Martha Coakley

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CIRCLE has numbers about yesterday's vote in the special election for the US Senate seat in Massachusetts.

According to the briefing:

"Tisch College, Medford/Somerville, Mass - In the special election for Massachusetts Senator, young voters (age 18-29) preferred Democrat Martha Coakley over Republican Scott Brown by 58%-40% (with 2% for other candidates), according to a survey of 1,000 voters conducted on January 19, by Rasmussen Reports.

About 15% of Massachusetts citizens between the ages of 18-29 turned out to vote.* For citizens age 30 and older, turnout was about 57%.

For comparison: 25% of young citizens (age 18-29) voted in the 2008 Massachusetts presidential primaries, and 47.8% of young Massachusetts citizens voted in the 2008 presidential elections, according to CIRCLE’s analysis. Seventy-eight percent of under-30 voters in Massachusetts chose Barack Obama in the 2008 general election; 20% chose John McCain."

Part of me is angry that we lost this seat to someone who doesn't support the youth agenda, but the major part of me is that young people obviously supported Coakley but there was - according to one political insider - "zero" outreach from the Coakley campaign to young voters.

This didn't need to happen.

As one person reminded me - Massachusetts is a state with one of the largest student populations in the country. It is an embarrassment that there was such a huge resource available to the Coakley camp but it was cast aside.

I just did a Skype interview with the Millennials Changing America blog that is done by Mike Hais and Morley Winograd, authors of Millennial Makeover. I was asked by Alex what the biggest failures I've seen both from the White House and from Congress are and my response was that its been a total lack of outreach on their part to young people around meaningful policy initiatives.

Young people continue to be the largest supporters for the President, they continue to be the largest supporters for meaningful Health Care Reform, but not once did the White House or Congress reach out to youth leaders and say "What can we do to bring you into this debate?"

It begs the question - is the Democratic Party abandoning young people despite young people being their base of support?

UPDATE: This is interesting. I just got an email from a field organizer who said that many of the folks from a nearby state who were working on the ground moved over to Coakley's campaign to help. They specifically told the DSCC that they thought it might be helpful to mobilize around UMASS Amherst who were coming back to school this week. DSCC said - great we'll have our youth person give you a call - no one ever did. (Turns out... there is no youth person)

UPDATE 2: The Cook Report's @Dave_Wasserman has been tweeting about district breakdowns for results. Holyoke, MA (which is home to all-girls Mount Holyoke College and right in the middle of the cluster UMass Amherst, Amherst College, Hampshire College, and Smith) also failed to turn out the vote. As a friend who pointed this out said - The fact that two of those schools are all-girls and politically active, and Coakley didn't mobilize them, is shameful.

Peter Daou's piece on the Huffington Post today argues that Democrats have hurt themselves by creating the convergence of the extreme right wing and progressive activists and bloggers. Governing from a lack of grounded principles, writes Daou, makes the president, and thus Democrats, look weak regardless of the legislation passed.

The half of Peter's argument positing that Democrats whiffed on the decision to legitimize Rush Limbaugh by repeatedly taking him on from the Press Room of the White House is on point. Robert Gibbs ridiculed any little comment Limbaugh (or Beck or Michael Savage or other conservative hacks) made. Daou actually wrote the following back in March.

There's precious little benefit in making Limbaugh more of a central player, in engaging him directly from the White House podium, in raising his stature, in stamping, sealing and approving the years he's spent bashing his political opponents. There was a moment, a brief moment, after Barack Obama was elected president, a moment long gone, where the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity could have become marginalized, bit players rather than media movers and shakers, the detritus of a sorry era. But instead, they have been granted more power -- out of some contrived political calculus. This, at a time when we don't need political calculus, we need single-minded determination to get us out of this economic calamity and to restore sanity to our government.

I agree with Daou, with some additional perspective offered. The Obama campaign came into DC following one of the best campaigns ever run. They were disciplined, they knew their message, and nearly every risk they took played well in the end. Part of their "change" message entailed changing Washington, refusing to get into the trenches against the "vast right wing conspiracy." Reviewing where we were then and where we are now, something obviously pushed the Obama administration off track.

I think Daou makes a strong argument that part of it lies within the Obama administration's decision to attempt to use Limbaugh et al. as their punching bags. But I think we have to zoom out one more level and ask: if Obama and Co. wanted to change the way elections are run, why would they violate their principles on right wing crazies? Attacking a group with such little credibility does little for the change message. The message of unconventional, but actual change transformed into the slimy politics of old.

Furthermore, the Obama administration looks even weaker when we juxtapose their toughness against the extreme right-wing commentators with their mealy-mouthed approach to health care, the agenda item forming the heart of Obama's domestic policy.

There's quite a bit of advice entering the public forum today, so I'll offer my two cents as well. The Democrats need to get back to what works, and that's offering a politics that solves America's problems from a coherent, ideological set of principles. In addition, they need to communicate with their base, especially those young voters who put him over the top in 2008 (and the millions more who will be voting in 2012), to keep them posted on exactly what is going on and how they can help support the Obama agenda moving forward.

The reality is that the Democrats still have 59 seats in the Senate. As Jon Stewart explained the other night, the Democrats still have more seats in the Senate than Republicans had when Bush was able to do whatever the hell he wanted.