Massachusetts Senate Race

The Boston Globe reports:

The decision by Edward M. Kennedy Jr. on Monday to pass on a run for US Senate in Massachusetts in 2013 eliminates one of the few Democrats with the star power to ward off serious challengers within his own party, increasing the odds of a tough Democratic primary fight that could damage the eventual nominee. 

Three Democratic congressmen, Edward Markey of Malden, Michael Capuano of Somerville, and Stephen Lynch of South Boston, have signaled interest in running for the Senate in a special election, for a seat expected to open with the nomination of Senator John Kerry to lead the State Department. None of the congressmen has declared a run. 

“I think people were waiting to see what Teddy would do,” said Philip W. Johnston, a former chair of the Massachusetts Democratic Party.

Polls suggest that Republican Scott Brown, who lost to Elizabeth Warren in November, would be in a strong position to win the seat. Massachusetts was one of the few states in which President Obama had coattails in a Senate election. With lower turnout and without the president on the ballot, a special election might work to Brown's advantage.

Why are several House Democrats considering a run? The results of the 2012 House elections suggest that the GOP may be in the majority for years to come. These lawmakers may be reckoning that it is much better to belong to the Senate majority than the House minority. That's true even for Markey, who is now among the most senior House Democrats.

Outside Groups Helped Warren and Other Democratic Senate Candidates

It is clear now that Elizabeth Warren picked Scott Brown's pockets on "the People's Pledge."  It committed the candidates to reject outside spending on broadcast and Internet ads.  But it did not apply to other -- and probably more effective -- forms of outside spending. American Crossroads CEO Steven Law warned at the time:

Because the agreement allows union phone banks, direct mail, and get-out-the-vote drives — all union core specialties — Warren’s latest agreement has loopholes the Teamsters could drive a truck through, the longshoremen could steer a ship through, the machinists could fly a plane through and government unions could drive forklifts of paperwork through.

And in the fall of 2012, direct mail flooded mailboxes. Right after the election, the Boston Globe reported:

Over the course of the campaign, union members knocked on the doors of 327,936 union households, said Steven A. ­Tolman, president of the ­Massachusetts AFL-CIO. They made 242,000 phone calls to union households, distributed 250,000 leaflets to 175 work sites, and worked 10,708 volunteer shifts, he said, often standing for hours outside ­Warren’s events.

An article in Politico suggests that Warren and other Democratic Senate candidates had "outside" help in a vareity of forms. A super PAC close to Harry Reid spent about $2 million in Massachusetts during the final weeks on direct mail, a field operation and "other under-the-radar activities."

Majority PAC ended up spending millions across the country — including $2.8 million in Connecticut; $4.5 million in Indiana; $4.1 million in Missouri; $5 million in Nevada; $4 million in North Dakota; $3.3 million in Ohio; $6.2 million in Virginia; $4.2 million in Montana; and $5 million in Wisconsin. Nearly all of it was in attack ads pummeling Republicans.

But sometimes, it took action in under-the-radar ways. In Maine, when independent Angus King came under attack from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Majority PAC and Patriot Majority conducted a private poll to inform allies there that the attacks were having an effect and the Republican candidate, Charlie Summers, needed to be defined. The effort was particularly sensitive because Democrats in Washington refused to endorse their own party’s long-shot nominee, hoping privately that King would win and caucus with them.

And after Labor Day, as the Warren-Brown race remained tight, Majority PAC and Patriot Majority — along with labor, environmental groups and abortion rights groups — put together an extensive mail, phone and field operation to attack Brown, identify Democratic voters and woo swing voters to back Warren. The Reid-affiliated groups dropped $354,000 in the race — and it had a very blunt message for Bay State voters.

“Don’t let Scott Brown give Republicans control of the U.S. Senate,” Majority PAC warned in a mailer to voters there.

And the Republicans?  The article quotes former DSCC executive director and Schumer confidant J.B. Poersch:

“They spent $162 million on their side, in Senate races, just on television,” Poersch said Saturday. “On the Democratic side, the collective number was $80 million. As outsized as it sounds, there was a wider percentage difference than in 2010. And when you look at how they spent it, [Republicans] spent way too much money early."

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Why The Brown-Warren Race Stays Close

Why has Elizabeth Warren failed to leap ahead of Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race?  Alec MacGillis has a smart analysis in The New Republic:

Since entering the Senate, Brown has proved to be a remarkably agile politician—casting a symbolic vote against extending the Bush tax cuts while protecting the carried-interest loophole for investment managers; voting for financial reform, but not before weakening it at the behest of the banks who’ve given heavily to him. Still, he should be beatable in Massachusetts on the basis of one vote alone: the one he would cast to make Mitch McConnell majority leader of the Senate. And yet polls put his statewide approval rating at around 60.

One of Brown’s great advantages is that he has lived in Massachusetts virtually his entire life, and he never lets you forget it. He can be seen at opening day at Fenway Park; he’ll buy time on the Red Sox network to bid farewell to retiring players. Andrea Nuciforo Jr., a former Democratic state senator from Pittsfield who is running for Congress, recalls seeing Brown in action at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Sturbridge: “He talked about the Patriots, the Red Sox, and the weather.”

Warren is no carpetbagger—the Oklahoma native moved to Cambridge in 1995—but she lacks the same fluency in the state’s cultural preoccupations. She “doesn’t know that Ben Downing, the state senator from the Berkshires’ dad used to be the D.A. and he died of a heart attack shoveling snow,” says DiCara. “You can get briefed all you want, but it’s tough to understand that stuff.”

"You Didn't Build That" -- Massachusetts ed.

From James Hohmann at Politico:

MASSACHUSETTS SNEAK PEEK – BROWN HITTING WARREN ON “YOU DIDN’T BUILD THAT”: Scott Brown has prepared a powerful 2.5-minute web video that will give goose bumps to anyone offended by Obama’s “you didn’t build it” riff. It juxtaposes the clip of the president saying “somebody else made that happen” as it relates to success in the private sector against exhortations of free enterprise from John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. Then it shows a clip of an angry-looking Elizabeth Warren saying, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody!” It ends with a still photo of two adorable blonde girls selling glasses of lemonade for 25 cents. The tagline: “Let America be America again.” 

GOP Online

Politico reports on potential 2012 candidates:

President Barack Obama’s prospective 2012 Republican rivals are investing heavily in the Internet, looking to cut into what was an overwhelming advantage for Obama in the 2008 campaign.

Through the first three months of the year, the political groups started by Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee have spent a total of nearly $600,000 building their web operations, according to reports filed this month with the Federal Election Commission and the Internal Revenue Service.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/36300.html#ixzz0m7EdH9ed

At The Weekly Standard, Mary Katharine Ham writes of "Techno-GOP," with TX governor Rick Perry as a prime example:

On March 2, Perry beat Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison by more than 20 points with a largely paperless campaign that used no direct mail and almost no yard signs (they were available for purchase upon request). The campaign also did no robo-calls and no newspaper editorial board meetings and focused instead on Internet ads, social networking websites, and person-to-person campaigning.

Perry is just the latest Republican to make headway using technology on the campaign trail, as the party out of power finally learns its way around the Internet. Virginia governor Bob McDonnell’s campaign was designed with a nod to Barack Obama’s online successes. And Scott Brown’s insurgent campaign for the Senate in Massachusetts showed how potent technology can be for a team that’s low on money but high on energy.

Jim Gimpel made a similar point several weeks ago:

Based on the mounting evidence for the effectiveness of personal contact, they invested in building a field operation of unprecedented size that would eventually situate nearly 40,000 Perry Home Headquarters locations across the state, each charged with mobilizing a targeted number of voters. This was about ten times the number of volunteers they had activated during the 2006 campaign.

Building on what was learned from the 2008 presidential election, their contacts with supporters and prospects were routed entirely through social media, e-mail, and website updates. To be sure, the jury is still out on just how effective some of these new strategies are — anecdotes abound but experimental tests are still in the works — but some of the old strategies that have been proved ineffective are clearly gone.

The GOP Civil War That Isn't

When the Republicans nominated John McCain over more conservative candidates, some pundits saw a mere fluke. The GOP, they opined, was destined for a civil war in which conservatives would wipe out moderates. But in The Politico, Jonathan Martin reports that these forecasts are proving wrong:

GOP leaders easily swatted down a proposed “purity test” for candidates at last week’s Republican National Committee meeting — an indication that party officials are no more willing to turn over the keys to right-wing activists now than they were during the Bush years.

In Illinois, Rep. Mark Kirk is hardly a conservative heartthrob — and some activists are openly contemptuous of what they perceive as his moderation — but he easily won the Republican Senate primary there Tuesday night, against a more conservative, underfunded opponent, in part because he is seen as having the best chance to capture President Barack Obama’s old Senate seat.

Recent elections also suggest a second trend: It may not be all that hard in a favorable political environment for skilled Republicans to bridge or blur the ideological divide between the conservative activists who dominate the party and the more moderate swing voters whom candidates need to win office.

Scott Brown has become the toast of Republicans nationally by winning Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat in Massachusetts even though he supports abortion rights. Conversely, Republican Bob McDonnell defied predictions that he was too far to the right to attract moderate voters to win a landslide in the Virginia governor’s race.

And there is more. Here in California, the leading candidate for the GOP nomination for the Senate is Tom Campbell, who is pro-choice and pro-gay-marriage. Rival Carly Fiorina has tried to run to Campbell's right, but conservatives have reacted to her latest web ad with derisive laughter instead of support:

The Evening After

Democratic polling firm Public Policy Polling writes of the loss of a Massachusetts Senate seat:

This was a repudiation of Barack Obama. Certainly Martha Coakley was a bad candidate and ran a terrible campaign but that doesn't change the fact that we found Obama's approval rating at only 44% with the electorate for today's contest, a huge drop from the 62% of the vote he won in the state in 2008. Brown won over 20% of the vote from people who cast ballots for Obama in 2008, and we found that most of those Brown/Obama voters were folks who no longer approve of the job the President is doing. And in one of the bluest states in the country barely 40% of voters expressed support for the Democratic health care bill.

This observation calls to mind what we wrote in the conclusion of Epic Journey (p. 202):

[T]here are distinct disadvantages to holding unified control of the elected branches of the federal government. In the wake of the 2008 election, Democrats hold responsibility for governing, in a comprehensive and highly visible manner, in a very difficult environment ... A worsening economic situation, a new terrorist attack inside the United States, slippage in Iraq or Afghanistan -- Democrats will own them all, fairly or unfairly. And a statute of limitations on blaming the Bush administration for the nation's ills will be imposed at some point

GOP Gains in Tech Battle

A few months ago, the GOP seemed to be losing the tech battle. Now the Republicans have seized the initiative. At the Washington Examiner, Chris Stirewalt reports:

GOP members of Congress have more than twice as many Twitter followers than their Democratic counterparts and tweet five times more often. Minority Leader John Boehner may look like a character from Mad Men, but the Don Draper of the House has a “director of new media” and more than 30,000 Facebook fans – almost four times as many as Nancy Pelosi.

Look at the Massachusetts Senate race, where Republican insurgent Scott Brown is using the same technologies Obama once did to mount a campaign that might derail the president’s domestic agenda.

Using tweets, text messages and e-mails, Brown raised $1.3 million online in one day and brought together an overflow rally to compete with the president’s stump speech for Democrat Martha Coakley.

At the Huffington Post, David Meerman Scott writes of the Massachusetts race:

Politics and platforms and personal connections are important. But didn't Obama for America teach us that the Web has the power to push a candidate over the top? Obama also showed the importance of young people (whose communications of choice is digital).

Let's look at a few numbers. As I compare the morning before election day, @MarthaCoakley has 3,520 Twitter followers compared to @ScottBrownMA with 10,214 followers. Coakley counts 14,487 Facebook fans to Brown's 76,700 fans. Advantage Brown by more than three to one.

Scott attended the Obama rally for Coakley at Northeastern University. He noticed something missing:

How do college students communicate? Facebook and SMS of course! Yet these two forms of communications played absolutely no formal part in the rally. The brochure that was handed out had no web addresses or social media sites. At the rally, Coakley fans were asked to vote. They were asked to volunteer at phone banks. They were asked to talk to neighbors and friends.

But were the many college students in the crowd told to talk up the Coakley campaign on Facebook, the college student communications tool of choice? No. Were people at the rally asked to tweet? No. Were they asked to join Coakley's fan page? No.