Scott Brown

There is some irony here. Brown’s comment seems to be the product of an unguarded moment on a Boston morning radio show, and, more than any other politician in Massachusetts, local radio has played a pivotal role in his rise.

Massachusetts may be a heavily Democratic state, but you’d never know it from scanning the radio dial. The Boston market has more than its share of standard-issue conservative radio hosts, and the ideology frequently bleeds over to the dominant all-sports station too. Local talk radio served as a virtual arm of Brown’s campaign when he won his Senate seat last year. He made frequent appearances on WEEI, the sports station, bantering with the hosts, playing up his regular-guy-with-a-truck image and connecting with the station’s predominantly white male listenership. When President Obama came to town for a last-minute appearance with Martha Coakley, Brown’s campaign organized a rally headlined by several prominent sports celebrities and three WEEI personalities. On that station and others, the promotion of his campaign, and the disparagement of Coakley, was relentless. Here’s how the Boston Globe’s Alex Beam described it:

On Election Day, WRKO ran 11 hours of nonstop pro-Brown agitprop from 9 a.m. on, including get-out-and-vote-for-Brown pleas. Over at its sister station, WEEI, Glenn Ordway’s afternoon sports goons taped promotional videos for Brown. You could say the same thing about WTKK, but ‘RKO and ‘EEI have actual listeners.

Since winning the election, Brown has kept up his local radio appearances, chatting casually with his friends, playing along with their drive-time antics, and sometimes letting his guard down. Here’s how Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham described one such session last July:

With all of that love and power, you can’t blame Brown for getting a big head. And as an interview he gave two of his fans on WEEI last Friday made clear, it is pretty darned big.

“So, last night I got off the plane and I’m driving through Wrentham saying, `Man, I just can’t believe I’m a United States Senator,’ ” he crowed to his adoring interlocutors. “And then Tim Geithner calls me on the phone and says, `Scott, I just wanted to go through some things that we’re working on right now . . .’ He just called me a minute ago, too . . .

So you might say that Brown’s casual put-down of Warren was a long time coming. Granted, it didn’t take place on one of the all-talk stations that double as Brown fan clubs, but rather a morning show on classic rock WZLX. Still, he was in a potentially dangerous setting — an irreverent live show with hosts who traffic in provocative hijinx and “guy” humor — where he’s come to feel a bit too comfortable. The sort cruelty embodied by Brown’s comment is heard all the time on these types of radio shows, in Boston and everywhere else, but it usually goes unnoticed. Unless it’s coming from a United States senator.

Update: A reader emails to point out that the latest Arbitron numbers show that WEEI is no longer the dominant sports station in Boston, and has been eclipsed by the new (and apparently not overtly conservative) Sports Hub.

“Hype,” though, is the key word here. Because Warren is entirely untested as a political candidate. All we know is that is that she has attracted a passionate following among national progressive activists, which should translate into a sizable, small donation-fueled campaign treasury, and that the media exposure she’s received these past two years has given her modest name recognition in Massachusetts. She has a compelling, genuinely populist story to tell voters, but whether she’s capable of telling it well and whether it will resonate are open questions.

She also faces a more basic challenge: Brown, the Republican incumbent, remains quite popular with Massachusetts voters. A recent poll showed the second-year senator with a 54-25 percent favorable/unfavorable rating. That’s actually down from the numbers Brown received in Democrats’ own polling earlier this year, but it’s still enough to make him more popular than Governor Deval Patrick, Senator John Kerry and the state’s other big-name politicians. (Warren scored a 17-13 percent favorable rating in the same poll.)

Of course, Massachusetts voters also have a demonstrated aversion to the GOP: Brown is the only Republican Senate candidate since 1972 to receive more than 45 percent of the vote in the state, the House delegation has been entirely Democratic since 1996, and no GOP nominee has come within 20 points of winning it at the presidential level since 1988.

So Warren’s hopes will rest on whether voters are willing to separate their generally positive personal views of Brown from their generally negative views of his national party. Will this actually happen? This is where things get interesting.

The idea that it will is bolstered by some relatively recent Massachusetts history. Back in 1996, Republican Governor William Weld was something of a political rock star in the state. Two years earlier, he’d won a record-shattering reelection victory with 71 percent of the vote, carrying virtually every city and town in the state, and he brought enormous personal popularity to the Senate race. But Massachusetts voters were also in revolt against the national GOP in 1996, thanks to the Republican “revolution” of 1994, which firmly established the GOP as a Southern/religious-dominated party. With Bill Clinton carrying the state by 33 points over Bob Dole, Weld lost the Senate race to John Kerry by 7.5 points.

We’ve seen similar stories in other states. Think of Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chafee in 2006. A liberal, anti-Iraq Republican with a famous (within the state) name, Chafee did everything imaginable to convince his blue state electorate to overlook his party label, and he made it to Election Day with an approval rating that hovered around 60 percent. But the climate of ’06, particularly in a state like Rhode Island, was so fanatically anti-Republican that Chafee still lost to Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse by seven points. Oregon Republican Gordon Smith faced a similarly impossible situation in 2008. Despite strong personal popularity and his decision to turn on the Iraq war, he was still edged out for reelection by Jeff Merkley, a rather generic candidate whose campaign was mainly powered by the fact that he wasn’t a Republican.

When it comes to Warren, the Democratic line is that because 2012 will be a presidential election year, the Massachusetts electorate will look much different than it did in the 2010 special election in which Brown won his seat — younger, more diverse, less conservative. This, they theorize, will produce an effect similar to 1996, when the weight of Dole and the Gingrich GOP Congress was just too much for Weld to bear. And maybe it will. After all, the same new poll that gives Brown a 54-25 percent favorable rating also shows him just nine points ahead of Warren, even though most voters haven’t even heard of her yet.

But if you think Brown absolutely can’t survive in a presidential climate, just remember the example of Susan Collins. Like Brown, the Maine Republican entered her reelection race in 2008 with wide personal popularity and a target on her back. National Democrats knew they were going to carry Maine comfortably in the presidential race and began thinking about coattails. So they recruited Tom Allen, a long-serving congressman from Portland, to oppose Collins and poured serious money into the race. But it didn’t work. On the same day that Obama racked up 58 percent of the vote in Maine, Collins crushed Allen by 23 points. 40 percent of Obama’s supporters crossed over and voted for her.

Collins’ win was chalked up to her personal popularity and her efforts to separate herself from her national party and to play up her moderate credentials. Of course, Smith in Oregon, Chafee in Rhode Island and Weld in Massachusetts all had the same things going for them but lost anyway. What was the difference? Weld in ’96 was challenging a Democratic incumbent and had his governorship to fall back on, which may have factored into voters’ thinking, but Smith and Chafee were in almost the exact same situation as Collins. It’s hard to say what (if anything) Collins did right and they did wrong.

What Brown does have going for him is that the 2012 climate won’t be nearly as favorable to Democrats as it was in 2008, 2006 or 1996. Yes, Obama will win Massachusetts easily, but his margin may be narrower this time, especially if the GOP nominates former Governor Mitt Romney. The GOP label still figures to hurt Brown, but the damage may not be that severe. In the past, I’ve written skeptically about Warren’s chances, mainly because of Brown’s popularity. But it’s fair to say that it’s an open question whether he’s another Susan Collins … or another Gordon Smith.

And it’s also true that the Democratic field now taking shape in Massachusetts is, as Robert Kuttner put it, “stunningly weak.” The current crop of candidates includes a suburban mayor who’s been on the job for just over a year, a one-time state senator whose last campaign (nine years ago) ended with a fourth-place finish in a gubernatorial primary, an activist who was part of the worst-performing Democratic ticket in Massachusetts history, and the guy who finished (a very distant) third in the Democratic primary for the special election in which Brown won his seat in 2010. The chairman of the state’s Democratic Party, John Walsh, is now openly urging Warren to enter the race, and — even though she’s not exactly a household name right now — it’s not hard to imagine her winning the nomination to oppose Brown.

But that’s where things get tricky. Democrats like to tell themselves that Brown is beatable simply because Massachusetts has such pronounced Democratic tendencies. Before Brown’s victory last year, no Republican had won a Senate election in the state since 1972, and it’s been 17 years (and counting) since a GOP candidate won a U.S. House race. With the presidential race at the top of the ticket, turnout should be much higher next fall than it was in the January ’10 special election, with the vast majority of those new voters likely supporting Barack Obama. The Democrats’ theory is that this Obama support will trickle down to their Senate candidate, erasing the 5-point margin that Brown won by in ’10 and returning the seat to Democratic hands.

But if it were this easy, why is the party having such trouble attracting a candidate? Gov. Deval Patrick has ruled out running and no one from the all-Democratic congressional delegation is interested. Neither is Marty Meehan, the still-ambitious former congressman who is sitting on a $5 million war chest. Their reluctance speaks to a reality that Democrats don’t like to admit: In his 18 months on the job, Brown has skillfully separated himself from his party’s national brand and emerged as the most popular politician in Massachusetts. It may be true that his simple presence in the Senate serves to empower conservative Republicans who themselves would be intensely unpopular in Massachusetts and that Brown is mostly a reliable Republican vote. But that’s not what most swing voters in Massachusetts apparently see. They like Brown personally, enjoy his style and — thanks to several high-profile and well-timed breaks with the GOP leadership — consider him an independent voice, not a Republican drone.

It’s probably true that, despite their warm feelings for him, a chunk of voters will vote against Brown next year simply because of his party label. If he were running for governor, where the taint of the GOP’s national brand wouldn’t really be an issue, Brown’s current poll numbers would put him on course to score the kind of rout that William Weld enjoyed in 1994. As a Senate incumbent, though, his ceiling is lower. But low enough to make him truly vulnerable? Again, the absence of interest from established Massachusetts Democrats speaks volumes.

There’s probably another reason Brown hasn’t yet attracted a top-tier foe: the increasing speculation that John Kerry will succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state in a second-term Obama administration (if there is one). If Kerry were to resign his Senate seat, Patrick would be empowered to make an interim appointment (likely another Paul Kirk situation) while a special election campaign played out. At least from this vantage point, this looks like the race worth waiting for, especially for incumbent congressmen (who wouldn’t have to give up their seats to run).

This doesn’t necessarily mean that Elizabeth Warren would be making a mistake to run now. There’s always the chance she could win, and even if she didn’t, a strong showing against Brown could position her to try again (maybe for Kerry’s seat, maybe for another office). But there’s also a risk that Brown is simply too popular and that Warren would end up losing by a wide margin — one that would preclude a future effort.

For a cautionary tale, she might consult a man named Mark Roosevelt, who was an up-and-coming Massachusetts state legislator in the early ’90s. In 1994, he decided to make his move, taking a Democratic nomination for governor that no established Democrat wanted and figuring that the state’s partisan tendencies would propel him to victory, or at least a respectable, career-enhancing showing. But after a 42-point loss to Weld, his political career was over and he left the state a few years later. Last I checked, he was running a small college in Ohio.

But the DSCC received some bad news this week when a poll it commissioned found that Brown’s popularity is soaring. The survey, which has been seen by at least one D.C. insider and was detailed for Salon, measured Brown’s approval rating at 73 percent — easily surpassing the scores for Barack Obama and the state’s two top Democrats,  Gov. Deval Patrick and Sen. John Kerry. It also found him running over the magic 50 percent mark against every potential Democratic challenger, and crushing the strongest perceived Democrats (Reps. Michael Capuano and Ed Markey and former Rep. Marty Meehan) by double-digit margins. The results only grew closer when respondents were primed with negative information about Brown.

The findings underscore the success that Brown has had in separating himself from the national Republican Party brand, which remains poisonous in Massachusetts. (Even in the strongly anti-Democratic tide of 2010 — the best climate for Republicans in Massachusetts since 1994 — the GOP failed to win any of the state’s six constitutional offices or 10 House seats and actually lost ground in the Legislature.) Brown has largely been a steady GOP vote in the Senate, but he has broken with his party in several high-profile instances: a jobs bill last February, Wall Street reform over the summer, and ratification of the new START treaty and repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in December. He also made news last week for (sort of) opposing the GOP’s effort to defund Planned Parenthood.

All of this has helped Brown craft an image as an independent senator. That some leaders of the Tea Party — which poured itself into Brown’s victorious January 2010 special election effort — are now openly criticizing him and calling for a GOP primary challenge next year only reinforces this image. Brown’s personal appeal — the whole working stiff with a truck thing — remains a clear asset too. 

This is why in a recent Op-Ed for the Boston Globe I likened Brown to William Weld — the Republican who won Massachusetts’ governorship in something of a fluke in 1990, only to build enormous popularity by picking some high-profile fights with his own national party. When he sought reelection in 1994, every big-name Democrat in the state who’d been talked up as a prospect — Paul Tsongas, Joe Kennedy, Ray Flynn, John Silber and on and on — passed. Weld ended up posting a record-shattering 42-point landslide over a hapless state representative.

The endurance of Brown’s popularity is likely to give pause to his strongest potential Democratic foes. Capuano and Markey (and South Boston’s Stephen Lynch, for that matter) would have to give up safe House seats to challenge him next year. Meehan would have to surrender his cozy perch in academia. Running against Brown might not be worth the risk for them — especially with at least one (the 2014 governor’s race, which should be an open seat) and possibly two (John Kerry’s Senate seat, which could open up for a 2013 special election if he is elevated to secretary of state for a second Obama term) other opportunities on the horizon. True, 2012 will be a presidential election year, which will theoretically boost Brown’s challenger in blue state Massachusetts. But it’s easy to overstate the coattail effect, as Susan Collins demonstrated in 2008, when she easily beat a strong Democratic challenger even as Barack Obama comfortably won Maine. In other words, unless Brown’s numbers dip markedly, it’s likely that Democrats will be stuck with a second-tier (at best) challenger in ’12.

The national implications are potentially significant. Democrats are clinging to a 53-47 edge in the Senate now, but they are defending nearly three-quarters of the seats that will be up next year — some of them in very red states. Already, North Dakota — where Democrat Kent Conrad is retiring — is regarded as a near-certain GOP pickup, and the Democrats’ hold on seats in Nebraska, Montana, Missouri, Virginia and West Virginia is shaky at best.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts might be the only logical pickup target for Democrats — especially now that embattled Republican Sen. John Ensign has finally ruled out a reelection campaign in Nevada. Maybe Indiana could emerge as a target, if Richard Lugar is derailed by Tea Party activists in next year’s GOP primary — and if his GOP foe, state Treasurer Richard Mourdock, proves to be a particularly polarizing nominee. Theoretically, Maine could too, with Republican Olympia Snowe sure to face at least one Tea Party-backed  challenger next year (although Snowe would likely be unbeatable if she decides to run as an independent).

Thus, ousting Brown would significantly increase Democrats’ chances of holding the Senate. But failing to do so could be the final nail in their majority’s coffin.