traderdave wrote:Did they call the election for Brown yet?

jerseyhoya wrote:Hopefully this goes as well as his Election Day prediction in 2004, when he said Kerry would comfortably break 300 electoral votes.

If anything him saying Coakley will win makes me feel better about Brown. Zogby is a stone cold idiot.

Glenn Thrush at Politico:

A Democratic operative familiar with Martha Coakley and the DSCC's massive get-out-the-vote operation says that outreach workers in and around Boston have been stunned by the number of Democrats and Obama supporters who are waving them off, saying they'll vote for Scott Brown.

jerseyhoya wrote:

drsmooth wrote:Good time for a weather guy to show up, as it will be raining in Beantown today.

Jersey, do the usual assumptions re: weather hold for special elections, or are they, y'know, special?

I think given the differences in the level of motivation that's apparent in the polling, anything that raises the difficulty of voting a plus for the Republicans today. The caveat on that is I'm sure there's a sizable Dem base in Massachusetts that votes come hell or high water, and Brown is really counting on getting the support of independents, who appear to be strongly committed to him, but maybe don't want to work too hard to vote. If it wants to rain real hard in Boston, but be nice in the suburbs, that would be the best of all worlds.

If Brown wins, I don't think it makes sense to continue the negotiations or trying to pass a bill through the senate prior to seating Brown. The House simply needs to pass the senate bill without revisions and await changes that will be passed in a separate bill that can be pushed through reconciliation (the content of a particular piece of legislation is critical to determining whether the rules allow it to go through reconciliation). Letting the bill die now would be stupid, frankly suicidal in political terms and good evidence that the Democrats just aren't prepared to govern the country.

For the House liberals, it was clear that only very limited revisions were going to be gained in the House-Senate negotiations. It's one thing if someone wasn't going to vote for the final bill at all. But if they were, the differences between the senate bill and whatever the negotiation was going to produce simply were not going to be big enough -- not remotely -- to justify voting against it.

For the conservative Dems, if they already voted for the more liberal House bill, it won't help them a wink to refuse to vote for the senate bill now -- whether that means casting a no vote or just preventing it from coming up for a vote at all. This should be obvious to anyone who knows how 30 second TV ads work (or frankly, even how very reasonable political argument works). And the lesson of 1994 is clear: the folks who killed health care in 1994 didn't gain any benefit from it. They were the ones who got slaughtered in November.

Let me hazard a prediction. If the Dems push through this bill now, bank the accomplish and move on to selling it and working the jobs agenda, it'll be a bad but not terrible November. If they all run to ground after a Brown victory, it's really all bets are off. Why? Because this is about meta-politics. There are all sorts of reasons for the troubles the Dems are now having. They're overwhelmingly linked to the catastrophically bad economy -- whether that's because of 10% unemployment, the spending that has been required to keep the economy from slipping into a Depression, the bailouts of the banks etc. But the key reason, the ones the Dems have some control over, is their ability to act and deliver on an agenda.

Not one to satisfy the base or to calm swing-voters. Doing either would have pros and cons. But acting. Showing voters that you're actually able to execute. This is what is hurting Dems across the board. Ideological voters think in terms of their policy wishes. But not all voters are like that. And not just 'low information voters'. Voters respond to the ability to act, to get results. That may sound trivial or shallow but it's not. It's both logical and goes to the heart of all of our experience of human nature. Democrats need to show that they can act and have some confidence in what they're doing. So pass the bill and move on.

Letting the bill die now would be stupid, frankly suicidal in political terms and good evidence that the Democrats just aren't prepared to govern the country.

At the moment, the RSC and its allies are discussing a reprise of the document that helped bring Republicans out of the wilderness in 1994: Gingrich’s Contract with America. Like the original, Norquist told me, this one would most likely be composed of a slate of legislative proposals, this time developed by the RSC rather than House leadership. In addition, Norquist ticked off a list of items the new contract might also include: No czars. Fiscal transparency. A waiting period to read bills. A top corporate tax rate of 25 percent. But, he cautioned, the RSC will only be the conduit.

“I think that it will come from the field,” Norquist said. “It will come from the tea party guys, from the grassroots guys. To come through the Hill, it has to be put into legislative language.”

As we talked, Teller started speculating on what the RSC might tackle first, if the GOP returns to power.

“Obviously the big thing, if there’s anything left to go after, would be stimulus and TARP…” he said. “It just depends on what goes into law in 2010. If there’s health care, energy, cap and trade--national energy tax we’ve been calling it--those would be obvious targets. I imagine our guys would go after the hate crimes law that was just enacted. Maybe minimum wage.

I’m trying to think what else is out there that we’d want to go after. Anything seen as signature Democrat initiatives that we robustly fought when they were in power, I would presume we would go in and repeal them.”

kopphanatic wrote:For what it's worth, Zogby predicted that Coakley would pull it out.

...Coakley’s sorry performance reveals a dirty little secret about Bay State politics: Yes, Massachusetts may be “one of the most enthusiastically Democratic states in the country,” as Adam Nagourney recently described it in the Times, but Massachusetts also boasts one of the most hackish state Democratic parties in America — in other words, just the sort of party that would produce a Martha Coakley. And, in a way, the person to blame for the party’s pathetic condition is Teddy himself.

Granted, it’s not as though Kennedy deliberately tried to sabotage Massachusetts Democrats. In addition to being the Lion of the Senate, he was the Lion of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, serving as a mentor to — plus fund-raiser and campaigner for — countless lower-wattage Democrats back home. But when one guy occupies one of the state’s top three offices for nearly half a century, it’s all but inevitable that political sclerosis will set in. And that’s what happened in Massachusetts, as generations of bright and promising young Democrats there were forced to temper their ambitions and bide their time until Teddy — and later, John Kerry, who’s held the state’s other Senate seat for going on a quarter century now — moved on to something else. Which, of course, they never did. Indeed, while Kennedy and Kerry’s outsize presence on the national political stage probably made people in Utah think of Massachusetts as Gomorrah on the Bay, it’s important to remember that from 1991 until 2007, Massachusetts’s governors were Republicans — despite the fact that Democrats enjoy a three-to-one registration advantage in the state.

There’s no better illustration of the Massachusetts Democratic Party’s decrepitude than its state legislators. For most state parties, the legislature is an incubator for political talent and the place to develop a deep political bench, but for Massachusetts Democrats, it’s been a breeding ground for pathological behavior and corruption. The last three speakers of the Massachusetts House of Representatives — Democrats all in a legislative body their party has now controlled for 55 years — have had to resign because of scandals that resulted in their indictments. Meanwhile, over in the State Senate, in the last two years, one Democrat lost his job after being arrested for sexual assault; another was forced from office after FBI surveillance cameras caught her stuffing a $1,000 bribe into her bra; and a third (and my personal favorite) recently bid the Senate adieu after a three-month stretch during which he was involved in a hit-and-run car crash that injured a 13-year-old boy, failed a breathalyzer test he had to take as part of the house arrest he was under stemming from the hit-and-run, and then tried to blame the failed test on the alcohol in his toothpaste — an explanation the judge rejected in sending him to jail, which finally led to his resignation.

A White House official emails: "It's a little mind-boggling to see political consultants spin the election before the election is even over. There's only one reason to do that."

jerseyhoya wrote:http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/01/rassachusetts.html - Swish, there isn't a real chance we win the seat, but it might be an interesting data point heading into the midterms