Post hoc rationalization - Brown vs. Shaheen

At National Review Online, Katherine Connell reads the exit polls on the Scott Brown loss in NH:

One thing that jumps out from the exit polls was that a majority of voters thought Brown was too new to their state.

Fifty-three percent answered “no” to the question, “Has Brown lived in N.H. long enough?” Of those who felt that Brown’s migration to the Granite State was too recent, 89 percent voted for Jeanne Shaheen. Of the 45 percent who thought Brown had been there long enough, 93 percent voted for him.

I've lived in, or on the border of, New Hampshire for 30 years now, and you can count me among the group that thinks the "carpetbagger" assessment is strictly post hoc rationalization from Shaheen supporters. If they wanted an alternative to Shaheen, they'd have voted for Brown. They didn't. I would be surprised if there 10 votes cast in Tuesday's election that really hinged in any significant way on Brown's newcomer status.

New Hampshire is not a conservative state, at this point, it's a liberal state, because it's majority-populated by people living within 30 miles of Massachusetts who were Massachusetts residents 25 years ago. Scott Brown was no less a carpetbagger than the majority of those who voted against him. And if he'd been there for fifty years, the race would have turned out the same way. Jeanne Shaheen has won statewide races in New Hampshire consistently for the last 20 years, often by large margins, and the state has continued to grow more liberal during that entire time. Obviously 2008 was a much better environment for running as a Democrat, but she beat an incumbent, John Sununu, who was a lifelong New Hampshire resident by 7 points then, and the state has continued to grow more liberal over the six years since.

To be fair to Connell, she acknowledges this possibility - "Of course, it could be that voters who had made up their mind to support Brown would simply say that they didn’t mind his state-hopping from Massachusetts, and those who favored Shaheen would be inclined to criticize him for it." But she does so almost dismissively, and I think that she's wrong to do so.

I wrote about this effect once several years ago.

Any arguments that too inexperienced and callow to be elected are legitimate.

But if I were to make them, it would be a lie. It would be to imply that, if only he weren't so young and inexperienced, I might vote for him. And the fact is, based on his entire career, the people he's chosen to align himself with and his voting record, there are no realistic circumstances under which I would ever vote for him...It's kind of like the NFL tie-breakers. If you go far enough down the list, you get to things like net points in division games. It's relevant, but the NFL is unlikely to ever actually make a decision based on it, because there are more important things that will separate the teams before you get to it. Obama's youth, his past drug "experimentation," McCain's temper, the Keating five, Hillary's "misstatements" about her trip to Bosnia - all interesting, all legitimate and all so far down the list as to be essentially irrelevant in making a decision.

That's' what's happening here.  No one didn't vote for Scott Brown because he was a carpetbagger, because he just made New Hampshire his full-time residence two years ago.  But if you were going to support Shaheen anyway, you'd be happy to offer that as a criticism of Brown.  I believe that this issue played no real part in any voters' actual decision to choose Shaheen over Brown.

The Strategic Angle - Jim Geraghty on National Review Online

Excellent piece on the strategy and tactics of the Reid-Angle race by Jim Geraghty, who has been all over it on National Review Online.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, finds himself with only one remaining advantage: money.

He’s a fossil in an anti-incumbent year, his job-approval and personal-favorability ratings are terrible, the state’s unemployment and housing troubles are probably the nation’s worst, and the next Nevadan to rave about Reid’s smooth charisma will be the first. For a long while, everyone in Nevada politics has known Reid had one shot at reelection: Define Angle early, destroy her reputation in an onslaught of negative ads, and eke out a victory in a low-turnout matchup.

“Reid gets it, but he thinks we’re going to play by the normal challenger playbook and sit on our cash,” says Jordan Gehrke, deputy campaign manager for Angle. “Republicans across America will be there to support us if we’re still in a competitive race after Labor Day. But that means they have to see us fighting back now, and so that’s what we’re doing.”

Read it all...

I have not yet decided what would give me more pleasure come November 3rd - a Republican controlled Senate that includes Harry Reid, or a Democrat controlled Senate that doesn't. Obviously, a Reidless Republican Senate is the best case, but given the choice between one or the other of the first two, it would be a tough choice to make.

What's wrong with this picture?

Here's a pretty good ad...



Hard to disagree with any of it, right?


Anyone know what Michael Bennet does for a living right now? Want to take a guess? Go on, take a guess before reading on.

Figure it out?








He's a sitting United States Senator. A Democrat. Who voted FOR the porkulus stimulus bill. (You remember, the one from "this Washington" where "they spend money they don't have.") Who voted FOR the Obamacare Health Care Reform bill. (You remember, the one from "here" where "they spend money they don't have" and "the special interests have too much power" and "this Washington is broken.") Apparently, Michael Bennet doesn't want to stand up in front of his constituents and defend those votes.

Which makes that about as deceptive and dishonest an ad as you're ever likely to see outside of an Obama or Clinton campaign.


(H/T: Jim Geraghty, who asks, "What's the strategy here, close your eyes and pretend you're not a sitting U.S. Senator?" Sure looks like it...)

Mr. Brown Goes To Washington

One of the things that people may have noticed during the coverage of the special Massachusetts Senate election last month was that I didn't actually have much to say about Scott Brown. I had a lot to say about Coakley, but not much of substance on Brown. There are a couple of reasons for that.

1. I had legitimate strong feelings about Coakley, for legitimate reasons.
2. I didn't know a lot about Scott Brown's record.
3. I expected, based on the little that I did know, that Brown was going to be a disappointment to me fully half the time, if not more.

So this doesn't surprise me at all.

Sen. Scott Brown (R., Mass) broke with his party this afternoon and voted with the Democrats on an important procedural vote on the jobs bill, boosting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s chances of passing his $15 billion jobs package.

“I came to Washington to be an independent voice, to put politics aside, and to do everything in my power to help create jobs for Massachusetts families,” Brown said in a statement. “This Senate jobs bill is not perfect. I wish the tax cuts were deeper and broader, but I voted for it because it contains measures that will help put people back to work.”

...


Three other Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins (Me.), Olympia Snowe (Me.), and George Voinovich (Ohio) also voted for cloture.

That last line speaks volumes.

I'm not outraged, of course. I don't know the details of this bill's contents, but I'm quite confident that any bill coming out of this particular Congress is going to be bad for the country, so I'm disappointed, but not outraged and not surprised. Scott seems like a pretty good guy, but I don't see any evidence that he's a real conservative, not even a real fiscal conservative. Is he the ideal Senator for me? Absolutely not, and I had no expectation that he would be.

He might, however, be the most conservative Senator that I can reasonably expect the citizens of Massachusetts to elect...

Tea party challenge to Reid

This strikes me as a very bad idea.

Sun columnist Jon Ralston is reporting that the Tea Party has qualified as a third party in Nevada and will have a candidate in the Senate race to battle for the seat held by Majority Leader Harry Reid.

The party has filed a Certificate of Existence but needs to get 1 percent of the electorate to vote for its candidate in November to permanently qualify, according to the report.

Ralston reported that Jon Ashjian will be the Tea Party's U.S. Senate candidate on the November ballot. Ashjian still must declare his candidacy.

The likeliest result of a serious effort by a third-party anti-tax senate campaign in Nevada is the reelection of Harry Reid, as the Tea Party and Republican candidates split the (substantial and likely majority) anti-Reid vote. This would be a classic example of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, or letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I very much hope that it does not happen.

Evan Bayh not running for re-election

This is fairly stunning news...

Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) will not seek a 3rd term in the Senate next year, according to a Dem source, handing Dems yet another setback as they struggle to salvage their damaged ship.

Bayh, elected statewide 5 times, will become the 5th Senate Dem not to seek another term. His decision to step aside , first reported by The Fix and confirmed to Hotline OnCall, creates an open seat in IN, a usually-red state that broke the mold in '08 by voting narrowly for Pres. Obama.

Last week, ex-Sen. Dan Coats (R), who held Bayh's seat before retiring in '98, announced he would run for the seat. Ex-Rep. John Hostettler (R) had already announced his own candidacy.

A recent poll taken for the liberal DailyKos website showed Bayh easily beating both Coats and Hostettler. And Bayh ended the year with $13M in the bank, far ahead of any potential challengers.

That was a seat that the Republicans thought they could win with Mike Pence if everything went well, but Pence decided to keep his House seat. That left Bayh in seemingly excellent condition to retain it for the Democrats, with big polling and money advantages. It's not overstating it to say that this significantly increases the Republican's chances of actually getting to 50 Senate seats in November. There are a number of likely gains, but they needed a couple of unlikely gains to do it, and this is one of them.

Senator Scott Brown

For the first time since I moved to Massachusetts in 1990, nearly 20 years ago, there's a member of Congress for whom I voted...



Our long national nightmare is now over...

And hey, lets all help the people of Rhode Island retire Patches Kennedy...

Special election certified

Mr. Brown's going to Washington...

The upset election of Scott P. Brown to the US Senate was officially certified this morning in a brief procedural hearing at the State House, clearing the way for the Republican to take the oath of office this evening in Washington.

The independently elected Governor's Council voted 6-0 to accept the official results, which showed that Brown won last month's special election by 107,317 votes. Nearly two dozen reporters and six television cameras crowded the cramped Governor's Council Chamber for the unanimous vote, which concluded when Governor Deval Patrick slammed down his gavel.

"Motion carried," Patrick said "Done."

He's expected to be officially sworn in this afternoon.

The Senate seat which Brown will take has been held by a Kennedy or a Kennedy coat-holder since JFK's election in 1952. Fifty-eight years ago.

Our long national nightmare is nearly over...

This would be offensive

If this happens, then the Republicans need to make a fuss about it.

Patricia Smith, President Obama's nominee for Solicitor of Labor, appears to have lied to Congress, according to e-mails released from during her tenure as Commissioner of the New York State Labor Department.

...

Senate Labor ranking member Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., has asked that Smith's nomination be withdrawn.
...

Smith's actions with respect to this program seem to show she has a heavy bias toward labor and against business -- no big surprise, perhaps, considering who is appointing her. But why she would mislead or even directly lie to Congress about any of this is a bit odd. Even when given the opportunity to revise her testimony in written questions, Smith stuck to a story that does not seem consistent with the paper-trail.

On Monday, Smith will get a cloture vote in the Senate. With Scott Brown waiting at least another week to be seated in the Senate, there is a chance her nomination will slide right through.

The other day, I said that I thought that Paul Kirk shouldn't be voting now, but it wouldn't make much difference unless there were a strictly-partisan cloture vote on something, or a 51-49 where he was in the majority. Freddoso's piece seems to imply the possibility of a strictly partisan-line cloture vote. If that takes place with Paul Kirk representing the 60th vote because Scott Brown, elected two weeks ago tomorrow, hasn't been seated yet, it's a travesty, an offense to the body politic, and the Republicans should be loud about it.

Why is Senator Kirk not yet former Senator Kirk?

SusanAnne Hiller has an excellent question:

The Senate has voted on three pieces of legislation today that required 60 votes–to raise the debt ceiling to $14.3 trillion, to reduce the deficit by establishing five-year discretionary spending caps, and Ben Bernanke’s confirmation–all of which interim Senator Paul Kirk (D-MA) has voted on. In addition, there have been other Senate votes since Scott Brown was elected as Massachusetts senator that Kirk cast a vote.

The main question here is: why is former Senator Kirk still voting on these legislative pieces? According to Senate rules and precedent, Kirk’s term expired last Tuesday upon the election of Scott Brown.

My suspicion is that, if the Senate tried to vote on a cloture motion which was going to be a 60-40 partisan vote, so that the vote actually mattered, the Republicans would make noise and fight it. None of the votes that they've taken in the past week-and-a-half have been such that it would have made any difference which way Senator MA-Jr. voted.

I think it's a bad precedent, but it hasn't made a difference in anything, so it isn't something that would be necessarily productive to squawk about.

And it's official...

Martha Coakley has conceded. Scott Brown, a REPUBLICAN will take the US Senate seat held for the past 47 years by Edward Kennedy. The REPUBLICAN gives the REPUBLICANS in the Senate 41 votes, sufficient to sustain a filibuster. Furthermore, the victory for the REPUBLICAN Scott Brown not only makes it virtually impossible for the Democrats to get their modified health care reform bill through the Senate, it makes it exceedingly unlikely that the House of Representatives would be able to pass the bill that the Senate has already passed. This means that the Obamacare health care takeover is very nearly dead.

More analysis tomorrow...

Election returns

The Secretary of State's office does not seem to have a link to election returns. But WRKO does.

The polls have closed

The polls have closed here in Massachusetts. I'm not going to call the race now (though Michael Graham did a couple of hours ago), but I've followed pretty much all of the available information about this race over the past week. That includes today, with all of the turnout stories, body language stories, memos and what-not. I'm not going to call it now.

But I no longer think it's going to be a late night...

Circumstantial evidence, piling up...

I've said that everything that's happened since the middle of last week has boded well for Scott Brown and ill for Martha Coakley. There haven't been any contrary indicators - everything's pointed to a Brown win. Everything.

Just about every election night, Republican pollster Frank Luntz assembles a focus group of likely voters to help predict election results. Tonight you can see Luntz interview an assembly of Massachusetts voters on Fox at 9:10 p.m. EST.

But you probably won’t see all the work that went into it. As of late this afternoon, Luntz was still scrambling to balance his focus group with supporters of Democrat Martha Coakley. “I just lost another one,” Luntz growled over his cell phone from a hotel ballroom at Logan Airport. In the last 24 hours, six Coakley voters have dropped out. By contrast, Luntz hasn’t lost a single supporter of her opponent, Scott Brown.
...

Instead, says Luntz, they’re ashamed. “They don’t want to be on television defending Martha Coakley. It’s passé. It’s socially unacceptable. I never dreamed I’d see Democrats in Massachusetts embarrassed to admit they’re Democrats.”

In all his years of running focus groups, Luntz remembers only a single other experience like this one. It was January of 2004, in Iowa....“All my Dean people quit two days out,” he remembers...It all comes back to Luntz now as he works to find bodies willing to represent Martha Coakley. “This is definition of collapse,” he says.

Polls close in 1 hour and 22 minutes...

Turnout anecdotes

In Andover, where six of nine precincts vote at the high school, and where Republicans generally win contested races:

It took me 25 minutes to get into voter parking at AHS. I stood in the snow with the girls for about an hour after holding my Brown sign, and there was lots of support from those driving in. :fingerscrossed:

More turnout

Norah O'Donnell tweets:

Brown camp sources tells me: "Longer lines outside Boston than inside. Not good sign for Coakley. Scott's voters highly motivated"

Turnout anecdotes

Geraghty:

Winchester:

I live in Winchester, just north of the city. Long line this morning at 7:00 AM when the polls opened— approximately 40 people were waiting to vote. With the exception of the 2008 presidential election, where there were 100 or so people in line, I haven't seen early morning turnout approach this.

High turnout isn't necessarily uniform across the state. One of my co-workers (who prides himself on being one of the few conservative voices in Jamaica Plain) said that turnout was exceptionally low— much lower than the presidential election. Given Jamaica Plain's strong blue tilt, it will be interesting to see how turnout evolves over the course of today.

Boston:

.I live in arguably the most liberal neighborhood in downtown Boston (I'll never forget the look on the Obama canvasser's face when he came by my apartment last year and I told him I was voting for McCain). When I got to the polls this morning, my wife and I were the only two people there other than the poll workers. In November, the line was out the door and halfway down the block

Well, this is fun...

Robert Costa has been blogging the Massachusetts Senate race for National Review Online at Bay State Report. Some of you will understand why I particularly enjoyed this post with pictures from yesterday's North Andover rally...



(For those that don't know, that grinning redhead is my youngest son, Benjamin. And yes, I posted a couple of pictures from that rally yesterday, but it's kind of neat to see the picture on a big blog, not just mine...)

And the polls are...

...open. Thirteen hours to go.

Massachusetts Special Election - prediction

We're about an hour from polls opening in Massachusetts for the special election to fill the United States Senate seat left vacant by the death of Edward Kennedy. And despite the contention in some parts of the media, such as WBZ radio and the Boston Globe, we are not beginning election day with the candidates "neck and neck," or in a "dead heat." There have been numerous polls over the past week, and the Republican candidate Scott Brown has led by three to fifteen points in all of them. If the polling numbers were reversed, no Boston media outlets would call it a "dead heat."

The question is, have the pollsters correctly identified the electorate that is going to turn out? It remains a predominantly Democratic state, and there's always the risk (or, depending on your point of view, hope) that the average Democrat-on-the-street will a) make the effort to go to the polls for this one race and b) actually support the Democratic candidate.

My belief, as we wait for the polls to open, is that there won't be enough of either for Martha Coakley to win the race. I predict that Scott Brown wins the seat, outside the margin of fraud. The final result will be something on the order of 52-45-3.

I further predict that, over the next 24-48 hours, there will be a lot of chatter from White House types and lefty pundits and "reality-based" bloggers about this being a local election, Coakley being a lousy candidate, the election results being unrelated to Obama or Obamacare, etc. It'll all be hogwash. An enormous part of the reason that Scott Brown, if he wins, will have done so was because the election was nationalized. Everyone on both sides knows the stakes. Everyone on both sides understands that this election is a referendum on Obamacare, and the way that the Democrats are trying to force a huge expansion of government through on partisan grounds. Money has poured in to both sides from all over the country. So, while Coakley has made some mistakes in her campaign and Brown has run a great campaign, that's not enough for him to win here. It's the nationalized nature of the election that's going to do it, if he does.