Tomorrow's Brownout In Massachusetts

One day out, it's really hard to read the tea leaves, especially since they are covered with snow.

When Democrats decided to nationalize this race by inducing panic among their base, they may have paradoxically redoubled the anxiety that many irregular voters in Massachusetts feel about the Democratic Party right now.

Obviously, there isn't one simple explanation for what's happened. Coakley, never beloved by liberals, ran a front porch campaign whilst her opponent benefited from the enormous, magnifying megaphone of late-in-the-game free media -- the tea partiers, interest groups and radio hosts, all of whom want to put the kibosh on the Obama agenda.


For its part, the last minute Obama engagement was....paradoxical. It's true that Coakley needs HIS voters, and they tend to support health care, but it isn't clear to me whether the benefits outweigh the costs. Massachusetts, of course, already has health insurance reform. The race isn't a referendum on whether the country should get Mass-care...in some ways, health care enters the debate because Massachusetts will be one of the largest donor states to the new system because it needs the least from the government.  This is something that Scott Brown picked up on early.

It's also fairly clear that Ted Kennedy's legacy isn't a motive force in this election. In the mind of consultants and strategists, perhaps, but voters seem to have processed his death and partitioned his memory away from their more practical concerns.

Over the past few days, Coakley and the White House have pivoted to a Shrumian "us versus them" populism. But the administration has no real credibility when it comes to economic populism -- one proposal to tax the banks doesn't satisfy that criteria for voters. And Coakley doesn't wear populism very well; other potential MA SEN candidates did -- like Mike Capuano, the congressman from Somerville. But this new message tack of theirs falls a little flat.

I know that the full force of the Democratic Party is behind some of the slightly better GOTV responses that Coakley's campaign is reporting. Btw: 250K calls were made into the state by Dems alone. Republican groups are mostly coordinating through the Brown campaign, which is using the RNC's well-managed Voter Vault.

Brown isn't a stellar candidate and is an ideological chameleon. He doesn't provide a roadmap to victory for GOPers; then again, maybe he does -- he's become the vessel for a lot of stuff: defeating health care, beating Obama, sending a message to Washington.

One immediate effect of this race, win or lose for Coakley: expect to see a lot more competitive primaries among Democrats.