Why do people just assume Scott Brown would win if Kerry takes a cabinet position.

[bluestate10]

44. About 40% of the voters in Massachusetts are Unaffiliated, or Independent.

Democrats make up the majority of Massachusetts voters, but only barely, by around 10-15%. Republicans aren't large enough in numbers to win without Conservative democrat support and pulling in an abnormal percentage of Independents. Most of the Independent voters were former democrats that became disgusted with corruption, particularly in the Massachusetts House. That corruption was bad during the eighties and nineties, three former speakers of the House faced criminal probes, two were convicted and one was dis-barred, one of the convicted is in federal prison. During the early 2000's, we had two high profile Black democrats get convicted of bribery. The recent better fortunes of democrats in Massachusetts (the party has grown in registration) is due to clean politicians winning office. Our Governor is a clean ex-legal counsel. Our Senate is led by a dull, but unquestionably honest leader, our House is led by another dull, but honest and competent speaker. Our political leaders meet and talk through contentious political issues instead of throwing mud at each other.

When we put up a good strong candidate that gets out and campaigns, the Independent vote breaks around 66% for the democrat. If we put up a weak candidate like Coakley, that vote gets split with the republican, unless the republican is a clear moron, like Coakley's last opponent for the Attorney General office was.

Scott Brown has about a 1 million vote base, mostly because his public image is that of a nice guy. Brown damaged that image during the run against Warren, but he still got 1.2 million votes in a Presidential election year when he was running against a clearly superior opponent - and Brown has worked on his image by doing a recent highly publicized charity event. In order for democrats to beat Brown in a special election, person like Deval Patrick would have to take Brown head on and out campaign him. Patrick has credo with Independents, that group gave him a second term by providing his 6% victory margin over a very strong republican, after Jill Stein took around 3% of the Liberal democratic vote away from Patrick.