Sour swing voters desert Democrats

It’s voters like Deborah Donahue that keep Democratic candidates and consultants up at night.

She’s from the suburbs, belongs to a union and is not registered with either political party.

“Next Tuesday we get to make a statement about where we want our state to go and our country to go,” Donahue said here last week as she stood outside a Martha Coakley event — holding a sign for Scott Brown’s campaign.

As they did in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial contests last fall, sour swing voters overwhelmingly supported the Republican in Tuesday’s Massachusetts Senate special election. Though there were no traditional exit polls, Brown’s 5-percentage-point victory in a state where just 12 percent of registered voters are Republicans makes clear that yet again, Democrats lost a race on friendly terrain because centrists fled into the arms of the GOP.

After Barack Obama won independents by 52 percent to 44 percent in 2008, the key demographic in American politics is moving away from him and his party. And as in any 12-step program to recovery, Democratic officials are finally owning up to having a problem with the swing bloc.

Though there were no exit polls, GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio surveyed 800 voters on election night and found that Brown won 64 percent of independents to Coakley’s 34 percent.

Democratic pollster Dave Beattie said that independent voters — particularly whites and Hispanics — are worried about the economy and that Democrats had erred in focusing on health care at a time when voters are focused on jobs.

“These are the same individuals that ditched the Republicans in the last couple of elections,” Beattie lamented. “These are folks who don’t like the way things are going.”

After the corporate bailouts, middle-class voters felt particularly neglected, he said. “It’s a feeling that the whole system in Washington is ignoring them,” Beattie said. “We have not addressed the economic concern.”

But the cure for Democrats isn’t as simple as tweaking their agenda, it would appear. Donahue, a nurse, complained about the federal health care reform plans and said one-party control in Washington was partially to blame. “We need a little bit of diversity politically,” she said.

The Bay State’s results proved that she is not alone.

A survey taken by GOP pollster Wes Anderson for the Republican National Committee in the days leading up to the Massachusetts vote found deep discontent with the Democratic majority in Congress in a state that, until Tuesday, didn’t have a single Republican on Capitol Hill.

Asked whether they were satisfied that Democrats in Congress were listening to them, 67 percent of Massachusetts independents polled said they were unsatisfied compared with just 28 percent who said they were satisfied.

Drilling deeper into the poll’s demographics illustrates just how grave the Democrats’ problem is at the moment. Like Donahue, the majority of the self-identified independents surveyed are white, middle-class, middle-aged suburban ticket-splitters — the sort of voters both parties crave.

And when tough economic times are combined with a heavily taxed electorate, as in Massachusetts, the results can be ugly for Democrats.

One Democratic pollster who sampled the state said the tax issue played a pivotal role for Brown in winning over the state’s independents.

“They were worried about taxes more than anything else,” this consultant said. “[Coakley] was seen as a big taxer. [Brown] was seen as someone who wants to lower taxes.”

David Paleologos, a pollster at Massachusetts’s Suffolk University, noted that Brown overperformed in heavily suburban, independent-filled towns — and that such voters came out in droves.

“The voter intensity of independents was unusually high,” Paleologos said.

Some Massachusetts suburbs — such as those in the South Shore’s Plymouth County and in towns north of Boston — had turnout of more than 60 percent.

“I think this is a signal, with two governors’ races and one U.S. Senate race, that independents are using their clout to make changes nationwide,” said Paleologos.

Some Democrats say they saw the warning signs well before what is being called the Massachusetts Meltdown.

In October, shortly before voters in New Jersey and Virginia went to the polls, Democratic pollster Geoff Garin delivered a presentation to Senate campaign managers at a Washington retreat sponsored by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

The title was “Emerging Dynamics of the 2010 Cycle” and the bottom line was sobering.

“While voters are less dissatisfied than in 2008, and core Democrats now feel the country is moving in the right direction, the center of the 2010 electorate expresses more doubts than confidence about the current direction of the country,” Garin warned in a memo distributed at the event.

The national survey noted that just 22 percent of independents said the country was heading in the right direction, while 21 percent of liberal-to-moderate independents and 21 percent of conservative independents said the nation was on the right track.

The memo said 38 percent of independents approved of the job Obama was doing and only 28 percent of independents approved of Democrats in Congress.

Just 20 percent of those surveyed said Democrats in Congress “look out for people like me,” while 55 percent said they “care more about wealthy special interests.”

The only upside: Republicans fared even worse in the poll.

“Voters disapprove of the job the Democrats are doing as the majority party in Congress, but they dislike the congressional Republicans even more. The message from independents: ‘A plague on both your houses,’” Garin wrote.

Increasingly, it appears that pocketbook issues are the chief cause for the exodus of independents from Democratic ranks.

In its final poll before the special election — which showed Brown leading by 4 percentage points — Suffolk University found that 46 percent of Massachusetts independents said that the economy was the most important issue. And among these voters, just 37 percent approved of Obama’s job performance.

“What’s driving them are the problems — notably that unemployment doesn’t seem to be getting any better and resentment of the bailouts and the big banks,” said Paul Harstad, a pollster on Obama’s 2008 campaign..

And with some independents, especially those who lean to the right and hail from higher-income brackets, government spending is another concern.

“They think it’s out of control,” said Democratic pollster Andrew Myers. “We didn’t pay a lot of attention to regular people, did we? I hate to say it, but to be honest this is largely self-inflicted,” he said. “All we talked about was spend, spend, spend.”

Just as big a concern, Myers said, was the view among independents that, after health care and the bailouts of the financial and auto industries, Democrats were simply too willing to extend the hand of the public sector into the private sector.

“We’ve more or less lost control of that debate,” he said.

He concluded, “Either Democrats are going to get the message, or if we don’t, we are going to seriously pay the price.”
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