Originally posted on Firedoglake
I’m shocked, I must admit, at the outcome of the Massachusetts election. Before the primary it had been widely assumed that the Democratic nominee would be a shoo-in in this state, the most Democratic in the union when measuring by Presidential elections in the last generation. I had not been following the election after the primary and didn’t realize the danger.
It’s hard to make clear statements about "what ifs" in elections. As the Washington Post notes, you don’t want such statements to be "Rorschach tests" that just reflect whatever you think. The uncertainty is made worse by the lack of any exit polls. But we do know that the bottom dropped out on working class votes during this cycle. According to Hart Research pollster Guy Molyneux,
the real story here was much more about class than gender, with just a collapse of working-class support
According to the AFL-CIO:
"Voters, and particularly working-class voters, were responding to the fact that no one was really addressing their needs. They rejected the status quo, they want results, and they didn’t see anybody really fighting for them."
It’s pretty clear to me that the other major Democrat in this campaign, Mike Capuano, understood the significance of this more than the other candidates. My current guess on Coakley is that she drew much early support from the Massachusetts state political machine and then failed to use that machine to her advantage.
I was an early Mike Capuano supporter. Capuano was the sole candidate among the four Democrats competing in the primary that supported Medicare for All. He was the sole candidate to support that aspect of the Massachusetts Democratic Party Platform and one of the seven of ten Massachusetts representatives who had endorsed HR 676. I don’t want to paint Capuano as ideal – he had said before that he’d enact Medicare for All if he were "emperor," not exactly a sign of strident support – but I think he was manifestly superior to all other candidates on health care. Apparently Progressive Democrats of America agreed, because they later endorsed him.
Coakley, on the other hand, supported only the Democratic status quo in Washington, which you can see for example from her health care white paper. With our country having perhaps the most inefficient health care system in the industrialized world, this would be no small matter in any election, let alone one in the middle of a huge health care debate and the biggest economic slump since the Great Depression.
There were probably many winning strategies in this election. But one strategy that would have worked, and the only one that would help the core problems of the country, was tapping into economic populism.
The Coakley defeat seems symptomatic of a larger failure by the left to organize the public, a failure that Noam Chomsky also noted in a recent interview. This defeat is part of the larger question of why the teabaggers are being organized by the right against their own economic interests instead of by the left for their economic interests. It’s also part of the question of why we have organizations like HCAN and Moveon running our effort (as opposed to the likes of Healthcare-NOW and PDA), organizations which on health care embrace bogus, pre-compromised solutions that the public can’t get motivated by or even understand.
I think another question is why Firedoglake has supported these same bogus solutions throughout this process, hewing closely to the agenda of the above organizations. The reasons aren’t that unclear: at least one HCAN staff member writes regular blog posts there. More fundamentally, blogs are in many ways elite outfits, attended by people like you and me who are already concerned with politics, and there’s a huge difference between sound tactics for building a brand and sound strategy for building a mass popular movement. It’s also difficult to network with established Democratic voices if you criticize them too harshly.
In this sense, the people saying "don’t just blame Coakley" for the defeat are right. We shouldn’t just blame Coakley–we should blame ourselves too.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate