- In the January 2006 caucuses, Patrick swept to a landslide victory in a venue which should have been empahtically unfriendly to him. Consequently, he won the Democratic convention in June.
- Despite a deluge of postiive Gabrieli ads over the summer, Patrick held his own, hovering at around 35% in the polls. Shortly after going on the air, Partick’s support ticked up to about 45%, and he never looked back.
- Patrick’s poll numbers in the general election went from about 24% ahead, down to 13% ahead after the onslaught of LaGuer ads, and rebounded to 24% ahead or so shortly afterwards.
- Last night, Patrick won an emphatic landslide victory, with 56% of the votes to Healey’s 35%, Mihos’s 7%, and Ross’s 2%.
I view the first three of these events as major turning points in the campaign, and I am not sure why they happened. The first event, the caucus victory, could probably be attributed to serious on-the-ground organizing combined with John Walsh’s incisive knowledge about plaing the insider Democratic game. The third event still leaves me a bit baffled. I had a brief chat with Will Hafer about it a little while ago, and he thought that maybe it was because Healey had nothing positive to offer, and so voters responded badly to the negative attacks. Simplistically speaking, if you’re going to go negative, that only means people will pay attention to you. If you don’t give them something to vote for, they’ll get mad at you.
The real miracle, it seems to me, is what happened in the primaries. It makes sense that Patrick would pick up a good bit of support once he got on the air – although 10% is quite a lot of ground to pick up in a three-way race, which speaks to the effectiveness of the ads. What doesn’t make sense to me is the 35% or so of the Democratic primary voters who were with Patrick despite the onslaught of Gabrieli and Reilly ads. The only way to explain this massive bank of support is that the 35% represented Patrick’s die-hard base, the folks like me who were sticking with him come hell or high water.
I’m a bit hesitant to claim that 35% of the Democratic party fits this profile, since it seems so absurdly high to me. That’s 35% of the Deemocratic party which the progressive movement and the Patrick campaign were able to reach through non-traditional media – the blogs, phone calls, and door-to-door visits – and a bit of free media. When you think about how many people voted in the primary, that is an absurd number.
Anyway, I suppose we should not be hesitant to claim our victory. To be sure, Patrick’s campaign did many, many things right; they “got” the idea of engaging the netroots; they “got” the idea of grassroots organizing; they “got” the idea of values-driven messaging and substantive policy proposals. But the core of Patrick’s historic landslide last night came on the back of a powerful Massachusetts progressive movement which proved that it doesn’t need paid media to win statewide elections. That is a breathtaking development in our statewide politics.
Deval won by spending over a year meeting people one by one, in small groups, and making the personal connection. When it was time for the caucuses, thousands of Democrats had met him and talked to him and knew he was worth spending a Saturday morning for. Then we lit-dropped, donated, told our friends, phonebanked, held signs and flocked to rallies.
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The support for Deval held because it was deep, which was because of the effort he had made so long ago to get to know us.
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about the unshakability of Patrick’s supporters. what surprises me is just how many hard-core supporters he had. 35% is an aweful lot of support in a 3-way race, before spending anything on paid media.
The slogan “together we can” resonates a lot better with voters versus “I’m going to lower taxes by .5%”. This election meant a lot more to the people that frequent this site but to the typical voter its just a bunch of bad television ads, a few meaningless slogans and debates nobody watches. Lets not forget that for every criticism Patrick made of Healey there has been a Democratic supermajority that has always had the power to override those decisions. Finally we have a Democratic Governor because Im sick of the Beacon Hill Salute.
that Deval talks about is for real. What created the depth is that when each of us who had personal contact with Deval’s leadership spread the word through door-to-door and personal contact, the people we spoke with could trust what we said. It struck me in the weeks leading up to the primary how profound it was that each personal contact made such a difference. I called a couple of dozen people who I knew but not intimately, and in many cases had substantive conversations for the first time with people who I had known peripherally for years. Then because those people had reason to trust me, the contact multiplied itself, as those people went and told their own friends and family to vote for Deval. I think the same thing happened when I went door to door in my own precinct, and was able to say truthfuly, “one of the great things about this campaign is that I am having this oportunity to get to know you, my neighbor.” This is what Deval referred to last night when he said we “won it the old fashioned way.” As our remarkable Congressman, Jim McGovern, has said over and over, “the politics of Massachusetts will never be the same.” I think Deval actually had it won after the primary, but of course we couldn’t say that out loud until the deal was finished yesterday.
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By the way, the support for Tim Murray has that same kind of depth. That was what pushed Tim’s numbers in the primary in Central Mass so high that they overwhelmed the other candidates’ modest advantages in other parts of the state. It also brought significant strength to the ticket for yesterday’s vote. Tim gets the importance of grassroots organizing as much as Deval does.
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Out here in Tim country, the mood in Union Station in Worcester last night was electric. The room especially went wild when Tim thanked “his supporters watching at Union Station in Worcester.” The place was packed but still felt intimate, as many of us had worked together for years and years, and were able to celebrate this sweet victory together. It was especially touching when some of the people who had not been with Deval before the primary showed real gratitude and appreciation for those of us who had been. By 12:20 AM or so when Tim got back from Boston the crowd had dwindled by about half, but the room went wild again when Tim made a dramatic entrance.
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So I agree that this landslide victory was the result of progressive politics, but the network of people that made it possible went way beyond those who would categorize themselves as belonging to any progressive movement. Shows why we need to get back to that “old fashioned way”.
i agree – not all of Deval’s 35% (and I’m not sure what the comparable number was for Murray, it must have been around the same) were activist progressives. But they were people that the progressive activists were capable of garnering support from without any paid media; that’s a pretty big deal!
Shai, you must remember that the percent of the vote is not the same as the percent of support.
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I suspect if voting was compulsory, DP’s numbers would have been far worse. It wasn’t the case that 35% of the Democratic party was DP’s die-hard base; rather, a huge percentage of DP’s die-hard base went out and voted in the primary, whereas so many of Gabs’ and TR’s supporters weren’t die-hard, and simply didn’t show up to vote in the primary.
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So, DP’s numbers were high in the primary because his supporters voted. It’s not clear if he actually had more supporters. It is clear that he had more voting supporters. And, the folks who are on the blogs and talk to neighbors are, methinks, more likely to actually vote.
and it seemed from early on that deval was the candidate of choice for voters who sought out someone to support. whereas candidates reilly and gabrieli went out looking for voters, there was here an active core of voters that went out looking for a candidate. and to his credit, deval openly accepted those voters and actually listened to their concerns. thus the commited visceral connection. and we see today the results of that.
hey stomv,
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point well taken, but on the other hand, i’m not sure if it matters much. suppose that Reilly had 1 million tepid supporters and Patrick had 500,000 enthusiastic supporters, and Reilly’s supporters were so tepid that about 75% didn’t event bother to vote. does that really matter? it’s sort of an if-a-tree-falls-in-the-forest type of question. having support that’s a mile wide but an inch thick is not a great way to win an election, and it’s one reason that Pollyanna candidates with no actual ideas don’t do so well.
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anyway, your theory is a little faulty since the primary had record turnout; the Democratic party’s actual make up was better represented in this primary than in most primaries. more than that, Patrick overperformed the polls only slightly, picking up maybe 4-5% on election day. so i think the enthusiastic Patrick supporter theory only mangles the pre-primary poll numbers a little bit.
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regardless, who showed up at the polls isn’t really what i was talking about. i was talking about the fact, more or less backed up by several polls in the mid-August period, that Patrick had had around 30-35% of Democrats in the bag. This was before he bought TV ads, and before he got a ton of free media from debates and news coverage. therefore, that 30-35% is effectively the measure of how much of the statewide Democratic electorate the progressive movement can capture with mostly non-traditional media and grassroots operations. when i say “progressive movement” i’m including both the netroots and the establishment progressives in there (so BMG/DFA/PDA/etc combined with Neighbor to Neighbor and some of the unions).
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if what you’re saying that people being polled in mid-August were not what you’d call “the Democratic Party” – i.e. they do not show up to ward meetings and that sort of thing, but just vote in the primary – then I have even better news for the progressive movement, and particularly the netroots. with almost no paid media and no establishment progressives on our side, the netroots was able to capture a majority of the most dedicated Democratic activists, the convention delegates.
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… and by the way, the DP abbreviation is kind of confusing, since it could mean Deval Patrick or Democratic Party 🙂
agree that DP is confusing — I use DLP personally. I think I picked that up from the campaign.
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Yep, that’s all I got.
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Great topic. I just don’t have enough brain cells at present to really weigh in.
As you know, Deval followed up his astonishing 95% of the primary vote in Heath with an equally astounding 83% in the general.
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Heath is not necessarily the natural base for a candidate like Deval. It is almost entirely white and in large part quite poor. Its sole claim to fame is the annual Heath Fair (what, you’ve never heard of the Heath Fair?) It’s not one of the hilltowns that has been colonized by the sprawl out of the Five College area, nor is it where New Yorkers retire to their former summer homes in the Berkshires. Although there may be a small handful in town with a connection to Williams, for the most part it is a forgotten small town, where the majority of its population are from families that have lived in the area for generations, if not centuries. Many are the left behind, as others from their families over the generations have headed out for brighter lights and greener pastures. It is the sort of town that was once the backbone of the Republican Party in Massachusetts when it was still a functional political organization. The residue of those days can still be seen in some towns very much like Heath, places such as Granville and Tolland, which dutifully voted Republican yesterday.
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So how did Heath become an almost iconic part of the Patrick campaign? He showed up. He showed up, in a place too often overlooked not just by politicians but anyone with power and place in society. He showed up and talked to people, listened to people all too often ignored, for their isolation, their small numbers, their lack of economic and political clout. What happened this year in Heath is a microcosm, a detailed miniature of a politics that reached out to the forgotten, the ignored, the powerless, and told them that they mattered, that he was there to listen to their concerns, to try to understand their needs. Deval and his campaign played that story out so many times in so many very different places, proving by his presence that his entreaty to “check back in” was more than talk, that he was willing to walk the walk as well as talk the talk to give people a reason and a chance to check back in. For the disempowered, the disadvantaged, and the disengaged, the very idea that someone with wealth and power will take the time to listen to them is truly a politics of hope. The forgotten ask little, most of all, just to be acknowledged, and Deval remembered them, reached out to them. It takes more than a few negative ads to break the loyalty, the sense of connection that Deval was able to forge by offering people that hope. The proof is in two numbers, 95% and 83%.
demonstrated something similar was going on: people who had been infrequent voters were coming back. Or trying to vote without having registered–clueless about the process just because they never tried before and/or no one had shown them.
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I saw numerous examples of people who didn’t know how things worked, who seemed unfamiliar with the process, who needed to be shown how to connect the black line between the arrows to make their vote count.
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I am leaping on some of the assumptions here, but I believe that many people who had not participated much before felt the need to do so this time. I don’t know if their frustration had finally boiled over (but that didn’t seem to be it), or if they just finally found someone they thought was going to care about them.
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I think that was it. Deval reached them they way other candidates haven’t before. I think that’s why they ran out of ballots in some places.
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It was a beautiful thing to see people checking back in. I hope it lasts.