Yesterday Democrat Niki Tsongas won a special congressional election in a Massachusetts district that leans 11 points more Democratic than the nation as a whole in presidential elections, according to the Cook Partisan Voting Index. Her relatively narrow margin of victory -- 51 percent to 45 percent -- has led a number of Republicans to squawk about how this is a bad omen for the Democrats nationally, that it represents a repudiation of the Democratic Party, etc., etc. But does it? Not nearly as much as the Republicans would have you believe, as Marc Ambinder explains.
Well -- this isn't an elite liberal district, as anyone who ever worked for Marty Meehan can tell you. It is insular and provincial and distrusts outsiders; Tsongas lived outside the district before she ran. Though it has stayed in Democratic hands since the 70s, Tsongas still outperformed Gov. Deval Patrick here by two or three points; George H, W. Bush won this congressional district in 1992, as did Mitt Romney in 2002.
So the Republicans lost a district that they won in the 1992 presidential election and the 2002 gubernatorial election, and in which their 2006 gubernatorial nominee ran about a net 18-19 points better than she did statewide and they're calling it a success?
The fact that Patrick, who won statewide 56 percent to 35 percent in 2006, apparently only won the district by 2-3 points whereas Tsongas won the district by 6 points is extremely telling. I'm not shooting for a sense of false triumphalism here. Tsongas had higher name recognition and a lot more money than Jim Ogonowski, the Republican nominee. The American public still generally favors the Democrats to the Republicans. Tsongas simply should have won more handily. At the same time, Tsongas won by a wider margin in the district than Patrick did in his statewide blowout in 2006 -- a fact that seriously undercuts the notion that the Republicans are rebounding or that Ogonowski has figured out the key to success for the Republicans in 2008.
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