Ross:

But with seemingly-unassailable incumbents dropping right and left in Republican primaries, and with once-safe Democratic seats in play from Washington and Wisconsin to Illinois and Connecticut, it seems pretty clear that she deserves to be remembered less for her own missteps and follies, and more as the first casualty of forces beyond any establishment candidate’s control.

I see what Ross is getting at, but part of what made Coakley’s campaign so lousy was that she embodied the worst traits of everything about politicians most people, including the non-ideological and/or confused Obama/Brown voters of Massachusetts, simply cannot abide. Coakley’s mistakes were numerous, but the worst of them were her sense of entitlement and her presumption of victory. Perhaps most important was her indifference to local interests and concerns. Not coincidentally, these are very much the things that undid Tedisco and Hoffman in New York. They are also the things that I am guessing will prove to be the undoing of the Republicans in November. These were not things outside of the candidates’ control. They were deliberately chosen strategies of identifying with a national party platform, pushing an ideological message that the candidates assumed would resonate in what was supposed to be friendly territory, and ignoring what mattered to the voters.

When it comes to talking about the midterms, there is a desire to find a unifying national theme to explain what is happening in the country. If there is any theme, it is that in pretty much every case the election has gone to the candidate that has paid the most attention to local issues and frames his positions on national policy questions according to how they affect his district or state. The most interesting thing about Scott Brown’s victory is that Republicans still don’t really understand why he won. Yes, he had a flawed opponent from western Massachusetts (which apparently almost never produces winning statewide candidates), but he also cast the major policy debate of the moment in terms of whether it was good for Massachusetts’ own unsustainable and extremely popular health care system. It was absolutely not an ideological appeal, but was based entirely on the basic political question, “What’s in it for us?” Brown also happened to have the good luck to be able to tap into voter frustration with the state Democratic establishment in Boston, which made the special election partly into a protest vote. For her part, Coakley was part of that establishment, essentially relied on the appeal of ideology as she emphasized her support for the President’s agenda, and she combined that with a call for partisan loyalty at the same time that Brown was pushing a message of independence from party politics. So it is Coakley’s missteps and follies that help illustrate what it is that voters have been rejecting, and most of these moves were not necessary and could have been avoided.