For those who doubt that Republican Scott Brown can win today’s
special Senate election in Massachusetts, the Bay State’s more
conservative northern neighbor shows why a win for him is not
impossible.
Democrats took once-red New Hampshire after former Republican
Gov. Craig Benson and the state Republican Party were tainted
with the stink of corruption, President George W. Bush was ruled
by general popular consensus to be incompetent, and the state
Republican Party had become so comfortable in power that it lost
many of its own supporters as well as the rising rolls of
centrist, independent voters by falling on tired talking points
rather than continuing to develop a message that had broad
appeal.
The result was a Democratic rout. John Lynch became governor in
2004 on a theme of honesty and fiscal responsibility, Reps. Paul
Hodes and Carol Shea-Porter were elected in 2006 on anti-Bush,
pro-fiscal responsibility messages, Democrats took the
Legislature that year by tacking to the center and exposing the
hollowness of the GOP message, which was mostly to repeat “tax
cuts!” ad nauseam. Then in 2008, Jeanne Shaheen won a U.S. Senate
seat by campaigning not against Sen. John Sununu, but George W.
Bush and Sununu’s big-spending colleagues in Washington.
There are parallels in Massachusetts today. The Bay State’s
Democratic Party reeks of corruption and hackery. Three
consecutive House speakers, all Democrats, have resigned amid
corruption scandals. That’s every House speaker since 1991.
In 2004, legislative Democrats changed the Senate succession law
when Republican Mitt Romney was governor to prevent him from
naming John Kerry’s replacement should Kerry win the White House.
They repealed the law that mandated a gubernatorial appointment
and replaced it with one mandating a special election. Then last
year they changed it again when Ted Kennedy was ill to prevent a
Republican from winning his seat in the very special election
they created for the sole purpose of preventing a Republican from
taking the seat.
Though Democrats still outnumber Republicans 3-1 in
Massachusetts, independents are now a majority (51 percent) of
voters, and those sorts of shenanigans have not gone unnoticed.
(Similarly, independents grew to outnumber Republicans in New
Hampshire in the last decade, helping give recent elections to
Democrats.)
For her part, Martha Coakley is the poster child for
overconfident politicians who have felt so protected by their
party’s dominance that it never occurred to them to actually work
on articulating a message that would appeal to middle-of-the-road
voters.
Like Republicans in New Hampshire just prior to the Democratic
takeover, she is primarily repeating party talking points
designed to win over her base. She has not been focused on
reaching out to the independent voters who now make up the
largest portion of the Massachusetts electorate. Scott Brown, on
the other hand, has done exactly that. He has campaigned hard for
those centrist votes.
Coakley is so out of touch with her state that she disdained the
idea of campaigning in front of Fenway Park and referred to
former Red Sox ace Curt Schilling as “a Yankees fan.” That’s
worse than John Kerry’s “Manny Ortiz” slip-up from a few years
ago (in which he combined the names of the Red Sox’ top sluggers
David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez). It reveals her to be entirely
insulated from the people. It was similar to the moment when
George H.W. Bush couldn’t come up with the price of a gallon of
milk.
With the candidate doing so badly, Democrats on Sunday turned to
President Obama, who flew in to save Coakley’s sinking candidacy
by giving another grand speech. But Obama is a large part of the
reason the Democratic Party’s popularity is falling. At least
since this past summer, when he campaigned so vigorously for his
health care reform plan, he has exhibited the same arrogance, the
same tone deaf repeating of canned talking points, that has
Coakley in so much trouble. And he did himself no favors in
Massachusetts when, also last summer, he intervened in the
dispute between the Cambridge Police Department and his friend,
Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Combine an unpopular president with an arrogant, out-of-touch
state party that has been tainted with corruption, and add a
large shift in the electorate toward more independent
registrations, and the 2010 U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts
looks a lot like the last few elections in New Hampshire. This is
somewhat oversimplified, of course, but the parallels are real.
Although they don’t guarantee a Brown victory, they indicate that
the conditions on the ground are ripe for one.
