Close-Up: Taking Stock of Scott Brown

The big news is out: Scott Brown is officially in the New Hampshire Senate race to challenge Democratic incumbent Sen. Jeanne Shaheen.

For the last year I was skeptical of the former Massachusetts senator running for Senate again, especially since he had specifically declared that he was too tired to run for any election in 2014; in fact, I was actually quite annoyed that polling for a man who hadn't even entered the race was crowding out polling for the real Granite Staters who were actually running. There were two reasons for this: first, I didn't like the idea of putting people in the simulator who hadn't even indicated that they were running. (I have the same feelings when it comes to everyone crowding around Hillary 2016--even though she's still thinking it over. More on that in later posts, though.) Second, I felt pretty sure that his move wasn't in preparation for a Senate run in 2014 but rather for a presidential run in 2016.

I still believe those decisions were the right ones at the time; of course, now that I've been proven wrong, we need to re-evaluate this race.

Last we checked in on New Hampshire, Sen. Shaheen was polling well, had amassed a formidable war chest, and was not facing any challengers with substantial name recognition. In particular, the last factor has changed. The last poll tracking name ID was taken in early March by Suffolk University. Bear in mind that while I will be citing the Suffolk poll quite a bit in this post, it's only out of necessity, as polls are scarce. Suffolk has shown a bias toward Democrats, and in any case it's just one poll. The ballpark numbers, however, can be revealing nonetheless.  

Before Sen. Brown filed on March 21, there were four Republican candidates: former state senator and gubernatorial candidate Jim Rubens, former U.S. Senator Bob Smith, 2010 gubernatorial candidate Karen Testerman, and Andy Martin, who has run in primary races in both parties since 1977 in no fewer than four states. Respectively, the Suffolk poll showed name recognitions of 49%, 76%, 37%, and 24%. By contrast, Sen. Brown's name recognition in the same poll was 96%--largely due to his 2012 Senate race in Massachusetts being one of the most watched in the country. (For Shaheen's part, 99% of respondents recognized the name of their senior senator.)

But while both candidates have exceptionally strong name recognition considering how early it is in the race, the incumbent has several major advantages, which we consider typical for an incumbent. First, Shaheen has a big money advantage: she's spent the past year amassing a personal war chest of over $4.5 million, while Sen. Brown's campaign has not been required to disclose numbers to the FEC yet (presumably they're way below $4.5 million). There's more in store for her throughout the rest of campaign season, too--in New Hampshire public office since 1992, she has spent two decades rubbing elbows and making the kinds of connections that make legends out of state politicians.

Second, Shaheen's approval ratings are fairly good--the Suffolk poll shows that 53% of likely voters approved of her performance, compared to 37% who disapproved. 

Third, New Hampshire voters just don't seem to take as well to Brown as well as Massachusetts voters did. Personally, I recommend that he do another ad about his once and forever true love. But no number of commercials about his truck can change the fact that Brown is trailing pretty badly in polls. Our latest average puts him more than 11 points behind Sen. Shaheen, with a correspondingly low (somewhere in the neighborhood of 3%) chance of victory. This is corroborated by the Suffolk poll, which shows a net 10-point disapproval rating for Brown. An additional hurdle he'll have to overcome is very specific to him: the Suffolk poll also conducted a word association question. When asked the first word associated with "Jeanne Shaheen", the most frequent answers were along the lines of "senator" or "Democrat" or "ex-Governor" (my personal favorite answer, given by 13 people, was "a woman"). When asked about Scott Brown, almost 11% of respondents answered "carpetbagger". You know, those Northerners who went to go reap the political and economic rewards of the devastated South after the Civil War. In addition, another 3% used a similar term, "opportunist". Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) reportedly snarked: "The Constitution guarantees every state two senators, but the Constitution does not guarantee every senator two states."

A short bit of history

In 2008 Jeanne Shaheen was a popular former governor who won by about six points against incumbent Sen. John Sununu, underperforming then-Senator Obama statewide. Her victory came partly as a result of winning big in western rural counties like Grafton and Cheshire, which delivered her over 50,000 votes. At the same time, she held Sununu to razor-thin margins in the populous, suburban counties of the south (including the traditional Republican stronghold of Rockingham County) which together accounted for more than half of the state's votes.

2008 New Hampshire Senate election, results by county and margin.

Four years later in Massachusetts, Sen. Brown lost by about 7 percentage points to Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren. Because Senate elections in Massachusetts have for years now been swept by either Sen. John Kerry or the late Ted Kennedy (the last competitive election was in 1996), historical trends are a bit difficult to observe, but a few things stick out:

• Warren's victory map (below) basically illustrates the archetypal Democratic voter base--urban dwellers, including minorities and the working class (Boston, Springfield, Worcester), and young liberals and academics (Cambridge, Amherst out in the west). 

2012 Massachusetts Senate election, results by county and margin.

• Sen. Brown's base is very distinct in both his 2010 special election and in 2012: it's largely suburban whites, who dominate central Massachusetts (Worcester County) as well as the suburbs outside the Boston metropolitan area (Essex, Plymouth, Norfolk). Wealthy retirees with nice beach houses (Barnstable) also tend to vote Republican.
• This map lines up extremely well with this population density map of Massachusetts. Green and red voted Warren; yellow and orange voted Brown. Coincidentally (not really), Shaheen's 2008 map lines up just as well with this population density map of New Hampshire: green voted Shaheen, while the substantial area of yellow and orange voted Sununu. The two red spots in the south are Manchester and Nashua, and they were just able to overcome Sununu's advantage in the Hillsborough suburbs in that county.

The diagnosis

Because a lot of New Hampshire's recent population growth has been driven by an influx of immigrants from Massachusetts looking for a nice, tax-free place to retire in peace, there are some demographic similarities between the states that could be reasons for optimism on Brown's part. New Hampshire is much more suburban than it is urban, and Brown may be able to energize a similar voting base in New Hampshire like he did in Massachusetts in 2010.

Additionally, New Hampshire is weird in that it's the only state in the Northeast that has more self-identified Republicans (or Republican-leaning independents) than self-identified Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents. Hypothetically, this should give Brown an extra leg up on Sen. Shaheen.

There are two holes we must unfortunately poke in this hope spot. First, not only is New Hampshire much more suburban than it is urban, it is much more rural than it is either suburban or urban. (Go back to the population density map and just wallow in all that green.) Usually rural, sparsely populated areas tend to favor the Republican, but taking a look at the results in 2008 and 2012, we see that rural New Hampshire was exactly where Shaheen performed best and that rural Massachusetts was one of the areas where Brown performed worst. 

Second, while Brown might have a larger party base to draw from, his advantage there is quite slim--and it's more than outweighed by Shaheen's greater party enthusiasm (90% of Democrats in the most recent American Research Group poll say they would vote for Shaheen, compared to 75% of Republicans who say they would vote for Brown) and her 15-point lead among independents, who make up the largest group in a state whose libertarian streak is exemplified by its motto, "Live Free or Die." I'd still put all of my money on Shaheen at this point. LIKELY DEMOCRAT