“The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states
and blue states,” Barack Obama said at the 2004 Democratic National
Convention. In the presidential election four years later, he
turned some traditionally red states blue. A little over a year
into his presidency, he is turning them red again.
No matter how you slice and dice it, this is proving true at the
local level as well. Cape Cod has historically been a rare
Republican enclave in Massachusetts. Even John F. Kennedy won only
Provincetown. Obama became the first Democratic presidential
candidate to sweep the Cape. But in this year’s special election
for U.S. Senate, Republican Scott Brown painted those towns (save
Provincetown) red again.
That may not be where it ends. Last week, Rep. Bill Delahunt
(D-Mass.) announced he was retiring rather than running for
re-election this fall — maybe due
to his handling of a 1986 case involving University of
Alabama-Huntsville shooter Amy Bishop,
maybe not. In any event, this is Massachusetts’ most
conservative congressional district. Scott Brown carried it January
with more than 60 percent of the vote.
Democrats are likely to point out that Delahunt never broke a
sweat running for re-election. His toughest race was his first in
1996, when he ran against former state House Republican Leader Ed
Teague. Delahunt beat Teague 54 percent to 42 percent. After that,
he never received less than 64 percent of the vote. But other than
Teague, he never faced a serious opponent. Nor had he ever run in a
hostile political climate.
After his initial election, Democratic Rep. Marty Meehan of
Lowell never got less than 69 percent of the vote. But when he
resigned in 2007, Democrat Niki Tsongas barely held the seat in the
ensuing special election, taking 51 percent to Republican Jim
Ogonowski’s 45 percent. That was back when independents were less
angry at the commonwealth’s Democratic leadership than today. And
that election took place in a somewhat more Democratic
district.
Delahunt’s tenth district contains what political analyst Robert
David Sullivan dubbed “Cranberry Country” — the Republican-leaning
areas of the Cape and South Shore — in his landmark study of the
Massachusetts electorate. This region gave 54 percent of the vote
to Bill Weld in 1990, 59 percent to Paul Cellucci in 1998, and 60
percent to Mitt Romney in 2002. (The 1994 and 2006 gubernatorial
elections were not competitive.) This November, there will be
another gubernatorial election and the Democratic incumbent is
unpopular.
Republicans already have two strong candidates running for the
seat. Former state Treasurer Joe Malone told the Boston
Herald he will enter the race on March 21. State Rep. Jeff
Perry of Sandwich has perhaps the most formidable political
operation on the Cape — he was re-elected with 60 percent even in
the Obama year of 2008 — and has tossed his hat into the ring.
Malone was successful statewide in the 1990s but he won his last
election in 1994. He lost the Republican gubernatorial nomination
four years later for two major reasons: Weld’s 1997 resignation
made Cellucci the incumbent; Malone was thus forced to run a
negative, ideological campaign that was at odds with the nice-guy
image that had made him so popular. Since then, Malone’s successes
in the treasurer’s office have been obscured by a $9 million
embezzlement scandal involving one of his underlings.
Perry may not have these problems. But he’s also never run a
race this big or raised the kind of money it will take to win a
congressional seat. The Democrats may have a lot going against them
in this race, but this is still Massachusetts. The Democratic bench
is deep — state Sen. Robert O’Leary, Norfolk District Attorney
William Keating and wealthy businessman Philip Edmundson — and
nobody is likely to run as poor a campaign as Martha Coakley. No
part of the tenth district has been represented by a Republican
since Margaret Heckler lost a re-election bid in 1982; the district
proper hasn’t had GOP representation since Hastings Keith retired a
decade before that.
But Massachusetts’ independent majority seems to have tired of
one-party rule on Beacon Hill and Capitol Hill. The climate
resembles the early 1990s, when Republicans won the governorship,
lieutenant governorship, state treasurer’s office, and two
congressional seats. Had the Democrats not dispatched liberal Rep.
Chester Atkins in a primary, Republicans may well have picked up a
third congressional seat.
If independents remain disenchanted with Obama, Gov. Deval
Patrick, and the Democrats into November, a congressional district
in one of the country’s bluest states could very well turn red. Or
Brown.
