Scott Brown during a visit to Soutborough last month (Photo courtesy of the Southborough Republican Town Committee)
Southborough is arguably a blue town, at least there are more registered Democrats than there are Republicans, but the majority of registered voters in town don’t specify a party affiliation, and it’s those unaffiliated voters who pushed Southborough decidedly into the red yesterday.
Twenty-four percent of Southborough voters say they’re Democrats, while 18% say they’re Republicans. For Republican Scott Brown to have captured 59% of the Southborough votes, he must have won over a good number of the 57% of voters who don’t pledge allegiance to either party.
There wasn’t much variation across Southborough’s three precincts in terms of turnout or results, with the difference being only a couple of percentage points. Precinct 2, which has the highest number of registered Republicans at 22% went slightly higher in favor of Scott Brown than the town average, but barely.
At over 69%, voter turnout in Southborough dwarfed the statewide average of 52%. Compare that to a 23% turnout for the primary election in December. Turnout during the 2008 Presidential Election was 85% (when, incidentally, the town voted largely Democratic).
Because Romney beat O’Brien almost 2 to 1 here in 2002, when the numbers came up last night as 59-41, I thought Coakley still had a chance, but the fact that precinct 3 (the most Democratic) gave similar results to 1 and 2 (the most Republican) was a warning sign that she wouldn’t build the lead she had to have in the cities to win.