When it comes to writing about elections after the fact, I’m not a big post-mortem guy — I feel it can sometimes be a little disingenuous to diagnose a race with absolute certainty a day or two after, in many cases, you were hedging your bets as to the final outcome. That said, though, there are an endless supply of post-mortems out there on Martha Coakley’s mind-numbingly bad result last night, and some of them actually have some worthwhile observations to offer. Let’s round up a few of these pundit attempts to leave their mark on the CW:
- Jeff Zeleny, “Blogging the Massachusetts Senate Race” (The Caucus/NYT).
- Tom Jensen, “Takeaways from Massachusetts (Public Policy Polling).
- Neil Newhousie, “Massachusetts Voters in their Own Words… (Public Opinion Strategies).
Neil Newhousie, “Scott Brown’s Twelve Keys To Victory… (Public Opinion Strategies). - Chris Cillizza, “First thoughts on Scott Brown’s special election victory (The Fix/WaPo).
- Emily Cadei, “Brown Victory Sends Democrats Big Wake-Up Call” (Roll Call).
- Markos Moulitsas, “One candidate campaigned to win” (DailyKos).
- E.J. Dionne, “How Massachusetts was won (Post Partisan/WaPo).
- Nate Silver, “Let’s Play the Blame Game!” (FiveThirtyEight).
- Ben Smith, “Coakley called ‘machine,’ didn’t use machine (Politico).
- Richard E. Berg-Andersson, “What Was It All About, Then?” (The Green Papers).
- David Weigel, “Conservative Grassroots Strategy Propels Brown to Senate” (Washington Independent).
- Steve Lombardo, “Why Brown Won” (Pollster.com).
- Jazz Shaw, “The GOP Love Affair with Scott Brown Will Be a Short Fling” (The Moderate Voice).
- Reid Wilson, “Menendez Promises Review Of Dem Campaigns” (Hotline OnCall).
Reid Wilson, “Pracitcal Lessons From Brown’s Win (Hotline OnCall). - Steve Singiser, “MA-Sen: The Turnout Tells A Tale” (DailyKos).
- Andrew Gelman, “Scott Brown is More Liberal Than Olympia Snowe, and Now He’s Pivotal, Too (FiveThirtyEight).
DemFromCT also has a pundit roundup. If data, rather than chatter, is your drug, the WVWV exit poll is now available, as is Rasmussen’s not-surprisingly dead-on election night poll.
who is among the most unqualified individuals to serve in the US Senate, will be a moderate Republican. My guess, he’s a solid conservative, and either runs for President or pines for the VP, and doesn’t run for reelection. Or he sees his victory as a conservative mandate, and assumes that MA has turned red and thus thinks he can win reelection as a wingnut. Either way, MA will have a Democrat in 2013, even if Romney’s (little) coattails help him in 2012.
Top of the list – blame Obama. But he uses his own poll to support that finding of just 44% approval. There topline numbers are excellent but for some reason they always underscore when it comes to the president. What is the evidence for that? Well, Rasmussen’s election day poll pegged Obama approval at 53% and PPP’s final polls of VA and NJ had very similar margins below what would eventually be reported in the exit polls. Clearly, disgruntlement with the administration played a large part but to almost completely brush-off the poor campaign is dead wrong in my view.
I think Brown will likely continue his rightward march. Palin/Brown seems like a likely ticket at this point.
But it should be an interesting read on how Obama can be popular again.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…