In a previous rant after the Massachusetts special election, I ranted about Scott Brown and how any vote for a Republican at this point is a vote for partisanship and evil etc. etc. To be vein and quote myself:

He is a senator, and is going to disappear to Washington and represent his constituents by voting with his party on every issue.

I have been anxiously awaiting his term so that I could flaunt how right I was. Well, I am here to say that, at least so far in this one instance, Scott Brown has acted in a respectable way by voting with what he feels is right and not just with his party. Nate Silver covers this well in his post, where he defends Brown as an “authentically moderate Republican.”

I still will likely not support Brown on several issues of policy. I am very happy, however, to see someone vote not with their party but with what they feel is right for their state and, hopefully, the country. With the majority of Republicans clearly “Not Embarrassed”, as the Rachel Maddow title says, it is refreshing to see a senator do their job, even if they are not in my party.

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.

(more…)

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.