I voted for Coakley last night, but was a supporter of Mike Capuano in the primary. There are many reasons that Coakley lost last night; she certainly shares in the blame, since she allowed her opponent to define himself instead of pointing out differences (like Brown supports enhanced interrogation).

But the national democratic party (including the WH) need to share in the blame as well. Very few people on this planet follow politics closely; the Republicans know this so they don’t bother making sense, they just spam the news with Death Panels and so forth. The Dems, on the other hand, expect voters to understand nuanced policies embedded in 1,000 page bills that are summed up in vague phrases like Health Care Reform. Guess what — the vast majority of people are watching a sporting event or some trashy reality show. They don’t want to think, so expecting them to do so is not a sensible strategy.

If the Dems had tried to pass pieces of the bill (yes, including the Public Option), even if they got voted down by the Republicans and their ConservaDem toadies, they would have had a better chance explaining what the hell it was to the voters. The Republicans would not have been able to sell the narrative that Dems were “ramming” all this scary stuff through, because the news would be full for months of how the Republicans voted down subjecting insurance companies to anti-trust laws, and outlawing pre-existing condition loopholes, and so on. Then the Dems (and Coakley) could have walked into this election saying “We need more Democrats to make the changes the people want.” And people could have understood that.

Instead the Dems played backroom politics, making the concessions themselves and therefore OWNING the bad policy decisions that resulted, along with every scary untruth the Republicans were able to make stick on the thousands of pages of policy that most people just don’t want to read.

Thank you for that, it helps the rest of us to understand how people are processing this in MA today.

I voted for Coakley.

Back in the 1980s, there was a TV spot that ran a lot on WSBK out of Boston with a catchy jingle that started, “The spirt of Massachusetts is the spirit of America…” Well, that’s what I was half-singing, half-mumbling to myself in an eerie minor key while I sat with my knees pulled up to my chest quietly rocking in a dark corner of my Berkshire County home last night. I made the mistake of checking my Twitter feed after I promised myself I wouldn’t and saw that Coakley had conceded.

Massachusetts, with its hyper-blue capital and western edge and its purplish-red suburbs, exurbs and rural middle, is a crude cartoon of the rest of the country. That’s what’s really got me worried about the midterm elections coming up.

People who didn’t grow up here don’t really understand how working class and Catholic and white (in a bad, racist way) Mass is. I was driving into Boston for some MCLE training a couple of years ago, during Obama’s campaign, and the call-in talk radio show I was listening to was all about Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s firebrand preacher from Trinity United Methodist in Chicago. What I heard–from both the callers and the hosts–was ugly, and it was shocking to the ears of this Berkshire County liberal. And then I thought about the busing riots and that amazing photograph: http://is.gd/6Gyjz

Coakley’s wretched “campaign” is a major problem here, and those in the commentariat and the media more generally who believe that Coakley is being unfairly scapegoated by the Democratic establishment can’t possibly know what they’re talking about unless they had a front-row seat to her incompetence.

Yes, Coakley mistook the Democratic primary for the election, and yes, she is a charisma-free and ethically-challenged politician. But where she really fucked up, in my opinion, was when she pulled an Obama on issues that are near and dear to Massachusetts progressives.

For instance, she claimed that she would accept the restrictions on abortion and reproductive health coverage in the Senate version of the health care bill: http://is.gd/6GywB If anyone’s wondering why turnout was lower than expected for Coakley, look no further than shabby “compromises” like this.

I think the more important lesson from this election–and one that I hope Obama learns before it’s too late–is that when even your core values and principles (at least those you claim) are on the bargaining table, no one is going to respect you. Not your political adversaries, not your political allies, and certainly not the voters.

We in Massachusetts can be proud of our pragmatic liberalism, to be sure, but we also know when we’ve been sold a bill of goods.

Not From Mass myself, but I have family there.

My cousin and her husband live there. She’s more of a centrist type a “can’t we all get along” type of Liberal, he’s more fire breathing like I am. We talk politics all the time because he’s the only one ever really willing to do it with me. She’s a registered D, he’s an Independant.

We talked after the election and they both did not vote Coakley, they voted Kennedy. They would never ever vote for a R, but they’re not sold to the Dems.

I’ll try and give the seperate reasons if I can.

For her it was Coakley herself. All the flubs, the lack of enthusiasm. What really set her off was when she leared about the whole innocent people in jail thing. She works with children so that really resonated with her. the national scene stuff mattered, but I get the feeling this was more of the reason with her.

For him it was pretty much all national scene. He considered Coakley and this is a direct quote “A centrist sellout who doesn’t actually give a shit about justice just her own future, like all the rest of the god damn Democrats today”. So there was that. But then he went on and on and on about how he was considering voting for Brown just to send a message to Dems. This is a man who considers Obama a sellout like I do.

Dems need to pull some big stuff out if they want to get voters like this back. Some fake jobs program isn’t going to cut it.

I voted for Coakley, somewhat reluctantly. If there was a left candidate from a 3rd party or independent I might’ve voted for them instead. Like ratsavage, I voted for Capuano in the primary as he was clearly the most progressive of the candidates. Coakley was the tepidly liberal choice of the state party establishment.

From my perspective down in Fall River, Coakley should’ve won no matter the national dynamics. She had a 20 point lead coming out of the primary and blew it. She fucking went on vacation in the Caribbean in that time, no joke. Meanwhile Brown was driving around the state and running tons of ads portraying himself as the truck-driving, straight-talking insurgent. Most people down here have no idea what Coakley stood for except that she’s against Brown. You blow a 20 point lead in a month and you’re a shite candidate, period.

I think national affairs had an impact less in terms of health reform and more in terms of the economy. Turnout in the post-industrial cities like my home FR, New Bedford, and Worcester, all Dem bastions, was down in the 30′s. I think people stayed at home because they are unenthused about the Democrats’ response to the recession. We had 8-10% unemployment here pre-recession, and a lot of people are settling into poverty and semi-permanent joblessness. The Treasury and the Fed propped up the banks with everything they had, while the stimulus was inadequate in size and too little focused on job programs.

The Democrats need to get not only more progressive, but more populist if they’re to hold on. Working people around here don’t perceive Obama as standing up for the working class, and as a result a few become susceptible to right-wing ideas but mostly they just lose all interest in a democracy that isn’t working for them.

I voted for Obama in 2008, and voted for Brown yesterday. My feeling is that health care reform, without some form of public option, is worse than no reform. Once the insurance companies get the revenue stream from all those new customers, they’ll never let go. Some claim the bill can be improved over time. Surely it can, but improved in whose view – the insurers or the insured? Given the insurers had their way with congress in crafting the original bill, isn’t it reasonable to conclude the same would happen when proposing modifications?

Two years ago, Scott Brown would have lost to an empty paper bag with a D on it. He won last night because people who voted for Obama did not vote for extending crony capitalism into every corner of the economy. People in Massachusetts already have what amounts to Obamacare – and we know it’s done nothing to stem premium rises, which are going up 10% or more for many. Middle income people looked to Obama for relief, and instead saw the insurers getting a big hug.

Brown’s election, far from the tragedy it’s seen to be by overwrought liberals, could be a very serendipitous thing – if Obama has the courage and imagination to make it so. He might want to start over by getting some new voices in his administration, rather than the hacks, sycophants and insiders he’s surrounded himself with now.

And if you can’t achieve anything with 59 votes in the Senate – to hell with you anyway.

In recent years, elections in Massachusetts have been more competitive. The late Senator Kennedy campaigned hard in every election, whether he won by big, or, small margins. He knew enough not to take any election or voter for granted.

MASSACHUSETTS U.S. SENATE ELECTION 1994

The re-election race against Mitt Romney was the toughest one Ted Kennedy ever faced for the U.S. Senate. By mid-September 1994, polls showed the race to be even. Kennedy responded with a series of attack ads, which focused both on Romney’s shifting political views on issues such as abortion and on the treatment of workers at a paper products plant owned by Romney’s Bain Capital…Kennedy won the election with 58 percent of the vote to Romney’s 41 percent, the second-smallest margin in Kennedy’s nine elections to the Senate.

MASSACHUSETTS U.S. SENATE ELECTION 1996

Democratic incumbent Sen. John Kerry eked out a victory after months of heated wrangling against two-term Republican Gov. William F. Weld in Massachusetts…No Senate race has received as much national attention as the Bay State battle of the political titans. The showdown between the popular, polished politicians was one of the closest Senate races….In the end, Democratic Party Senator John Kerry won re-election with 53 percent to the Republican Party’s William Weld’s 45 percent in the November, 1996 Election.