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At least in Lowell, Brown didn't so much win as Coakley lost

Richard Howe posts some interesting Lowell numbers: Brown got only a few more votes yesterday than McCain did in 2008. But Coakley got fewer than half the votes Obama did:

... The Obama vote stayed home, and did not have to transfer to Brown for him to carry Lowell. ...

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it seemed like there wan't much enthusiasm, especially in the black and Hispanic communities, about this election. Which is partly the Coakley campaign's fault, for not reaching out to these voters.

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Because of the timing of the election being abnormal, weather, etc., voting was expected to be lower in general. Therefore, you wouldn't expect as many voters as in 2008 for Republicans OR Democrats. For Brown to get the same number as McCain, the likelihood is that Obama voters flipped to keep the numbers up to match.

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Brown didn't win the election in Lowell - he won it in the suburbs. The fact that he won in Lowell is in interesting slap in the face to Dems, but it doesn't tell you why he won. The Dem candidate should have won without an Obama-sized minority turnout. Martha Coakley is Hillary Clinton without the sparkling charm.

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That's true statewide as well.

Brown got 59,253 more total votes than McCain.
Coakley got 845,415 less than Obama.

Turnout in traditionally republican areas seems to have been similar to the presidential election, while most of the fall-off seems to have come from traditionally democratic areas. info.

What's more interesting is why. Research 2000 polled after the election including 500 Brown voters and 500 voters who stayed home. Their conclusion is that voters are dissatisfied with the change coming from Washington, not TOO much change but TOO little change and not Congress going TOO far but NOT FAE ENOUGH.

I have a post up: "What MA voters told us about the Senate health bill and change? Not enough!"

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or any senate race for that matter.

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Peter:

Overall turnout in this election was below the standard presidential race, but well above the gubernatorial years. Individual senate races switch back and forth between those years, so that's the better comparison. (In other words, more people turned out in 2000, '04 and '08; fewer in '98, '02, and '06.)

There were certainly a significant number of Obama voters who switched to throw their support behind Brown. There's simply no other way to read the data. But it's also indisputably the case that turnout was lowest in the urban, minority neighborhoods where Obama tended to rack up some of his highest margins. If voters in Boston had turned out like voters in North Andover, this wouldn't have been close.

That probably says a lot more about Martha Coakley, though, than about Barack Obama. To drive turnout in urban, minority areas, you need to convince the residents that you understand their concerns and will represent their interests. Coakley is an Irish Catholic woman who lives in the suburbs and is married to a retired cop. So I think it's fair to say that if she wanted the support of these communities, she was going to have to convince them that if they looked past those superficial facts, they'd find a real friend. She never made the effort. She didn't partner with the major advocacy groups, didn't attend the big churches, didn't sit down with communal leaders, didn't walk around their neighborhoods to show her commitment. It takes a few hours to walk up and down Blue Hill Ave, shaking hands with shopkeepers and inducing them to put signs in the windows. Coakley didn't bother; the Globe reported there were only two signs on the whole strip. Coakley assumed she'd have the support of these communities, because they were never going to vote for Brown. But as it happened, they had another option - staying home. And they did.

What this suggests is that efforts to read this election as turning exclusively on issues - health care, terrorism and national security, taxes - are missing perhaps the biggest factor. The minority voters who generally turn out but on Tuesday stayed at home weren't angry about issues. They agreed with Coakley, they just didn't particularly support her. They didn't believe she'd represent them or their interests. In other words, she ran a lousy campaign, and failed to win over a large number of potential voters just because she didn't try. It's not a particularly satisfying or earth0shaking conclusion, but it has the virtue of being accurate.

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