Votes for Ed Markey in the 2012 Senate special election don’t necessarily translate exactly into Democratic primary voters next month, but I still thought it was worth a look to see where Democrats turned out (more accurately, where voters turned out who voted Democratic) for last year’s special election within the 5th Congressional District. For the Cambridge and Sudbury results, I manually tallied up only the wards and precincts in the 5th CD.
2012 Senate Special Election
| Community | DemocraticVotes |
| Cambridge | 10316 |
| Arlington | 9632 |
| Medford | 7655 |
| Framingham | 7078 |
| Lexington | 6877 |
| Malden | 5888 |
| Waltham | 5563 |
| Watertown | 4965 |
| Natick | 4666 |
| Belmont | 4542 |
| Melrose | 3930 |
| Revere | 3567 |
| Woburn | 3491 |
| Winchester | 3432 |
| Sudbury | 2719 |
| Stoneham | 2662 |
| Wayland | 2311 |
| Winthrop | 1868 |
| Holliston | 1736 |
| Ashland | 1715 |
| Weston | 1545 |
| Lincoln | 1386 |
| Southborough | 1069 |
| Sherborn | 692 |
Please share widely!
You can see that most of the candidates have a local base of support in the top half of that list.
BTW, it seems like ages ago but the Markey election was just this June, not last year!
This year, not last year. Sorry. Guess it just seems like there should be at least a year between Congressional elections.
Based on that, it’s Brownsberger’s to lose.
and yet the vote-rich communities at the top of the list seem likely to be especially annoyed by his stand on Citizens United, among other things. Really, it’ll be fascinating to see how this plays out.
We’ll elect likely a lifelong Congressperson with this primary, and the winner will only have to hit about 20-25K votes. It’s sad that the media isn’t giving this the coverage it deserves.
It’s a pity we don’t have something like the 40% primary threshold in the NYC mayoral race. In general, that’s a useful device to make sure the will of the majority isn’t thwarted in a primary that’s winner-take-all.
Carl Sciortino has been pretty quietly gathering endorsements from leading House progressives. Mark Takano was an early supporter, and then Alan Grayson requested recommendations from the public before endorsing Sciortino. Jared Polis then endorsed, and now Raul Grijalva and Keith Ellison have endorsed Sciortino.
Of course, this will likely have little bearing on the race, although it could lead to some out-of-state fundraising.
I think this bodes well for Sciortino in case of a victory, however, because he has already lined up powerful progressive friends who can serve as mentors when he enters the House. That could make the learning curve a lot more bearable.
Will Brownsberger probably doesn’t like the Roll Call coverage of the story, though.
Roll Call says:
I’m sure it’s just an error, but ouchy!
We don’t need someone to be brought under the spell of others, these “mentors” come with IOU’s and believe me, they collect.
I say, let’s send someone to D.C. who is intelligent enuff to not need a tudor or his hand held, someone who is not only well prepared, he won’t gum up the works like the others who took the liberal version of the Grover Norquist Pledge. Vote for Will Brownsberger, he will be the hyper-partisans and DC lobbyist worst nightmare, which means he will be our best friend.
If you think having strong, progressive allies in the House is a bad thing, then I really don’t know what to say to you. These aren’t “good-ole-boys” like Steny Hoyer or someone. These congressmen have regularly bucked their party and leadership for progressive positions, so I think Sciortino is in very good company.
Picking the guy who thinks he is smarter than everyone and turns off voters and colleagues is not someone I think will be effective. I guess you do, though.
You mentioned them as mentors, I would suggest avoiding them like the plague.
Of course you wouldn’t like them because you are a conservative. You don’t want to see progressive policies.
Apparently you do.
You mean like Henry VIII?
.
Cambridge was where our five most serious candidates debated last night. Our venue was jampacked, but too small to bring in new faces from the city’s dense night-time population. The small amphitheater had room for maybe 316, but not five hundred, I believe.
I failed to bring in new faces into the forum last night, but the one neighbor I e-mailed came, because I believe that he would have come anyway. Five of us 35 Framingham Democratic Town Committee members attended, but other than hauling in a MarkeySpilka volunteer, we did not shuttle in such a slice of Framingham to the small amphitheater.
Arlington is where one candidate is from. He collected the thousands of signatures needed, but last night’s organizers decided to exclude him. There were good reasons to exclude him; one I believe is that he sounds like an ideal Democrat voter who would however do poorly as a candidate himself. His speech is too simplistic. On one other forum, he kept attributing “the big lie” to Republicans. We want a bunch of Democrat voters like him, but as a candidate himself he lacks the ability of getting elected rather that Spilka has. Spilka gets votes from Americans of different religions, and from community leaders. She thrives in her own town, even among my fellow parishioners.
Oops, it’s ten o’ clock – I got to go to my job.