Bad policies, bad campaigning or bad luck? Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com puts it well: “When a Democrat loses a federal race in Massachusetts, the default assumption ought to be that several factors are to blame.”

The trend of the polls over the last couple of weeks had suggested a runaway victory for Republican Scott Brown in Tuesday’s Senate by-election in Massachusetts Senate. In the end that didn’t happen: the result was quite close, Brown winning with 52.5% of the two-party vote against Democrat Martha Coakley, a swing of about 10.7% compared to Barack Obama’s performance there in 2008. (I’m using the figures from The New York Times).

But the good news for Democrats pretty much ends there. A loss is still a loss, and losses for the Democrats in Massachusetts are a rarity. It’s long been regarded as one of the most left-wing states in the union; Richard Nixon, when asked if he’d ever been to a communist country, is supposed to have said “Do you count Massachusetts?” It only adds insult to injury that this was the seat left vacant by the death of Ted Kennedy.

For Obama, this is a setback but not a disaster. It returns his Senate position to where it was last year before the defection of Arlen Specter, with 59 Democrat seats — one short of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster. His legislative program will be constrained, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing: some of Bill Clinton’s most productive years came in the mid-1990s when he had to work with a Republican-controlled congress.

In the short term, the administration’s health care plan will probably need rethinking. Since it has already been passed by the Senate, it’s technically possible for the House of Representatives to just approve the Senate version, but House Democrats sound decidedly unenthusiastic about that. Politically it would risk being seen as tricky, as not taking the message from the electorate seriously. (Although since Massachusetts already has universal health care, that may not have been a key issue for voters.)

The voters appear to be sending a message of distrust in the political establishment, specifically that new government programs and government spending are not the answer to their problems. (Republicans have successfully obscured the fact that this is also Obama’s view.) But they were also responding to local factors; by-elections frequently throw up strange results (lower turnouts are partly responsbile), and there’s general agreement that Coakley ran a particularly poor campaign.

Nor is a Republican from Massachusetts uniquely anomalous in the Senate. Senators rely on their personal vote much more than House members; several conservative western states have Democrat senators, while Maine, one of the most reliably liberal states, returns two Republicans. It’s also worth noting that by Republican standards, Brown’s track record is very liberal, and the fact that he wants to hold his seat in liberal Massachusetts — he’ll come up for re-election in 2012 — is likely to keep him that way.

The fact that the Republicans were able to unite behind such a moderate candidate is a good sign for them. Nonetheless, the party’s divisions still run very deep — establishment and anti-establishment, pro-choice and anti-choice, pro-torture and anti-torture, fundamentalists, teabaggers, birthers and just plain nutters. If they can put together a united front for November’s congressional elections, they might just be able to repeat Tuesday’s triumph on a larger scale. But don’t hold your breath.

Meanwhile, Sky News Contrarians correspondent Luke Walladge writes:

I don’t know who David Hirst is, but if his ‘analysis’ of the Massachussetts special election in Crikey yesterday is any guide then I haven’t missed out on much.

According to Hirst, the result represented “…a simple rejection of the political class that rules the US”, and the evil mainstream media can’t see the wood for the trees of their own particpation in the problem. Which, like most self-aggrandising nonsense, is, well, nonsense.

No Senate seat is ever safe. Massachusetts had a Republican Governor (Mitt Romney) as recently as 2007, and the State’s most recent Republican v Democratic Senate election not involving a Kennedy saw the Republican challenger poll 44% of the vote. Throw in voluntary voting and the fact this was, in Australian terms, a by-election and you have the groundwork for a less-than-usual result.

That is, of course, before Democrat Martha Coakley’s gaffes started. Calling Boston sports hero Curt Schilling a “Yankees fan” was one; not merely failing to press the constituent flesh but actively ridiculing the need to meet your electors was another. (For those whose baseball knowledge stops somewhere south of Kevin Costner, the Schilling comment was akin to calling Wally Lewis a proud New South Welshmen. In Brisbane.) And the sooner the curtain of mercy was drawn on her debate performances the better.

In a word, Coakley’s entire campaign was execrable. The woman spelled ‘Massachusetts’ wrong in a campaign ad, for God’s sake.

And while his opponent wandered around the state, bearing all the personality of a thrice-boiled potato and spouting a vague, nebulous fog of nothingness, the Republican candidate (and – I sh-t you not – former nude model) Scott Brown had one message to sell the punters; Obama’s health care plan “kinda stunk” and he was a’gin it.

Why did this work? The answer lies in the fact that Massachusetts already has near-universal health coverage, thanks to a law passed by Romney (and voted for by Senator-elect Brown while he sat in the state legislature). The only thing folks in downtown Boston have to gain from ObamaCare is a bloated federal budget and the threat, however imagined, of cuts to their existing benefits. Particularly among seniors, the fear of a decreased Medicare safety net has been a powerful force in activating opposition to health care reform.

In short, the Democrats lost because they had a terrible candidate, a terrible campaign and a message for Massachusetts that Massachusetts didn’t really want to hear.

However much Hirst or his fellow anti-establishment types try to protest otherwise, speeches by Congressmen in Texas who polled single figures in a quixotic Presidential campaign two years ago had no bearing on the result.  Trying to read your own prejudices into election outcomes isn’t an new game, but it is as fraudulent as it is hackneyed.

There are major potholes ahead for the Democratic Party; no-one could dispute that. The Left are complaining, the Right are mobilising and the middle class independents are seeing confusion where they expect results. But as important as health care, climate change and military draw-downs are, none of them will be achieved by delusional analyses of the Massachusetts special election.