Dueling memos preview contentious Senate race in Massachusetts

Dueling memos released Monday by Democrats and Republicans in Massachusetts offered a window into what is rapidly shaping up to be one of the most hard-fought Senate races of 2012.

Sen. Scott Brown’s (R-Mass.) campaign manager issued an update predicting that Democrats would raise and spend huge figures to take on Brown, but would primary themselves all the way off the left side of the political cliff.

{mosads}Meanwhile, with Democrats able to lose only three seats without losing control of the Senate (if President Obama wins reelection), the state party warned that Massachusetts would be the front line for maintaining the Democratic majority.

“In 2012, voters in the Commonwealth could very well decide which party will control the U.S. Senate,” wrote Kevin Franck, communications director for the Massachusetts Democratic Party.

Although he maintains high approval ratings, Brown is fighting for reelection under the most difficult of circumstances: He’s a Republican from a deep-blue state who has to fill the shoes of the patriarch of Massachusetts Democrats — the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. 

And while Democrats may have fumbled the ball in 2010 by falsely assuming any Democrat with a pulse would win Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts, they’re not going to make the same mistake twice.

National Democratic groups have been lining up behind Elizabeth Warren, a former Obama administration official who entered the race in September and has surged to the top of the field.

“We anticipate the Democratic nominee will be well-funded and be the beneficiary of millions of dollars in third party spending by outside special interests, whose discredited attacks have continued in the 20 months since Scott’s election,” wrote Brown’s campaign manager, Jim Barnett.

A poll released Monday by UMass Lowell/Boston Herald showed Warren taking 36 percent of primary votes, with none of the other candidates topping 5 percent. Just weeks after becoming a candidate, Warren is tied with Brown in a general-election match-up, underscoring the reason she has become the top target for both Brown and her Democratic primary opponents.

Brown’s campaign noted that while the incumbent senator runs for his party’s nod unopposed, Democrats could be hurt by the shuffle to the left as Warren faces Alan Khazei, state Rep. Tom Conroy and others in the primary.

“A long, divisive and expensive Democrat primary will undoubtedly produce a hard-left ideologue whose out-of-touch philosophy will be out-of-step with these voters,” Barnett wrote.

Whether that dynamic will indeed characterize the Democratic side of the race will start to become clear Tuesday, when the candidates will debate in Lowell, Mass. Yet even before having a nominee, Democrats painted a Brown reelection as risky for the party — not because Brown’s record is particularly right-wing, but because the sway of the Senate balance has much broader implications.

“Brown voted to repeal ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,’ after it was clear it would pass, but a Republican Senate would have never held a vote on the anti-gay policy,” Franck wrote.