Well, well, well. Another day, another midterm bloodbath. And this time, unlike 2010, we can’t even be all self-satisfied by looking at how bravely Massachusetts withstood a national Republican juggernaut. There was really only one race that was expected to be close here, and Charlie Baker won that one.
So, what did we learn?
- Polling works, sort of. I’m fond of saying “polling works” after every election – usually, the polls taken within the last couple of weeks of election day correctly spot motion in the race, and as election day approaches, pretty much nail what is going to happen. That kind of happened again, but kind of not. Here in MA, there was an enormous amount of polling, and pretty much all of it correctly detected that Baker had a late advantage. Almost all of it also overstated Baker’s advantage, especially the Globe/SocialSphere, which published the shocking Baker +9 poll followed by its final poll showing Baker +7. Seems pretty clear that that’s never where the race actually was. Closest to the mark were Suffolk (continuing its long streak of doing very good polling inside Massachusetts) which showed Baker +3, and MassINC, which correctly showed Baker at +1. Around the country, too, a lot of polling roughly got the results right, but was way off on the margin. The statistics geeks will no doubt have more to say about all of this over the next several days.
- Massachusetts likes having a Republican Governor. I don’t really see a way around this one. Think about it: in the last 25 years, the only time a Democrat has won a race for Governor is when the Democrat was one of the most gifted campaigners anyone has ever seen. Deval Patrick also had the good fortune to run against two lousy candidates: Kerry Healey, and Charlie Baker 1.0. John Walsh and I got into a little back-and-forth on this subject on Twitter, which you can peruse here.
- We have a new party. Since Evan Falchuk got just over 3% of the vote, his “United Independent Party” will be a real party now. If anyone knows what that actually means going forward, or what he is actually planning to do other than lose another run for Governor, please do let everyone know.
- At least Scott Brown lost again. In all the grim news last night, there was one very bright, shining spot: Jeanne Shaheen won reelection to the Senate in New Hampshire, defeating our old friend Scott Brown, who apparently became the only person in history to lose two US Senate elections to women. Unfortunately, even New Hampshire wasn’t all good news: Maggie Hassan won the Governor’s race and Annie Kuster was reelected to the House, but Carol Shea-Porter lost her House seat to Frank Guinta.
- Money talks, as my co-blogger Bob accurately observes. Paul McMorrow at MassINC, among others, did a great job keeping track of the outside spending in the race for Governor. Among other appalling tidbits: the day before election day, McMorrow could state that “the RGA spent more money last week than Martha Coakley has spent all year.” No wonder Charlie Baker didn’t want to sign a People’s Pledge.
- Tom Menino’s death came at a really bad time for Martha Coakley. Unexpected late events can have an outsized impact on elections, and that seems to me what happened here. Charlie Baker committed a major unforced error in the last debate by telling a story about a fisherman that seems to have been fictional in substantial part, and that generated a flurry of bad headlines and embarrassing press appearances where he was mumbling things about the essence of the story being true, whatever that means. If the press had run with that for another couple of days, who knows how many late-breaking undecideds it might have swung in an already very close race. But Menino’s death took over the front pages for about four straight days, and made it impossible for either campaign to make news in the final stretch – which suited Team Baker just fine.
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eb3-fka-ernie-boch-iii says
The loss was all about the candidate the dems put up. Martha. period.
Ma does not like having a republican governor. It likes having a governor the people dislike the least.
Evan Falchuk aka Mr. Blank was rewarded with votes from people who could never vote for either of the two main candidates.
Money may have been one of many things all needed to give Charlie the small victory but it certainly wasn’t the Tom Brady of the team. More like a good place kicker.
Menino’s death was not significant for either side. The organizations kept on rolling towards election day.
ykozlov says
This one was disappointing. She was one of MaydayPAC’s “reform” candidates as a proponent of public financing of campaigns, and the race looked fairly close. Not only would it be good to have her in Congress fighting for this issue, but the race could have shown that the issue can move votes to win elections. All but two of Mayday’s candidates lost, but hopefully they got some positive data for 2016.
llp33 says
Howie Klein of Down with Tyranny has often written about Rep. Steve Israel and his DCCC doing their darndest for conservadems while shafting progressives in 2012 and 2014.
Gaius Publius, a guest blogger at Digby’s, joins him by convincingly contrasting the two NH House races. Liberal Rep. Shea-Porter’s district is only slightly GOP (R+1), she had a small lead in polls, and she’s won three times. This was a winnable race. The more conservative Dem, Rep. Ann Kuster, holds a Dem district, and was polling well ahead of her challenger. She had also raised a lot of $ already, more than Shea-Porter.
Yet the DCCC and House PAC dumped way more money into Kuster’s campaign. Going by Klein’s figures, they spent more than $4 million on her, vs. only $2.4 million on Shea-Porter. An email from Nancy Pelosi herself (or a ghostwriter) sought support for Kuster by claiming her race was “one of the most competitive races in the country”.
Kuster won with 55%. S-P lost with 48%.
Looks like we need better electoral leadership.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/is-dccc-even-pretending-to-win-tale-of.html
Christopher says
That’s exactly the opposite of the vibe I’ve always gotten.
JimC says
Kuster is a good rep.
CSP is more of a street fighter (I mean that as a compliment), and her loss is a bad one. It’s all the more disappointing because it’s Guinta. Personally I figured she’d be OK because people would be tired of him.
drikeo says
Massachusetts voters get behind an innocuous Republican governor as a check to the Democratic Legislature when the Democrats don’t field a candidate who seems capable of leading the Legislature in a meaningful direction. Baker sold himself as well-meaning and mostly harmless. Coakley inspired no one. It was enough for Baker to eke out a win.
It’s not that voters like it. It’s that a slim majority in non-Presidential years figure it’s a workable default setting.
historian says
Like cover an election and the mayor’s funeral at the same time
williamstowndem says
… and that’s largely what happened around the country. We have to make the case for people to vote for us, and we didn’t … esp at the top of the ticket. We have two years to get our act together for the Presidential race. Time not to mourn, but to get to work!
drikeo says
I don’t think the resolute failure of Question 2 is getting enough focus. I used a little hyperbole in the title, because there have been some patently silly anti-tax questions from the right in past years. Yet the expanded bottle bill may qualify as the least popular idea the left has put on the state ballot.
Question 3 fared immensely better despite also being the target of a well-funded opposition that pounded the electorate with an oily ad campaign. On top of that, Q3 didn’t have established grassroots organizations behind it or the support of prominent political leaders. Also, the case for Q3 was complex. It was a tough sell and it still managed to outperform Q2 by a wide margin. Q3 at least gets to hold its head high as a principled stand against impossible odds. Q2 deserves no such recognition.
Taking a 30-year-old policy initiative and trying to dress it up as progressive was all kinds of dumb. It was oblivious to substantial changes in how people recycle and of the pocketbook issues many people face. The “But it’s no expense if you go through the inconvenience of returning the bottles” argument clearly fell flat. People aren’t shopping in the political arena for new inconveniences.
Q2 didn’t just get defeated, it got swatted like the annoying fly it was. It made the left seem out of touch. Instead the left should have been pushing for the state government to work with municipalities to close the gaps in our recycling programs. It could and should have an issue in the governor’s race. Instead we got dopey ballot question that failed resoundingly.
undercenter says
And thank you for your common-sense observations about this resoundingly silly, counterproductive, ballot initiative.
Patrick says
That probably didn’t help Coakley.
nopolitician says
I am not a party activist. I follow politics, but my interest waxes and wanes with the amount of time I have.
I can say that Martha Coakley was not buzzed about the way that Deval Patrick and Elizabeth Warren were, especially here on this site. When I voted for Elizabeth Warren, I felt like it was a vote for my issues – for economic progressiveness. When I voted for Deval Patrick – when he became *my* candidate – I voted for moving this state forward away from Republicans who had held it back – in the form of more investments for infrastructure, more local aid, and a Democratic approach to things like education, health care, and even how to deal with cities and towns. I donated to both Patrick and Warren – I was compelled to do so. I did not donate to Coakley. Nothing compelling.
Maybe that is just going to happen when you have a Democrat running for a seat already held by a Democrat. It’s easy to get worked up when a Republican is screwing with your city, to want change. It’s not so easy to get worked up when things have been decent over the past 8 years, to yearn for … “what we already have”.
I don’t watch TV news, I read the paper, and I read this site. In all that, I was not presented with how a Martha Coakley administration would improve my life – other than it not being a Charlie Baker administration.
Christopher says
I’ve complained before about candidates being awfully slow to hire field directors this cycle and even yesterday there were fewer volunteers I saw than even for the Markey special let alone the Warren Senate race.
Speaking of volunteers, it’s been a while since I’ve seen Kate’s rules for how to treat volunteers, but I would like to add a couple if they are not already included. First, give volunteers the opportunity to take on the tasks they are comfortable with. I tell people right off that I am not comfortable with direct voter contact, but very much enjoy cutting turf and am fine with data entry. Despite repeated outreach to the local staff I did not get contacted and was later just told that others covered it, which leads to new rule number two – follow up.
I attended a volunteer meeting in Lowell a few weeks ago where they passed around the clipboards to get people to sign up for tasks and shifts, especially for GOTV weekend. I checked off that I would enter data and also told both the local organizer and regional director that I would staff the office on Tuesday (basically as a Staging Location Director). I never heard back for confirmation compared to the Warren and Markey races where I would get calls confirming and reconfirming to the point where it was getting ridiculous. I walked into the office on Monday basically to say election is tomorrow and you’re not answering my emails and are we set for me to come in Tuesday. Turns out they got someone else. I showed up anyway on Tuesday ready to help do something, but the operations were all covered. I stuck around for several hours just in case and did a couple of rounds of lit counting, but for the first time in years left an election office hours before the polls closed because I was twiddling my thumbs. I could have been given significant responsibility for managing, but the way things were going you never would have guessed I was probably the only one in the office with a masters degree in political management.
sco says
But if what I need at a staging location is for people to be on doors or phones and a volunteer says they are unwilling to do so, there’s only so much I can do to keep them busy.
Christopher says
Like I say I filled out the form saying what I would do, but if you really can’t use me it would be nice to at least know my efforts at taking the initiative aren’t being swallowed by a black hole.
Al says
going to turn out to be Ross Perot II on the state level with his mostly self financed new independent party? How did that turn out after the first flush with Clinton and Bush? As for Scooter Brown, glad to see him take the fall, especially after the night Dems had nationally. At least my belief that Jeanne Shaheen was no Martha Coakley as a statewide candidate was validated. She was a strong, aggressive candidate with a history of successfully running and winning top statewide races. She had no losing history like Martha did to drag her down. Funny thing, now Brown has lost two high profile elections to prominent women, within a couple of years. Will he go away now, and I don’t mean to the next possible race, Maine maybe?
Al says
I never heard a thing about it until I got my ballot, and I think I ended up casting a vote against my beliefs as a result. Nice going.
ykozlov says
The non-binding questions are different in different districts, which is part of why you don’t hear much about them. It’s difficult to even say vote N/Y on X because the same question can be different numbers in different places.
Someone posted the list here last week: http://www.sec.state.ma.us/ele/ele14/pubpol14.htm
Patrick says
http://masscitizensforlife.org/2014-election-results/
Christopher says
I don’t think they should be on the ballot myself.
bob-gardner says
I don’t think I’ve gotten any since before the primary. It was just a couple years ago when they were coming in half a dozen at a time (mostly attack fliers against Warren).
David says
mostly local candidates, and I think I got some from the No on 2 crowd.
I suspect they were heavier in the Warren/Brown race because, due to the People’s Pledge, direct mail was one of the only avenues open to special interest money. This time, everyone could go straight to the teevee.