A poll conducted by Suffolk Research for Boston’s Fox25 shows Republican Scott Brown leading Democrat Martha Coakley in three Massachusetts cities picked as bellwethers on the basis of their performance in the 2006 Senate race, in which Edward Kennedy easily won a sixth term. Brown leads 55%-40% in Gardner, 55%-41% in Fitchburg and 57%-40% in Peabody. Fitchburg and Gardner are factory towns in northern Worcester County with blue collar populations; Peabody is a modest-income Boston suburb just inland from Salem.
They are emblematic of blue-collar Massachusetts, which despite the prominence of the state’s university communities play a critical role in its politics. As long as they vote solidly Democratic, the state is out of reach for the Republicans, since there are very few affluent suburbs that reliably vote Republican and nothing in the way of a Jacksonian belt that has been trending Republican lately. (The feisty Scots-Irish didn’t cotton to the bossy Puritans of colonial Massachusetts, though both were technically Calvinists, and headed south from Pennsylvania along the Appalachian chain instead.) But when these areas go Republican (or vote only marginally Democratic), and when Republicans run a candidate strong enough to carry affluent suburbs (Bill Weld, Paul Cellucci, Mitt Romney), the state can go Republican.
