Warren vs Brown: It's On

In a midterm election with a weak President and even weaker contending candidates, you would think a senate race would not be very important. However, here in beautiful Massachusetts, a race between heavyweight contenders is stacking up.

Yesterday, Democrat Elizabeth Warren declared her candidacy for the senate. While she has to win the primary against some solid candidates, she has been instantly dubbed the favorite to challenge Republican Scott Brown for his Senate position. If you remember, Scott Brown, improbably, defeated favorite Martha Coakley with a campaign that very much mirrored that of President Barack Obama. For Democrats, the seat has even sentimental value as it was the seat of the late Ted Kennedy. Democrats hope to reclaim the seat and Warren has been a favorite both in the Commonwealth and in Washington. They see her as the right candidate to take on Brown.

Basically, I want to survey how the campaign will go and why you should care.

The Campaign:
Warren declared her candidacy yesterday:

She's already a favorite of Democrats because of her work in creating Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She's a Harvard Law Professor and wants to fight for the middle class. They feel she can reach their constituency, unlike Martha Coakley.

What Democrats love about her:

Warren was tapped by President Barack Obama last year to set up a new consumer protection agency, but congressional Republicans opposed her leading the office. She returned to Massachusetts this summer.

Supporters say her image as a crusader against well-heeled Wall Street interests and her national profile will give her candidacy muscle, though she’s never run for political office.

At the same time, her ties to Barack Obama and her job at Harvard might not cast her in the most positive light amongst the "townies:"

Should the professor win the primary, expect Brown to label her an out-of-touch academic in the mold of another law school professor, President Obama.

Ties to Harvard have all of a sudden become a bad thing with all the academics that have gone into government and introduced failed policies. There's also the negative stigma of elitism that is directed from Cambridge, a city of high intellectual capital but also a center of liberal thought.

It's already happening:

But, assuming she gets past the Democratic primary, any attempt to use her background as a consumer advocate to run a populist campaign against incumbent Republican Scott Brown will be burdened by her day job as a professor at Harvard Law School. Even before Warren officially declared, she was already being accused of “Harvard elitism.” Her fortunes in 2012 may well turn on whether she finds an effective response.

Why is Harvard bad?

Todd Feinburg, co-host of one of Boston’s popular morning call-in radio shows, told me that “all my callers know about her is she’s a Harvard elitist. They see the country being run by Harvard elitists who don’t know what they’re doing.”

But Massachusetts only has so many registed Republicans. In fact, they only represent 11 percent of the electorate. So who are the ones that elected Scott Brown and who are the ones that Warren will have to win over?

Rather, she’ll be after another group that may already be casting suspicion on her resume—the historically Democratic blue-collar voters whom Scott Brown won over with a barn coat and a pick-up truck in the 2010 special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat.

There's a term that they've come up with and I love it:

Specifically, the middle-class and lower-middle-class voters Brown appealed to are what veteran Boston political commentator Jon Keller calls “townies,” those multi-generational Massachusettsans who don’t live in the state’s campus nexuses, poor urban areas or affluent suburbs, but in the hardscrabble towns and cities on Boston’s periphery. Keller argues Brown peeled them off in unprecedented fashion not only because of his everyman persona but because of the way he baited their economic and cultural anxieties: Brown incited small-town fears about illegal immigrants underbidding contracts, and argued that President Obama’s Affordable Care Act would “screw unions out of their gold-plated plans.”

I'll note that there is a difference between the types of demographics in the Boston area. Having lived here my entire life, I've been exposed to them. Most of the educated people in the Boston area tend to side with the liberals while the further you get away from Boston, the more socially conservative people you get. Scott Brown campaigned on the every man campaign and it resonated with those people on the outer parts of the Commonwealth.

One of the problems with Coakley is that she was too associated with Boston. With Warren, the connection will be more linked towards her ties to Harvard:

Which brings us back to the Harvard question. If townie voters identify Warren with Harvard (and echt-liberal Cambridge, where she happens to live) to the same degree they linked Coakley with Boston, Sullivan and other local pundits predict that Brown will carry the election. Thinking along the same lines, Brown’s campaign has already begun calling her “Professor Warren.”

Even though Brown and Warren aren't that different:

Where he was raised in a broken home in tiny Wrentham and did whatever he had to to pay for his education, Warren grew up poor in Oklahoma, won a scholarship to college, and paid her own way through law school. She can also argue that her scholarly work on bankruptcy and contract law hasn’t secluded her in an ivory tower, but given her a pathway to understanding the problems of ordinary people.

With her financial backing and her party popularity, she should run a good campaign. It appears she's ready to put in the work. I'm still skeptical that she can actually reach out to the people, considering she doesn't have New England roots. If you look at all of Massachusetts's politicians in recent years, all of them were deeply rooted in Massachusetts. Can she reach the townies?

Well Scott Brown isn't as popular as he was:

Senator Scott Brown remains the most popular major political figure in Massachusetts, but his approval rating has fallen from a year ago, a sign he may be more vulnerable than anticipated as he gears up for a reelection fight, according to a Boston Globe poll.

And the actual numbers:

Though Brown, who faces reelection next year, has fallen a bit from the lofty perch of public approval he had enjoyed, he remains quite popular for a Republican in a traditionally Democratic state. Nearly half of respondents, 49 percent, said they view him favorably, compared with 26 percent who view him unfavorably. A Globe poll conducted last September showed him with 58 percent approval and 21 percent disapproval.

That article also says this about Warren:

Warren, the choice of many Washington Democrats and some state party insiders to face off against Brown, remains unknown to large swaths of the voting public, according to the poll. While those who know of her tend to like her - 23 percent rate her favorably, 12 percent unfavorably - 60 percent said they don’t know who she is or have no opinion of her.

“If she’s going to be the candidate, she’s going to have to do a lot of work just to boost name recognition,’’ Smith said.

That work she's prepared to do is good because people don't know who she is. If I was Brown, I would capitalize on this by portraying her as someone from the Ivory Tower of Cambridge and someone who has spent time in Washington DC, but isn't knowledgeable of the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. For Warren, the advantage of people not knowing who she is means she can portray herself as she wants. In these days, a lot of Democrats have a bad rap, and she should take solace in the fact that she's not one of those Democrats.

As far as the campaign, I think Brown is still a very popular candidate and so long as he puts up a good campaign, he will be reelected. The Democrats made a huge mistake by taking Massachusetts for granted when Brown was elected. Brown must be weary not to do the same thing.

Why You Should Care:
Well, it appears that the Republicans have sured up their position in the Senate. When Brown was elected, he was the 41st seat, which was necessary to filibuster the Democrats. With the current President, the Democrats could have run amok with their spending policies. At the same time, the Republicans are still outnumbered by the Democrats in the senate. Looking at the potential elections for this class of Senators, it doesn't seem like there are many seats that the Republicans will lose, but Scott Brown in liberal Massachusetts may be the most likely, even with his popularity.

This election will go down the same year as the Presidential election and a lot can change with a potential new President. The Republicans will need all the help they can get. It's an important election and they're vulnerable both on the state and national level.