I've been off TAPPED for a while so i figured I'd start off my first post back by making a prediction I'm pretty confident is true -- Massachusetts will not vote for a Republican in 2008. Crazy, I know. Strangely, this puts me at odds with TNR's Jamie Kirchick who wrote yesterday that "Massachusetts might go red if Rudy Giuliani -- and, possibly, John McCain -- is the Republican presidential nominee." Now, on a superficial level he has some evidence. Niki Tsongas did, after all, win a congressional seat by a surprisingly narrow six percent last Tuesday over an extremely strong Republican challenger. Sounds worrisome, except that she actually did better than governor Deval Patrick who barely won the district despite getting 55 percent of the vote in the state overall. She did six points worse than John Kerry and Al Gore, but they did four and two points worse in the district respectively than they did in the state overall. Also remember that she ran a lackluster race against a veteran whose brother died on 9/11 and who ran a moderate campaign. Kirchick says she "had the entire state political machine behind her" but, as I understand it, people in Massachusetts hate that machine and are understandably open to a charismatic, ostensibly non-partisan alternative. Anyway, all of this is a distraction. The last two democrats to run for president won Massachusetts by about 60 percent. The idea that the next one will get less than 50 percent is deeply silly. Heck, I bet Dennis Kucinich could carry Massachusetts if he got the chance. --Sam Boyd
