It is snowing here in Massachusetts, with temperatures close to freezing. Perfect weather for driving a pavement-melting SUV to the polls and not very good for a Prius or Smart Car. If the only people who can get out and vote are those who are comfortable getting 10 mpg, this may favor the Republican candidacy of Scott Brown. There are, of course, plenty of Democrats who are destroying the earth with their Volvo SUVs, but I would say that monster SUV owners are more likely than the average Massachusetts voter to reject the idea that an ever larger government will make the U.S. a better place to live and work. This is not good for Martha Coakley.
10 thoughts on “Snowstorm in Massachusetts favoring Scott Brown’s Senate bid”
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“I would say that monster SUV owners are more likely than the average Massachusetts voter to reject the idea that an ever larger government will make the U.S. a better place to live and work.”
Do you find this as ironic as I do?
Hmm.. the irony was unintended, but I see your point! I am envious of the SUV crowd today.
I think the weather also hurts Coakley in urban areas where pedestrian voters are less likely to make it to a polling place with all the slush, rain, etc. particularly very old voters.
Anecdotally, this morning in slightly left-leaning Cambridge, I voted at a barren polling place with literally no line, while later, others in my office were complaining about all the car traffic (SUVs.) and voter congestion at their suburban polling venues.
Having grown up in Maine, I’m not sure about that. SUVs are generally miserable on ice. Too much weight and too top heavy. Their clearance doesn’t help you and the weight makes them harder to stop when the roads are slick. Their only advantage is for getting over the snowbank that the plows left at the end of your driveway. Once you’re on the road, you’re far better off with a small Subaru Outback with good snow tires than any SUV I’ve ever driven. SUVs seem to give drivers a false sense of security, so when the roads are so bad that no one ought to be out, you’ll still get the SUV drivers flying down the highway. Drive down 95 in Maine on an icy day sometime and most of the cars off the road are SUVs with out of state plates.
I haven’t driven a Prius or Smart Car yet, though so I don’t know how they stack up.
Whoa. It looks as though Brown prevailed. God must truly love him, to have sent this great pile of slush down from the sky.
[No need to ask how I voted… I was disenfranchised. I changed the address on my driver’s license. This is supposed to drop you as a voter from your old town in MA and add you as a voter in your new town. I visited the two different town polling stations and found out that it did not work to register me in the new town but I had been dropped from the old town. Now that nearly all of our politicians are lawyers, perhaps the next step will be to ensure that only a lawyer can figure out how to register.]
You should have been offered a provisional ballot in your new town. If the poll workers didn’t offer you one then you have a federal case!
It isn’t all bad for Coakley. As far as I know, at no time during this campaign did she quit or take a leave of absence from her job as Attorney General of Massachusetts. She will not have to look for a job along with tens of millions of unemployed Americans. She will continue to collect a government paycheck as she has since 1986. She will enjoy an inflation-adjusted defined benefit pension backed by the assets of the property owners of Massachusetts regardless of whether the economy continues to slide. She didn’t get one of the few hundred best jobs in the nation, but she still has a job that is better than 99 percent of American jobs. And any American with a job should be grateful; roughly 20 percent of us have no jobs at all.
So what are your thoughts on web-based voting?
Perhaps the latest in nature’s referendums on Global Warming and Cap-and-Tax?
Copenhagen – first white Christmas in 14 years and only 7 in the past 100 yrs,
Washington DC – Dec blizzard drops 20 inches,
Numerous record cold temperatures around the world already this winter…
“I have enough faith in my fellow creatures in Great Britain to believe that when they have got over the delirium of the television, when they realize that their new homes that they have been put into are mortgaged to the hilt, when they realize that the moneylender has been elevated to the highest position in the land, when they realize that the refinements for which they should look are not there, that it is a vulgar society of which no decent person could be proud, when they realize all those things, when the years go by and they see the challenge of modern society not being met by the Tories who can consolidate their political powers only on the basis of national mediocrity, who are unable to exploit the resources of their scientists because they are prevented by the greed of their capitalism from doing so, when they realize that the flower of our youth goes abroad today because they are not being given opportunities of using their skill and their knowledge properly at home, when they realize that all the tides of history are flowing in our direction, that we are not beaten, that we represent the future: then, when we say it and mean it, then we shall lead our people to where they deserve to be led!”
– Aneurin Bevan to the British Labour Party in 1959, following their general election defeat.
Ahh. They don’t (can’t? won’t?) make them like that any more…