1. Republican Charlie Baker’s victory over Democrat Martha Coakley signifies a return to normalcy on Beacon Hill.
For 16 of the last 24 years, the GOP held the Governor’s office as a voter-approved check on the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature.
This does not mean that Governor Deval Patrick’s almost eight years in the corner office were an aberration. Patrick is an unusually skillful retail politician. His eloquence matches President Obama’s. He connects with individual voters with a personal grace approaching Cary Grant’s. And, unlike Obama, Patrick — more often than not — is able to camouflage his disdain for low-concept wheeling and dealing.
Baker’s win is more of a personal triumph than a party achievement. Only 11 percent of Massachusetts’s voters are registered Republicans. Professing allegiance to the party of Abraham Lincoln, Henry Cabot Lodge, Bill Weld, and Mitt Romney is not quite outré. Endearing or not, it’s more of an eccentricity. Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, and Somerville probably number more vegans than Republicans.
It is, however, this minority status that makes Baker’s win exceedingly savory for national Republicans. To win in the only state to reject Richard Nixon in 1972 — “Don’t Blame Me, I’m From Massachusetts,” the bumper stickers once read — is sweet indeed. And that goes a long way to explain why the national Republican governor’s PAC spent $12 million on Baker’s campaign.
2. These bragging rights are important if the GOP is to make a convincing case that Tuesday’s Republican gains are part of a national mood swing, rather than a predictable and routine political adjustment.
Since the end of World War II, every president who served two full terms — Republicans Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush and Democrat Clinton — have served the last two years of their terms with a Senate controlled by the opposition.
If rampant Republicanism were truly on the march, Richard Tisei might have fared better in his run against Democrat Seth Moulton in the Sixth District on Boston’s North Shore. As it was, Moulton won by a very solid 15 percent.
3. More telling than the Moulton-Tisei race, was the New Hampshire Senate contest between incumbent Democrat Jean Shaheen and Massachusetts’s transplant Scott Brown.
It was a nail bitter, and Brown — one of nature’s great on-the-ground flesh pressers — did far better than experts initially predicted.
Brown sought to nationalize the election — and almost succeeded. But almost doesn’t count.
Shaheen won by essentially running for Mayor of the Granite State. Brown presented himself as the anti-Obama, saying the election was about Ebola, ISIS, and Immigration.
4. Fox News and even the more respectable elements of the national press will no doubt be echoing — to one degree or another — this theme during the election postmortems.
Obama’s sliding approval and favorability ratings without a doubt contribute to the meta-narrative that the spirit of Ronald Reagan is once again rampant. The heirs to that tradition now carry names like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. And there is still a world of difference between these differing flavors of conservatism.
5. In national terms, the real takeaway from this election is this: The Republicans did not screw up. This is no small thing. The GOP establishment found it could not outmaneuver Tea-Party radicals, so it adopted their ideology and dressed it up in a main street grey flannel suit.
As a result, today’s Republican Party is further to the right than George McGovern’s Democrats of 1972 were to the left. This is more than an academic point. It means the 30-plus-year conservative shift in American politics continues.
