Tag Archives: Elizabeth Warren

Luck and Talent in Politics

When I posted Your Next Senator Will Be … last week I was having some fun with the larger point that supposed experts and insiders may enjoy forecasting political events but are often wrong because of the “unknown unknowns” that attend our lives. Two days ago in Algebra of “Your Next Senator Will Be …” I provided a formula evaluating the outcomes of the 2006 gubernatorial, 2010 senate special, and 2012 senate elections. Simple as that equation was I can simplify it further and this time I have the work of a Nobel Prize winner behind me.

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Algebra of “Your Next Senator Will Be …”

Last week I posted Your Next Senator Will Be … in which I noted that while speculating on the identity of our next US senator or governor is an entertaining pastime,   recent experience with Deval Patrick, Scott Brown, and Elizabeth Warren should caution all of us about our  capability with a crystal ball. Some comments and conversations about the topic got me thinking about what common factors might have contributed to each upset victory. So here is my mathematic-looking but unscientific thought on why Patrick, Brown, and Warren won: each ran from the outside and stood for something, and their opponents really didn’t.

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Your Next Senator Will Be . . .

Your next senator will surely be (your guess here) and that will set things up for (who knows?) to be your next governor. There is a lot of speculation about how the next two years of politics will play out and it is this sort of expert attention that boosted the successes of Governor Tom Reilly and Senator Martha Coakley, as well as the inevitable re-election of the unbeatable Senator Scott Brown.

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Warren goes after the filibuster

If Senator-elect Warren becomes known as the legislator who brought sanity to the filibuster, she will have accomplished more in one term than many in Washington.

She couldn’t have picked a better target for two reasons:

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Unfinished Business

American campaigns are always about the size and role of government; it’s been this way since the days of Publius and The Federal Farmer. But campaigns often ignore topics the parties believe the populace might find unpleasant, especially if there is no benefit to either party in shining a light on the difficulties. So here are a few items that pose challenges to the nation, though you might not know it from the campaign.

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Scott Brown 2012: Always Combative, Never Competitive

If the UMass Minuteman football team were to play the New England Patriots in an exhibition game and win, how many football fans and analysts would give them a snowball’s chance in Hell of winning a re-match?

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Brown-Warren Post Mortem

The network “calls” are all in and we have expensive exit polls as well, all to inform us of what my colleague Professor Duquette has been telling us all along: Democrat Elizabeth Warren would decisively defeat Republican Senator Scott Brown, and there wasn’t a lot Brown could do about it. Henceforth a few observations about what happened Tuesday and what the exit polls tell us about it.

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Election Day in America. Lucky Us.

Today is Election Day in America and we should be grateful for how fortunate we are. We get to elect our leaders and our votes are counted honestly and competently (almost always) and if an incumbent loses he or she actually leaves the office. This sort of thing hasn’t happened all that many times in human history and doesn’t happen to this day in many places We get to take it for granted.

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Other races we’re looking at tomorrow

With polls opening in one days time, we’ve some thoughts on the state of the race and some other races that have gotten a bit less attention.

Professor Cunningham:  As we await the traditional opening of the polls for Election Day tomorrow, some closing thoughts on campaigns we’ve discussed and some of the politics we’ve not examined as closely.

We’ve certainly talked about the Scott Brown-Elizabeth Warren race. Few US senate races are highly competitive in Massachusetts and not many have attracted the quality of candidates that this one has. I don’t put enormous stock in every TV advertisement that runs but I think the last ads by Senator Brown and Elizabeth Warren capture some of the essence of the choice each represents.

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The “tale of the tape” in Brown v. Warren

The following is a list of links to all 55 blog posts I wrote that touched on the Brown-Warren Senate race between August 16, 2011 and September 28, 2012. It is both interesting and instructive to see how well my assumptions and expectations regarding this contest have fared. At this point my only uncertainty concerns the margin of victory for Warren. I predicted a “comfortable” margin. But what is a comfortable margin? I think Warren would have to win by AT LEAST 5 points for my prediction on this score to have been accurate. Anything less, would represent over performance by the Brown campaign.

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