The best prediction on Massachusetts' Senate race came from my source in the state who said earlier today that the contest looked like Republican Mitt Romney’s 2002 gubernatorial victory over Democrat Shannon O’Brien.

 

Yes, it did. Romney won by 5 points. So did Republican Scott Brown. Romney swept the moderate to conservative middle class suburbs. So did Brown -- in some cases, running well ahead of where Romney was.

 

To pick four representative communities (and for Romney’s numbers, I'm using figures helpfully posted by the Swing State Project). In Andover, Romney got 63 percent, Brown got 58 percent. In Braintree, Romney got 55 percent, Brown, 62 percent. In Middleborough, Romney got 59 percent, Brown 70 percent. In Weymouth, Romney got 53 percent, Brown 64 percent.

 

A few days ago, I wrote that those who thought that Massachusetts was defined by Cambridge (where Democrat Martha Coakley won 84 percent of the vote) had never been to Dracut or Westwood. Dracut gave Brown 70 percent of its votes today, Westwood 60 percent.

 

Coakley ran unevenly in some of the state’s Democratic strongholds, including the smaller working class cities. She got only 57 percent in my home town of Fall River, where O’Brien had received 67 percent and Barack Obama won 73 percent last year. In New Bedford, she won 59 percent to 70 percent for O’Brien and 74 percent for Obama. On the other hand, Coakley won 69 percent in Boston -- Mayor Tom Menino seems to have delivered -- which was 8 points better than O’Brien. In Brockton, Coakley’s 54 percent put her five points ahead of O’Brien.

 

The upshot is that a result that shook the nation was quite typical of past Republican victories in Massachusetts. Despite the state’s Democratic tilt, Republicans won one gubernatorial election after another from 1990 through 2002 because so many of the state’s 351 cities and towns are thoroughly middle class places. Many of them are suburban in character with moderate politics, a certain aversion to taxes, and a great many voters who register as neither Republicans nor Democrats. Call these places “Middle Massachusetts.” They’re the places that sent Scott Brown to the Senate.