In Senate Race, Massachusetts Bucks a Political Stereotype

MARLBOROUGH, Mass. — Angela Grenham, 50, was raised a Massachusetts Democrat — “We had the crucifix and the J.F.K. sign,” she recalled — and voted for a Democrat for president as recently as 2000, when she supported Al Gore.
But this weekend she stood on a street corner here in the heart of Boston’s politically unpredictable western suburbs holding up a sign for the Republican running to fill the seat long held by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Scott Brown, who has vowed to stop the Democratic health care bill in its tracks.

Cars and pickup trucks honked their approval as they sped by. Ms. Grenham proudly announced that a group of rivals holding up signs for the Democratic candidate in Tuesday’s special election, Martha Coakley, had given up and left the other corners of the intersection.

“The response was not great for them,” said Ms. Grenham, who changed her registration to independent several years ago after she grew more conservative.

Voters like Ms. Grenham have helped make this crucial race too close to call, endangering the Democrats’ 60-vote majority in the Senate and President Obama’s health care overhaul. President Obama came to Boston on Sunday in hopes of rescuing Ms. Coakley’s faltering candidacy. “Understand what’s at stake here, Massachusetts,” Mr. Obama said.

Marlborough is the kind of place where many Massachusetts elections are won and lost these days. Democrats outnumber Republicans by three to one in the state, but independent voters now outnumber them both: a majority of the state’s voters are no longer members of either party. And the independent vote is particularly strong in places like Marlborough, a small city in the crescent-shaped swath of suburbs surrounding Boston, whose swing voters have tipped the balance one way of the other in several recent statewide elections. Those voters could prove crucial again on Tuesday.

The lingering economic downturn and unease about the Democrats’ muscular return to government power have left many voters here in a sour mood.

“It’s just tax, tax, tax, and I think the people are just getting sick of it,” said Richard Gasparoni, 57, an independent who was holding up a Brown sign at another intersection here along Main Street.

Mr. Gasparoni, who has lived here all his life and works as a tax manager for a medical device company, said that he had never campaigned for anyone before, but that he was moved to act because he was upset about the state’s decision to raise its sales tax, leery of the health bill in Congress, and fed up with the scandals that have involved several Democratic state lawmakers.

“I think people have had enough,” Mr. Gasparoni said.

States do not get much more Democratic than Massachusetts. Democrats hold every statewide office and control both houses of the legislature with lopsided majorities. The state’s entire Congressional delegation is Democratic.

But Massachusetts does not always live up to its national stereotype as a bastion of liberalism. Yes, it was the only state to vote for George McGovern for president in 1972, but it also voted twice for Ronald Reagan. Democratic enrollment has fallen from 48 percent of the electorate in 1984 to 37 percent last year. And thanks largely to votes from independent voters in the suburbs, Massachusetts was led by Republican governors for 16 straight years, until Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, broke the streak with his 2006 landslide election. Now Mr. Patrick is dealing with slipping approval ratings as he seeks re-election.

In tough times like these, the political hegemony of the Democrats has its risks.

“The Democrats are controlling both Washington and Beacon Hill,” said Joseph Malone, a Republican who served as the state treasurer during the 1990s. “So if I’m angry as hell about what’s going on with our government, who am I going to throw out? Who am I going to vote against? That’s a big part of this race.”

Several political analysts said that it was still possible — some said it was even likely — that Ms. Coakley, the state’s attorney general, would win on Tuesday, particularly if President Obama’s visit helps turn out the Democratic faithful in strongholds like Boston and if Ms. Coakley is able to hold down Mr. Brown’s margins among independents.

But independent, suburban voters in several other parts of the Northeast voted Republican in November after trending Democratic for years, ousting Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey, a Democrat, and unexpectedly returning Nassau County, on Long Island, to Republican rule.

The possibility of a voter revolt in Massachusetts took many Democrats by surprise: local officials were overwhelmingly re-elected last year. Some worry now that they were too complacent in this race. Special elections like this one turnouts, but the January blizzard of campaign commercials — it is not unusual to see three or four in a row during local newscasts — has whipped up interest in the race.

Many of the ads are negative — the successive spots sometimes sound like a tit-for-tat argument — and a sizable portion of them are being paid for by interest groups trying to either pass or block the health care bill.

Randy Scott, one of the owners of the Main Street Café, said that there had not been this much politics discussed at his counters in years. “There’s a lot more buzz,” he said.

Several independent voters said that they wanted to elect Mr. Brown to block the health care bill, which they derided as full of deals for special interests — though several said that they thought Massachusetts’ law extending near-universal coverage, one of the models for the national bill, had been largely a success.

“It’s not perfect, but why should we have to pay again when we have health care?” said Ms. Grenham, who works as a physical therapist.

Massachusetts was not hit quite as hard as other parts of the country during the recession — its unemployment rate in November was 8.8 percent, below the national rate of 10 percent — but there has been no shortage of pain and economic anxiety. Voters have grown restive: a poll released last week by the Suffolk University Political Research Center found that 55 percent of respondents said that the state was on the wrong track, up from 44 percent in April 2007.

Sitting over his coffee at the counter of the Main Street Café, Michael Corbett, 64, an independent, said that he was supporting Mr. Brown based largely on national security issues. Mr. Corbett, a veteran, was already upset by the Obama administration’s plans to try some suspected terrorists in civilian courts; he said he was appalled when Ms. Coakley suggested in a debate last week that the terrorists were gone from Afghanistan.

At his wife’s beauty parlor in Framingham, he said, a clientele that had largely supported President Obama last year was now uneasy. And he said that as he drove through towns where Obama-Biden lawn signs sprouted just over a year ago, he now sees signs supporting Brown.

“That doesn’t mean that they’re going to get out and vote,” said Mr. Corbett, who has a business selling industrial maintenance and repair supplies. “But the signs are out there. It’s certainly a difference. The Obama-Biden signs are gone, and I just think the people are sick of this.”