Democrats have seen this coming for quite some time now. Personally, I thought some of the fears they voiced in the press were designed to light a fire under their own people so they would turn out on Election Day. So what happened in Massachusetts? What are the implications for Barack Obama?
Right now as usual there is a lot of spewing about what cost Coakley the race and very little analysis. Frankly without data about the actual vote the rest is speculation. Unfortunately no exit polls were conducted because apparently the polling organizations figured Coakley had it in the bag and so decided not to waste any resources on exit polls.
While we can argue about not having these data, it is possible to go back to the much more reliable method of examining voting data to provide some picture of what happened.
A lousy campaign
That Coakley ran a lousy campaign is the theme of every piece of analysis out there. That is the wrong question and the wrong answer. The real question is first, how did someone who is such a bad campaigner get the nomination in the first place and second, why was she allowed to continue to run such a bad campaign for so long?
This is a campaign that featured gaffes such as misspelling the state’s name and pissing off the garden club. This is a campaign that was so poorly organized that voters who signed up to help did not get called until the eleventh hour. This is a campaign that was so politically clueless they did not bring in the top vote getter in the state in 2008 until all was lost. This is a campaign that was so policy clueless that the candidate ran against Obama’s health care bill in the state where the Senator whose seat she hoped to inherit was perhaps the major supporter of health care reform over the last quarter century.
Talia White has one of the more perceptive pieces arguing that Coakley totally ignored African Americans. By White’s account Coakley’s appearance at the Martin Luther King Day breakfast was embarrassing at the least and insulting at the worst.
Finally there was the notable sound of silence from the Kennedy clan (more on this further down). You get some idea of their lukewarm support from hearing that Patrick Kennedy, Ted Kennedy’s son, kept referring to Coakley as Marsha instead of Martha during a stump appearance for her. I blame this not on the Kennedys but on Coakley. It doesn’t take a political genius to figure out that if you are running for the seat held by John and Ted Kennedy, you should first court the Kennedy family’s support and second take every opportunity to involve the Kennedy family in the campaign.
This is especially sad because Ted Kennedy carried on his courageous battle for life for one reason: he wanted to see health care reform passed. Remember it was he who urged that his seat be filled as quickly as possible in the event of his death. In hindsight the rush to do this may have hurt Coakley. But when your opponent makes it clear his main objective is to kill the Obama health care bill that Ted Kennedy worked so hard for, then if you really want Ted Kennedy’s seat you will do battle with everything you have for the issue that mattered most to him.
The refusal to support the bill was Coakley’s biggest gamble and she lost it badly. In a heavily Catholic state where the Kennedys have wisely finessed the abortion issue, Coakley announced in November she would oppose the bills passed by both the House and Senate because of the abortion restrictions in them.
The stance was courageous, but stupid. It backed her into a corner where there was no way out. She would have had to insist on this when elected, torpedoing the compromises that had already been worked out. In short, even had Coakley won there would not have been 60 votes for the bill. Instead, Coakley could have finessed the abortion issue in the campaign but held it as a trump card when she got to Washington. Now her defeat gives more aid and comfort to the enemy.
Yet all of this analysis, like much else written so far about the campaign, begs for more data rather than ranting.
Voting analysis
Those of you who followed this blog through the 2008 election may remember the spreadsheets I used to track, and predict, the winners of various primaries and then the final Presidential vote. Using these same sheets for a post mortem on the race for Ted Kennedy’s seat helps provide some perspective on the loss.
Above is a blank sheet. It is based on the presumption that the key votes for any Democratic candidate come from people of color, the poor, less educated and organized labor. When Democratic candidates receive high turnouts from these voters they inevitably win as they did in 2008. Finally, one other constituency is key to Democrats winning–women. The so-called gender gap is very real. Democrats typically win when the percentage of women voting is higher than that of men.
In addition, older and younger voters have become a swing vote in the sense that older voters tend to vote more conservatively while younger voters have been one of Obama’s key bases. In some ways the story of the 2008 Democratic primary hinged on whether Obama could turn out enough younger voters to counter Hillary Clinton’s strong support from older voters.
Unfortunately it is difficult to compare Obama’s totals with Coakley’s because there are too many data holes. For example, there are no data on Obama’s percentages among people of color. Data on Coakley’s results are even scarcer given the lack of exit polling.
The vote by county
That means first place to start is with county data. In order to better understand that we need a county map.
The chart below compares Barack Obama’s 2008 percentages with Coakley’s. The Obama percentages come from the Boston Globe and the Coakley votes from Dave Leip. Notice how poorly Coakley did across the board, losing double digit percentages in every county but one. The biggest changes are noted in red.
Just to see if you are on your toes and also because I am getting tired of this red/blue state stuff, the counties with the biggest shift are shown in blue. In order to better understand these shifts we need to go down one more level to look at city voting results.
The vote by city
Data by town from the Boston Globe supply the reasons for Coakley’s defeat. Start with Boston, the key for any Democrat who hopes to win Massachusetts. In 2008 Barack Obama received 184,000 Boston votes or 80% of the vote. Coakley only received 105,000 votes and 69%, a drop of 11%–which is also the margin of difference in Boston’s Suffolk County.
That eleven percent essentially cost Coakley the race. Without precinct data, it is hard to take this further, but certainly it is difficult to not assume that the difference was due to a lower turnout and lower support among African Americans.
The chart below shows a comparison between cities in the 2008 Presidential election and the Senate contest. The cities were picked because all of them showed substantial margins by Obama and hence were instrumental in winning the state for him. The color coding in the Brown-Coakley contest shows those changes. The blue cities are those that Coakley won by large margins, red indicates cities that switched from Obama to Brown and the brown (pun intended) highlights cities that Obama won handily, but in which Brown significantly narrowed the gap.
The colors tell the story of the election. The chart is dominated by brown and red with only a few blue cities. The other key finding to note is that even in this off-year election Brown totaled more VOTES than McCain in 2008 in virtually all the cities on the list. This indicates the Brown organization did an amazing job in turning out their voters while Coakley did not.
If we look at the chart in more detail several significant findings emerge. First, the only places Coakley managed to come close to Obama’s lead were largely in college towns: Cambridge and Amherst. In fact Cambridge gave Coakley her largest vote total of any city on the chart. You are not going to win elections by just carrying Harvard and MIT.
One significant exception to the college rule stands out: Wellesley. Coakley won a town that Obama carried by a 2-1 margin by a mere twelve votes! The female candidate could only barely carry the home town of what is generally regarded as the best women’s college in the country.
The red cities–Lowell, Haverhill, and Dartmouth– that swung from huge Obama wins to Brown wins are interesting. Haverhill is an old shoe manufacturing town that was once home to John Greeleaf Whittier, Louis B. Mayer, and the first Macy’s department store. Income and housing values are below the state average while the cost of living is above the national average. Most of its residents have only a high school education. Unemployment has skyrocketed to over 10%.
In short this is the kind of town Democrats need to win if they want to stay in power. The Haverhill Gazette laid the blame squarely on health care reform, terming the bill a “monstrosity” and so “overly complex” most voters do not know whether it helps or hurts them.
Lowell is another old manufacturing town that has been struggling to turn itself around for decades. An editorial in the Lowell Sun titled “The Shot Heard Across the Nation” stated why Brown won:
There is no great mystery to Republican Scott Brown’s decisive victory in the Massachusetts Senate race. He worked harder than Democratic opponent Martha Coakley, connected with voters in a way she failed to do and clearly stated his position on the issues.
Located not far from Haverhill, Lowell is part of a region known as “the valley.” Lowell’s profile is almost a carbon copy of Haverhill’s with income and housing values below the state average and residents who are mostly high school graduates. Like Haverhill, the unemployment graph has taken a huge upsurge over the last two years jumping to 12%.
Dartmouth, the third swing city, has a similar profile to Haverhill and Lowell, although it does not have their history as a once-prosperous manufacturing center.
The city data essentially tell us that Coakley lost because she did not connect with traditional Democratic constituencies, whether the African Americans of Boston or the blue collar voters of Haverhill and Lowell. With these data we can make some assumptions about our voting projection chart. Of the key constituencies Coakley needed to win: people of color, the less educated, and labor she did not do well with any of them. If Wellesley is any indication she did not do well with women either.
Who brought you to the dance?
Like some Democrats (are you reading this Nancy Pelosi), Coakley forgot who brought her to the dance. In many ways Coakley’s loss reminds me of the disastrous Ned Lamont campaign in neighboring Connecticut. In both cases what I term the “Limousine Liberals,”– well-educated, upper-middle class white voters– were the only ones who saw anything in the candidate. Coakley wins Harvard but loses Lowell and has a lackluster showing in Boston.
Contrary to what the press is saying about some huge Republican tide, the Coakley debacle is an excellent case of the old adage, “all politics are local. ” Reviewing the data, the wonder is not that Coakley lost, but that she kept the race reasonably close. Massachusetts does not need to worry about suddenly swinging Republican; it needs to worry about the Limousine Liberals capturing their party.
I have said for several decades that the Limousine Liberals are to the Democratic Party what the Religious Right is to the Republicans, a powerful interest group that cannot be allowed to dominate the party. The problem with Limousine Liberals is not so much what they believe, but that they operate with blinders. This is most evident in the key issue of the Democratic Party and our times–the economy. Three years ago I argued that the economy not Iraq would be the key issue in 2008 and that if the Democratic Party ignored it they would lose.
I also argued that both Al Gore and John Kerry had ignored people of color in their campaigns and that cost them the White House. The Democrats won in 2008 because they had an African American candidate, not in spite of one. The Obama coattails that helped to turn out people of color in 2008 that were the key in several close Congressional races.
In short, Martha Coakley forgot who brought the Democrats to the dance. It has been a long time since I have seen a candidate who made so many tactical blunders: ignoring the Kennedys, people of color and blue collar voters is not how you win elections.
The Clinton factor
In the post-mortems on the Coakley candidacy, people forget that she was a hold-out delegate for Hillary Clinton at the 2008 national convention. The PUMA-type blogs are full of posts about Coakley. One example:
For those of you who don’t know, Martha Coakley is a strong Hillary Clinton supporter. Coakley was a Clinton delegate to the Convention in Denver and refused to surrender her vote to Dr. Utopia, even when Deval Patrick and the Kennedy spiders pressured her to do so. Coakley stood by Clinton, and Clinton Democrats need to stand by Coakley now.
The PUMA Pac itself was not sure what to do with Brown, given their hatred for Obama (note the silly tactic of spelling Obama with no cap).
He IS a Washington outsider, at least for now (though so was Martha Coakley), so maybe he’ll do enough harm to the obama administration to make it worthwhile for pumas to suffer the fool.
The long view, then, is that Coakley was part of the long-standing Kennedy-Clinton feud. For the Clinton camp to have one of their own in Ted Kennedy’s seat would have been a real coup. This is the real reason why Coakley did not seek support from the Kennedys and why their support for her was so lackluster they could not even get her first name right.
There are some who will try to spin this as yet another message about turning to the right, but even as the results of the Coakley debacle were trickling in I was reading a recent report on the 2008 election firm Catalyst, the microtargeting effort progressive Democrats launched in 2008.
Its conclusion was startling and should hearten progressives. Two points stand out:
Obama did better where more progressive registration and persuasion work occurred.
When controlling for demographic factors, progressive activities still appear to explain outcome at the county level in a way that demographics alone cannot.
Coakley made no use of the groups behind the Catalyst effort (the service employees’ union was a major one) nor its tactics.
The big picture
I have been saying for almost a year that the Obama Administration made a huge tactical mistake by going after health care reform as its first big effort. I compared it to their Bay of Pigs or Bush’s Iraq debacle in that it was a “pay-back issue,” an issue from previous administrations that this one was determined to get through.
Health care reform is a laudable goal and needed desperately, but you do not go into a battle with the troops on your side so badly divided that some of them are opposed to the objective. To switch metaphors, you also do not take your eyes off the ball, especially as the economy is worsening.
Those unemployment charts from Haverhill and Lowell send a message as clear as their votes in the Coakley election: things are not getting better and people want the White House to deal with the economy not expend precious political capital on another fight.
If I were on the White House staff I would post this chart on my wall and make sure Barack Obama sees it every chance he gets. Curiously if you flip that chart upside down it virtually mirrors Obama’s ratings, which have dropped at a slop rate very close to that of the unemployment rate.
Barack Obama won the White House because people perceived that the nation’s problems were largely caused by Republicans and that he would do something to steer the Titanic away from the looming iceberg. The rise in unemployment in Haverhill and Lowell–and in similar towns across America–carry an ominous message far more important than Brown’s victory. People are now beginning to ask what has Obama done to relieve unemployment?
The Bush Depression ins now in danger of becoming the Obama Depression. If so, this President is doomed to one term, for if people view the Depression as Obama’s rather then Bush’s–and in two years they have a right to do so–then this nation is in serious trouble, for the alternative is more of the William McKinley top-down economics that will only widen the gao between rich and poor.
If Obama wants a second term then it is time to get rid of Summers, Geithner and the Clinton clones who are making this mess worse (some of them helped to cause it) and bring in some people who can get the job done, not suck up to Wall Street.
But more on that for a future post. Meanwhile congratulations to newly elected Senator Brown, for in a strange way you may be just what the Democratic Party needed–a good kick. You have forced us to look in the mirror. Let’s just hope we understand what we see.
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