David and the rest of the SSP crew have been kind enough to give me a soapbox here, and I think I'll be starting a series on breaking down large jurisdictions through the lens of some election.
Having gotten my hands on precinct data for the city for both 2008 and the 2010 Special, I thought I'd continue to examine the disparities between Obama's and Coakley's respective performances.
As you can see on the map, the geographic central core of the city, Roxbury and Mattapan, remained strong with little dropoff from Coakley to the Obama. Jamaica Plain, Allston/Brighton, and Back Bay - all strong Obama areas as well - showed slightly greater drop-offs. Even greater drop-offs were noticeable in the already swingy areas of the city, such as West Roxbury, Dorchester, Charlestown, and Southie. McCain won only 3 precincts throughout the entire city's 254; Brown increased that to 33.
Putting this statewide perspective, we get this:
Again looking at the map, South Boston was pretty darn brutal for Coakley, with Brown scoring 60%+ in several precincts. Many people (including one Stephen Lynch) indicated particular hostility for Coakley in the neighborhood. She did get destroyed here, but was it any worse than how badly she got destroyed across the rest of the state?
I think not. Sidenote: I'm defining "South Boston" the same way the Boston City Council does, that is, all nine precincts in Ward 6 and precincts 1-7 in Ward 7.
In 2008, in the 16 precincts constituting "South Boston" (or Southie), Obama beat McCain by a margin of 3,100 votes, or roughly 59-39. In 2010, Coakley lost by a margin of 1,500 votes, or roughly 43-56. Overall, this was a 16.0% swing; this is somewhat worse than that 15.31% swing experienced by Coakley across the state.
But, despite my election-night model assuming so, Coakley didn't experience a uniform dropoff. Instead, dropoffs are quite correlated with how well Obama performed in the area was to begin with. (This makes sense - Democratic strongholds are likely to remain so, while swingy areas in which Obama did well might have been particularly receptive to Republicans in a close election.)
Throwing this up on a graph (with Coakley's dropoff on the vertical axis and Obama's margin on the horizontal), we get:
You'll see a few outliers here: the point at the origin you can throw out - that's Boston Precinct 01-15, which last had a voter in 2004. The correlation on that is 0.83 0.816, suggesting quite a strong relationship.
Taking the geekery to the next level, I busted out the extraordinarily helpful Stata (how academic of you, my SPSS-using friends tell me...):
For those who are less of statistics nerds than I am, the regression tells us two main things:
For every point increase in Obama's margin in a voting unit (precincts within Boston, towns elsewhere), we can expect Coakley's performance relative to Obama's to improve by 0.14%.
For a hypothetical voting unit that was exactly tied between Obama and McCain, we should expect a 17% swing away from Coakley.
Applying this to South Boston, we see that there isn't really a pattern: some precincts had drop-offs more than to be expected, others had less.
There really isn't much a discernible pattern here, again, supporting the conclusion that while Southie didn't like Martha, they didn't indicate their dislike for her through their votes more than the rest of the state did.
This can all be represented visually as well:
The last benefit of getting the Boston data was I could finish results of the Senate Race by CD. As we'd already known, they weren't pretty, but here's the results table just as a freebie:
Beltway political pundits are pointing to Scott Brown's recent U.S. Senate victory in Massachusetts as a sign that Republicans nationwide should be excited about their prospects in November.
You know what would be a terrific rebuke to that false logic: a progressive Democrat winning the historically Republican state senate seat that Scott Brown gave up upon his election to the U.S. Senate. Turning the Scott Brown seat from dark red to bright, progressive blue would make a resounding statement with these political pundits and be a big victory for progressive change.
Dr. Smulowitz is a health care expert and progressive Democrat, very much in the proud, progressive tradition of Dr. Howard Dean. He will bring to Massachusetts government innovative ideas on reducing health care costs while focusing on primary and preventative care - ideas that can be duplicated in states across America. Dr. Smulowitz will fight for economic growth and job creation, particularly by easing the tax burden on small businesses and promoting investment in green industries. He will fight to make government more transparent and responsive to its citizens. And he will always fight for civil rights and privacy rights, including protecting marriage equality for same-sex couples and reproductive rights for women.
The primary in the special election to fill Brown's old state senate seat is in just a few weeks, on Tuesday, April 13. Dr. Smulowitz needs your help in the Democratic primary to make sure that a Howard Dean progressive can succeed the conservative Scott Brown. Dr. Smulowitz has a primary challenger, a hack in the state legislature who was formerly a member of the state House leadership under two consecutive House Speakers, Tom Finneran and Sal DiMasi, who both eventually became convicted felons and who both represent what is wrong with Massachusetts state government. This hack's ties to the convicted felon former Speakers make her completely unelectable in a general election.
On the other hand, Dr. Smulowitz can help champion progressive change by winning conservative Republican Scott Brown's old State Senate seat. But we need your help in the progressive blogosphere!
Please join our fight to help a progressive Democrat, rather than an establishment hack, win the primary and have the opportunity to turn the Scott Brown seat blue. Please make a contribution today via ActBlue!
The pundit class thinks that Senator Ted Kennedy's seat going to Scott Brown is a big, bad omen of what is to come for Democrats in November. Electing a Howard Dean Democrat, Dr. Peter Smulowitz, to succeed Scott Brown would turn that omen on its ear and send a poweful message of its own. Please join our fight!
Last night's victory by Republican Scott Brown over Democrat Martha Coakley for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in the Bay State was certainly one of the biggest political shockers in my lifetime. The fact that in happened on the eve of the first anniversary of the Obama presidency also leaves a sour taste in everyone but Republican's mouths.
My view is the Democrats got complacent with "safe" seats, and Republicans can get that way also as we've seen in the last 4 years when they just kept losing. The Democrats were so used to Ted Kennedy holding onto his seat, they thought it would be a lock for them and they could run just about anybody, no matter how terrible a candidate he or she was. Brown managed to develop what I thought was a great one-liner in response to David Gergen: "It's not the Kennedy seat, it's the People's seat!"
All the telltale signs that this was not a safe Democrat haven since at least 1990 were there. William Weld, Paul Cellucci, and Mitt Romney weren't accidents. If they could win the governorship with that much success, it was only a matter of time before they managed to ascend to higher office. Hell, Brown even made Coakley look like an elistist with his driving around in his GMC Truck. Can you say "Fred Thompson 1994"?
For a party that emphasized reaching out to Indpendents in 2008, how in the world did they not realize that Independents now outnumber either party affliation is staggering. Either people out there honestly did not approve of HRC, or they didn't understand it because Democrats on the ground weren't campaigning hard enough up to this vote to gain ground with Independents. I would argue that the latter point is more accurate. Democrats like Coakley and Obama pretty much failed to actually campaign until the last minute, allowing Brown to capitalize. How else do you explain a 30 point lead for Coakley evaporating virtually overnight?
Where I come from, I know of a party that had been in office for a long time. They thought the other guys could never beat them and they got complacent. Guess what? The Liberal Party of Canada is in opposition today, and the best leader we could come up with was a guy who spent 30 years away from Canada and was recently a professor at, coincidentially, Harvard. While Democrats haven't been in control in the amount of time Liberals had been, the same situation seems to be present. They need to pick up their game and campaign hard, or else they can start to lose safe seats like they did last night.
I'm as freaked out over Massachusetts as anyone - and I might be plenty angry/despondent/confused/hungover tomorrow morning.
But in the meantime, I've been working on a crude projection model using, in part, the "baseline" idea that Crisitunity and DavidNYC have made a part of SSP Election Night Tradition.
The model, as inputs, takes partial results from towns that have reported, and outputs a whole slew of numbers comparing the current situation to the "baseline" numbers.
Results are soon pending in the special election to replace Senator Ted Kennedy. Once a guaranteed Democratic victory, the race has become surprisingly competitive due to a bad national environment and a lackluster campaign run by Democrat Martha Coakley. In fact, several polls have put Republican Scott Brown in the lead, striking panic amongst the Democratic establishment.
Interpreting incomplete results can be difficult if one is not familiar with how different areas in a state vote. Senator John McCain, for instance, led the vote in Virginia during much of election night; this was because deep-red rural Virginia reported first. After Democratic strongholds in Northern Virginia began posting, Barack Obama quickly pulled away (he ultimately won by 6.30%). Because Massachusetts is rarely competitive outside of gubernatorial elections, geographic unfamiliarity probably extends to even most politically active folk.
I have therefore created a map indicating what a tied election would probably look like:
And breathe. Hopefully this means the ads are sinking in and making Democrats get off their behinds for next Tuesday. President Clinton is up there tomorrow and First Read reports a Vicki Kennedy ad is in the can and ready to go up before the weekend.
I think we all remember the 2008 Democratic primaries, that exciting and epic battle. In many ways the campaign caused more excitement than the general election, whose result was never really in doubt (especially after the financial crisis).
Both candidates drew upon distinctly different coalitions. In an influential article, Ronald Brownstein analyzes the difference this way:
Since the 1960s, Democratic nominating contests regularly have come down to a struggle between a candidate who draws support primarily from upscale, economically comfortable voters liberal on social and foreign policy issues, and a rival who relies mostly on downscale, financially strained voters drawn to populist economics and somewhat more conservative views on cultural and national security issues.
President Barack Obama assembled a coalition from the former, these "wine-track" Democrats. When most Americans think of liberals, they think of wine-track Democrats. Mr. Obama, then, was the liberal candidate; Mrs. Clinton the "beer-track," working-class representative.
So candidate won the most liberal place in America?
In fact, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won the state of Massachusetts (you may have realized this by reading the title of this post). The result wasn't even close; Mrs. Clinton's margin was 15.37%.
These results are most strange. Barack Obama supposedly built a coalition upon liberal Democrats - yet he lost Massachusetts, the very image of liberalism. He then proceeded to win the nomination.
I will attempt to explain this puzzling result below.
This is my first redistricting diary. I've used Dave's redistricting before for other states; I've just never cared to post it. I chose to do Massachusetts, which is poised to lose one seat in 2010. Barring a Republican win at the state house (which is increasingly unlikely with the candidacy of Tim Cahill), Democrats should be able to push through a liberal gerrymander. Here were my goals:
1. Take out Stephen Lynch: Lynch is the very definition of a DINO. He represents a D+11 district, but votes like a Blue Dog. I don't know a single progressive in Massachusetts that doesn't have sweet dreams about primarying him.
2. Make sure that all representatives continue to live in the district they represent: This, I knew, would be hard, considering that 4 representatives live in Middlesex county alone, but it remained important to maintain the Democratic machine
3. Make the state look less gerrymandered: This, for reasons described above would also be hard, but I hoped that I could, at the very least, make my map look better than this:
4. Give Boston a compact district: Just personal, for me. I want the best city in the country to basically have a district all to itself
With the 2010 Census just a year away and the next round of nationwide redistricting two or three years away, I've decided to start looking at the redistricting situations in different states and begin some conversation about what kinds of changes we can expect to see. These diaries will be sporadic, and the data is always subject to change (for now, county population estimates are from 2007; 2008 numbers will be out soon, meaning my number-crunching will need constant adjusting)...but for we super-geeks, merely the discussion of redistricting and speculation on its effects will be sufficiently entertaining.
My "state focus" redistricting diaries will cover two states, usually one large and one a bit smaller.
Today, I was feeling the vibes of 2004, so we'll delve into Massachusetts and Texas. Below the fold...
I didn't expect to be writing any diaries about the Massachusetts Senate Race, but I have been suspecting for some time that John Kerry might be wearing out his welcome. And now, according to a Suffolk University Poll, it appears to be just the case.
