OLYMPIA – Like a rising tide, Republican Scott Brown’s stunning Senate victory Tuesday in Massachusetts is lifting hope for widespread GOP success this November in Washington.
“This is a turning point in America. Republicans are coming back,” Senate Minority Leader Mike Hewitt, R-Walla Walla, said. “If I were an incumbent Democrat, I’d be worried.”
Brown defeated Democrat Martha Coakley for the seat held by Ted Kennedy and will become the first Republican elected to the U.S. Senate in that left-leaning state since 1972.
“I think it’s a shot in the arm for everybody to see that if this kind of anti-establishment, anti-incumbent movement can take hold in Massachusetts for Ted Kennedy’s seat, it can certainly happen here,” said Republican consultant Mary Lane who worked on Dino Rossi’s two campaigns for governor.
Democratic strategists credited Brown with proving the value of connecting with voters — and the cost of running a lackluster campaign.
“This is certainly a wake-up call that no politician, regardless of party, can ever take an election for granted and rest on their laurels or rest on the laurels of those who came before them,” said Democratic consultant Christian Sinderman.
Carol Albert, manager of Sen. Patty Murray’s re-election campaign, said the election is not altering their strategy.
“Are voters sending a message in Massachusetts? Yes. What we will do out here is not going to be any different tomorrow than it is today,” she said.
Spirits of GOP leaders are soaring from a combination of Tuesday’s result, gubernatorial wins in New Jersey and Virginia last year and polling that shows independent voters are no longer as supportive of President Barack Obama and Democrats as they were in 2008.
Brown capitalized on the shifting mood of voters, gaining strong support from an array of old conservative voices and new populist forces such as the Tea Party movement.
Camano Island tea partier Kelly Emerson backed Brown and urged support of him through her Web site, Renew Liberty. She said his win is a clarion call for lawmakers in general and Democrats in particular of voter dissatisfaction.
“Democrats just don’t seem to be listening to any of the uproar of the people,” said Emerson, who is running for Island County commissioner this year. “They should be hearing that the people out there are unhappy and they should listen to that and if they continue not to listen they will be hearing about it at the ballot box.”
Paul Guppy, research director of the Washington Policy Center in Seattle, predicted Republicans will gain seats this fall because “Washington voters may be feeling the same deep discontent as their Bay State counterparts with the direction of the country and of our state.”
Lew Moore of Everett, a veteran GOP strategist who managed Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign, declined to make a prediction, but said he’s getting a sense of the same sentiment present in 1994 when Republicans booted Democrats from power in the statehouse and Congress.
“Independent voters are very restive here as they are around the country,” he said. “There is more of a potential for a rebellion in this state because there are more independents.”
Incumbents and challengers ignore that frustration of voters at their own political peril.
“If you’re not really tapping into voters’ discontent or voters’ angst or voters’ hopes and fears – zeitgeist in a word – all the strategy won’t help you,” Lane said.
Political scientist Todd Donovan of Western Washington University cautioned against reading too much into the results.
“They really get amplified because they are the only things out there,” he said.
Coakley was an unenthusiastic candidate in a state where voters have never elected a woman as governor or U.S. senator, he said. Three of the last four governors in Massachusetts were Republicans, he noted.
Also Democrats are expected to lose seats in the Senate and the House this fall, which is typical for a majority party in mid-term elections, he said.
So while the battle to succeed the retiring Rep. Brian Baird of Vancouver will be vigorous, it’s too early to estimate the strength of challenges to Democratic incumbents Rep. Rick Larsen and Jay Inslee, he said.
Cathy Allen, a Seattle-based Democratic consultant, drew a line between what happened in Massachusetts and what might happen in Washington.
“It is a cold and sorry day for my home state of Massachusetts,” she said. “That’s Massachusetts, and it couldn’t be more unlike Washington state.
Still, she said, Brown’s win does “put every Democrat on notice” and voters who elected them will need to get engaged in a big way because “this year is going to be a feisty one.”
Brown’s arrival in the Senate will likely force Democrats to revise the national health care bill they’ve been pushing.
That could hurt states such as Washington that have been counting on additional federal aid for Medicaid programs coming to them via the legislation.
A Brown victory makes a large scale bailout for states unlikely, said Jason Mercier, director of the Center for Government Reform at the Washington Policy Center.
“This means lawmakers in Olympia need to look to themselves to balance the state’s books and not our creditors in China,” he said.
Reporter Jerry Cornfield: 360-352-8623; jcornfield@heraldnet.com.
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