The Battle For "Ted Kennedy's Senate Seat"

The justification offered for the plan to block Brown from voting on the health care bill if he wins: the idea that this is "Ted Kennedy's Senate seat" and therefore shouldn't be used to vote against Kennedy's agenda. But this is not "Ted Kennedy's Senate seat." It does not belong to the Kennedy family, but to the people of Massachusetts.

In Monday night's debate, Brown was asked about whether he would sit in "Ted Kennedy's seat" and vote against the health care bill. He replied: "With all due respect, it's not the Kennedys' seat, it's not the Democrats' seat, it's the people's seat." No, he didn't get the line from me. He spoke it only a few hours after I wrote it, and my piece hadn't gone up at RCP yet. (In fact, in the version that ultimately went up at RCP, I substituted Brown's quote for my own.) I don't have illusions about Scott Brown being a fire-breathing free-marketer, but at least he gets the idea of the consent of the governed and the sovereignty of the people. And the line will be really effective, because there is nothing the American voter hates more than being taken for granted.

Rob Sama sent me a note giving some local perspective on Massachusetts politics:

"I'm living here in Massachusetts, and I've worked on a political campaign for a family friend, so I have a sense of the dynamic here. Basically, Massachusetts isn't quite as liberal as one would think, it's just that there are no real geographic concentrations of conservatives within the state. In any given election, roughly 30% of the electorate can be counted on to pull the lever for the Republican (or Libertarian when no Republican is running) every single election. Conversely, 40% of the electorate can be counted on to pull the lever for the Democrat no matter what.

That doesn't sound terribly lopsided, but it is. What it means is that 2/3 of the independent voters in the state have to side with the Republican in order for him to win. Clearly it's not an impossible task, but it's not an easy one either. What gives me hope are the polls that show that 71% of the independents are leaning towards Brown. If that holds up on election day, he'll have just enough to win.

I should also point out that there is a Libertarian in the race, a man named Joseph Kennedy. He has no relation to the Kennedy family, and he seemed relatively articulate on stage for last night's debate. I don't see him drawing votes away from Brown, because that core group of Libertarian voters wouldn't vote for a Republican if their health care depended on it. What is interesting is that he may be able to draw votes away from older Democrats who may be confused when they go in to vote. Early polls during the primary showed that if the Joe Kennedy of the Kennedy family ran for the nomination, he'd have easily walked away with it. So this may confuse some voters away from Coakley.

Finally, Coakley is a truly despicable character who ought to be kept away from the US Senate. Her actions as a prosecutor, both in keeping the innocent locked up and refusing to go after the obviously guilty, are reprehensible in the extreme. I wrote some about it on my blog, inan entry designed to sway independent voters. These facts are not lost on Massachusetts voters, and may contribute to her undoing next week."

Rob's observations about the vote are bolstered by the analysis below from one of the horse race guys at RealClearPolitics. It does a nice job of harmonizing the seemingly disparate results from the various Massachusetts polls and showing the weakness they all indicate in Coakley's campaign. The bottom line is the same: it looks like independents are breaking strongly for Brown, and this could be enough to decide the race in his favor.

RCP also has a piece showing that there may be some genuine procedural delays that could prevent the immediate seating of Brown if he wins—which would make the decision by the Democratic leadership to plow ahead with the health care bill supported by the vote of an appointed senator all the more despicable.

"Massachusetts Senate and the Undecided Rule," Sean Trende, RealClearPolitics, January 11

The bottom line is that almost all of these polls agree on one thing: Democrat Martha Coakley is hovering right around 50%.

Consider: PPP (D) has her at 47%. The Globe/UNH poll has her at 53%. Rasmussen has her at 50%. Even internal Democratic polling—which usually represents the Democrat's best-case scenario—has her leading state Senator Scott Brown 50%-36%. In other words, most of the variance comes from Brown's numbers—which vary between 36% and 48% support—not Coakley's. As I've noted before, when you see one candidate very stable and one candidate with a high degree of variance in their numbers, it means that the undecideds are trending toward the candidate with the higher variance. In other words, that candidate will tend to be toward the high end of their polling range.

This is where the "undecided rule" starts to come into play. It's a political science rule that predicts that undecided voters will break heavily for the challenger….

So what does that tell us about the Massachusetts Senate race? We have a sitting Attorney General who came out of a contested primary, going up against a more-or-less completely unknown state Senator. She's struggling to get above 50%. All of this points toward a very close final race—potentially much closer than a week ago when I guessed at a 54-46 spread. Again, this is also consistent with what we're seeing in the variance in the Coakley/Brown numbers. Coakley should be worried.