In times like these I like to crawl into the mathematically certain arms of Nate Silver, who parses the Massachusetts results this way:
Overall, we have a 31-point swing in the vote to explain: from Barack Obama’s roughly 26-point victory in November 2008, to Martha Coakley’s roughly 5-point loss today.
At a bare minimum, 10 of those points must be assigned to the national environment. Generic ballot polling suggests that the Democrats’ position has worsened by a net of 10 points since November 2008, from winning the House popular vote by 10 points in 2008 to being dead even with Republicans today.
Also at a bare minimum, 11 points of blame should be assigned to Coakley. That represents the difference between the 58 percent of vote that she received at her high-water mark in the polls to the 47 percent she received on Election Day. A fairly large number of voters, it appears, actually turned away from Coakley; it was not just a matter of undecided ones turning toward Brown.
That leaves us with 10 more points of blame to assign; let’s just dole those out as evenly as possible, giving 3 more points to Coakley, 3 more points to the national environment, and 4 to Massachusetts-specific special contingencies—it gets the extra point because it hadn’t received any yet.
That would make the final score: national environment 13, Coakley 14, special circumstances 4.
If you follow through on the math… it suggests that the Democrats would have won by 9 points, rather than losing by 5, had the candidate been someone other than Coakley.
wrong.
Croakley sux as a candidate but Mass has been electing a boob like Kerry for years.
She happened to be the poor sap standing in the path of voters when they got a chance to express an opinion on the fiasco of Obama’s disasterous health care reform. She is road kill. an innocent bystander.
score 30 points Obama.
one for her.
Mass knows Coakley.
She didn’t become 14 points more disagreeable to them in a month….
What changed was Obama’s tactics in shameless vote buying with Senators and unions.
Even Liberal Mass couldn’t stomach it…
yup.
Note how the O word is strangely absent from this assessment…..
btw as to Coakley being a sucky candidate?
The freaking president is supposed to have a hand in this. He’s supposed to line up a good candidate. he’s supposed to make sure a senate candidate doesn’t fucking take a month long vacation. He’s the party leader dammit. Obama is active as all hell in helping insiderish Gillibrand against camouflage hat wearing Harold Ford…..why didn’t he get a candidate who would win?
The continural refusal to assign any blame at all to Obama is amazing. Not saying he’s bad, he’s been good, but in some ways yes he is fucking up and not messaging and not leading and let’s just get the blinders off, okay?
He didn’t even have a health care plan he felt like talking about. The “national environment” what the fuck we talking about, the air?
From MA, and this is more a local issue than not. The Dems have a fairly sordid history of abuse and corruption, enough to turn people off the party in general. And Coakley’s campaign was poorly conducted on all fronts. While Brown’s core supporters focused on the election as a referendum on Obama, the independent swing voters move can be more blamed on local issues and Martha than on national politics.
What about the gays? You didn’t assign any blame points to us. When anything goes wrong anywhere there’s usually someone who blames the gays.
Last time I checked you can still force them to physically filibuster with their GOP Senators that still only represent 10 percent of the US population and let the 59 Dem Senators represent the 90 percent of the US population by a basic majority vote.
Grow a pair and stop coming up with excuses for inaction. You just look like wusses.
As usual, Silver cuts right through the bullshit and hits the nail squarely on the head.
Teaparty sheeple lap the spittle of Blimpjaw.
Short-term amnesia is their oxycontin.
Why can’t you fuckers just admit that the Democratic Party sucks gangrene donkey cock and isn’t worth voting for? Eli, please tell me what Obama’s asshole tastes like. I’m dying to know.
The Democratic Party is ABSOLUTELY WORTHLESS. If you vote for Democrats, you should be ashamed. How many times do they have to sh*t on you before you finally see the Democrats are NOT the party of the people? The solution is not to vote Republicans, who are little more than Nazi-lite. It’s time to get serious about democracy and REAL CHANGE. It’s time to start having a real voice and voting for third parties. Democratic Party worshippers: you’re time has come. You are part of the problem, NOT part of the solution
@9 – sorry, could you repeat what you said?
I was busy peeing on Cheney’s grave.
Does that guy work for the Department of Imaginary Numbers or hold an endowed chair at Total Douche University.
I could barely read that bullshit, I was laughing so hard. He actually put numbers to his nonsense! He may be completely right, but only by accident.
Numbers. too funny.
Don’t know about these numbers, but: Nate Silver is so much better than John Silber.
I think looking into it like that doesn’t prove anything. I will agree with that final point though, that if instead of running an “established” candidate the democrats went with a lesser known, even possibly more liberal, candidate they would have had a much better shot. I kinda feel like Coakly was too much center, and so she didn’t really drive as many people to the polls, like…nothing was exciting about her campaign and the majority of it was spent with the media trashing her to bits. The too little too late effort from the president has become a staple of his career so far, and how everyone stayed silent for so long letting republicans grab the message of killing a bill that, because of the democrats (in both not passing the reform and allowing the reform on the table to look like total shit), looks like a pile of shit.
The democrats need to learn from this that new blood is needed, people like Alan Grayson. “Establishment” – like candidates aren’t going to get the kind of support in previous years. People are pissed, and it would seem democrats would rather “let” a republican take office then vote for another shady democrat.
Alan Grayson?
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