Related: Globe Finally Discovers Voter Discontent
This is why they didn't see it coming:
"Liberal bastions lament as the blue fades" by David Filipov, Globe Staff | January 22, 2010
AMHERST - They filed in and out of coffeehouses, all but crying in their cappuccinos, barely touching their carrot cake muffins, still in shock that Scott Brown - a Republican! - had been elected to the US Senate in the state that pioneered universal health care, legalized same-sex marriage, and normally sends 12 Democrats to Congress.
In the days since the unthinkable happened, diehard Democrats have been forced to confront results that suggest Massachusetts votes much the way rest of the country does - blue on the edges with a big red swath in the middle. They have grappled with the possibility that the Commonwealth, until this week viewed by the much of the country as an outpost of extreme liberalism, may not be all that. And that has left them blue - in the other meaning of the word - over Martha Coakley’s defeat.
There is no better place to sense that mood than Amherst and Cambridge, two outposts of extreme liberalism in Massachusetts. They share a self-effacing nickname - “The People’s Republic.’’ They share (along with Provincetown) the distinction of being the most pro-Coakley communities, having handed her 84 percent of the vote. And they share the shock.
And they share most of the Globe's poll results because this is who they are calling, readers.
“I’m upset. I’m heartbroken. I just hate the idea that the Republicans have just won,’’ said Nick Seamon, owner of The Black Sheep, a bakery/bastion of liberalism on Main Street in Amherst. Yesterday, Seamon served up one of his best-selling Republican Party cookies (“because they are full of fruits and nuts’’), and summed up the jolt delivered by the vote. “We tend to be a little insulated here. We don’t spend a lot of time in Central Massachusetts, or wherever they voted for whatever his name was,’’ Seamon said.
Yeah, NO KIDDING!!!!
I tend to think of it as CLOSE-MINDED PREJUDICE, but what's in a name, right, liberals?
Across the Commonwealth, the Democrats’ dejection was no less palpable at the 1369 Coffee House in Inman Square. “In Cambridge I’m surrounded by disappointed and upset people now so I’m not feeling that isolated,’’ Annabel Gill, shift manager at 1369, said Wednesday as she fashioned an elegant leaf design in the foam of a skim milk latte. “But it is a little unsettling to realize that more people in this state want to vote [Republican] than I would have suspected, so that does make me feel a little isolated.’’
Yeah, HOW DOES IT FEEL for once, smug and self-righteous s***s?
NOT TOO GOD, huh?
THINK ABOUT THAT the next time you display your vaunted "tolerance" for the other side!
This week, Coakley supporters in Cambridge gazed at the electoral aftermath beyond the Republic’s blue horizon and saw a political landscape they barely recognized.
“It makes us realize that we’re not really as different as we’d like to think, like, ‘Oh, we’re this Democratic liberal state,’ ’’ Arwen Downs, a baby sitter, put it as she pushed an infant in a stroller along Cambridge Street on Wednesday. “We’re not.’’
Yeah, it is JUST AS CORRUPT as all the rest -- if not MORE SO!
And she had a point. The thing about Massachusetts is not that it always goes liberal, no matter what people in other states think. (Downs, who hails from North Carolina, said her friends back home still think that Massachusetts is “way out there, completely crazy.’’)
The Commonwealth had 16 straight years of Republican governors, a string that ended with the election of Deval Patrick in 2006.
Deval the disaster!
Massachusetts may have stood alone in the union against Richard Nixon in 1972, but it went with Ronald Reagan twice. The thing about Massachusetts is that it has always prided itself on its uniqueness.
Pride is a terrible thing that can be misused, Massachusetts.
Fans here don’t just root for a baseball team; they form their own nation. The Commonwealth doesn’t have a capital; it has the Hub. Massachusetts doesn’t just have history; it’s the Cradle of the American Revolution.
And it is the capital of self-centeredness!!!!
And now it has a mass of independent voters who see themselves as revolutionaries for breaking the Democratic lock on the state’s congressional seats....
And YOU need to GET OUT of that BUBBLE, Globe, before you discredit yourself even further!
--more--"
Yeah, this Senate race made you look REAL BAD, Globe.
