If I ever get elected to public office I'm going to be sworn in on a CD of Woody Guthrie songs.
Any rate, people are drawing the obvious analogies between Doug Jones this year and Scott Brown in 2010. They both involved the victory of a candidate in improbable territory which was seen as a backlash against the incumbent president but had a lot more to do with the awfulness of the opposing candidate.
The list of differences are far longer:
- Massachusetts is a highly elastic state with an electorate composed disproportionately of college-educated whites. We often elect Republicans to office. Alabama is a highly inelastic state with an electorate composes mostly of blacks and white evangelicals and hasn't elected a Democrat to statewide office in well over a decade.
- Because of this, primary voters on MA selected a moderate Republican while primary voters in AL selected a liberal Democrat. Scott Brown was more moderate than Olympia Snowe both in statewide office and when he became Senator. Doug Jones looks like he'll be considerably more liberal than Joe Manchin.
- When Martha Coakley broke the law she made sure to do it in ways that couldn't get her fired, Roy Moore got his ass fired twice.
- Martha Coakley's problems were strictly with how she used her office; the closest she came to a personal scandal was when she called a Red Sox player a "Yankees fan" in an obvious attempt at a bad joke.
- Not one Democrat refused to endorse Coakley, that I recall.
- The business community of Massachusetts wasn't running campaigns that electing Coakley would tarnish Massachusetts' image.
- Any backlash against Democratic overreach was a result of the Democrats actually getting stuff passed.
- The incumbent president was elected with a large majority of the popular vote.
There is one additional similarity I recall though, not in the elections but in the reactions from the peanut gallery.
In the comments of FiveThirtyEight, people pointed that a higher percentage of voters turned out for the Democratic primary than had voted for the winning candidate in a similar election (I forget which one), and said that they couldn't see voters in the Democratic primary voting for a Republican. I pointed out that I voted for Pagliucca and was voting for Brown, and that my reasons for doing so were essentially liberal reasons: Martha Coakley represents the worst of the prison-industrial complex. Even then, the commentators remained skeptical that Brown could win. (I was too actually, but mostly because everyone Coakley seemed like the sort of Democrat Massachusetts loves to elect.) Elsewhere, the analysis was less sophisticated but basically amounted to "Massachusetts may love to elect Republican
governors, but they'll never elect a Republican
senator, not when federal policy is on the line."
I saw similar people making arguments about Alabama. Mind you, some of these people were FiveThirtyEight and Sabato's Crystal Ball pointing out that Alabama is a really inelastic state, and those points were reasonable; it took a perfect storm for Jones to win. But a lot of them were Republicans saying "I can't imagine Alabama would ever send a baby-killer to the Senate." And well, I guess now they don't have to imagine it.
Basically, I think that the only generalizable lesson is that no matter how safe you think the seat is and how much you want a woman or a hell-raising evangelical, if the only candidate who meets those criteria is an awful one, maybe don't nominate them to an open seat while your party controls the presidency.