Campaign Diaries

Update: Is it time for Democrats to start panicking? A new Rasmussen poll finds Martha Coakley leading by only 2% (49% to 47%). This is the first time we can consider trendlines (Rasmussen is the first pollster to release a second poll, and this is where things get scary for Democrats: Coakley led by 9% 10 days ago, so all the momentum is definitely on Scott Brown’s side. Yet more confirmation that the Attorney General is caught in a downward spiral comes from Marc Ambinder’s Twitter account: “FWIW, internal Democratic tracking in MA last week had Coakley up 15. Today, she’s up by five.” Suddenly, PPP has a lot of company - and it’s The Boston Globe that’s looking isolated.

A reminder: The Globe poll was conducted from January 2nd to January 6th, before PPP even went into the field - let alone Rasmussen and these reported internal polls. So any poll that’s been on the ground for the past 10 days has found a dead head. This snoozer of a race is turning into a nightmare for Democrats.

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Original post: While an internal Democratic poll (only the fourth survey we have seen of this race) gives Martha Coakley a 14% edge over her opponent, Democrats have gone in full battle mode in Massachussetts: A GOP victory might remain unlikely, but the stakes are simply too high for the party to remain indifferent to the possibility that Scott Brown might win Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat. As a result, with only 7 days to go until the vote Democrats are treating this special election like a full-blown and highly competitive race; for instance, John Kerry sent an e-mail to his list today asking them to help out (read: volunteer, contribute) in what he said had become a “dead heat.”

Over the past 24 hours, the two candidates have appeared to switch places: While you’d expect the front-runner to be taking the high road and the underdog to go on the attack, it’s Coakley who chose to take a sharp negative turn -  and do so in only her second general election ad? (A side note: considering how much money she raised this fall, it is somewhat stunning that her campaign didn’t find a way to go up on air before last week.) This is the best sign that Brown has much of the momentum, and the confirmation that, while no one doubts that the race is still Coakley’s to lose, it is still her race to lose.

Coakley’s spot has as simple a message as you can imagine: Scott Brown is a Republican. Since a Republican can only win in the Bay State by de-emphasizing his party affiliation, and Coakley is doing her best to ensure every voter remembers that this election is a federal race in which the partisan stakes are high:

Coakley would have more reason to worry about the ad potentially backfiring if it was primarily aimed at turning independent voters away from Brown; if these traditionally left-leaning independents are considering voting for a Republican, it means they’re turned off by Democrats and this ad won’t necessarily help matters on that front. But her main goal now is to turn out loyal Democrats: If turnout reaches a decent level and if the two bases aren’t disproportionately represented, it’s hard to see her losing. As such, Coakley’s strategy will continue to be to dramatize this election to ensure voters think of it as a high-stakes battle and remember to turn out on January 19th.

Coakely should be helped by the dramatic change in media coverage: A race that just a week ago was relegated to the back pages is now at the forefront of every political observer’s mind, which should presumably help her ensure turnout is high. As such, last night’s debate was charged and heated, yet more evidence that Coakley has understood that she can’t coast till January 19th. This led to some tense exchanged. “I’m not in your courtroom. I’m not a defendant,” Brown said at one point. At another: “You can run against Bush-Cheney, but I’m Scott Brown. I live in Wrentham. I drive a truck.” Interestingly, Brown doesn’t appear to have done much of an effort to appear like a moderate. Witness his warnings that “we are at war. We’re at war in our airports. We’re at war in our shopping malls.” He also confirmed that he wouldn’t entertain the thought of supporting health-care reform, which highlights just how important this election is since it will come just a week or two before the final health care vote.

Of course, the mere fact that Democrats have been forced to treat this race as competitive is already a huge victory for Republicans, one that does foretell the success of their map expansion strategy this fall.

Indeed, the DSCC just dumped more than $550,000 in Massachussetts airwaves. That should help Coakley hold off Brown’s momentum, but it is also an expensive commitment by a party committee that has already many seats to defend in November. Worse still for Democrats, the DSCC opened its wallet without the NRSC having to do anything; the combination of tighter-than-expecting polling (the public ones, of course, but also presumably private surveys) and a huge fundraising success from Brown made national Democrats so nervous that they could not afford sit still.

Here lies the benefit of expanding the map to the degree the GOP is trying to do. Republicans have nothing to lose in districts like AR-02, PA-17, VA-09, WV-01 or in Senate races like California’s and Massachussetts’s; Democrats, on the other hand, cannot afford to lose these races. As long as a GOP candidate has some fundraising success, benefits from encouraging polling numbers or gains some momentum on the ground, the DSCC and the DCCC are forced to pay attention even if the NRSC and NRCC haven’t gotten involved. While these marginally competitive races can be defended more easily than the toss-ups, saving them then means devoting less money to more obviously vulnerable seats (OH-15, for instance) and certainly far less to any hope of offense (PA-15, NH-Sen).

Sure, $550,000 won’t drive the DSCC to bankruptcy, but this is an eerie parallel to what happened to Republicans over the past two years. Remember that by end of the 2008 campaign, McCain had to divert money to North Carolina and Florida at the expense of even more vulnerable states, like Colorado. And it’s not just the DSCC that’s getting involved: labor groups will reportedly pour money in Massachussetts to help out Coakley.

All this agitation on the Democratic side has allowed Brown to try to seize the high road, as a response ad he released this morning blasts Coakley for attacking him instead of talking about issues like health care. He goes on to appeal to “every independent-minded voter;” needless to say, the spot never mentions the word “Republican.”

Brown is somewhat limited in what he can do. Since Coakley has strong favorability ratings, he needs to bring them down to ensure that Democratic-leaning voters consider voting for him - just as Jon Corzine’s profound unpopularity allowed Christie to receive support from voters who typically never vote Republicans. Yet, his only hope of victory is to keep the election uncontroversial enough as to not give the Democratic base a reason to turn out; for him to attack the popular Attorney General could fire up partisan passions and infuriate casual liberals into finding him repulsive enough to care about this election.

7 days remain, and the key question is exactly that: will casual voters who automatically vote Democratic when they do go to the polls care enough to counter the phenomenal energy of those casual voters who automatically vote Republican? Democrats can only hope all the political and financial capital they’re pouring into the race will be enough to ensure of that.