Blue Mass. Stands Apart From Nation

Massachusetts tonight proved that Sen. Scott Brown’s victory in January was more fluke than the leading edge of a trend. It’s a clean sweep for incumbents in Congress and an all-Democratic night for candidates for constitutional office.

Rep. Jeff Perry’s loss proves that Character trumps Ideology, as voters in the 10th district chose to believe the victim of a strip search rather than Perry’s account. Brown is going to have to relive his deep and abiding support for Perry in Brown’s re-election in 2012.

Rep. Barney Frank’s victory gives him a rewarding capstone to a 30-plus-year career in which he has never lost an election, going back to his days as a state legislator and now 16 terms in Congress. Frank has become, with the death of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the favorite whipping boy for the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. Sean Bielat was a candidate of no ties to the district and no accomplishments in the public sector, other than winning Pentagon contracts for iRobot where he once worked. If you took a vote inside the Beltway, Bielat would’ve won hands down, but he had no connection to the 4th district, while Frank had done an exceptional job bringing home the bacon to towns like Fall River, New Bedford and Taunton. And he remains enormously popular in the large liberal towns of Newton and Brookline.

Attorney General Martha Coakley won a share of redemption in her victory on a night when Brown was losing in the Perry campaign and in all other districts where he delivered a blanket endorsement of Republicans — nearly all of whom got justifiably crushed.

And now that the Patrick campaign has declared victory, it seems that Massachusetts voters believe that the glass is half-full, not half-empty. They chose to put their faith and their vote behind the upbeat, high-energy governor. Charlie Baker may have peaked the day he announced. He was never able to connect to people and ran a bloodless, angry campaign that failed to move voters, even as he complained endlessly that the state is going in the wrong direction.

Wrong or right, Massachusetts took a different direction than the nation.