NH-Sen: Scott Brown's flirtation

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Wow. I genuinely did not at all think that Brown would really go for it. I didn't think he was smarter than this, necessarily, but I did think he was lazier--or, to be charitable, more tired.

I still don't think this'll go that well for him. The primary against Bob Smith, assuming it happens, is going to be glorious.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It's not that I think a Brown-Smith primary will be at all close, I just think it'll be funny.

I think RogueBeaver's got the right idea about how this is going to go.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

What happened?  Is it over?

No. What's happening, I think, is that for a number of reasons, including the entry of a decent Libertarian candidate into the race, even Brown's supporters are coming 'round to accept that he'll be shit-kicked.

No. We'll see the final result in November, although Shaheen has about a 73% chance of winning at this point. I personally hope Brown can make a comeback, but his new state seems to feel quite differently so far.

Yeah, because they feel, in my view correctly, that it's still not his state in any but the academic sense. And he's not really out there doing Clinton 2000-style listening tours or anything either.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Brown thought Shaheen would be an easy target because she's from a state that is far more purple than MA and because Shaheen is one of the least bipartisan senators, voting with the majority of democrats about 99% of the time.  But apparently her state doesn't care whether she's bipartisan or not, or perhaps they just don't see a former massachusetts senator who lost by 8 despite having a 59% approval rating as being all that better than Shaheen.

And why should they? Shaheen was a popular three-term governor before and still has a lot of good will left over from that, and remember that, for people who are so hard-up for bipartisanship, the state's other senator is a conservative Republican.