If the tone of Scott Brown’s campaign had matched the tenor of his concession speech, the man from Wrentham might be looking at six more years. Instead, Elizabeth Warren goes to Washington and Brown and his pick-up truck shift into park, presumably nowhere near Harvard Yard.
Brown’s decision to pummel Warren over her Native American heritage, her academic and legal work, and even her title, even though polling showed that going negative wasn’t helping, blew up his Mr. Bipartisan Nice Guy image. That package represented his narrow path to victory and he squandered it.
His missteps, combined with Warren’s party-over-person messaging, appeals to women, and late-in-the-race determination not to be the second coming of Martha Coakley, mean Brown will have some downtime to reflect on those miscalculations — as well as all those secret meetings with kings and queens and prime ministers.
John Tierney handed Richard Tisei a real North Shore smackdown, hanging onto his Sixth Congressional District seat by the skin of his teeth. In January, the 113th Congress premieres the newest episode of “The Kennedys: The Next Generation” as Joseph P. Kennedy III, the Fourth Congressional District victor, brings honor to the family by taking the storied name back to the nation’s capital. The rest of the Massachusetts congressional delegation cruised to easy victories.
Voters approved two of three of the ballot questions. They gave a nod to a stronger right-to-repair law that goes into effect in 2015 rather than 2018, as called for by the last-minute compromise that the Legislature worked out earlier this year. (It remains to be seen whether Beacon Hill will revisit the issue next year.) The measure permitting the dispensing of medical marijuana for certain illnesses also passed. Now state public health and law enforcement officials have the thankless job of figuring out how to make it work without running afoul of the feds since marijuana remains an illegal drug under federal law. The right-to-die question narrowly failed as religious groups and some medical interests mobilized to defeat it.
As for President Barack Obama, “Four more years” was his simple message via Twitter. Ross Douthat of The New York Times is already calling the victory the Obama Realignment. The president’s base remains bicoastal and upper Midwestern with a little splash from the Southwest. At least the president knows what he’s in for, as the numbers in the Senate and the House still add up to gridlock.
Mitt Romney may have earned the undying enmity of Republican Party true believers. His loss underscores why ideological shape-shifting is never a recipe for success, especially when vying for the votes of the new potent American electoral majority — women, young people, and Latinos. How long that gumbo of voters will hold together is anyone’s guess. However, one thing is for certain: The US has probably seen the last Bay State candidate at the top of a presidential ticket for years to come (sorry, governor, just don’t see it).
—GABRIELLE GURLEY
WINNERS:
No Drama Obama — After faltering badly in the first presidential debate, Barack Obama cracked a few jokes about his soporific effort, dusted himself off, regained his voice, cranked up a well-oiled campaign ground game, and largely replayed the 2008 electoral map that swept him into office.
Pointy headed liberals (from the ragged edge of the middle class) — Elizabeth Warren’s full-throated liberalism and rags-to-Harvard smarts proved to be big winners with an electorate that briefly dated a good looking guy from the basketball team.
The People’s Pledge — Brown and Warren agreed that PAC money should stay out of their race, and it worked. People who complain about all the negative ads should know it could have been a lot worse.
Sen. John Kerry — The Democrats’ success in retaining control of the White House and US Senate could make the Massachusetts senator a big winner. Kerry wants to be secretary of state, and Obama could oblige if Hillary Clinton follows through on her earlier decision to leave. One possible roadblock is whether the Democrats can afford to let Kerry give up his seat. The Democrats hold a 51-45 edge in the Senate, with races in North Dakota and Montana still too close to call. Two Democrat-leaning independents also hold seats.
Howie Carr — He is always more comfortable writing as an acerbic critic than as a cheerleader. He now has a Kennedy in Congress, and a Cambridge law professor in the Senate. He’ll make it through to the next election just fine.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — His no-nonsense response to Hurricane Sandy and the bipartisan optics of saluting President Obama for moving quickly to get aid to Jersey and other affected states position him well for 2016. Not to mention that now the Boss loves him back.
Dan Fishman — The Libertarian candidate in the Sixth Congressional District got off most of the best lines in the race. “My job is to protect you from my opinion, not impose it on you,” he said at the first debate. On election night, he won 4.5 percent of the vote, and probably helped US Rep. John Tierney eke out a victory over Republican Richard Tisei.
Journalist-turned-climate-change activist Wen Stephenson — The former Boston Globe editor and his fellow global warming activists will emerge as winners if Sandy + Election 2012 = change in the conversation about the effects and the solutions to a problem that isn’t going away.
Nate Silver — The New York Times’s chief electoral statistician works with math and science, a fact that made him the chief target of soothsayers, horserace prognosticators, and various folks on the right who don’t believe in math and science. When Silver’s critics pushed him, he pushed back, insisting that President Obama had a relatively narrow but stubborn lead in a number of critical swing states — a fact that gave Mitt Romney long electoral odds, not the tossup status GOP partisans claimed. The election broke the way Silver predicted it would. And it turns out that being at the center of a national screaming match doesn’t hurt one’s book sales.
Gay rights — The hue and cry over judicial activism will now subside after voters in Maine, Washington, and Maryland were the first to approve same-sex marriage at the ballot box, while voters in Minnesota rejected a constitutional amendment to define marriage as one man and one woman.
Catholic Church — An institution that has seen its political clout in Massachusetts all but vanish in recent decades spearheaded a late-forming coalition that narrowly defeated the state’s physician-assisted suicide ballot measure, which looked poised to win earlier in the campaign season.
Bill Clinton — The Energizer bunny of American politics proves that he can still get out the vote and unite the fractious wings of the Democratic party.
Doug Rubin — When the architect of Gov. Deval Patrick’s two statewide victories left the State House for the private sector, he told the State House News Service that his “intent is not to do any campaign work,” but said he might get back on the campaign trail “if something really interesting came my way.” Something interesting did come along — Rubin guided Joe Kennedy III to an easy Congressional win, and took back the People’s Seat from Scott Brown.
Community Preservation Act — Seven communities approved a tax surcharge to buy land for open space, recreation ,or affordable housing while only two rejected the questions.
Nantucket — Where Vice President Joe Biden will continue his Thanksgiving tradition.
Martha’s Vineyard — Where President Obama can now return to vacation without worries of perception.
The Cipollini brothers — It’s Democrat Oliver’s turn on the Governor’s Council after defeating his brother Charles, the GOP incumbent.
Obamacare — It will not be repealed on Day One of the new presidential term and will be fully implemented before the next White House resident moves in.
Independent car repair shops — They’re in a can’t-lose position with a new law from the Legislature and a more muscular law passed by voters.
Big Bird has an extra strut in his step down Sesame Street this morning.
LOSERS:
Mitch McConnell –The Senate minority leader said two years ago that the Republican Party’s top priority over the next two years would be to deny Obama a second term. What’s his priority now?
Conservative bloc of the Supreme Court – The Clarence Thomas-Antonin Scalia wing of the Court will not expand and most likely move into the minority over the next four years.
Super PACs — Money may be the mother’s milk of politics, but when used to clobber voters incessantly over the head with mindless attack ads, voters may sour on it.
Election lawyers — All dressed up with nowhere to go.
Financial services firms threw in big with Brown, and he delivered for them. Brown used his tie-breaking vote on the Dodd-Frank financial reform to extract changes that allowed firms like Fidelity Investments, State Street, and MassMutual to invest in private equity and hedge funds, and he continued to press for tweaks to Dodd-Frank after the law’s passage. The big financial companies of Massachusetts and New York have been no fans of Elizabeth Warren, nor is she likely to go easy on them. On Tuesday night, Warren threw a shout-out to her pals in the credit unions. The big guys could be in for a long six years.
David Paleologos — He announced weeks ago that his polling operation at Suffolk University would no longer survey Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina, which he declared safely in the Romney column. Obama carried Virginia and has a narrow lead this morning in Florida. Doubling down on his Romney momentum meme, Paleologos released released polling data on Monday from “bellwether” areas of New Hampshire and Ohio that suggested a possible edge in both states for Romney. Both went for Obama.
Media handicappers caught napping in the Tierney-Tisei race. A poll for WBUR by the MassINC Polling Group in September had Tierney ahead by seven points, but a Globe poll later that month by the UNH Survey Center had Tisei up six. No one polled after that, leading to Tierney’s Election Night surprise.
Charlie Baker — He’d like to take another shot at the governor’s office, but his party’s disarray nationally and locally has to be troubling.
The Massachusetts GOP — The state’s minor party keeps on shrinking. It now accounts for just 11 percent of registered Massachusetts voters, and in big, tough races, the party’s infrastructure just can’t keep up with Bay State Democrats. Warren’s grassroots campaign knocked on more than 242,000 doors on the weekend before the election. Without a competitive ground game, the state GOP was forced to rely on a media campaign, and the force of Scott Brown’s personality. Both Brown and Tisei followed the moderate, bipartisan playbook and ran competitive campaigns, but to no avail. Brown called it a numbers game after his concession speech, and he was probably right. The same scenario held true in the state Legislature, where the heavily outnumbered Republicans lost ground.
The Republican Party’s conservative wing — Early this year, New York magazine’s, Jonathan Chait argued that time was running out on the GOP’s election map. Chait said the GOP’s base of aging white voters was shrinking, compared to Democrats’ growing coalition of college-educated whites and minorities, and he argued that unless Republicans pivoted to the left, softened their extreme social positions, and embraced Latino voters, the demographics that handed New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Virginia to Democrats would permanently marginalize the party. Instead, party activists tilted even further to the right, and the result was an electoral map that gave Mitt Romney far fewer paths to victory than President Obama had. Now the day of reckoning is at hand.
Eric Fehrnstrom — The Bay State operative at the center of both the Romney and Brown campaigns is probably going to get an earful from Karl Rove: Next time, if there is a next time, run one major race at a time, Eric. He may not care, though, since American Rambler, the company he formed with two other Romney media strategists, was paid more than $23.6 million by the Romney campaign for consulting services plus another $130 million to coordinate media buys for a variety of conservative forces.
Kerry Healey – The former lieutenant governor needs to stop following Mitt around.
Sean Bielat — The pit bull who made a name for himself running against Barney Frank turned into a poodle in his race against Joe Kennedy III.
Richard Tisei — He could not have been in a better position but this morning he wakes up with no job and no prospects.
Donald Trump — The buffoonish business magnate goes off the deep end with calls for revolution.
Bibi Netanyahu — The Israeli prime minister will not move to the top of the White House speed dial.
Massachusetts law enforcement –– The medicinal marijuana question passed despite its opposition, and a half dozen communities overwhelmingly approved nonbinding questions to legalize, regulate, and tax pot the same as alcohol.
Tim Cahill — People will now start paying attention to his ongoing trial.
The Boston Herald. Let’s just say the struggling tabloid, aptly dubbed a full-throated Scott Brown “fanzine” by Esquire’s Charlie Pierce, will not anytime soon be accused of committing journalism in its coverage of the Senate race.
Corporate personhood — Voters in 36 Massachusetts House and Senate legislative districts overwhelmingly approved a nonbinding ballot question supporting a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. Oh, and Elizabeth Warren doesn’t believe in corporation’s humanity either.
WORTH WATCHING
Scott Brown didn’t win Tuesday night, but his campaign team is already in place. Could he win another special election that could start as early as next year should John Kerry decamp for Foggy Bottom? The Dems don’t have an obvious candidate to run against him.
Deval Patrick — Is his next stop the US Supreme Court, the US Senate (if Kerry starts winging around the globe), or the private sector?
Marty Meehan — He insists he’s going to spend five more years running UMass Lowell, but if Kerry leaves his Senate post Meehan may be tempted to go for it. The former congressman has a strong resume, good political instincts, and $4.7 million earning interest in his campaign war chest.
Lt. Gov. Tim Murray — He’s got to be praying that Kerry goes to the State Department and Patrick decides to run for the Senate. A trial run in the corner office may be the only way he can prove that his early-morning crash didn’t make him political roadkill. He may also be looking for tips from Tierney.
The electoral college — The candidates’ preoccupation with swing states to the exclusion of everywhere else propelled a backlash, but Obama’s victory in the popular vote and electoral count probably means the reform movement will stall for now.
Ayla Brown — Will her band’s bookings dwindle?
Gail Huff — Will she be viewed as too biased for reporting?