Strong evidence indicating Massachusetts was mainly a candidate problem

by: Chris Bowers

Wed Jan 20, 2010 at 12:24


Think Martha Coakley lost mainly because of President Obama, the national Democratic position, and health care?  Think again.

The following four charts measure trendlines since December 31st for the Massachusetts Senate race, the popularity of health care reform, the national congressional ballot, and President Obama's job approval.  What they show is that Martha Coakley trended sharply downward during a time when opinions about the health care bill and the 2010 congressioanl vote were static, and job approval of President Obama was on the rise:

President Obama, job approval trend since December 31st

National Congressional Ballot, trend since December 31st

(Note: My numbers show a slightly better position for Democrats because I include Daily Kos polls)

Health care plan, favor / oppose trend since December 31st

Massachusetts Senate race, trend since December 31st

Martha Coakley went from a 13% lead to a 5% deficit since December 31st, for a swing of 18%.  During that exact same time period, national approval of the health care bill stayed exactly the same, the national congressional ballot stayed exactly the same, and President Obama saw a 2% upswing in his approval rating.

The national political environment is worse for Democrats than it was in 2008.  As I pointed out last night, the generic congressional ballot shows a 9% swing toward Republicans since Election Day, 2008.  However, Martha Coakley's campaign dropped 18% independent of this trend.

There is a lot of blame to go around.  However, the available evidence shows that the bulk of it rests on the candidate and the campaign.  On that front, it is also worth considering the relative difference between the Scott Brown and Martha Coakley campaigns.  That is, Coakley could have been slightly below average rather than terrible, while Scott Brown--and the conservative organizing behind him--might have been fantastic.

Chris Bowers :: Strong evidence indicating Massachusetts was mainly a candidate problem

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Strong evidence indicating Massachusetts was mainly a candidate problem | 32 comments
You are confusing us. (0.00 / 0)
Your previous post asserted that the loss was due 100% to the state of the economy.

miasmo.com
No it didn't (0.00 / 0)
If you are looking for someone to be angry at, please read my posts more carefully before you take it out on me.  From my post:

Given their relative numerical impact, ranked in terms of importance, the factors were: 1) Brown is the superior candidate, 2) national trends, 3) relatively lower Democratic turnout.

So yeah, I was really blaming it all on the economy in my previous post.

[ Parent ]
My bad. (4.00 / 3)
I was referring to this:
At the same time, many within the progressive blogosphere will claim that a more populist, progressive campaign from Coakley or leadership from national Democrats would have resulted in more favorable political conditions.
I am here to say that both claims are just crap, at least when they are about ideological positioning in and of themselves.

If you think the political situation for Democrats would have been better if they had different messaging or passed different legislation, consider a simple hypothetical:
Over the past year, instead of saying and doing what they did, Democrats in D.C. and President Obama passed exactly the legislation, and engaged in exactly the sort of messaging, you suggest..
Despite doing this, current economic conditions are exactly the same as they are today.
In this hypothetical, if you think the political situation would be any different for Democrats than it is currently, then you are deluding yourself.
The political environment isn't difficult for Democrats right now because the country is opposed to what Democrats are doing in some sort of abstract, ideological and rhetorical sense.  The political situation is difficult because the economy sucks.  Period.

Rereading this, I see that you were referring to the overall political environment rather than the MA Senate race specifically. So the confusion was my own fault. Sorry for the inaccurate criticism. (I don't completely agree with you, but you are right that it doesn't contradict your current post. I do agree that Coakly ran a lame campaign and that the economy plays a big role in the political situation. I just think that if Dems were actually fighting effectively to get better economic results, they'd be in better shape than being half-assed, ineffective and corruption-riddled. Of course if they did that, they would almost certainly get better economic results, making the argument unlikely to be resolved in any case.)

miasmo.com

[ Parent ]
Huh? (4.00 / 1)
If you are looking for someone to be angry at, please read my posts more carefully before you take it out on me.

I see miasmo disagreeing with you.  I don't see miasmo being either being angry with you or taking it out on you.  It's not personal, whatever the merits of the argument.

Full Court Press!  http://www.openleft.com/showDi...

[ Parent ]
I'm reminded of a NIN song (4.00 / 2)
Terrible lie
Terrible lie
Terrible lie
Terrible lie

You made me throw it all away
My morals left to decay (terrible lie)
How many you betray
You've taken everything (terrible lie)
My head is filled with disease
My skin is begging you, please (terrible lie)
I'm on my hands and knees
I want so much to believe

Don't take it away from me
I need someone to hold on to
Don't take it away from me
I need someone to hold on to

Will it be all the "bad candidates" in November, too?

Fascinating point (4.00 / 2)
Trent Reznor really makes it hit home.
[ Parent ]
Yup (0.00 / 0)
Creigh Deeds, Jon Corzine, and now Coakley.  
[ Parent ]
Probably the economy and health care were the reasons she only (4.00 / 2)
had a 13% lead on Dec 31st, rather than a 23% lead.

At Nate Silver said, we could have survived the economy or Coakley, but not both.

Coakley's slide began with Senate health care passage (4.00 / 3)
Voters change their mind about candidates during the final weeks of campaigns based on facts, like the crappy health care bill, that they hadn't taken time to consider before in passed the Senate at the last possible moment of 2009 on December 24th. Your point seems to be that a better candidate than Martha Coakley might have done a better job selling a health care bill to Massachusetts that they already thought was terrible. But you don't have any numbers to prove that.

In fact, the one number that proves the opposite is this: 20% of Democrats in MA voted FOR Brown.

Clearly, a lot of voters changed their minds in the final weeks of the campaign, that is AFTER the Senate passed its crappy bill on Christmas eve, less than four weeks before the election. The slide in Coakley's fortunes coincides almost exactly with Senate passage of the health care bill. That's the fact.

Why would MA voters vote against a national healthcare plan.... (0.00 / 0)
....that is substantively the same as what they have already, and is favored by 58% of MA voters?

I'm willing to believe jobs, bailouts and Coakley as factors.  HCR doesn't make sense, not in MA.

[ Parent ]
Pls provide the details of that support for the bill! (4.00 / 2)
If I read the Ramussen exit poll right, much of this is only "somewhat support". Also, see this the other way round: They already have a kind of universal healthcare, and the new bill would only make their Medicare worse and put an additional tax on them. Why should they want that, if there's nothing in it for them?
[ Parent ]
They wanted something better from DC (0.00 / 0)
By the time the Senate passed their crappy bill, there was little left to recommend it as better than what Massachusetts already had. MA citizens went through this exercise five years ago. A quick look at what the Senate passed, and prognostications that that was as good as it was going to get on the national level turned them off.

To coincidence of Senate passage of the health care bill and the beginning of Coakley's slide is hard to ignore.

[ Parent ]
Polls (4.00 / 1)
Its often difficult to disentangle the consequences of various political factors when using statistics, especially when there's a short time horizon involved. Let me humbly suggest that atmospherics was the most important factor - that the image of national Democrats being weak & ineffective in dealing with serious national problems, ie. unemployment & healthcare, translated into Coakley being seen similarly.

Carter

not the only problem (0.00 / 0)
When a bunch of Democrats get on TV basically saying "we give up", you have more than a candidate problem.  You have a feckless, ineffectual party in control in very bad times.  If that doesn't shift, the Democrats will suffer massive losses.

They could even lose the Senate if they lose a bunch of seats and Lieberman switches to the Republican side.

Thank you EMILY's list (4.00 / 2)
I live in Boston.  Got positively bombarded by literature from EMILY's list promoting Coakley before the primary.  Then...crickets.

Wouldn't it be nice if EMILY's List stuck to supporting pro-choice women running vs. anti-choice candidates rather than against equally pro-choice men who in many cases are more progresive on the issues (Such as Mike Capuano, whom I voted for)!

Meantime, EMILY'S List has yet to endorse (4.00 / 1)
Jennifer Brunner, a real progressive who could have used some early money (unlike some of the incumbents on their list here). But her opponent has the support of the Democratic establishment.  Their choices look like establishment support is what is really driving their endorsements.  

Politics is the art of the possible, but that means you have to think about changing what is possible, not that you have to accept it in perpetuity.
[ Parent ]
Ever seen that Bob Newhart where he competes at darts? (4.00 / 2)
Bob throws a few and is off the mark.  So he declares, "This tie is too tight, it's the culprit here" and takes it off.  Next throw even worse.  "Must be this jacket, it's hindering my shoulder movement.  The jacket is the culprit."  Off it comes.  Next throw is worse still.  "Well, the shirt, this damn shirt!"  and so on ... scene fades out and back in ... Bob is now in his undershirt and boxers, lobbing darts in the general direction of the board in a pitiful attempt.  Tom pipes up, "If he says his shorts are the culprit, I'm outta here!"  Cue laughtrack

Let me know when you find the culprit Chris, if you get down to your shorts, I'm outta here...

Not totally convicing. (4.00 / 1)
Could still very well be that something Coakley or Brown said about healthcare led to the decline. We shouldn't simply disregard the fact that Coakley was left with an impossible task by having to sell the crappy bill, which won't deliver anything to the majority of the MA voters. After all, as Brown annoyingly but rightly points out, MA already has "universal healthcare". Sort of.

Also, pls notee that many pundits now say Coakley should have put the focus on something else, for instance the Obama idea of a bank tax! This implies that the healthcare bill is a negative asset, doing more harm than good in the campaign.

Chris, (4.00 / 1)
I'd be interested to see your take on these numbers:

http://act.boldprogressives.or...

Based on this, I don't think your hypothesis that it was Coakley, not the national trends, is entirely correct.

That's some of it for sure, but with those numbers, you can't help but think that a good 20% or more of the Obama base decided to bloody his nose because of the whole lot of nothing occurring in Washington for the past year.

Chris, I don't understand (4.00 / 1)
Those top three charts register national trends, correct?

If so, what possible relevance could they have?


So hcr (0.00 / 0)
So hcr had a sudden, massive drop in popularity in Massachusetts, even though it was at the same level across the country as a whole?

Not only is that implausible, but it isn't backed up by polling in the campaign over the last two weeks.

[ Parent ]
A sudden drop, I'm not sure (4.00 / 1)
But obviously people focus on the issues in the lead-up to a big election. Health care reform is unpopular. The polls on health care need not swing dramatically for the negative feelings about the HCR to become determinative late in a race and influence the outcome.

In any case, I'm no polling expert like you but it seems odd to present national polls as "strong evidence" for what happened in a state race.  

[ Parent ]
As an aside (4.00 / 1)
I think health care play a big role only to the extent that it's prevented Obama from fashioning a message and policy on the economy. Robert Reich:

Here's what's really going on. In Massachusetts, in New Jersey, all over the nation, voters are petrified of losing their jobs, their homes, and what's left of their savings. Nothing counts more than the economy. Rightly or wrongly, presidents and the party in power are blamed when the economy is lousy. Voters fired Jimmy Carter in 1980 because the economy went south. They fired George Bush the first in 1992 because the economy was awful. They fired congressional Democrats in 1994 because the economy was still awful. And they're in the process of firing Obama and the Democrats - unless or until the economy turns around.

That's about it. If the economy were decent or recovering, Coakley would've won going away. I don't need a weatherman, or polls, to tell me what happened in Massachusetts.  

[ Parent ]
was coakley a bad candidate? sure (4.00 / 1)
she took a 2-week vacation 1 month before the election and she wasn't even an incumbent!

but I'm also pretty sure if obama's 'change' had made an appearance on the 2009 economic theater the public wouldn't have taken the senate seat from the dems and/or if obama hadn't sold us out so much in the hcr theater an enthusiastic left would've made the difference. that capitulation to lieberman and the endless baucus bipartisanship crap demoralized the activist left.  

national vs regional (0.00 / 0)
What I don't understand about your comparison is how you can compare how Democrats poll nationally to how Coakley did regionally. Couldn't, say, Obama's job approval trend in Massachusetts be different than the national average? Especially when you consider regional demographics, economics, etc. If that's the case it may not be 18% of it being a bad campaign on Coakley's part, it could be 22% or 10%.

Anecdotally, in the Bay Area, Obama's approval seems to have dropped. Without me ever bringing it, conversations seem to turn to Obama and people generally express dissappointment. But then, my friends and the bay area in general, tend to be more liberal.

18% drop while he was up 2% elsewhere? (0.00 / 0)
It isn't impossible, but it is highly, highly implausible.  Further, it isn't backed up by polling in Massachusetts.
[ Parent ]
I didn't say Obama dropped 18% in Massachusetts (0.00 / 0)
I just didn't understand how accurate you could be one way or the other comparing national to state numbers. I'm not a polling expert. So I asked the question.

I see that you've posted Massachusetts' numbers in another post. Thank you.  

[ Parent ]
I have been arguing that this is mostly (4.00 / 1)
the result of the economy.  If so, it portends bad news for November, because Massachusetts unemployment is 8.8% - significantly below the national average. Moreover, the year over year change in unemployment is 2.7%, far below changes in other states (eg in Neveda, where it has gone from 8 to 12.3), and unemployment actually went down in December in Massachusetts.

Clearly a lot of factors at play here... (4.00 / 1)
The economy is probably mostly responsible for the "national environment" issue that's dragging Democrats down. Part of the problem is also just the fact that things are slightly better in MA doesn't mean that they're not aware of how bad things are overall. Even people with jobs don't like to see the unemployment numbers skyrocketing each month with seemingly nothing being done about it, while banks report that they're dealing out record bonuses.

Clearly, the economy needs to improve substantially for Democrats to have any chance at all of minimizing losses in November. But, at the same time, I think Barney Frank and others are being incredibly naive if they think that, after spending more than 6 months on health care that just giving up on it is the way forward for Democrats in terms of softening the blow in November.

[ Parent ]
She polled almost (4.00 / 1)
exactly Obama's national approval number.  Her numbers dropped when her message was "I'm the 60th vote for healthcare".

No, it wasn't just her.

Making Coakley the main problem simply falls too short (0.00 / 0)
We should keep to the known facts instead. One of them is that sh failed because of low Dem voter turnout. Was that her fault? not really, says Research2000:

53% of Obama voters who voted for Brown and 56% of Obama voters who did not vote in the Massachusetts election said that Democrats enacting tighter restrictions on Wall Street would make them more likely to vote Democratic in the 2010 elections.

http://pol.moveon.org/brownpol... (hat tip to David Mizner)

So, obviously, the tolerant approach of the Dems towards the WallStreet pissed of Dem voters and doomed Coakley. Sure, she made lots of mistakes herself, but we should be careful wit the fingerpointing. Putting all the blame on a scapegoat would only further delay drawing hurtful but necessary lessons abpout the failure of the Obama WH and the Dems to deliver to their voters.

Coakley is already yesterday's news. Emanuell, Reid, Lieberman, Nelson, Dodd, Conrad, Baucus, and all the other lamers are still in business.

Making Coakley the main problem simply falls too short (0.00 / 0)
We should keep to the known facts instead. One of them is that sh failed because of low Dem voter turnout. Was that her fault? not really, says Research2000:

53% of Obama voters who voted for Brown and 56% of Obama voters who did not vote in the Massachusetts election said that Democrats enacting tighter restrictions on Wall Street would make them more likely to vote Democratic in the 2010 elections.

http://pol.moveon.org/brownpol... (hat tip to David Mizner)

So, obviously, the tolerant approach of the Dems towards the WallStreet pissed of Dem voters and doomed Coakley. Sure, she made lots of mistakes herself, but we should be careful wit the fingerpointing. Putting all the blame on a scapegoat would only further delay drawing hurtful but necessary lessons abpout the failure of the Obama WH and the Dems to deliver to their voters.

Coakley is already yesterday's news. Emanuell, Reid, Lieberman, Nelson, Dodd, Conrad, Baucus, and all the other lamers are still in business.

Strong evidence indicating Massachusetts was mainly a candidate problem | 32 comments
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