Coakley polls show she is losing

Byron York:

Here in Massachusetts, as well as in Washington, a growing sense of gloom is setting in among Democrats about the fortunes of Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley. "I have heard that in the last two days the bottom has fallen out of her poll numbers," says one well-connected Democratic strategist. In her own polling, Coakley is said to be around five points behind Republican Scott Brown. "If she's not six or eight ahead going into the election, all the intensity is on the other side in terms of turnout," the Democrat says. "So right now, she is destined to lose."

Intensifying the gloom, the Democrat says, is the fact that the same polls showing Coakley falling behind also show President Obama with a healthy approval rating in the state. "With Obama at 60 percent in Massachusetts, this shouldn't be happening, but it is," the Democrat says.

Given those numbers, some Democrats, eager to distance Obama from any electoral failure, are beginning to compare Coakley to Creigh Deeds, the losing Democratic candidate in the Virginia governor's race last year. Deeds ran such a lackluster campaign, Democrats say, that his defeat could be solely attributed to his own shortcomings, and should not be seen as a referendum on President Obama's policies or those of the national Democratic party.

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Democrats have this interesting way of insulting their own when things are not going their way. In doing so they are trying to avoid giving credit to Republican candidates who have run very good races. Brown has run a good races and seized on issues in a timely manner.

He started out with a John Kennedy statement on tax cuts that began to resonate with voters. It fed into his criticism of the tax increases in the Democrat health plan that would not add any benefit to people in Massachusetts. The bottom line is that people in the state had plenty of reasons to be against eh health care bill and Brown was able to tap into that discontent.