Massachusetts Senate Race And DemCare

The special election to fill Ted Kennedy's former Senate seat is coming up in about a week.  Things appear to be getting interesting, as one poll is showing Scott Brown within one point of Martha Coakley, and another is showing Coakley up by 15 points.  How do you reconcile this discrepancy?  Hot Air has some thoughts:

AmSpec's Philip Klein does a much better job of outlining differences between the two polls: (1) The Globe sample is much more Democratic; (2) PPP has Brown winning Independents by a huge margin; (3) PPP polled after the Globe. But the differences do not stop there. The Globe poll used a smaller sample, producing a larger margin of error. The Globe poll used live interviewers, while PPP uses automated calling. The sequencing of key questions also differs. For example, PPP started by asking for whom the respondent would vote, while the Globe asked about party registration and candidate favorability first. The Globe specifically included Independent candidate Joe Kennedy, while PPP did not (though one might have expected a faux Kennedy to hurt Coakley, that turned out not to be the case).

The import of the first two factors Klein identified is crystallized in his observation that the Globe only polled 83 independents, while PPP polled about 290. The Globe asked specifically in terms of registration, while PPP did not, which may account for some of the gap. Even so, there will be a much larger margin of error in a sub-sample as small as 83.

The one thing both polls agreed upon is the fact that Republicans are "very excited" (66%-48%) about showing up at the polls, and that alone could spell trouble for Coakley.  So why do you care about this?

At stake is the 60th vote for DemCare.

But we're also seeing the Dems' true stripes...again.  Even if Brown wins, the Democrats are planning to delay seating him until the DemCare vote takes place:

In a clear demonstration of the Speaker's comment that we will do "almost anything" to pass health care, the Democrats have said they will delay seating Scott Brown, the GOP candidate for Senate in Massachusetts if he wins the race for former Senator Kennedy's Senate seat on January 19th.

Red State provides a bit of analysis on the plan:

For the Dems to be planning in this level of detail for a loss is revealing, and puts an explanation point on the great anger at ObamaCare in the nation — and the Dems desperation in even considering this CHEAT.

Wow.  As soon as the race for Mass Senate ends, the race for DemCare begins!

There's my two cents.

PS - Scott Brown conducted an online 'money bomb' with his 'red invades blue' campaign, hoping to raise half a million dollars in one day.  A recent update I saw a few minutes ago showed he had passed $625,000 and was now shooting for $750,000!  Wow!  That kind of single-day fundraising has got to raise some very concerned eyebrows in the Democrat party.  This could get very exciting, indeed...