Yes, yes, I know that too much focus on poll movement can be unwarranted. But of course even knowing that, we can’t help ourselves. And with the caution that the race is still fluid and it’s critical the campaign — including volunteers — finish out strong and not get overconfident based on polling … well, sure is nice to see Elizabeth Warren up by 5 points over Scott Brown in this latest poll. Margin of error is +- 4.4, I assume at 95% confidence level.
She’s up 48-43 in this poll among decided likely voters and up a bit more, 50-44, among leaners (yet another reason to keep canvassing).
While less than the 9 points that PPP recently had her up, this is an important swing in the WBUR data toward Warren’s favor. The prior WBUR poll had shown Brown up 4 after the first presidential debate. “When you go from a four-point lead for one candidate to a five-point lead for another candidate, it is a meaningful change, definitely,” pollster Steve Koczela told WBUR.
Despite Brown’s push for women voters, Warren crushes him on “will stand up for women’s issues” 51-25.
their previous was an outlier, since other contemporaneous polls did not show Brown in the lead. I think this poll is really a correction, not a shift, to be honest. She consistently has a 5-point – or larger – lead for quite a while.
Not time to back down. I want to CRUSH him on election day.
Don’t be satisfied with merely a win. It is message-sending time.
It did seem that the prior poll showing a Brown lead was an outlier. I generally try to stop myself from thinking that when the poll that seems like an outlier also happens to be one with results I don’t like … especially given what happened 2 years ago. But the consensus trend definitely shows Warren with a lead right now.
Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight is giving Warren an 89% chance of winning with a projected 51.6 to 46.8 victory. I would be ecstatic with that result.
or see him (maybe) again running for the other Senate seat.
Especially if Kerry does go to Foggy Bottom. That would be enough of a disaster that I hope Obama stays away from it just for that reason.
There’s also governor in 2014. Brown vs. Coakley again? Or does Charlie Baker have GOP sewn up?
and this one is 50-44, with leaners. That means this one has more undecideds. But it’s encouraging that Scott Brown can’t seem to hit 45% in any of them lately.
Last night my wife and I attended GOTV training in Newton. We’ll be out there canvassing this weekend and next and we’re taking off Election Day and the day before. I write a lot of words but I’m really reticent about going door-to-door. I can’t say I feel comfortable about it. But this is worth it so we’ll be out there.
By the way, there must have been over 100 people jammed into a smallish room for GOTV training from 8:30 to 10 pm on a Tuesday. A lot of people seem energized about this election. Let’s go get it done.
with a talker. I am a talker, but my last canvassing partner, a newbie BTW, rocked so hard that I just let her do most of the talking.
Tell you what, it was weird being the silent partner for once! But she had a compelling story to tell (a family member who died of mesothelioma).
You knock, you say hi, you’re polite and you represent your candidate in as friendly a manner as possible — and in as few or many words as is required. And you ask for their vote.
a big gender gap again. Warren is leading by 13 points (52-39) among women and trails slightly among men (46-44). Warren also is viewed much more favorably by women (52-36) than by men (47-42). Conversely, men view Brown more favorably (57-30) than do women (now a negative 42-45).
Women, especially women 50+, are more favorable to Warren than are men on every single question in the poll:
-Who agrees with you on issues that matter to you? (women say Warren 52-33, men favor Brown 40-44).
-Who will stand up for regular people? (women favor Warren 45-30, men favor Brown 37-38)
-Who’s better on women’s issues? (actual women say Warren 55, Brown 23, an annoying 15% say both equally; men say Warren by 47-28-19)
-Who knows how to get the economy moving again? (women slightly favor Warren, 35-33; men favor Brown 25-42) How the Republicans have any credibility on the economy at this point is beyond me, but I blame the President for failing to fight for a sufficient stimulus to compensate for the huge gap in private demand created by the 2008 crash.
-Who’s been honest in the campaign? (which disappointingly showed an overall lead for Brown) (women say 30 Warren, 28 Brown, 19 both, 14 neither; men say 19 Warren, a whopping 38 Brown, 17 both, 19 neither).
-Who’s from a middle class background (women 24 Warren, 21 Brown, 38 both; men say 17 Warren, 37 Brown, 29 both)
is what I call (no offense intended) the “Billerica problem.” For some reason Democrats like Warren do well in many wealthy suburbs like Newton, and urban places both wealthy and poor. But they have trouble connecting in suburban towns that are more solidly middle-income.
Thus Warren is trailing 53-41 with people making $75-100K and up big among all other income groups. She also trails 52-44 among those with a bachelor’s degree, but no more, and leads by 10 or more among all other education demographics.
Interestingly, the people in those groups were no different from the other groups on the issues, or on their support for Barack Obama. The income and education crosstabs showed remarkable consistency there. This suggests to me that Brown is winning on style with these voters.
Many of them are inheritors of the “Reagan Democrat” heritage. From FDR until the 1970s the Democratic Party had a clear advantage with regular middle-class people; Reagan flipped that and we’ve gotten some, but not all, of them back.
I’ve always been dismayed by the GOP doing better in Waltham than Newton or Lexington, better in West Roxbury than the Back Bay. We have to do a better job with economic arguments.
I have long thought that the really bitter, lasting division in Massachusetts isn’t race, but class, dating all the way back to the society vs. immigrants days.
Even the bussing fiasco of the 70s that earned Boston’s reputation as Mississippi North was an instance of the educated patricians residing on Beacon Hill or in Weston directing the integration of your school, while conveniently leaving the schools to which they sent their own kids untouched. The lingering resentments of that, decades later, strikes me as a class-based, rather than racially based, resentment.
It strikes me that a lot of the reason that Warren does not do as well in Waltham and West Roxbury is because she does so well in Newton and Back Bay. It was not for nothing that when Brown was doing well, she was Prof. Warren from Harvard, and she has been doing better once he got sidetracked by silly nonsense.
People don’t vote their economic interest alone. Otherwise, the Back Bay would be a GOP stronghold.
The Supreme Court, in a case out of Michigan in the early 70s, prohibited any remedy for school segregation that included suburban districts not themselves found to have engaged in segregation. Since most suburbs were in those days (and most are today) ultra-white, such a finding was hard to make.
But my great-uncle in South Boston never stopped muttering about Mike Dukakis walking his kids to school in Brookline while Southie kids were put on the bus to Roxbury. He was supremely uninterested in the way the Supreme Court had taken Brookline and Newton off the table. To him it was a judge from Wellesley and a governor from Brookline ganging up on the neighborhoods.
especially because METCO was formed in 1966, ostensibly in (a large?) part out of a Brookline organization called the Brookline Civil Rights Committee, who suggested that maybe some black kids from Brookline should instead be allowed to enroll in the Brookline public schools. To this day and despite the booming enrollments inducing the spending of over $100M on school expansions*, the Brookline School Committee is adamant about it’s METCO support, and ~300 Boston kids are enrolled in Brookline schools.
So while Mike Dukakis was walking his kids to school in Brookline, he was waking his kids to a school which had black kids from Boston enrolled.
* This is over the span of maybe 20 years, and includes state portions of the expenditure. Still, Brookline is actively expanding one of its schools every 3 years or so, one at a time.
having kids come into your local school as compared to having your kids sent elsewhere. The kids in Brookline still got to go to the same schools they always had.
Of course a lot of folks in the Boston neighborhoods didn’t want the black kids coming into their neighborhoods any more than they wanted their kids bused out. But facts like Brookline support for METCO don’t matter much as these things become emotional.
In a way it made it seem worse to people in Southie that liberals in Brookline were OK with it, since it reinforced that the Brookline liberals were the ones “forcing this experiment” on Southie and to a much larger extent than what was going on in Brookline with METCO.
I was not trying to say that racism was THE issue during the 70s crisis. I was trying to say that the lingering resentments of the issue, in 2012, are not necessarily so.
You said it better.
I hope folks figured it out, but… it should read “who suggested that maybe some black kids from Boston should instead be allowed to enroll in the Brookline public schools.”
It’s not just in Mass. that this happens. I’ve seen it in NY, the DC area, Philly, California, a lot of places.
In 1936, like this year, the economy was lousy but getting slowly better. FDR took all but 2 states. He had credibility in the eyes of the average American and the GOP didn’t. I’d argue that today the national GOP is as far from average Americans’ interest as it was in 1936, if not more so, but many more middle-income respond to their pitch.
Somewhere in the 70s and 80s, the Democrats lost their big edge in terms of being seen on the side of the common person. Personally, I think the results of that have been disastrous for the average American and I’d love to close that gap.
This sometimes gets described as the “elitist” issue: Republican accuses Democrat of elitism, and scores big points; Democrats accuse Republican of being elitist because said Republican is stinking rich, and crickets chirp. Then, the wailing: why?! Can’t you see that our policies are in your best interest?
Or: Democratic candidate in an effort to not seem elitist makes a complete ass of himself trying to play “regular guy” whose favorite Red Sock is “Manny Ortez” or at a NASCAR race.
It isn’t really about being rich, and it isn’t about knowing the ERA of Jon Lester during day games or pretending to like auto races and watery beer. It is about being able to communicate with people without seeming like a smug lecturing schoolmarm. It took EW awhile to break free of that; she has been more successful now that she has (but I think it still is and shall remain a weakness). Clinton was exceedingly good at this– and this talent certainly cost him a bit in the Lexingtons of the world– but I think that this skill was THE factor in his electoral success.
that great slugger Manny Ortez. In early 2004 my feeling was that the Democrats needed a Harry Truman figure and John Forbes Kerry, whatever his merits, was not the right guy on style. Bush had done as well as he did in 2000 (I will never say “won” since he didn’t) because of this “have a beer” thing. Most GOP aristocrats, G. H.W. Bush and Mitt Romney excepted, have been better at “connecting” than many Democratic candidates. Martha Coakley showed that when she mocked the very idea of shaking hands in the cold outside Fenway.
My uncle out in Oregon, an 80-year-old strong Democrat, thinks a lot of this goes back to the Kennedys. As things moved from the glamour of Camelot to the more sordid events and revelations post-1968, and the 70s were marred by economic uncertainty and things like busing, a lot of people were open to a backlash. That Dems continued to do well in Newton and the Upper West Side only helped fuel the narrative.
The GOP has played this folksy thing very well, while screwing 99% of the people royally.
Republican economic policies produced the hollowing out of the national economy and flat income for most people since Reagan. His policies ended American national economic greatness. People in Back Bay know this. That is why they vote Democrat. Those who don’t are less well informed.
As to your class theory, well, I guess this is what class resentment looks like. No doubt teenager Joseph Rakes would have attacked anyone wearing a three-piece suit that day in City Hall Plaza.
And, finally, with regard to Warren, she’s been saying the same thing throughout the election. The difference is that Brown switched his strategy from “likeable moderate,” which won him the last election, to hater (“as you can see, she’s not”) rallying the 13-percent far-right MA Republican caucus. His hard-right anti-Massachusetts votes, against jobs programs and in favor of the anti-choice Blunt amendment, appear to have convinced some voters that ugliness is his true character and the amiable Scott was an act. This election has always been his to lose.
Have you read Common Ground? Those kids didn’t go to Government Center to attack people. But…there it is. It was racial and class-based. Joseph Rakes wouldn’t have attacked anyone in a three-piece suit and he wouldn’t have attacked a black man wearing a janitor’s uniform, but seeing a black man in a three-piece suit was apparently too much for him. And as for busing, yes they should’ve included the suburbs, but let’s not forget that the Italians in East Boston and the North End didn’t want their kids bused to Irish Charlestown and vice-versa. The resentments and predjudices went far beyond merely race and class.
Is not OK. It’s kind of stunning.
Ted should have understood that, as a black man, he shouldn’t become a lawyer and have to wear three-piece suits because it might upset the sensibilities of some kid from the Town who would prefer to see him as a janitor?
Whether they went there intending to attack people or not hardly matters. You can’t attack someone for being Successful While Black.
And I say this as someone who fully appreciates the complexity of the issues at the time.
that income has been “flat” for people in Newton and Lexington since Reagan?
… incomes in Newton and Lexington are not, as you allege, ‘flat’… yet the average remains flat, that’s indicative of a corresponding dip: An overall ‘flat’ -ness of wages, in the context of greatly increased wages for some means greatly decreased incomes for others. The bigger increase for Mitt Romney the greater the decrease for some shmuck with unfortunate DNA.
But that sort of steps on Bob_Neer’s first paragraph above, to which I was responding.
Not to mention Cambridge. Educated relatively affluent people who know that Republican economic policies instituted under Reagan and after have profoundly hurt the country. Warren Buffet is an example of the same principle at work. First, these people would have done even better under competent economic management. Second, over the long run GOP incompetence will bring everyone down, the fast as well as the slow, the rich as well as the poor. It is already starting to happen: look at this country’s dropping rankings in global comparisons of health, education and standard of living. These people are well informed, and are emphatically voting their economic interest.
FDR enacted forceful reforms and programs within days of taking office, and he got results: real unemployment dropped by 40% by 1936 and the economy grew by 9% per year during that same period.
Today, the economy is drifting around in the doldrums.
which is about as economically diverse as a Massachusetts suburb can be, with a large number of middle-income voters.
I’ve become more cautious about drawing too many firm conclusions on smaller slices of these polls, since the sliced sample sizes will have a considerably higher margin of error than the overall poll. Probably the slice I trust most is gender given the numbers. I’m especially wary about the income data, since a lot of people (myself included) will not answer that question when polled, and it’s hard to know whether there’s a political bias among people who do vs. don’t tell a stranger their income levels.
despite superficial Demographic similarity.
but on this phenomenon playing out over many elections in many places over many years. In 2010, Lexington went 65-34 for Coakley. Billerica went an identical 65-34 for Brown. In 2008 Lexington went for Obama 73-26 and Billerica favored him only 50-48. They’re 15 minutes and a couple of light years away, at least in terms of votes, from each other.
Agree with Marcus that Framingham’s a bit different. Coakley won in Framingham and Obama won 2-1. But Framingham has more ethnic diversity. My observation is on continued Democratic troubles with white blue-collar or middle-income voters, the classic “Reagan Democrats.”
I lived in Billerica from 1979 to 1986, and I don’t think this aspect has changed significantly since I was there. I suspect that our choice to maintain the 351 separate cities and towns that comprise Massachusetts plays a large role here.
People who move into a town — especially buyers — tend to know or learn something about the culture of that town before they move in. People who discover that they don’t like the culture of a town are more likely to move out. Schools are strongly influenced by local culture, and schools play a large role in shaping long-term culture.
Call it “elitism”, “prejudice”, “ignorance”, or whatever, people who celebrate diversity and liberal/progressive values don’t fit into Billerica very well. The town doesn’t like them and they aren’t likely to like the town. For better or worse, it is what it is.
I agree with centralmassdad that people don’t vote their economic self-interests alone. They also vote their biases (positive and negative), hopes, fears, dreams, and nightmares.
We’ve seen Scott Brown run a campaign based on lies, prejudices, scapegoating, and anti-intellectualism. Some voters are more swayed by such campaigns than others, and some towns attract more of those voters than others.
know enough about the factors affecting their economic well-being to vote them.
And I’m not talking about “low-information” voters, uneducated, or even stupid people. Talk to regular people (unlike us) and what you hear is neither empirical nor well-reasoned. If they say the economy is the reason for their voting choice, it isn’t because they understand much about the economy.
they would not be calling for reduced public spending right now. Still-weak demand remains our biggest problem.
It wasn’t until major public outlays – for defense mobilization in 1940 – that we really came out of the Depression. In ’37-’38 the effort to balance the budget just set things backwards. Same thing now. We should have a major rebuilding of our infrastructure, etc., to solve two problems at once.
I think when I’m 80, God willing, I’ll be muttering about Obama being too timid about asking for a sufficient stimulus when he came in. It doesn’t help when you have major GOP figures like Paul Ryan and Gingrich meeting on Inauguration Day to plan their obstruction of all you try to do, but when he came in he had momentum and popular support, both of which have been in short supply since 2010.