With that game over, the cameras here are now turning to back to healthcare, where Brown’s victory has big implications. Democrats had succeeded in passing healthcare reform bills in both the House and Senate, leaving just the process of hammering out a single compromise bill for Obama to sign. Brown’s victory reduces Democrat flexibility in that process; with only 59 votes in the Senate, they can no longer overcome Republican filibusters, meaning much less freedom to play with for the Senate bill. One alternative is to persuade the House to pass the Senate bill without edits, but that’s not comfortable stuff for Democrats facing difficult midterms, and now fearful of more Brown-style insurgencies.
From a British perspective, the election turnaround itself may be more interesting – and it is difficult to overstate how surprising that turnaround was. In 2008, Obama won 62% of the MA vote. In November, some polls put Coakley 30 points ahead. In early January the gap was still 17 points. The race was expected to be so boring that no exit polls were even conducted: no news organisation thought the result would be interesting enough to merit the cost.
So what happened? The most convincing interpretation I’ve seen is given by Matt Bai of the New York Times. Rather than seeing the vote as a referendum on healthcare, or the economy, Bai points to the ‘little guy’ rhetoric of Brown’s campaign: ‘The most prevalent ideology of the era,’ he notes, ‘seems to be not liberalism over conservatism so much as anti-incumbency, a reflexive distrust of whoever has power and a constant rallying cry for systemic reform.’ The president presented that same analysis today, saying, in an interview with ABC News: ‘The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office. People are angry, they are frustrated.’
That’s not exactly great news for Labour, but are there lessons we can draw? Christopher Beam of Slate magazine offers three suggestions to incumbents facing a change candidate:
1. Say you’re still sorting out the mess made by the last guys
2. Get fired up about an ongoing, uncompleted mission,
3. Reveal your opponent as a charlatan – an establishment candidate in ‘change’ clothing
Those will all sound familiar to Labour strategists but, instead, the most encouraging lesson from the Democrats’ loss in Massachusetts may be simpler – even change candidates quickly become vulnerable to a dose of their own medicine. If the Tories ride in on a platform of change, they had better deliver some, and quickly.