Will GOP fight for Massachusetts Senate seat?

Notes from Washington
December 12, 2009

James R. Carroll
jcarroll@courier-journal.com
Previous columns

In case you missed it, there were party primaries for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts last week.

Don’t feel bad if you failed to catch the returns. Most people in Massachusetts didn’t show up for the commonwealth’s first-ever special election.

But returns there were: the state’s attorney general, Martha Coakley, won the Democratic primary — the first woman to win a Senate race in Massachusetts. And Scott Brown, a state senator from Wrentham, a town just west of the New England Patriots’ stadium in Foxboro, took the Republican nomination.

You may be excused for thinking, “Poor Mr. Brown,” because the recent record of federal races in the Bay State has a distinct hue of Democratic blue. The state’s 10 U.S. House members are Democrats. Sen. John Kerry, a Democrat, was first elected to the Senate in 1984, while the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, also a Democrat, was first elected to the Senate in 1962.

The primaries and the Jan. 19 special election were called to fill the seat of Kennedy, who died in August.

Yes, you might think that the Massachusetts Republican Party might be able to meet in a phone booth in downtown Leominster, but that’s not quite the case.

Consider that Massachusetts was served by four successive Republican governors between 1991 and 2007.

And while Democratic voter registration vastly outnumbered the GOP’s by a margin of 37 to 12 percent, a whopping 51 percent of Massachusetts voters were registered as independents in 2008.

Full column