Crucial Massachusetts Senate Race Goes Down to the Wire

Scott Brown has been down this road before. Six years ago, the Massachusetts Republican ran in a special election to succeed Sen. Cheryl Jacques, an openly gay state senator who resigned her seat to run the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group in Washington.

Brown ran against Angus McQuilken, Jacques' longtime chief of staff, in an election that was cast as having extraordinary significance because the issue of gay marriage would soon come before the Massachusetts legislature. If Brown, who opposed same-sex marriage, were to take the seat of the issue's greatest champion, it would be seen as a referendum on the issue itself.

In the end, Brown won the special election by less than 1 percent.

Fast-forward six years and Brown, described by Republican strategists as an ambitious "darling" of the state's GOP establishment, is poised to repeat his upset of 2004. Once again, he has defied the expectations in a special election that Democrats had been widely assumed to win, with a singular issue at stake.

Although a Suffolk University poll showed him losing to Martha Coakley, the state's Democratic attorney general, by 31 points eight weeks ago, Brown has surged down the stretch and pulled ahead of Coakley in seven out of eight of the most recent polls on the contest.

Questions about how the race closed so quickly will be the subject of Wednesday-morning quarterbacking for years to come, but there's no question that Massachusetts voters will have a stark choice between two very different candidates when they go to the polls today. (A third candidate, independent Joe Kennedy -- no relation to the Kennedy political family -- is not expected to garner significant support.)

In Brown, Bay Staters have a small-government Republican who hews mostly to his national party's platform. He opposes gun control, tax increases and gay marriage. He opposes partial-birth abortion, supports waterboarding to interrogate suspected terrorists, and perhaps most importantly, he has promised to be the "41st vote" against the Democrats' health care reform now in Congress.

Softening the edges is his lengthy career in the Army National Guard; his wife, Gail Huff, who is a well-known TV reporter in Boston; his daughter, Ayla, who appeared on "American Idol"; his affection for shaking voters' hands on street corners; and his now famous pickup truck, the symbol of Brown's everyman appeal, which he has driven around the state from event to event, adding more miles to the 200,000 it already has.

In a year that Gallup says is the most anti-incumbent on record since 1972, Brown has smartly cast himself as an outsider running against the Democratic machines in Massachusetts and Washington. During the final debate of the campaign, he memorably told moderator David Gergen, "With all due respect, it's not the Kennedys' seat. It's not the Democrats' seat. It's the people's seat."

In contrast to Brown, Coakley is a traditional liberal Democrat, with a prosecutor's edge. She supports the Democratic health care bill, abortion rights, gay marriage, and climate change legislation with a "cap-and-trade" mechanism. She opposes Obama's planned troop increase in Afghanistan.

But beyond her base-pleasing position papers, Coakley has lacked a compelling narrative and an energized campaign to appeal to independent voters, who make up half of the state's electorate and have been an important part of Brown's strategy. As a career prosecutor, she has no voting record, no street-level charisma and had never developed a broad stump speech or inspirational message.

Her cautious campaign still painted her as a "trailblazer" because of her status as the state's first female attorney general and possibly its first female senator. "They said that women don't have much luck in Massachusetts politics," she said during her victory speech after the December primary. "And we believed that it was quite possible that that luck was about to change."

After winning that easy contest against an unpolished U.S. Rep. Mike Capuano, Coakley kept mostly quiet during the holidays and waited until Jan. 6 to run her first television ad -- two days after a Rasmussen poll showed that her lead had shrunk more than 20 points in six weeks. Amid worrisome headlines and slipping polls, Washington Democrats sent a triage team to amp up her campaign and slap a theme on it.

Two days before the election, President Obama, who flew to Boston to rally for Coakley, finally made Coakley's message loud and clear. "Understand what's at stake here, Massachusetts. It's whether we're going forward or going backwards," Obama called out from the stump at Northeastern University. A Coakley "Fighting for You" bus tour across the state followed, and Coakley seemed finally, but belatedly, to have landed on a message she could run with.

While the campaigns plotted their strategies for the race's final days, outside interest groups, including Tea Party activists, unions, the NRA and Planned Parenthood, took a sudden and very expensive interest in the contest as it tightened further. With Senate Democrats' crucial 60th vote at stake, the Brown-Coakley race became both a multimillion-dollar referendum on the national Democratic agenda and a linchpin for its success. Without a Coakley victory, Democrats would see their one-vote advantage slip away -- along with any hope of passing the remainder of their ambitious agenda, including the broadest contours of health care reform.

With so much momentum behind Brown and so little time to reverse it, Democrats in Washington are now privately planning for a Coakley loss. Two of the nation's leading independent prognosticators, Charlie Cook and Stu Rothenberg, have predicted a GOP victory. "Brown is running extremely well with independents in the Bay State, and unless Democratic turnout exceeds everyone's expectations, Brown is headed for a comfortable win," Rothenberg wrote Monday. Cook said Sunday he's "put a finger on the scales" for the Republican.

On Monday, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called the race crucial for Democrats. "We need to win in Massachusetts," he said. "If we don't, the challenge is even greater to pass health care reform." Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) had a more dire assessment, telling the AP on Friday, "If Scott Brown wins, it'll kill the health bill."

A Brown win would also give beleaguered New England Republicans their first taste of victory in years.

If anything could comfort Democrats, it's the fact that special elections are notoriously difficult to poll, and that even the most obvious political predictions can trip on reality somewhere down the road.

Two months after Scott Brown won his state senate seat and handed a symbolic defeat to gay marriage activists in 2004, Gov. Mitt Romney followed an order from the Massachusetts Supreme Court and began issuing licenses for same-sex marriage. In the end, the state legislature did not act on the issue and it was decided through the courts without Brown casting a vote until 2007, when an effort to pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage failed.

The polls in Massachusetts close at 8 p.m. EST.

Follow me on Twitter @1PatriciaMurphy.