Tag: MA-Sen

Like a head coach whose heavily-favored team craters early in the playoffs, DSCC Chair Bob Menendez has to be feeling pretty vulnerable right now. If Menendez were to get pushed aside from his current role, who could take his place? Whom would you want to take his place? The floor’s all yours.

Dear Attorney General Richard Blumenthal,

You had better learn and take to heart the lessons provided yesterday by your neighboring colleague.  In particular: (1) a gigantic lead now is VERY MUCH NOT the same as a blowout victory (or even any victory), and (2) neglect is NEVER the right way to run a campaign.

Your supporter,

Glenn Magus Harvey

More beneath the fold.

Dear Democratic Party,

I damn well hope that this costly lesson about the negatives of complacency has been well learned.

If we can win Idaho, they can win Massachusetts.

Your supporter,

Glenn Magus Harvey

~~~~

Dear progressive movement,

Stop whining about how watered-down the health care bill is, stop threatening to vote for all sorts of crazy people (on any side) against sane Democrats who can get elected (and possibly risk losing nasty districts), and start accepting political realities (remember the “living in reality” slogan?).

Stop whining about how the Obama administration isn’t progressive enough, and start asking yourself what realistic steps you can do to inch the country toward a better future.

You want results?  Be prepared to work very hard for them.  Whining and sulking do not produce results.  Do something better with your time–such as learning about on-the-ground political realities, figuring out how to use and to affect them to help your goals, coming up with productive ideas, and putting such ideas into action.

Your friend and ally,

Glenn Magus Harvey

~~~~

Dear Nevada State Democratic Party and other relevant persons and parties,

Figure out a way to deal with Reid.  Both of them.  Preferably, figure out a way to get rid of both of them.

Your fellow Democrat,

Glenn Magus Harvey

~~~~

Dear Senator Joe Lieberman,

You suck.

If Chris Dodd can afford to offend the insurance companies, then so can you.  So shut up.

Your detractor and former supporter,

Glenn Magus Harvey

With all but five precincts reporting, this is what tonight’s election results look like on a town-by-town basis (click image for larger version):

UPDATE: Jeffmd does some quick number crunching to look at performance by congressional district. The preliminary conclusions:

Coakley Wins: 1st, 7th, 8th

Uncertain, but likely Brown wins: 4th, 9th

Brown Wins: 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 10th

UPDATE: Dave Wasserman tweets:

Q: Where are the other potential Dem collapse areas this Nov? A: Almost precisely the places Hillary carried in the 08 prez primary

He’s definitely on to something. Below is a map of the 2008 presidential primary results in Massachusetts between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Red is Clinton, blue is Obama:

The results between tonight’s race and the presidential primary correlate at a rate of 0.56, which is quite high.

Looks like the bowl’s been cashed.

Polls have now closed in Massachusetts, as Martha Coakley and Scott Brown square off to replace Ted Kennedy in the Senate. In the primary, we got our first nibble of results fifteen minutes after polls closed, so hopefully we won’t be waiting too long for the first trickle of numbers to come in tonight.

RESULTS: Boston Globe | Associated Press | The Boston Channel | WBZTV

RESOURCES: Town benchmarks (Wasserman’s chart) | Jeff’s projection model

9:33PM: (Crisitunity): Coakley missed most of her baselines:

Agawam 35/64 (should’ve been 41/57 under 2008 model)

Andover 41/58 (should’ve been 44/55)

Braintree 37/62 (should’ve been 38/60)

Fall River 57/41 (should’ve been 61/38)

Needham 52/47 (should’ve been 54/45)

New Bedford 59/39 (should’ve been 62/37)

Springfield 61/37 (should’ve been 65/34)

Wellesley 50/50 (should’ve been 53/46)

Westfield 36/62 (should’ve been 41/57)

Fitchburg was 40/59, almost exactly how Suffolk pegged it. (Should’ve been 48/50, the biggest underperformance I’ve seen.)

But we beat the spread in Belmont:  59/40 (should’ve been 57/41)

and Quincy was right on: 46/53 (should’ve been 46/52)

9:23PM: The Associated Press has called this one for Big Brown. Say hello to your newest Senator from Massachusetts: Republican Scott Brown!

9:23PM: Coakley has conceded, according to Cillizza.

9:20PM: With two-thirds of the vote in, Jeff’s model has nudged up to somewhere between 47.7 and 47.94% for Coakley.

9:13PM: 1405 precincts are now in, and Brown is holding firm at 53-46. I don’t see how Coakley wins this, but look on the bright side, Democrats: at least they’ll be a special election for Scott Brown’s Senate seat! Democrats only have a 34-5 margin of control in that body!

9:04PM: 1298 precincts in, and Brown leads by almost 90,000 votes. (53-46) Coakley’s on pace to end up somewhere between 47.6-47.8%.

9:03PM: Using the Jeff model, Coakley is on pace to 47.5% (’08) or 47.85% (’96). Not looking so hot.

8:58PM: 980 precincts are in, and Brown leads by 52-47.

8:55PM: 875 precincts are now in, and Brown is up 53-46. Wasserman tweeted earlier that he thinks that Scott Brown has won.

8:54PM: Sorry folks — we’re getting utterly slammed with traffic tonight and the site is experiencing some server issues.

8:51PM: 738 precincts are in, and Brown leads 52-47.

8:40PM: We’re up to 445 precincts now, and Brown is holding onto his 53-46 lead (or a 33,000 vote gap).

8:35PM: 283 precincts in, and Brown still leads by 53-46 (or about 18,000 votes).

8:32PM: 243 precincts in, and Brown’s up to 53-46.

8:29PM: Jeff: Under his 2008 model, Coakley is projected to win 49.2% of the vote based on the returns so far. But using the 1996 model, she’s projected to win 52.5%. Still a nailbiter.

8:27PM: 143 precincts in, and Brown leads 51-48.

8:22PM: 116 (of 2168) precincts are now in, and Brown leads by 52-47.

8:20PM: From Jeff: “Coakley’s underperforming the baseline by just a little bit. Model sez 48.7% Coakley by 2008; 49.8% Coakley by 1996.” Of course, we know that the model is not perfect, but this is looking pretty tight so far.

8:18PM: 36 precincts are now in, and Brown has a 10-point lead.

8:14PM: The AP has a few numbers in from 12 precincts, where Scott Brown leads by 54-45.

8:10PM: Rasmussen just released some details on their e-night poll. Among those who decided in the last few days, Coakley has a 47-41 advantage. Among those who made up their mind over a month ago, Coakley has a “big advantage”. I guess this race hinges on just how well Brown is going among those who made up their mind within the past month, but not within the past few days.

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’m as freaked out over Massachusetts as anyone – and I might be plenty angry/despondent/confused/hungover tomorrow morning.

But in the meantime, I’ve been working on a crude projection model using, in part, the “baseline” idea that Crisitunity and DavidNYC have made a part of SSP Election Night Tradition.

The model, as inputs, takes partial results from towns that have reported, and outputs a whole slew of numbers comparing the current situation to the “baseline” numbers.

Explanations below the flip.

So here’s the front end of the model:

http://spreadsheets.google.com…

You’ll see a few things:

• How Coakley and Brown are currently doing.
  

• How Obama was doing in 2008 with the same towns and parts of towns reporting.
  

• How a 2008 “baseline” Democrat on target to win by 1 vote would be doing.
  

• How Kerry was doing in 1996 against Bill Weld with the same towns and parts of towns reporting.
  

• How a 1996 “baseline” Democrat would be doing.
  

You’ll also see comparisons between Coakley’s performance and those of Obama, Kerry, and the two “baseline” Democrats.

Perhaps most significantly, you’ll see the “2010 Projection using 2008” line.

The model compares relative turnout between 2010 and 2008, and the relative performances of Coakley and Obama to project results from towns that have not yet reported.

The “2010 Projection using 1996” line does the same, except with 1996 data.

I’m not claiming this model is perfect. In fact, it’s pretty damn bad. I can think of a few glaring weaknesses:

• The fundamental problem of the ‘baseline’ idea: it assumes that every town will swing uniformly.
  

• Disparate turnout: this model compares turnout in aggregate, instead of at the town level. This may lead to an overestimation of turnout in areas with relatively low turnout (compared to 2008 and 1996) and the reverse in areas with relatively high turnout. This may potentially bias the projections in Coakley’s favor.
  

• Assumption of town uniformity: the model assumes that each town votes uniformly the same way, but…Jamaica Plain and Southie are not going to vote the same way, very simply. If a relatively Brown-friendly area of a town reports first, this will bias the projection in his favor. The reverse is true if a Coakley-friendly area reports first.
  

Incidentally, here are the blood and guts of the model: http://spreadsheets.google.com…

Update: In columns AS, AT, BB, and BC, you can see baselines for every town for both 2008 and 1996.

I threw in some junk results to test it, and so far I didn’t detect any coding errors. I don’t pretend that I’m better than the Associated Press – but I just want to have an idea of where we are at each point of the results phase.

Hopefully I’ll get a chance to keep this updated as results stream in tonight.

Lastly, if you live in Massachusetts, are reading this, and you haven’t voted (assuming you’re a citizen, not a convicted felon, etc..), what the hell’s wrong with you?!

Here’s hoping Coakley pulls this off.

The county baselines post has become a game day staple at Swing State Project for advanced elections-returns-watchers, and today’s no different. The basic idea here: find the bare minimum percentage in each major county that’s necessary to get the Democratic candidate over the hump at 50%. (That, of course, is predicated on all the counties moving the same direction as the presidential election the benchmarks are based on, which doesn’t actually happen in real life, but it’s a rough estimate.) As election returns come in, compare the benchmarks to the actual returns to see if we’re on track to win.

There’s one small problem here, which most of you are probably already familiar with: Massachusetts, and the other New England states, don’t report election results by county, but rather by town. With hundreds and hundreds of little towns, that’s a lot of ground to cover, so we’ll just look at the biggest, plus some towns in what seem to be the key areas to watch in this race.

In fact, let’s take a look at the state’s town-by-town map, created by our own DavidNYC (you can click on the map to see a full-size version):

This map is based on the relatively close 1996 Senate election between John Kerry and William Weld (a better choice here, because a map of the 2008 Presidential race would be almost entirely blue, and the 2002 gubernatorial race would be almost entirely red, with Romney winning the vast majority of towns). But it gives the general lay of the land in the state: the Democratic votes are heavily concentrated in Boston and its immediately surrounding cities. (There’s also a lot of low-density blue out in the college towns and arty enclaves of the Berkshires and Pioneer Valley in the west.) The red on the map is mostly rural and low-density too, so the real areas that we’re focused on today are the purplish and pinkish suburban turf to the north, west, and south of Boston.

Rather than just one model, I’m using two different models: one based on the high-turnout, high-Democratic-intensity 2008 presidential election (won by Barack Obama, 62-36), and the low-turnout, low-intensity 2002 gubernatorial election (won by Republican Mitt Romney, 50-45) — more generally, a best-case scenario for Dems and a worst-case scenario for Dems. With turnout projections high but not as high as yesterday (SoS William Galvin is predicting 40%), and weather mediocre, we’re probably looking at something somewhere in between, so consider these the bookends. Nevertheless, after making the necessary adjustments, both models, in most towns, point to very similar benchmarks.

Let’s start with the largest cities in Massachusetts (the ones that provide more than 1% of the state’s votes each). These aren’t really the places to watch, as they’re heavily Democratic (with the sort-of exception of Quincy) and the real question with them is whether turnout is keeping pace proportionately with the rest of the state.

Democratic performance in most of the state, as you can see above, stayed fairly consistent with the rise in the tide from 2002 to 2008. Statewide, Democratic performance went from 45% to 62% (a 17% gain), and, for example, Boston followed that closely, going from 61% to 79% (an 18% gain). Many other towns tracked that, too; for instance, the most conservative parts of the state (like Falmouth and Sandwich on Cape Cod, or the suburbs around Lowell) also moved about 16 to 18% in the Dems’ direction.

The interesting areas are the ones where the movement was much greater — these tend to be the wealthier areas in the state, fancy Middlesex Co. suburbs like Wellesley or North Shore towns in Essex Co., consistent with Obama’s overperformance nationwide among high-income voters — and where the movement was much less — mostly in blue-collar towns of the South Shore, as well as other blue-collar outposts in the state’s west. To me, these seem to be the swingy areas, and the ones most worth watching, especially since the trends may (or may not) continue to accelerate today — upper-middle-class voters may be attracted to Coakley’s technocratic image (especially those in Middlesex Co., where she was DA) or they may revert to liking the fiscal conservatism that they saw in Romney, while blue-collar voters seem likely to respond to Brown’s regular-guy shtick but may also be motivated by their ancestral Democratic loyalties and union or local machine GOTVing.

Let’s start with some well-to-do suburbs west of Boston:

And here are North Shore suburbs. (Lawrence is a little out of place here, as it’s working-class with a large Hispanic population, but it had the same large 02 to 08 shift that its wealthier neighbors did.)

Now turning to the more blue-collar locales where the trend seemed less favorable to Democrats, starting with the South Shore towns. (Looking up to the biggest towns list above, you can see that same trend happened not only in Quincy, but especially in Fall River and New Bedford, which are strongly Democratic but barely moved at all from O’Brien to Obama. In their cases, I’m not sure if that’s indifference to Obama, or particularly strong local machines good at keep turnout consistent.)

And finally, a mix of western mill towns and blue-collar suburbs around Springfield:

Now for the bad news… Suffolk polled several bellwether towns over the weekend, and found that Coakley is polling well below the level she needs to meet the benchmarks, in fact slightly below even Shannon O’Brien levels from 2002. They found a 41/55 race in Fitchburg (see the western mill towns chart), and a 40/57 race in Peabody (see the North Shore chart). I have no idea about the sample size or any of the other innards, but this suggests that for Coakley to pull this out — as has been more broadly evident for several days — the only way is for the pollsters to have been missing large swaths of heretofore unactivated voters who just got transformed into Democratic likely voters in the last few days.

Blue Mass Group has an interesting post that lists some other bellwether towns that you might want to keep an eye on. UPDATE: (And Cook’s Dave Wasserman has made available a Google spreadsheet doing more or less the same thing for every single freakin’ town in the state, albeit only for the 2008 model. Check it out.)

We’ve got no babka to give out this time, folks, so you’re just playing for bragging rights. Let’s hear it: Dig deep and give us your best and most honest prediction of what what the end result will be in the Senate special election between Democrat Martha Coakley and Republican Scott Brown.

InsiderAdvantage for the Politico (1/17, likely voters):

Martha Coakley (D): 43

Scott Brown (R): 52

Joe Kennedy (I) 2

(MoE: ±4%)

You know, we’ve picked these polls apart enough already, so how about we all take a page from trowaman and ask: If Scott Brown takes this race tomorrow, who should Democrats run against him in 2012? Not that we’re predicting that he’ll win, but it’s never too early to think through the hypotheticals. Tell us who you think should run in the comments.