How did Massachusetts unaffiliated and independents vote in the Massachusetts Senate race? Being as there are reportedly no exit polls for the race Republican Scott Brown won, we may never know.
Some numbers.
A majority of Massachusetts voters (fifty-one percent) are unaffiliated. Among voters stating a party preference, Democrats have a three-to-one advantage over Republicans.
Yes, until now, Massachusetts has not has a Republican Senator since 1972. But despite the Kennedy legacy, it is hardly a one party state. Republicans held the office of Massachusetts Governor from 1990-2006. (Democrat Deval Patrick is the governor, and the first African-American to hold that office in the state.)
Different political constituencies are crowing or crying over Senator-elect Brown's victory. I'd like to understand more about the people who voted for him, especially whether unaffiliated voters, who made up the majority of the Massachusetts voting population, tended to have unified ideological goals. Two people can vote for the same candidates for very different reasons. Saying that a voter is unaffiliated or independent is similar, in its descriptive scope, to saying that someone is mixed-race. You could say that about someone who's Black-Korean or someone who's White-Mexican. It's not that the label is wrong; it's just incomplete.
Was this vote the harbinger of a Republican Revolution redux? Or is it a singular expression of choice based on one set of candidates? Did unaffiliated voters in this Senate race tend to have a common ideology that will shape their actions in 2010 and 2012?
I toss the questions to you....
Follow Farai Chideya on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@faraichideya
Oh, and by the way, if you are going to "toss the questions to us...." you should inform the sensors here at HP. They tend to reject most post's at this hour, why got me, figure they have small children working these hours.
The top post was 2 words over the limit, guess I got carried away.
Then after one year in office, we saw that he anointed all the crooks from GS to head up his economic policy team. Then we saw promise after promise being broken, it was turning into a joke, just too bad no one got it. Just start with his first day rule on lobbyists, on day two he hands out two dozen exceptions, and go from there.
The health care policy was the straw that broke the camels back. So we (I) felt we needed to send a message now and not wait for November. And just maybe we can at the least wake up congress to the facts, that we are just not going to take it anymore, and that this needs to stop. You can not get away with promising changes and than after the election, forget about us, for we will remember come the next election, and you will be gone.
Most of us refer to this special election, as the shot across the bow. Come November we will be aiming at the water line, so you best be prepared to abandon ship.
So far some seem to have gotten the message in congress. The sad thing is that people in the media (MSNBC) seem to have air for brains.
http://ipolity.com/blogs/post/113