Polls close in Massachusetts tonight at 8PM Eastern. As usual, we’ll be liveblogging the race until the bitter end. By the time we’re done, you’ll be left with stems and seeds.
Let’s use this thread to take care of the pre-game chatter.
- Benchmarks: If you haven’t yet seen Crisitunity’s town-by-town benchmarks for the absolute bare minimum that Martha Coakley needs in order to win, get your fine self over to that thread. It’ll definitely be something worth keeping in your pocket as you follow the returns tonight. Blue Mass Group has a list of key benchmarks to watch for, and David Wasserman has an expansive spreadsheet available.
- Jeff’s take: SSP data guru jeffmd offers his projection model for the race.
- Turnout: The Boston Globe has a list of poll-watcher reports by town. Greg Sargent (my former boss at Talking Points Memo), has some hard turnout numbers from Boston indicating that the city appears to be juiced-up about the race.
- 1994, redux?: A former Ted Kennedy aide sees parallels between the race between Scott Brown and Martha Coakley, and the ’94 Senate race between Kennedy and Mitt Romney. The aide’s math suggests that Coakley will win.
- Fingerpointing: However, you know things are tense when Democrats are already getting a head start on the blame game. Oy.
- Polling: Rasmussen will be out with a new poll as soon as the results start to trickle in. And if you’re looking for exit polls, there are none to report. However, the cumbersomely-named Women’s Voices. Women Vote has commissioned an exit poll by Lake Partners Research and American Viewpoint. Those results won’t be available for dissection until tomorrow morning, though.
I always hate the last few hours of waiting.
I love how a comparison between 2010 and 1994 is presented as a positive for the Ds 🙂
But question James, when did you work at TPM? Must of been cool working at one of the top liberal blogs in the country and working for Marshall and Co.
Anyways sit back, relax, grab a stiff drink if it’s handy and prepare for the returns because it’s going to be long.
Also I want to commend SSP for it’s fantastic job of covering this race and the posters for providing the great insight. We truely got some of the most pragmatic and knowledgeable posters out of all the liberal blogs around and I say that with tremendous pride.
Oh yeah and go Martha!
Using the MA SoS’s communities and numbers for this race’s primary, I found something interesting. A seriously contested primary brings out more voters, of course. Here’s what I found, though:
You have to add all of the communities with a ratio of four Democratic primary votes to one Republican (and then some) to reach half of the vote.
We can be fairly sure that those 200+ communities will go for Brown, but for the other 140, which made up 51% of the vote, who knows. Only in two places were there more R votes than D votes, while there were areas in which the ratio was 90:1 for Ds. I’m not sure if this says anything, but where the R primary vote made up less than 20%, there’s not much that can be said of Brown tromping those areas.
and as such, in the fine tradition of a true Methodist, I’ve got a cold six-pack of Tecate to enjoy. Since I might not enjoy the election results, at least I can enjoy them half-lit.
Ted Kennedy knew how to run a campaign and he also had several months to take apart Romney. the Dems don’t have that kind of time with Scott Brown. If they had another month, I’m sure that they could have painted Brown as a another do-nothing right-wing Republican.
Whoever on Coakley’s campaign leaked that memo to Politico blaming DC Democrats, and whichever DC Democrats have been giving blind quotes about her horrible campaign are pathetic. Wait until after the polls are closed at least. Some people are still trying to GOTV.
I also can’t believe the Coakley campaign only held 19 campaign events in the 40 days since the primary.
Whichever way this goes, I hope it’s resolved relatively early…I really don’t need to be up until the wee hours tonight. :-/
With the momentum so much in Brown’s favor either he blows out Coakley or the Democratic partisan advantage carries Coakley over the top.
I have a strong gut feeling that we will pull of a win. I know its kind of nuts but my gut feeling tends to be right. I think it will be close, but we will win!
the results thread isn’t working. When I click on it, it says the page doesn’t exist. And the hyperlink in the first paragraph takes you to the results thread… from the primary.
Omen of things to come?
The results thread disappeared from the front page!! Gremlins, I tell ya, gremlins!!!
(Or y’all posted it a few minutes too early. Tsk, tsk.)