A poll conducted by Suffolk Research for Boston’s Fox25 shows Republican Scott Brown leading Democrat Martha Coakley in three Massachusetts cities picked as bellwethers on the basis of their performance in the 2006 Senate race, in which Edward Kennedy easily won a sixth term. Brown leads 55%-40% in Gardner, 55%-41% in Fitchburg and 57%-40% in Peabody. Fitchburg and Gardner are factory towns in northern Worcester County with blue collar populations; Peabody is a modest-income Boston suburb just inland from Salem.
They are emblematic of blue-collar Massachusetts, which despite the prominence of the state’s university communities play a critical role in its politics. As long as they vote solidly Democratic, the state is out of reach for the Republicans, since there are very few affluent suburbs that reliably vote Republican and nothing in the way of a Jacksonian belt that has been trending Republican lately. (The feisty Scots-Irish didn’t cotton to the bossy Puritans of colonial Massachusetts, though both were technically Calvinists, and headed south from Pennsylvania along the Appalachian chain instead.) But when these areas go Republican (or vote only marginally Democratic), and when Republicans run a candidate strong enough to carry affluent suburbs (Bill Weld, Paul Cellucci, Mitt Romney), the state can go Republican.
The following table shows the percentages statewide (R-D) and in each of these small cities for (1) Scott Brown in the recent Suffolk University poll, (2) for John McCain and Barack Obama in November 2008, (3) for Hillary Clinton versus Obama in February 2008 and (4) for Republican Kenneth Chase and Edward Kennedy in 2006.
1/2009 11/2008 2/2008 11/2006
MASS 50-46 36-62 56-41 29-67
Gardner 55-40 38-59 63-33 30-68
Fitchburg 55-41 38-60 66-32 30-67
Peabody 57-40 42-57 71-25 29-67
The poll gives Brown 17% more than McCain in Gardner and Fitchburg and 15% more in Peabody. Coakley runs 28% behind Kennedy in Gardner, 26% behind in Fitchburg and 27% behind in Peabody. I expect that the Obama/Kennedy vote will remain more solid for Coakley in the university cities, in the upscale zone running westward from Boston between Route 2 and Route 9 (you can see it on http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/ this map; subscription required) and in the Pioneer Valley and Berkshire County in western Massachusetts which, like neighboring Vermont, are left-wing Democratic country these days. Hence the statewide figures show less of a gain for Brown and less of a dropoff for Coakley than the numbers in these three bellwether towns. At the same time, Brown seems to be doing especially well with voters who favored Hillary Clinton over Obama in the February 2008 presidential primary.
By the way, the Suffolk polls show Brown running better than Mitt Romney did in these towns in his 2002 election for governor, which he won by a 50%-45% margin.
