Sunday, February 05, 2006

Deval Sort of Wins

Well, for what it's worth, word is that gubernatorial candidate Deval Patrick overwhelmed Tom Reilly in yesterday's Democratic caucuses. Now what and so what?

As we learned, a 2 to 1 count of delegates from caucus votes is like the straw poll right after you walk into the jury room. They are not committed to vote that way in June's party convention.

In this specific contest though, the first real question is whether we are seeing a rejection of a clearly incompetent Reilly or the embrace of Patrick because he has a strong, clearly articulated platform. In our own Ward 19 caucus, one delegate candidate after another said that Patrick could win the November race.

After leaving that Deval love fest, we were surprised to see that Boston went 60% for Reilly. Deliciously, not only did he lose his home caucus in Watertown, but his daughter was unable to become a delegate from there.

Cynics can say that 6 of 10 Bostonians voted for that white guy, that Irish guy. Maybe, but we can't be sure of that. From the Globe chart (not available online), the initial returns were predictable. Patrick won the most liberal areas, like Somerville, Newton and Arlington, and Reilly won the traditionally centrist and DINO areas, like Springfield, Lowell and Fall River.

A third of the 5,300 delegates are still in the works. Some are not committed to a candidate, others are elected officials and party shots, and other add-on class to provide gender/racial balances will get a spot at causes this week. About 600 caucuses occurred yesterday.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Not all of Lowell!! :)

Damn my blasted kidneys...had I a couple more weeks, I could have even taken on Reilly in my own ward, even IF three Reps, a state Senator, and a US Rep were on hand with their supporters to lend to Reilly...