My Dad forwarded me two articles from Boston.com which I disagreed with. I wanted to share the email I wrote back to him and maybe clean it up a little bit for Juice, and really only reflect on one of those articles. Here are those thoughts edited for JTB. They are probably the uninformed rants of a foolish, young online-leftist, but since everyone is shouting I may as well take part.

The article, Coakley Downs In Safe Harbor, reflects the talking point surrounding this whole election, which I think is really insulting and embarrassing. The talking point is that Coakley did not do enough campaigning to win the election and that the people were taken for granted.

At a neighborhood New Year’s Eve party, everyone was talking about Republican Scott Brown’s new television ad … The neighborhood consensus: clever and attention-grabbing. Martha Coakley laughed it off. It was a serious mistake; many others followed. They included a barrage of terrible ads and Coakley’s incredible question about what people expected her to do: stand outside in the cold, shake hands and ask for their vote?

Now Democrats have learned their lesson and will not “take anything for granted.” This is not only acknowledging but embracing stupidity. As the article and the polls clearly point out, Brown started airing commercials on New Years Eve and the polls turned around. Brown was outside of Fenway shaking hands in the cold, and Coakley was not. I guess someone forgot to inform me that the job of a senator was to be a master hand shaker. He is a senator, and is going to disappear to Washington and represent his constituents by voting with his party on every issue.

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Scott Brown, former Cosmo centerfold, is the next Senator of Massachusetts.

There’s a lot of things you can potentially say about this race.  Martha Coakley was clearly a pretty terrible candidate.  On the right, you’re going to hear a lot about this being a referendum on heralth care and Obama in general.  This, I think, is clearly off-base.  This race was never about the issues.  This race was entirely about personality.

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Nate Silver:

The FiveThirtyEight Senate Forecasting Model, which correctly predicted the outcome of all 35 Senate races in 2008, now regards Republican Scott Brown as a 74 percent favorite to win the Senate seat in Massachusetts on the basis of new polling from ARG, Research 2000 and InsiderAdvantage which show worsening numbers for Brown’s opponent, Martha Coakley.

Andrew Sullivan despairs:

Democrats can stop hoping at this point.

I can see no alternative scenario but a huge – staggeringly huge – victory for the FNC/RNC machine tomorrow. They crafted a strategy of total oppositionism to anything Obama proposed a year ago. Remember they gave him zero votes on even the stimulus in his first weeks. They saw health insurance reform as Obama’s Waterloo, and, thanks in part to the dithering Democrats, they beat him on that hill. They have successfully channeled all the rage at the massive debt and recession the president inherited on Obama after just one year. If they can do that already, against the massive evidence against them, they have the power to wield populism to destroy any attempt by government to address any actual problems.

This is a nihilist moment, built from a nihilist strategy in order to regain power … to do nothing but wage war against enemies at home and abroad.

What comes next will be a real test for Obama. I suspect serious health insurance reform is over for yet another generation.

This is bad.  Real bad.

There’s still a chance that Coakley will win, but it will have to be a perfect storm of response bias and a big GOTV push tomorrow, which at this point seems unlikely.

I hope people in Massachusetts know what they’re doing.

Classy.

Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat is at serious risk of being taken over by a Republican.

Nate Silver:

Earlier today I tweeted about how there wasn’t enough evidence to describe the Massachusetts special election as a “toss-up”, as some other forecasters have done, based on the information available to us at that time.

Well, now there’s some new evidence. And it isn’t good for Martha Coakley.

In particular, the evidence is a Suffolk University poll that shows the Republican, Scott Brown, ahead by 4 points, 50-46.

This would be unusually bad for the Democratic Party, and for the progressive agenda as a whole.  Putting aside the obvious symbolic shock this will create and the subsequent narrative, losing this seat could potentially impact health care reform, if the two chamber’s bills can’t be reconciled quickly.

This race will come down to turnout.  Dems outnumber Republicans 3-1 in Massachusetts.  We need to make sure that all those complacent, or even disaffected Dems make it to the polls.

Coakley’s ActBlue page is here.  You can volunteer on her website here.

It would be a terrible shame if health reform dies at the hand of Senator Kennedy’s own seat.