Well, the polling is just all over the freakin’ place in this race. Suffolk’s new poll, taken Monday through Wednesday and released tonight, has Brown at 50%, Coakley at 46%, Kennedy at 3%, and 1% undecided. Suffolk shows Brown with 65% of unenrolled voters, which mostly accounts for the difference between this poll and our poll. Suffolk polled 500 “very” or “somewhat” likely voters, so their margin of error is +/- 4%.
I’m too tired to pore over the details. The questions and answers are available here. The crosstabs are supposed to be linked from this page, but at the moment they seem to have the wrong file uploaded. Perhaps they will fix that soon.
One really interesting thing about all the recent polling is that Coakley’s numbers have pretty consistently been high 40’s to low 50’s (though Suffolk’s 46 is definitely the bottom end). But Brown’s numbers fluctuate dramatically from poll to poll. My own theory, based on nothing more than a gut feeling, is that that’s because it’s really, really hard to figure out how many teabaggers are going to show up next Tuesday. They are the element that has caught everyone by surprise in this race, and no one is quite sure what to make of them, or maybe even who they are. So the different pollsters have different ways of determining who is likely to show up, and as a result, they sample rather different populations.
I dunno. I guess we’ll find out on Tuesday.
Palin has 25% favorability in MA.
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p>Much too high.
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p>facepalm.
Also, apparently 27% are less likely to vote for Coakley because of the Kennedy family’s endorsements, and just 20% are more?
I’m guessing that the 27% were never going to vote for Coakley in the first place and the other 20% were never going to vote for Brown.
So it’s safe to say that at least 30% of the voters are Republicans; why should Palin’s 25% favorability rating surprise you?
…smarter than the national GOP.
One clue to suggest that Suffolk’s likely voter screen is very tight — perhaps too tight — comes in the Obama approval/disapproval question.
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p>In this poll, Obama’s approval was a rather weak 48%/43%. Back on November 12th, when Suffolk last polled the state, Obama’s approval was 60%/36%. It’s highly unlikely that Obama’s numbers crashed down so heavily in Massachusetts during these two months (especially since his approval #s have been stable nationally), meaning that the screen they are using now is far tighter than the one back in November (when they had Coakley beating Brown 58%-27% before the primaries). The race has certainly tightened considerably since then, but I doubt the electorate that shows up had a 48/43 Obama approval. We’ll see.
The Suffolk poll is much more suburban/rural than BMG’s, and it skews much older. For instance…
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p>Suffolk has WMass/CMass and SEMass combining for 57% of their pop, while the BMG poll is only 44% in those areas.
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p>Suffolk has 24% over age 65, while BMG has 18% over age 60.
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p>Suffolk has 31% under age 44, while BMG has 41% under age 44.
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p>In other words, Suffolk seems have a higher pop of what one might assume would be Brown voters, while BMG has a higher pop of expected Coakley voters.
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p>No idea which one is right…
none of them are really ‘wrong,’ per say. Suffolk or BMG may be very accurate with their polls within the population groups they think will show up… it’s just that only one of them can be right about which one of those pools is actually reflective of the electorate (though both of them could, potentially, be wrong). Suffolk is not my favorite polling firm, they (imo) tend to predict a more conservative electorate than what actually turns out, though in this election… who knows… they could be more right than I’d care to guess.
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p>On a related tangent, I remember reading a fascinating blog on one of the progressive Californian sites during the Prop 8 campaign, way back, that discussed why the polls leading up to the election were so wildly different back then. All the results polled either a comfy Prop 8 loss or small Team H8 win. The blog went on to explain that neither of the results were wrong, per say, because two groups of Californians tend to come out on elections — one either dominated by LA and, to a lesser extent, the San Diego region, or one dominated by San Francisco bay and the bulk of the rest of the state’s more liberal areas.
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p>I think the same thing happens within Massachusetts, within our demographically-diverse regions. Sometimes certain elements that are predominant in those regions stay home at higher-than-normal rates (ie our own Teabaggers, of which we have plenty) … sometimes they don’t… and that widely determines races in this state, as well as can explain how different polling firms could actually have fairly accurate polls that produce wildly different results. It’s not always easy predicting who turns out to vote — no one got Deval Patrick’s election right, it wasn’t even close, because it had been so long since someone had drew out that kind of turnout. That’s one important reason why we can’t take one ounce of this race for granted.
Rye, you’re making excuses.
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p>Coakley should be winning by 25 points. Slicing and dicing the polls should be a geeky political science exercise at this point.
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p>The Coakley campaign, busy planning coronation festivities, missed the very real and wide-spread discontent with Obamacare, specifically its tax implications facing middle-income voters in Massachusetts. (No wonder Congressional Dem leaders didn’t want anyone to read the bills.)
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p>The Brown campaign lasered in on this and NOT “government takeover” of health care or other esoteric left-right.
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p>This concern mirrors the top concerns of the average voter nationwide, and “health reform” is not in the top 3. But jobs, taxes, and fiscal responsibility are. (Memo to progressives: climate change is not in the top 10.)
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p>Frankly, I’m not sure what Martha could have run on that could have been messaged credibly. But, boy, they certainly didn’t do their homework.
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p>They may still pull it out in the 11th hour. We’ll see.
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p>You may not be aware of this, but I am a geeky political scientist. Fair-weather warning: You’ll probably find a lot of them on here at BMG.
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p>I don’t agree that Coakley should be up by 25, but I would agree she should be up 10-15. Strangely enough, that’s where the Globe put it – and almost where BMG put it. Or, as I put it, we don’t really know which poll is right yet, because they’re all probably taking different stabs at who’s actually going to show up.
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p>Of course, that’s what I just wrote about and you decided to shrug it off, making sweeping pronouncements about how we shouldn’t be doing that… how we shouldn’t be trying to understand why the polls are differing widely right now and what those implications could be. I guess it must feel nice to just overly simplify things and proclaim that, however well Martha Coakley is or isn’t doing, she should be doing better. Boy, that must be a warm-fuzzy attitude for a Scotty Brown boy to take, kind of like the political version of heroin, because under those circumstances, Scott Brown really can do no wrong, win, lose or lose by giant margins (which is what’s still most likely to happen), because then he just should have lost by even giant-er margins. Yay, political delusions!
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p>However, I’ll ask this: Is it a helpful attitude? If the BMG poll is closer to where this state’s at, and the Suffolk poll’s the wrong one, wouldn’t you want to know that? The Cowboy approach to knowing things — or, as Steven Colbert coined, truthiness — is designed to feel good, but as we saw from 2000 to 2008, it isn’t a very good long term approach in politics, whether the goal is to run a country (Democrats) or merely to stay in power, to help out friends (Republicans and Blue Dogs).
that are probably all over the board. They’re all trying to guess at who’s most likely to come out on election day, in a special election unlike any we’ve held before, in the dead of winter, the day after a major, national holiday. Who knows?
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p>That’s why turnout will matter a great deal in this election. If democrats stay home, thinking this will be some cake walk, and it’s the teabagger brigade that shows up, we’re screwed and something more akin to Suffolk or PPP may happen. If a typical electorate shows up, with a Ted-Kennedy-like turnout, the Globe’s poll will probably be right.
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p>Honestly, I suspect it will be something in between, maybe a 5-10% margin, because I get the sense that democratic activists have got the message by now that this is actually a somewhat close election which Martha Coakley could lose if we aren’t active. I think the fact that she’s finally come out swinging helps, too.
… right poll… or not. It’s entirely possible they are all wrong. But with so many polls with such differing numbers, at best, only one can be right. So we’re in a situation with the majority of polls, we can now say with certainty, being wrong. We just don’t know which ones are wrong…
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p>I’m not a die-hard poll watcher so I don’t know… but it seems to me that this is the only time I’ve seen pollsters split hairs amongst ‘interested’ and/or ‘likely’ voters. The Globe poll slices things up between ‘extremely interested’, ‘very interested’ and ‘somewhat interested’… Is this a new trend in polling? It doesn’t make much sense, with a MoE of 4%, to slice more thinly: at a 4% MoE on the entire sample, the sub-group ‘extremely interested’ will have an MoE of ‘worthless’.
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p>Of course, Martha Coakley is relying heavily on phone banking (she has several dozen all across the state… Brown has five (5) and doesn’t go west of Littleton…). Perhaps she’s saturated the phone market and people are just not responding…
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p>In any event, I’m not seeing any need to panic… and this latest poll with yet more differing results re-enforces my feeling that the problem lies not in our stars, but in our polls.
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does the voter check out. I got a big smile out of this democrat with a R vote. And tea bagger was media hijacked from the 911 truth movement and trashed to benefit the Marxism party.
When we do the postmortem on this loss, I lay the blame squarely at the feet of the Mass Legislature for screwing with the succession laws. If well-enough had been left alone, Deval would be making the appointment…and more importantly, we wouldn’t be about to elect an amiable dunce to the US Senate.
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p>I stand by my prediction posted a couple days ago:
Brown 51%
Coakley 46%
Kennedy 3%
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p>I thought Brown would pull ahead over the weekend, not before. The spread could end up greater than five.
then I applaud the lege, even if I don’t like the outcome. The lege did the right thing by allowing the people to choose our senator — even if they did it in a roundabout way for the wrong reasons.
I guess politics is an unpredictable thing. When politicians try to game the system, unintended consequences happen. (Not that I mind it in this case.)
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p>Ultimately, stomv is right. It’s ALWAYS better to let the people decide than to make the decisions in the back room.
I think we should point the finger at ourselves.
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p>The only “surprise” in the room right now is that the lie-and-smear tactics of the extreme rightwing have apparently been effective against Martha Coakley. We knew what kind of primary campaign the three candidates ran. We knew how seriously (or cavalierly) each of the three candidates took the real pain and anger of the electorate. We certainly knew how extreme the GOP has become, and how disconnected from reality and the standards of civil discourse they have become. Whatever the outcome next week, I certainly hope that each of us has heard the wake-up call that the competitiveness of this race represents.
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p>People are hurt and angry. LOTS of people. We Democrats have run the show, one way or another, for a very long time here in Massachusetts. That means that LOTS of people are angry at us. We ignore that anger (and that is precisely what too many of us have done in setting our “strategy”) at our extreme peril.
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p>I will have more to say after next Tuesday, in the tiny window we have before the mid-term and gubernatorial campaigns heat up.
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p>For now, the most important thing is to do everything we can to win next Tuesday’s election.
I did, but was roundly ridiculed on BMG a couple of posts ago.
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p>Independent/unenrolled voter discontent was palpable, and the Coakley campaign was oblivious. Some neighborhoods — not just in typically Republican towns, either — were covered with Scott Brown lawn signs. Had Martha been out meeting the voters rather than awaiting her coronation, her campaign might have spotted the discontent earlier.
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p>The Suffolk poll shows 17% of Dems polled are switching to vote for Brown. That’s still not enough to neutralize their 35-15 registration advantage, but Brown is polling 70% among the I/U’s. That’s the killer.
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p>The language used by the Coakley campaign, especially in their attack ads (which I have no beef with) is all progressive buzz words which, I think, are the wrong frequency for middle-of-the-road Massachusetts voters. The ads are hyperbolic, too, and therefore not believable.
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p>We’ll see if Brown can hold onto this lead, or whether there’s a massive D turnout which could still tip the outcome.
The ground is frozen. Special elections have limited resources (money and time). Lawn signs?
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p>Obama didn’t invest heavily in lawn signs. People howled. He did just fine.
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p>I don’t know what is the right number of lawn signs for Coakley — but lawn signs or lack thereof can be interpreted six ways from Sunday with no rigor or way to validate.
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p>
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p>What I can quantify is the quality of her GOTV lists in my town. They aren’t great, that’s for sure. Part of that is the time crunch of a special election, but that’s exacerbated because she didn’t get GOTV sessions going by Jan 2, so that the errors could be filtered out then and volunteers could get a higher hit rate now.
I am increasingly convinced that lawn signs are not an effective barometer regarding how people vote. During the 08 campaign I saw more McCain lawn signs than Obama signs in MA and knew that it wouldn’t make a difference. When I asked MA HQ why this was the case and if I could get a lawn sign they said they were out of them and the national campaign didn’t feel like wasting money sending more of them to MA when it could direct those resources elsewhere, but that I could buy one from the website. So the Obama campaign smartly used lawn signs as a way to raise money from blue states and visibility in swing states while McCain wasted resources basically giving them away in a state he had no chance of winning. Long story short, Obama still won by a landslide.
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p>In council races the past two years Eddie Sullivan clearly has had a lawn sign lead which has translated into 11th and 13th place finishes and no council seat.
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p>Ogonowski had more lawn signs in the 5th district during the special, I predicted then this was an indicator of an upset for him, and I turned out to be wrong. What I think it indicates more broadly is that Brown’s supporters are more willing and excited to declare their allegiance and that a lot of Coakley’s supporters are holding their nose for her. The trick is since so many of her potential voters are uninterested and unexcited is appealing to them to get out there and vote for her. In my case the startling realization that Scott Brown would single handedly kill health care drove me to do the unthinkable and hold my nose for her. She should really run an ad making that crystal clear and hopefully that will get enough elderly, union members, and working people out to the polls. She should run an ad remarking how Brown is anti-marriage, that will get gays and progressives to the polls. Basically just remind voters he is a Palin style Republican posing as a Weld Republican. Coakley shouldn’t hide from this campaign anymore, and while there are no positive reasons to vote for her she is clearly the lesser of two evils by a longshot and should just be honest and say so.
In-trouble Kazanjian had his orange signs all over the place…mind you, not nearly as bad as his first run at the City Council…and lost by a landslide. (His lack of ethics were showing.) Turns out, there were credible rumors that he’d used his lists of lawn sign locations from his previous campaign, and quite a number were pulled down pretty quickly, so I am guessing that was true.
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p>Two challengers got in, and I wouldn’t say their lawn sign showing was better than anyone else – in fact, I think it was largely worse in most neighborhoods. But they both ran damn good campaigns.
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p>Lawn signs don’t vote.
… visibility differences for the challengers that got it were very very good websites and very good personal visibility.
I do find it a little disturbing that I see more Brown signs than Coakley signs in my very Democratic neighborhood in Boston.
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p>There are also a bunch of Brown supporters who have been showing up in the nearby rotary where I have yet to see any Coakley people. [BTW, does Brown have any non-white or female supporters? All the guys in the rotary were middle aged white men.]
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p>I have no doubt that most of my neighbors will still vote for Coakley, but perhaps it is a sign of complacency. Hopefully, these polls will motivate Democrats to get out there.
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p>Needless to say, there is no way I am going to skip voting when the polling is this close.
property is effective.
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p>Deval Patrick’s campaign invested heavily in them.Visibility works.
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p>This whole season coming over and between holidays is reminiscent of what nearly happened last time to the NH primary date.
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p>I had numerous discussions with different campaigns up there during the Presidential primary which all admitted they were extremely perplexed about how to handle media buys because they recognized they would have run the risk of alienating voters saturating them during a holiday season;lawn signs were going to play a huge role as a substitute reminder.
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p>NH allows for placemnt of signs in public places.
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p>That diminishes their value.
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p>Many communities in MA require signs to be placed only on private property which adds to their value.
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p>A political consultant once told me that by getting one voter to place a bumper sticker on their car equaled a $10,000 donation/add buy by that voter because of the potentail voters that vehicle could ‘access’ during a normal drive time during a campaign framework.
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p>I don’t know how he reached that numerical conclusion but I do believe in the value of visible support being shown.
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is the best thing that ever happened to Martha.
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p>Good thing she took a month off from the Dec 9 – Jan 9. Sigh.
Obviously, a right-wing nut polling well in MA is bizarre. Has any polling showed that it is because:
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p>a. People like Brown
b. People don’t like Coakley
c. People are disillusioned by Democrats and/or Obama not delivering on promises, standing up for the working class, etc.?
d. People feel that the Democrats are too far to the left?
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p>or some other reason?
I think Brown has been a lot more visible than Coakley and as the old saying goes “voters like to be asked”. Additionally, the majority of Democrats voted for someone else and were disappointed that she won the nomination, she hasn’t had a lot of visibility going into the general election to remind those same voters to vote again and to remind new voters to come to the polls. Another factor is that Coakley ran far to the left to win the nomination, has had the support of Democratic insiders since day one, has only responded to her general election problems by trumping out more big name Democrats. Basically she is still running like the frontrunner in a Democratic primary when she is in fact in a dead heat in a general election.
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p>She needs to make more direct appeals to independent voters, show where she differs from the President, and show how she has been tough on crime and corruption as AG and is thus both a Beacon Hill and Washington outsider. Frankly I am surprised she has not run an outsider campaign since day one. The fact that she is a fresh face to state-wide politics (only three years as a public figure), doesn’t owe any favors to Beacon Hill (well to Murray but arguably to no one else), and is not already entrenched in “the ways of Washington” are all assets she is explicitly not touting, hell its the reason my parents picked her over Capuano (dad: “He’s been in DC too long”). The voters clearly didn’t want another Kennedy or one of them would have run, and trumpeting more Kennedys and Clintons is not the way to appeal to independents. Making an ad showing how she has prosecuted tough criminals, big business, and some corrupt figures and how she is a reformer that will clean up DC could do a lot to assail independent concerns that she will just vote in lockstep with the DC leadership which is viewed by that demographic as incompetent and overly partisan. Brown is killing her with independents and they will be the key to winning this race-not Democratic stalwarts.
I think you are basically right, she should have put distance. But you are the first comment I’ve seen on this site that suggested it, which indicates what the feeling in the party is and why she hasn’t done it.
I know we’d learn something very important for November.
The divergent polling outcomes cannot be reconciled because they are making fundamentally different assumptions about who will turn out. The energy is with the Scott Brown campaign; his supporters are more motivated and thus more likely to count as “likely” voters. Coakley, by contrast, has sleepwalked through her campaign and left her supporters less energized.
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p>The wild card is turnout. Conventional wisdom has predicted a low turnout, which would favor Brown in the circumstances. Still, with all the attention this race has been getting lately, I suspect turnout may exceed expectations which could give Coakley a boost.
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p>The bottom line is that we progressives need to get each other to the polls without fail.
Something that struck me about the Suffolk poll is that (unlike in the past) they didn’t do the belwether polling (unless I missed it) which tends to be dead on.
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p>Special elections are such live wires when it comes to turnout. In a general we could expect a healthy turnout. A special the day after MLK Day? It’s a crap shoot.
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p>I just hope Democrats are motivated enough to get out and vote. We’ll find out Tuesday.
Coakley’s campaign seems to be about an expectation of winning and Dems showing up no matter what. I really worry about the motivation.
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p>I am going to vote for her, and have convinced a few uninvolved voters to show up and vote for her, but frankly, it is an anti-Brown vote more than a pro-Coakley vote.
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p>She has done very little except have a D next to her name to make me want to vote for her. Her campaign has been so uninspiring and downright annoying.
Other polls ask: Are you planning to vote in the upcoming election?
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p>This poll like Rasmussen, differentiates Likely Voters and Very Likely Voters instead of how they normally classify their previous polls. If you check the cross tabs it’s mainly those they consider Very Likely.
The only reason a Republican has a chance in Massachusetts, is because this election has become a referendum on Healthcare and the fact that the unions will be affected by this tax. It’s all great to spend 1.2 trillion dollars until you actually tax a Union member.
Since the deal reached on teh health care bill is now backed by the unions.
Just because the union endored the plan doesn’t neccessarily mean the members will.
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p>I was just talking to a union member yesterday. True and thru Democrat going back 30 years. Said he is voting for Brown because of Obama’s healthcare plan and its tax on “cadillac plans”.
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p>I asked him why doesn’t he switch to a Honda plan. Thank you folks I’ll be here all week.
Hi All:
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p> I did my part for the Democratic Party nominee and attended the West Roxbury phonebank organized by Maura Hennigan on Wednesday. On the bright side of things, the polling went very well and in Martha Coakley’s favor by a five to one margin. đŸ™‚
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p> Unfortunately, there were only four of us there, and the Democratic State Committeemen and women from the State Senate District were noticably absent. Marian Walsh and the potential candidates for her State Senate seat were nowhere to be found either.
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p> I will probably will be attending the phone bank there on Monday night as well, but I hope that someone will remember that I consistantly do my part for the Party when or if I ever decide to seek public office again.
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p>Sincerely,
Wayne Wilson
Member, Ward 19 Democratic Committee
Boston
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p>P.S. In these final days, please try to help in some way as this election is so important in a myriad of ways.