Senator Scott Brown conceded to Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts:
Elizabeth Warren won a hard-fought race for the Senate on Tuesday, recapturing for the Democrats the seat held for almost half a century by the late Edward M. Kennedy.
Cheers filled the hotel ballroom here where Ms. Warren was holding her victory party as word of her win came out.
Nearly three-fourths of voters in Massachusetts went to the polls on Tuesday, a turnout higher than the 3.1 million who voted in the 2008 presidential race.
If a liberal Republican like Brown couldn’t hold onto Massachusetts, it’s hard to imagine any Republican can. There’s not much good news for the GOP tonight, at least not yet — Senate candidate Richard Mourdock lost to Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly in Indiana, gaining Democrats another seat; Todd Akin lost to Senator Claire McCaskill in a race that was expected to be an easy win for the GOP before Akin’s comments about “legitimate rape”; and AP projected Josh Mandel lost his race to Sen. Sherrod Brown.
Republicans did pick up one Senate seat. NBC and CBS have called Nebraska for Republican Deb Fischer over former Sen. Bob Kerrey.
But overall, not a good trend for Republicans. It’s important to keep these races in mind if Romney’s loss is blamed on him being too moderate on social issues. Mourdock and Akin in particular are socially far to the right, and they still lost their races.
Well Hillary Clinton can breathe a sigh of relief. She can now leave her job on her own accord instead of being shoved aside to give it to John Kerry in order to make room for Deval Patrick to give his seat to Warren.
I think a lot of people, including me, bought into the hype that Scott Brown's 2010 victory in the special election to replace the late Senator Edward Kennedy was a sign of a Republican resurgence across the United States. Instead it seems Brown's election was a fluke, made possible by the disarray in the Massachusetts Democratic political machine following Kennedy's death. That disarray was at least partly due to Kennedy's failure to groom or handpick his potential replacement. Had Kennedy resigned when his health began to fail instead of dying in office, there may have been enough time to find a successor who the Democratic machine could rally behind and Scott Brown would never be a U.S. Senator. As it turned out, the machine started working again and found someone who managed to win not because of her strengths but for the fact that Massachusites will vote for anyone with a "D" behind his or her name.
I would argue the exact opposite. Brown was essentially edged out of the '10 Governor's race and took this "unwinnable" race as a consolation prize. He was helped by the weather in the January special election — memory is sleet north of Boston, drizzle/freezing rain to the south, not exactly good Birkinstok weather while turnout was through the roof. There was heavy traffic on quiet back streets 3 blocks away from the polling stations — this was unprecedented. n nThen there was the 2010 election and the main roads through town became virtually impassable after 10:30 AM — there were so many people going to vote that it was creating mid-morning traffic backups that were far worse than anything ever seen during rush hour. At 2PM I was told that the particular poling station I was holding a sign at had already set an all-time record of votes cast while a third of the votes are usually cast after 4:30 PM when folks come home from work. n nTisei's people — and I do know it was them because the person who told me had heard it from his people — started these asinine rumors that Baker/Tisei was winning hand/over/fist with things like a 2:1 exit poll in uber-leftist Cambridge and the like. This backfired, as might be expected, and folks coming home from work, having been told that the election had already been won, didn't bother to vote. What had been busy all day turned into a empty parking lot with more campaigners than voters. n nEnd result, Deval Patrick — who was beatable and WHO WAS BEING BEATEN instead was re-elected…. And these are the same people who tried to help Scott Brown… n