Something to remember before a premature victory lap

Former governor William F. Weld and former lieutenant governor Kerry Healey also said they would not run, leaving few strong options for Bay State Republicans hoping for a victory in the June 25 special election.

Scott Brown (R-stop Obamacare) was a long-shot State Senator of little distinction when he ran - a campaign 40 times as large as any he had ever run. He was blessed by facing the worst campaign ever from Martha Coakley.

Coronations are dangerous in a democracy. In more ways than one.

Rump party

The Massachusetts Republican Party has fielded such a dismally sparse slate of legislative candidates that its partisans can't dream, even mathematically, of gaining a majority in the state House of Representatives. Despite Martha Coakley's obvious vulnerability, the Republicans have no one to run against her.

How could the Republicans miss such an opportunity to make this election truly competitive? The ground is better for Republicans in Massachusetts than it has been in decades:

• The national anger from the right has energized conservatives. (True, the most energized are extreme conservatives, who don't play well in Massachusetts anywhere besides newspaper comment threads and bilious talk radio.)
• Scott Brown won in January, and it wasn't a fluke result of a special election, as turnout was very high.
• The top of the Republican ticket is credible - Charlie Baker is conservative but not insane, though he appears to have less of the common touch than Mitt Romney.
  
• The GOP should expect to win at least two statewide offices. (Anything less would be a disastrous fumble.)
• Several high profile Democrats have been drummed out of the legislature on the way to indictment and possibly prison, including three straight House Speakers.
• The current House Speaker, Robert DeLeo, though not to my knowledge under investigation, displayed the extent of his power in pushing racinos into the casino bill. Everyone outside the race track owners and employees in his district knows slot parlors are bad public policy, yet his parochial interest trumped the consensus on casinos in a way very embarrassing to Democrats (even though I was glad the whole bill was not enacted).
  

Yet twelve of forty Democratic Senators are unopposed, as well as a whopping 84 of 160 Democratic State Reps. This is, of course, good news. Most of my friends in the legislature are likely to win re-election, and their politics is good for us.

First, it's not campaign contributions the Republicans lack. They can often outspend Democrats three-to-one, as least for open seats.

They lack candidates because the career path of a legislator is middle class. How is a conservative businessman going to give up $250,000 a year for a $60,000 legislator's salary? Thus, brand new Republican candidates who've never even run for local office cluster at the top of the ballot, where at least they can hope for a U.S. Congressman's low six-figure salary. But it's not an accident that two of the most credible Republican candidates are Karyn Polito and Mary Connaughton. They've both been in campaigns before, locally and regionally. They know how it's done, where it's not clear that Baker does.

It's also not surprising that they're women. Republicans have done a terrible job of recruiting women to run, but women - especially married women out here in the suburbs - may have less economic pressure. Yet when a woman is primed to run statewide, the party fathers intervene (Jane Swift and Mitt Romney), or the party fractures (Kerry Healey and Christy Mihos, though he ran as an independent).

Massachusetts is not nearly as liberal as its national reputation, but it's very Democratic. It's just that the Democrats have liberal and centrist factions, and the Republicans fight over the remnants on the right. Hard to win elections that way, much less enough elections to contribute much to governing.

The Republican "leaders" have chosen instead to stay in control of their rump party and hope to win the governorship. Their alternative would require a move to the center and the recruitment of fewer CEOs and more suburban women. I'm not holding my breath.

Lessons from the Coakley campaign

First, a disclaimer: I wasn't an insider in Martha Coakley's ill-fated campaign. I wasn't even a well-placed outsider. I supported Michael Capuano in the primary, mostly as a voter, and then I did a little volunteering for Coakley at the tail end of the general election. I am not a big shot, and this is merely my educated speculation.

Everyone thought this was going to be a base turnout election. I made that mistake, and it appears that Coakley's campaign did too. Their tactics were pitched at voters who know what they want; both their media ads and their direct mail - between them, practically all of the campaign - told the Democratic base not to elect a scurvy Bushist Republican.

Non-base voters are the muddled middle that the two major parties typically squeeze at the end of a general election. This middle isn't so much moderate as clueless. It's composed of people who don't pay much attention, don't ferret out actual facts from obvious bullshit when they do hear something that sounds relevant, and can't make up their minds in any lasting way about politics. About them, Abe Lincoln said, "God must have loved the common people; he made so many of them." Most of them are middle class, working class, or poor. And someone famous - apparently Josh Billings instead of Mark Twain or Will Rogers, who often get credit - said something like, "The trouble ain't that people don't know enough; it's all they know that just ain't so."

Base voters are ideological voters. You're not going to lose them to the other candidate. You're at risk for losing them to apathy. Coakley was really at risk of losing them to the temptations of the sofa or the coffeehouse on a cold January day without enough motivating daylight. To win, she apparently thought, she needed to get her ones and twos off their duffs and to the polls. I don't blame her from thinking that; I did too.

How do you deal with a strategy whose assumptions prove false? You have to keep taking data, and Coakley didn't. Contrary to post mortem claims, they had money to keep polling. They just chose to spend it on media.

After you've taken data, you have to be prepared and willing to change strategy. That's hard and messy, and people who still believe in the old strategy get bruised egos. So what.

More important than just polling the horse race, you have to poll who's going to show up. Sure, everyone models their view of the likely voters. Something happened in this election that obsoleted those models, and a nimble campaign would have been able to adjust from turning out the base to the real fight this turned into. The problem for Coakley was that the persuasion universe turned out to be much larger than she anticipated.

Coakley tried to improvise an effective field operation. Her campaign failed. In my area, her organizer simply wasn't up to the task, and he was a terrible listener, besides. It's not that unusual in the trenches to meet a twenty-something who thinks he knows your territory better than you do, but it really hurts when you're improvising.

Nearby, a friend reported that the campaign repeatedly failed to return his calls seeking to volunteer. I was able to help him help them, but most people don't have a friend who's tapped into the activist networks and email lists.

It turned out that all those hokey visibility events, where average people stand on street corners with signs waving to motorists, matter. They may not win any votes, but they keep votes from hemorrhaging away when the momentum shifts. They put a human face on the campaign, which otherwise is slick ads and disembodied and increasingly annoying voices on the phone. I previously wasn't sure of the worth of visibility events, but now I am. Standouts keep leaners from shifting. Coakley didn't do standouts.

The same logic works for lawn signs. Neighbors influence each other. Coakley never effectively delivered lawn signs and didn't seek locations.

As a bonus, signs and visibilities are cheap and easily delegated.

On the up side, saturation phone calls and ads did drive turnout. Whether they drove positive votes is another question. Both campaigns used them intensively. Both would again.

It's hard to research races that are close enough to matter. I'd like to know when phoning reaches the point of diminishing returns. My ear tells me it was the Saturday before the election, but it would take a very brave campaign to turn off its GOTV phone banks that early, even in a few test precincts.

And, of course, no matter what your lead in the polls, you can't take any time off the campaign. OK, Christmas day. Maybe.

Win some, lose some

The dog still has to be walked, the driveway still has to be shovelled, the dishwasher still has to be loaded. And it is a beautiful night outside.

Most voters don't vote ideology. They vote for change when they hurt, and they vote for safety when they're afraid. Right now, they hurt.

Never mind who made them hurt. They don't analyze. Martha Coakley didn't give voters much to vote for, and they forgot the last time a handsome Republican fooled them into thinking he would keep their interests close.

And, sure enough, there at Scott Brown's victory party: Mitt Romney. The people of Massachusetts will soon start to learn for better or for worse about Brown's sincerity. I expect the worst.

Meanwhile, Brown captured a mandate. Killing the current health care bill - if he can get sworn in time - may actually do the Democrats a favor. It's not a very good bill.

Hating the phone

People hate political phone calls, especially in a competitive environment. The two hours that political calling might in an extreme case take out of their lives in any single election season is too big a price to pay for self-government. Watch the season opener of 24? Sure. Take thirty 4-minute phone calls? What an outrage!

People will tell you they don't like your call because they might be on the line when a call comes in to RSVP for a child's birthday party, but that's really just a lame excuse. Political calls seldom last more than a few minutes, and the very same people are often more than willing to give you down the road for calling them, and it can take a while to get all their frustrations off their chest.

Still, the truth is that people hate political calling. There is no doubt whatsoever that some voters will go to the polls for a spite vote against whoever's campaign called them the most. They will of course blame a campaign's allies (SEIU, OFA, DNC for Coakley; RNC and a host of dressed up health insurance companies for Brown), who can't legally coordinate their calling.

Campaigns need to figure out:

• how to eliminate duplication of calls - autodialers don't yet work any better for political calls than they do for selling timeshares
• when to stop calling because they've gone past even diminishing returns to the point at which they're actively alienating supporters
• how to bypass the phone altogether for channels that people will accept - no, mass media ads are not the answer; they're only a little better

Research needs to be done on different phoning strategies, but that requires a much more sophisticated operation than what now exists on the Democratic side. We need to pick well-modelled bellwether precincts and treat them differently to see which strategy gets the best results in turnout and margin of victory.

I've long thought that we need to push our organizing back down to the street level, back to old methods that rely on delivering the message through neighbors. It's a lot harder to tell someone you know to go to hell (well, not for one of my neighbors) than some stranger on the phone.

In the end, though, the phones and the saturation of media ads worked. We don't know here just before 7:00 p.m. whether they worked to increase either candidate's share of the vote, but we already know that they drove turnout to huge levels for a special election with only one race on the ballot on a snowy January day.

Glimmer of hope

CNN reports:

"Turnout has been pretty good," said Brian McNiff, a spokesman for the office.

The noon report from Boston showed 55,309 voting so far - a number that is just 3,000 under the turnout for the 2006 midterm election.

Since the 2006 mid-term was also a gubernatorial election and thus relatively high-turnout, this number suggests hope for Martha Coakley. Maybe all those annoying phone calls from both sides (oh, and from insurance companies for Brown) did their job of driving less-than-impassioned Democrats to the polls.

It's especially hopeful that turnout is coming from Boston, where Coakley has to have a large majority. Turnout is also large in the small exurb I live in, where Brown will definitely win.

Analogy nostalgia

Some people my age can wax nostalgic for the analogy questions that used to be such a large part of the SAT verbal. Sick - and I don't mean that not in current slang. But those analogies helped us get into college, so they must have been important.

A Scott Brown robo-call a few minutes ago made me think of those long ago questions. He said he was calling about the election, that he doesn't like these calls, and that he doesn't "like the lies and misrepresentations."

I set up the question like this:

"I don't like political calls" : "I make political calls" :: "I don't like lies and misrepresentations" : ________

1. "I'm an independent voice."
2. "I want to change partisanship in Washington."
3. "Martha Coakley went negative first, and I'm pure as the driven snow."
4. "I lie and misrepresent."

Easy question...

ED in Massachusetts

We Democrats need some voter Viagra to get turnout up this Election Day. Instead, we have snow. Conventional wisdom suggests - and history confirms - that low turnout is good for Republicans and that bad weather is bad for turnout.

Martha Coakley managed to stop the bleeding over the last week. The real question is whether she stopped it in time. The snow bodes ill for her, but we'll see just how effective her field operation has been over the past few days.

I know this: When you're phoning people who think Ted Kennedy opposed the health care bills now before Congress and who are still inchoately incensed about welfare, you're scraping the bottom of the barrel. So maybe we did reach everyone we could possibly reach.

I was optimistic yesterday. Today? Not so much... But like everyone, I'm just making a wild-ass guess, like Nate Silver, although his models put the odds 3:1 in Scott Brown's favor.

Republican justice

This sounds a lot like the Scott Brown supporter I spoke to yesterday when making phone calls for Martha Coakley:

Criminals should not be tried. The trial of a criminal is against human rights. Human rights demand that we should have killed them in the first place when it became known that they were criminals.

Come to think of it, it sounds a lot like many Republicans in response to the penis bomber.

Actual source in comments.

Going negative

Scott Brown is right to claim that Martha Coakley has gone negative on him. She's put out ads and direct mail pieces that identify him as an orthodox right-wing Republican. How much more negative can you get than that!

But he's lying when he claims, playground style, that - waaah! - she started it. He has been running negative ads on-line for a long time now. One of them criticizes Coakley for taking money from Washington, when large chunks of his campaign funding are coming from all the usual suspects on the right and particularly from the Washington Republican establishment.

Coakley takes a chance

Martha Coakley is a very careful politician. For years, it has been tough to get her to make definitive statements about most issues of the day (and that's why I support Mike Capuano - no such difficulty there).

So I find it odd that she has stuck her neck out to choose that public funding of abortion is more important than all of health care reform. She's not choosing not abortion rights. She's opting for funding or no public option, no forcing of insurance companies to do right, no attempt at universal coverage. The House bill is far from perfect, but it has a lot of value.

I really would have expected her to waffle on this, since it's definitely an issue that Democratic primary voters will vote on, and she's already the frontrunner - in perception, at least. Instead, she has put herself in a position with little wiggle room for later.

This reminds me a little of Shannon O'Brien's ill-fated campaign for governor in 2002. At the time, Mitt Romney supported abortion rights (such a short time ago!), and O'Brien apparently thought that should be her issue. She tried to open up some space between their positions by advocating the rational position that the age of consent for abortion should be the same as the age of consent for sex, and it backfired very badly on her. I think it cost her a very close election.

Now Coakley seems to be trying the same thing. I not only disagree with it. I think it's bad politics.

Two immigrants dead

Today, the Boston Globe juxtaposed two stories on the front page:

• the indictment of the smallest player in the Big Dig ceiling collapse that killed Milena Del Valle
• the death in Federal custody and promised investigation of Edmar Alves Araujo from easily prevented epileptic seizure

I've met Martha Coakley, and two friends know her well both personally and professionally and trust her. Still, I can't help believing that Powers Fasteners, the epoxy manufacturer, is not the culprit in the Big Dig fiasco. As reported, the criminal indictment says that Powers didn't warn loudly enough about the characteristics of an epoxy that the company claims they didn't think was being used because they assumed their apparently too quiet warnings had been heeded. This is an indictment for manslaughter based on a thin rationale:

"They had the opportunity to make clear the distinction in the products and raise the red flag at that time and possibly change the course of events; they did not do so," Paul F. Ware Jr., the special prosecutor overseeing the Big Dig investigation, said...

I hope that the Powers indictment is merely the first of several indictments. It could be a public threat to Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, Gannett Fleming, and Modern Continental.

Araujo's death in custody by comparison looks like a simple case of the police reflexively saying, "No. You can't help. Get out of my lock-up." Cops are used to dealing with people who are trying to put one over on them, especially related to drugs, so it takes some way to set yourself apart to get prescription drugs to someone who has been arrested. This immigrant family apparently did not have any pull.

I suspect that the Feds will investigate by interviewing a few people. They'll hold a press conference, tsk-tsk sadly, and say that these things unfortunately happen. Then they'll close the books without doing anything.

This matters to me beyond simple human empathy because I have family members who rely on or have relied on insulin, thyroid, and anti-seizure medication to live normally. I would use every bit of pull I have to get them their medications, but then I'm a white male affluent suburbanite with an elite education and useful connections in politics and law. On the other hand, I also have a relative whose every approach to law enforcement would be a scam, whose arrests provide the only tracking data we get, so I'm not claiming this is easy to get right 100% of the time.