All Eyes on Massachusetts

By Dave

It's looking like the senate race to fill Ted Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts has gotten a little close for comfort, and it has huge implications for health care reform. If Democrat Martha Coakley loses to Republican Scott Brown,  Democrats will lose their 60th vote right at the 11th hour. To make matters more interesting, the polling is all over the map. The Boston Globe has a poll that shows Coakley up 15 points, PPP shows them nearly in a dead heat. Nate Silver gives an interpretation:

All of the polls have positives and negatives. And any of them could be right.

The average of the three polls shows Coakley up by 8 points. As I've written before, I would probably take "over" on that 8 percent number. Fundamentally, this is still Massachusetts, and unless the Democratic candidate has some sort of fatal flaw (Coakley is a bit boring, but that's hardly an unpardonable sin), it's just going to be a really heavy lift for the turnout to be lopsided enough to allow the Republican to prevail.

At the same time, while I'm taking the "over" on that 8 percent, I'm also taking the over on variance. Special elections are notoriously hard to predict. And we also seem to be at some weird sort of inflection point in the electoral cycle. You can point toward some evidence to make the case that the bottom is really falling out from Democrats, and you can point toward other evidence which suggests that the whole tea-party backlash, while not unimportant, is really just operating at the margins. So, I acknowledge that there is a fairly tangible shot of Brown winning -- higher than the 3-5 percent I assigned to him after seeing the Rasmussen poll, but lower than the 15-25 percent chance I gave him before seeing the Boston Globe result.

So, your guess is as good as mine. It sounds like Coakley has a reasonable chance of pulling this off, but it's not unthinkable that she won't. If she doesn't Democrats will either have to scramble to pass health care before Brown gets into office, which probably means the House will have to accept the Senate bill nearly as is. Or they will have to go back and see if they can pull in a Republican like Olympia Snowe (R-ME).