Blue Mass Group

It’s been more than 5 weeks since the primary; and not only has Markey been leading in every poll, but his lead has exceeded margin of error in every poll. This should not make us complacent: We all know what happened in 2010. I am convinced this is not going to be a replay of 2010: Ed Markey is running a better campaign than Martha Coakley did, Scott Brown was a better candidate in 2010 than Gabriel Gomez has been so far since the primary, and most importantly I believe Democrats learned a valuable lesson 3 years ago about not taking things for granted. Ultimately it’s all about turnout, since modeling likely voters in a special election is a dicey proposition.

All that said, though, as I look at the data, it’s hard to describe the race as close at this point in time.

Publicly released polls since the primary showing Markey’s reported leads compared with each poll’s margin of error. Green line shows the average Markey lead from all polls.

(UPDATE: David Bernstein is reporting that yet another poll, by UMass Amherst, is about to come out. Markey leads 51-40 in that one, almost identical to the topline in the recent NEC poll. Gomez in the last 3 polls: 40, 39, 40. I see a pattern. Bernstein writes that 25% of 2010 Scott Brown voters report they’re not voting for Gomez; Markey leads 82-16 among respondents who did NOT vote in 2010 but are considered likely voters this time. We’ve gotta turn them out on June 25.)

As reported first by Politico, PPP has released their latest poll in our Senate race. Commissioned by the LCV, it shows Ed Markey leading Gabriel Gomez by 8 points, 47 to 39, with 14 percent undecided.

After a brief look at the crosstabs my initial reaction is that the partisan breakdown (41 Dem, 23 Repub, 36 unenrolled) suggests a Republican-friendly sample. Registered Dems outnumber registered Republicans by more than 3-to-1 in Massachusetts, but less than 2-to-1 in this sample. Gomez is taking 20 percent among Democrats in the survey, less than Scott Brown took but more than he’s been getting in other recent polls. Bad news for Gomez: the poll shows unenrolled voters splitting about evenly (41-40 Gomez with 19 percent undecided). Gomez needs to do a lot better among independents to win.

It also seems a little light on women (51-49 women). Women favor Markey by 16 points, 51-35, which is consistent with what we’ve been seeing in the other polling. The race is about even among men (43-42 Gomez with 14 percent undecided). Gomez is at a net unfavorable (39-40-21) thanks to women. 35 percent of female respondents view him favorably, a full 44 percent unfavorably even before last night’s debate performance. Men are the opposite: 43-35. Markey’s at 50-33-17 among women and 38-46-16 among men. Bad news for Gomez: more men disapprove of Markey than say they’ll vote for Gomez.

Interestingly, Markey is killing it among the young (up 46-23 with 31 percent undecided among respondents 18-29), but for the first time he’s also up among voters 65+, leading 50-41 with 9 percent undecided. Could be an aberration, could be that Gomez’s support for Chained CPI is not helping him.

The polls seem to be settling around a 10 point lead for Markey with between 8 and 15 percent of the electorate still undecided. The undecided pool seems to include a lot of Markey-friendly groups, in particular nonwhite voters (favoring Markey 54-19 with 26 percent undecided) and voters under 30 (favoring Markey 46-23 with 31 percent undecided). Let’s reach out to those voters and get Markey in by a wide margin.

Amid all of the sound and fury bubbling up from the IRS examination of the various conservative organizations there’s hope among the Tea Party faithful that this controversy will somehow breathe new life into their movement. But will it be enough to reinvigorate a movement considered to be in disarray, if not politically stalled? Yes the vast majority of Americans holds the IRS in low esteem and is troubled by the revelations that the agency has, if nothing else, tangled rightwing organizations in excessive red tape, even if it hasn’t moved to cripple them altogether. However, as Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times pointed out, this isn’t the first time that an administration has used the IRS against the opposition, even though, to date, there’s no evidence that President Obama ordered any such action.

While the wild eyed voices on Capitol Hill have been bellowing for the impeachment of the president, the more level headed among them, and among conservative political pundits, have counseled caution least the Tea Party claque in Congress overplay its hand with negative consequences for 2014. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a meticulously detailed piece outlines the vast differences between Watergate and the current IRS controversy. It is an analysis that undermines the very argument being made by the far right for the impeachment of President Obama: “Those who bother to read these historical snippets will find many important departures and only tenuous parallels between the Obama Administration’s IRS affair and Richard Nixon’s Watergate-era IRS scandal. A principal distinction is the ingredient of direct presidential involvement. President Nixon was the fulcrum, the visionary and the principal conspirator in his various capers to use the IRS as a political weapon. Nixon personally directed and persistently harangued his staff to audit, investigate and gather dirt on his enemies for personal purposes. Nixon went to reckless extremes even punishing IRS agents who refused to participate in his vendetta. A mean-spirited viciousness and his contagious enthusiasm for law breaking were also distinctive Nixon bailiwicks. In contrast, there is no evidence that Obama even knew of the IRS investigations which were presided over by Donald Shulman, a Bush appointee. The most recent evidence indicate that the Tea Party audits resulted not from intentional political targeting of conservatives from the sheer preponderous of Tea Party applications among the hundreds of 501(c)(4) tax exemption requests that deluged a tiny understaffed IRS field office.”

But while it’s important to note the fact that, to date, the current scandal doesn’t even come close to approximating the severity of Watergate as an assault on the Constitution, there is evidence that Tea Party organizations have pushed the limits of what was politically legitimate. That in turn has increased the attention given these groups by the IRS, which isn’t necessarily unwarranted or beyond the pale of legitimate agency operations. In the article “Groups Targeted by I.R.S. Tested Rules on Politics”, referenced below, two political reporters, Nicholas Confessore and Michael Luo, detail the many activities undertaken by conservative organizations over the past few years that have given rise to legitimate questions on the part of IRS agents who have conducted these examinations. Have those agents been overzealous, perhaps, but at the same time those agents wouldn’t be looking into these groups if they didn’t have a reason to believe that somehow these organizations hadn’t run afoul of the law. The IRS simply doesn’t have the luxury of excess manpower with which to carry out such a political wild goose chase no matter who might have requested such a thing. Likewise the claim by conservative columnist Peggy Noonan, a tireless critic of Barack Obama, that conservatives generally have been singled out for IRS harassment has been debunked prima facie as well by Nate Silver, as referenced below.

As you may have heard, Gabriel Gomez pretty much sh!t the bed last night when asked about abortion.  He said that he supports imposing a 24-hour waiting period for abortions – something that right now does not exist in Massachusetts – yet he also doesn’t support changing any laws.  Huh?  He also says that he doesn’t want to change Roe v. Wade, yet he would vote for a Supreme Court Justice who would do just that (there are now four votes on the Court to overrule Roe).  What??

Watch for yourself.

David Bernstein’s take on that exchange seems right to me:

It was a mess, for many reasons—not least that he vowed to never support a change in the law, and declared his support for a change in the law, in a single 60-second answer.

But it was particularly striking to me because it was almost verbatim the exact same thing Mitt Romney said when running for governor in 2002—personally pro-life, politically pro-choice, promise to never change the law in any way. Pro-choice Bay Staters never forgave themselves for falling for it then, so it seems like a really bad idea to invoke the memory, especially while admitting that you don’t mean it.

Can’t say it enough times: our differently-winged friends at Red Mass Group were right when they declared Gomez “simply not ready for primetime.”

(UPDATE: David S. Bernstein has revised the transcript of his exchange with Gomez, expanding on Gomez’s last answer.)

I was busy tonight at a big debate watch party and watching the Bruins’ dramatic double-overtime win, putting them up 3-0 on the Pittsburgh Penguins in the Eastern Conference Finals, so I didn’t take any notes on tonight’s (last night’s?) first debate between Ed Markey and Gabriel Gomez. But I had to pass on David Bernstein’s piece about it.

Bernstein found the debate pretty boring, and thought Gomez was much improved from his primary debate performance. I personally thought the debate was OK and found Gomez quite off-putting and condescending (à la Scott Brown in 2012), starting from his opening line: “After 37 years in D.C., welcome back to Boston.”

Perhaps channeling “As you can see, she’s not,” the line that wrote Scott Brown out of the 2012 Senate race, Gabriel Gomez continued with his “pond scum” campaign theme in the first moments of last night’s Senate debate. Boston.com:

The pat words of thanks to the debate’s hosts – WBZ and the Globe – were scarcely out of his mouth before he turned to Markey, saying, “After 37 years in D.C., welcome back to Boston.

“Closed-minded.” “Rigid.” “Old-fashioned.” All phrases that come to mind. But say one thing for Gomez, he is running exactly as College Republicans report is typical for contemporary GOP nominees. “Our research finds … a dismal present situation” the group observed in comprehensive 95-page study released this week.

The Angry Republican is a stock character that can win in some parts of the country, especially states of the former Confederacy, but is not popular in 21st century Massachusetts, except in some of the undrained swamps of local political discourse. As soon as Brown started to channel his inner Tea Party, he lost. Here, Gomez effectively dropped his stick at the face off.

Full Globe coverage by Jim O’Sullivan is here. What did you think of the debate?

For voters who care about women’s health – i.e. the vast majority of Massachusetts voters – it is telling and deeply troubling to see Senator Mitch McConnell step into the U.S. Senate race. Senator McConnell has led his party’s efforts on Capitol Hill to turn back the clock on women. He has voted against equal pay for women and supports private companies who want to deny women health insurance coverage for birth control. Now, he’s counting on Gomez to join his regime and be another vote against women’s health.

Gomez claims he will stand up to his own party when it comes to some issues, but he continues to dodge questions about women’s health and keep voters in the dark. Voters don’t want to play guessing games – we already did that for two years with Scott Brown.

Voters want a leader they can trust to stand up for women. That leader will be Ed Markey.

As a U.S. Representative, Congressman Markey has received a 100 percent rating from the Planned Parenthood Action Fund for his votes against legislation that would have restricted access to safe and legal abortion, and for his votes in support of comprehensive sex education, birth control access, and funding for Planned Parenthood.

Congressman Markey supported the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the single biggest advancement in women’s health in a generation, which Gabriel Gomez would vote to repeal. During the congressional debate on the ACA, Congressman Markey also opposed the Stupak-Pitts amendment that would have effectively banned health coverage of abortion in the new health insurance marketplaces. How Gomez would vote on a measure like the Stupak amendment is yet another question he has refused to answer.

We are proud to stand with the Planned Parenthood Action Fund to support Congressman Ed Markey for U.S. Senate – a vocal and consistent leader for women’s health.

Now that was teamwork. WTG!

Markey just put out a new ad highlighting Gomez’s positions and his laughable attempt to rebrand himself as a “New Kind of Republican” whatever that means.

By Gomez’s standards, using his own words is mean. Maybe Gomez really is a new kind of Republican, just ask Mitch McConnell.

Random thought: I just received the following email from one of the two candidates running for Senate.  It’s reprinted in full, except for the signature.  Guess which one sent it.

From: Candidate X

Subject: Breaking: “Toss up”

Date: June 5, 2013 11:48:59 AM EDT

To: blue@bluemassgroup.com

“The highly respected Cook Political Report has just changed its rating on the Massachusetts US Senate race from ‘Lean Democrat’ to ‘Toss Up.’”

– Boston Magazine, 5/30/2013

Dear Friend,

19 days out from Election Day, pundits are now calling our race a “toss up.”

The final FEC deadline of this campaign is midnight tonight. And with our race this tight, we need to make it count.

We need $50,000 by midnight tonight. We cannot miss this mark. Contribute $5 or more right now to help.

Between single digit polls and the disgusting personal attacks coming from the other side, there’s a lot we need to do to fight back. In a toss up race, our ground game makes all the difference.

We need boots on the ground, ads on the air, responses ready to go. We need to keep our staff at full force, our volunteers on the march, and it will all depend on whether or not we can afford it.

Help us blast through this $50,000 goal. Contribute whatever you can, even if it’s just $5, today.

This is the final stretch of the campaign. We have to leave everything we have out on the field.

There’s no time to sit back and watch from the sidelines — every contribution can make the difference.

Help us reach this last $50,000 FEC goal. Contribute right now.

Thank you for your support.

It’s remarkable how generic campaign fundraising has gotten, no?

First, as I noted about 10 days ago, the National Republican Senatorial Committee started pitching the line that Markey vs. Gomez was indeed a national race that was a key part of the goal to  ”build a new Republican majority in the Senate.”  Then, famously, Senate GOP Minority Leader Mitch McConnell lent his name to the effort, generating national headlines and helping Markey (with an assist from Elizabeth Warren) raise a big pile of money in the process.

And today we learn that Marco Rubio has also weighed in on Gomez’s behalf.  Rubio’s message is just as stark as the others, if not even more so.  From his email to supporters (email, no link):

We don’t have to wait until 2014 for a major victory.

In just three weeks, Republicans have a chance to take a huge step toward replacing Harry Reid with a Republican Senate Majority Leader.

The Massachusetts special election is right around the corner, and Gabriel Gomez needs our help…

I started the Reclaim America PAC to help win tough races and Reclaim a Republican majority…. Together we can see to it that Gabriel Gomez is the first victory on our drive to a GOP Senate majority.

So, there you have it, laid out with a clarity that nobody could miss.  If Gomez wins, Republicans are closer to controlling the Senate, and Mitch McConnell is closer to becoming Majority Leader.

Asked about precisely this problem, which of course will drive Massachusetts voters away from him and toward Ed Markey in droves, Gomez hilariously tried to sidestep.

Asked how he would respond to Republican pressure to join in the party’s filibusters, Gomez said he will not kowtow to anyone in Washington. “I’m not going to be in the back pocket of any group or anybody. I will be my own person,” he said.

I have no idea what that means.

Asked who he would support for Senate majority leader, Gomez said, “I’ve got to see who’s available….who is the best person to advance our country forward.”

HAHAHAHA!!  Let me help you, Gabriel.  There will be two people “available” for the job of majority leader: Harry Reid, and Mitch McConnell.  One of them is raising money hand over fist for you; the other wants you to lose.  Which one will you vote for, if you win?