Vote, Vote, Vote

If you’re in Massachusetts, go vote today. I know, you’re hearing it from everyone.

Better yet, when you go vote, grab or make a pro-Brown sign and spend half an hour holding it up outside the polling station before you go vote. Then, if you’re excited by all of the thumbs up and honks of support, hold it up for another half hour after you vote.

Sign holding in Massachusetts is fun. Those planning to vote for the more conservative candidates tend to get the most visible support. The Democrat sign holders, even if their candidate is slated to win, usually get taken down a notch or two when they find their voters just don’t care as much. Part of that is due to the divide among left-leaning voters in the Bay State.

Michael Barone has a good look today at some polling in bellweather towns in the Bay State, and if I may, I would like to steal a line from him. He says those towns are “emblematic of blue-collar Massachusetts…despite the prominence of the state’s university communities”.

This is a great point, especially how it relates to this election battle between Brown and Coakley. Massachusetts is known as a Democratic stronghold, and most people vote Dem because for a long time, there really weren’t other viable alternatives, and ‘despite the prominence of the state’s university communities’ that doesn’t mean it is a liberal stronghold. In fact most of Massachusetts comes from ‘hearty stock’, or in other words a Catholic, blue-collar background. And while perhaps not as conservative as other places in the country, as a voting block it is certainly more mainstream than the liberal crowd pulled in and retained by the magnet of Harvard/Radcliffe/Brandeis/Tufts.

If you ever find yourself in Western Mass, go spend a day in Amherst. It’s a town that has its own foreign policy and a weekly anti-war protest that was happening years before I ever arrived and we were years away from Iraq & Afghanistan. But if you spend part of that day at a bar on the outskirts of town, you’ll see the transition first hand. Go in around 4:30 and you’ll see blue collar workers coming in to have a drink after a hard day of work. They clear out by 7 and then the college kids come in and the hip hop comes on. Talking to some of the students, you’ll find they have no clue about who was sitting in their seat an hour before, nor do they have any interest. You could argue it’s that way with all kids, but the difference is that in Massachusetts, those kids stick around as part of elite liberal crowd and they never learn to care about the guy who was sitting in their seat an hour before.