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Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Politics Massachusetts: The Blame Game, by the Numbers
Posted by Eli Sanders on Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 1:06 PM
In times like these I like to crawl into the mathematically certain arms of Nate Silver, who parses the Massachusetts results this way:
Overall, we have a 31-point swing in the vote to explain: from Barack Obama's roughly 26-point victory in November 2008, to Martha Coakley's roughly 5-point loss today.At a bare minimum, 10 of those points must be assigned to the national environment. Generic ballot polling suggests that the Democrats' position has worsened by a net of 10 points since November 2008, from winning the House popular vote by 10 points in 2008 to being dead even with Republicans today.
Also at a bare minimum, 11 points of blame should be assigned to Coakley. That represents the difference between the 58 percent of vote that she received at her high-water mark in the polls to the 47 percent she received on Election Day. A fairly large number of voters, it appears, actually turned away from Coakley; it was not just a matter of undecided ones turning toward Brown.
That leaves us with 10 more points of blame to assign; let's just dole those out as evenly as possible, giving 3 more points to Coakley, 3 more points to the national environment, and 4 to Massachusetts-specific special contingencies—it gets the extra point because it hadn't received any yet.
That would make the final score: national environment 13, Coakley 14, special circumstances 4.
If you follow through on the math... it suggests that the Democrats would have won by 9 points, rather than losing by 5, had the candidate been someone other than Coakley.
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