Whew. Per the Boston Globe:
Veteran Democratic US Representative Edward J. Markey beat Republican businessman Gabriel E. Gomez today in a special election for US Senate in Massachusetts that was marked by its brevity and by low voter interest.
Gomez gave a concession speech shortly after 9:30 p.m., thanking his family and supporters. At the beginning of the race, he said, “Nobody knew who I was outside of Cohasset, a couple of Little League baseball teams, and the amazing people I worked with. But look at us now.”
Markey had 55 percent of the votes, compared with 45 percent for Gomez, with 96 percent of precincts reporting….
The race struggled to gain public attention. First, a number of high-profile names dropped out of the race, including Brown, who lost a reelection battle in November to Democrat Elizabeth Warren. Then, other news events grabbed the media’s attention, including the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15.
Early on, some observers even suggested Bay State voters had a case of election fatigue, with tonight’s election the third US Senate race in just over three years.
Not surprisingly, given the challenges, turnout today appeared to be lackluster. Secretary of State William F. Galvin predicted record low voting numbers statewide, perhaps about 37 percent. By 6 p.m., only about 18 percent of voters had turned out in Boston…
What this means, for the 99.99% of Balloon Juice readers who do not live in Massachusetts, is that President Obama has one less corporatist sockpuppet/social-issues teabagger to contend with “just for the next seventeen months” (as the Gomez ads have been whinging for the last ten days or so).
The President, Joe Biden, and of course Senator Warren all endorsed and campaigned for Markey. The GOP threw a ton of money into tv ads, but there’s not a lot of photogenicity among that crew. Scott Brown wouldn’t be seen in public with Gomez until about 36 hours ago, and even then he looked like a man thinking “don’t let this luzer get his stench on me.”
Turnout seems to have been weighted — no surprise — towards the Cranky Old Pharts demographic, not least in my own town, which seems to have give the Twelve Visions dude his fourth-highest tally. (I never heard of him, either; from the front of his website it seems to be a form of get-off-my-lawnism too cranky even for the Free Staters.)