a few days ago that showed Martha Coakley ahead by 15 points and a slim plurality in favor of the health care reform bill now in Congress, Suffolk University has just released a poll with Scott Brown ahead by 4 points and a clear majority against health care reform.

If true, I wonder if the real reason "liberal lion" Ted Kennedy got re-elected all those times was that he was good at steering defense contracts to Massachusetts. 

Is the state really going to pull an Emily Litella and say "never mind" after giving Kennedy 47 years in the Senate? We'll find out on Tuesday.

Coakley's impression on one P-town/DC correspondent

Andrew Sullivan weighs in on our US Senate race and offers the following explanation for the new conventional wisdom that Republican Scott Brown has a shot at victory: "perhaps Martha Coakley is a machine hack who doesn't deserve elevation."

I'm not sure that Sullivan (no relation) is following Bay State politics that closely. The knock on Coakley doesn't seem to be that she's a machine pol (she's never even served in the Legislature!) but that she's bland and overcautious. That is, she's more Michael Dukakis than James Michael Curley.

UPDATE: Sullivan takes a look at Brown and is even more scathing: "He is, in other words, a parody of the brainless bush Republican, mixed with Romney-like cynicism."

Still worrying about shrillness

This is fairly depressing to read in 2010. The Dallas Morning News has an analysis of an upcoming debate among the GOP candidates for governor in Texas, including incumbent Rick Perry and US Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. Christy Hoppe drags out the old Mars vs. Venus trope and says that Perry "must stay steady and calm." As for Hutchison:

Kay Bailey Hutchison, in her fervor to score political points, must not come across as too "shrill" – a word reserved almost exclusively to describe women in debates.

She must avoid a high-pitched tone and anything that resembles scolding. What comes across as forceful for a man is sometimes seen as churlish in a woman.

Are journalists still getting paid to come up with reinforce the idea that confident women are "shrill"? Why not go all the way and say that women candidates must be careful not to come off as heretics?

Scott Brown as Goliath killer?

The American Spectator's Jeffrey Lord compares Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown to Harris Wofford, the Democrat who won a special Senate race in Pennsylvania in 1991 by focusing on the need for health care reform -- and whose victory presaged a Democratic win in the 1992 presidential election. In this case, however, Brown is standing athwart the current health care reform bill yelling "Stop!"

From the Spectator:

What does the emergence of Scott Brown really mean?

It means that win-lose-or-draw, Scott Brown is already the Harris Wofford of 2010. Like Wofford he has played the role of the little-known, no-chance David going up against a political Goliath with health care as his sling-shot. But unlike Wofford, Brown's sling shot is the promise of effectively stopping government-controlled health care in its tracks, while tying it Wofford-like to corruption -- an argument made easy by the Ben Nelson "Cornhusker Kickback." [See explanation here.]

Each registered voter costs Oregon $4.51 in paperwork

That's according to a new report from the Pew Center for the States, which treats Oregon as a case study to see how much state governments spend on maintaining their voter rolls. The authors say that the $9.7 million Oregon spent in 2008 could have been reduced by using less paper and more binary code:

Innovative, cost-saving steps toward modernization have already been implemented by some states. For example, Delaware reduced its labor costs by $200,000 annually with its eSignature practice that requires every visitor to the Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to register to vote, update their record or decline to do so and then electronically syncs the data with the state election office. In Phoenix, Arizona, an online registration costs an average of 3 cents to process versus at least 83 cents for a paper registration form.

More good strategy from Coakley?

Dan Kennedy wonders whether Democratic US Senate nominee Martha Coakley is insisting that Libertarian nominee Joe Kennedy be included in debates to ensure that people are aware he isn't that Joe Kennedy. More evidence that her shrewd sense of strategy may make her the Bay State's first woman senator?

Martha Coakley and the myth that women can't get elected in Massachusetts

I’ve never really bought the idea that Massachusetts is particularly hostile toward women as political candidates. (See this weekend's story in the Boston Globe, as well as a different take on the topic by my CommonWealth colleague Alison Lobron.) We rank 17th in the percentage of state legislators who are women, and we’ve had plenty of women mayors across the state. As for the idea that the “old boys’ network” has blocked the progress of female politicos, it doesn’t explain how Therese Murray got to be president of the state Senate, or how Patricia McGovern was one of the most powerful members of the Senate back in the 1980s.

Indeed, a chief reason why we haven’t elected a woman governor is that Bay State voters have a strong bias against “next in line” candidates, or insiders who work their way up the ladder, for that position. Michael Dukakis, Bill Weld, Mitt Romney, and Deval Patrick all leapfrogged over establishment candidates to capture the Corner Office. But all of the major women candidates for governor over the past 20 years have been precisely the kind of pseudo-incumbent that turns off voters looking for change.

Evelyn Murphy, Jane Swift, and Kerry Healey were all lieutenant governors whose (male) mentors weren’t terribly popular, and they seemed to offer more of the same. Patricia McGovern, who didn’t get past the Democratic primary in 1998, was an effective and respected leader in the state Senate, but legislative leaders almost never advance to higher office here. (Ask George Keverian and Tom Birmingham.)

Gay marriage was roadkill on I-95 in Maine

Matthew Gagnon has put together some cool maps showing the difference between the last gay-rights victory in Maine (when an anti-discrimination law was upheld in 2005) and last week's defeat for gay marriage. The dark-brown communities on this map are places that switched from "pro" to "anti" gay. (I know it's not that simple, but I agree with Gagnon that these cities and towns made the difference in the outcome.) The red line represents Interstate 95.

As Gagnon notes, "The people who were receptive to voting for gay rights in 2005, and thus open to a good argument, but voted against gay marriage in 2009 were middle class suburbanites in the small to medium sized satellite towns that were within striking distance of larger cities and transportation corridors." It's great analysis; go read the whole thing.