Reply #11: You mean Patrick, who said that Kerry was an "uncommonly good man"

[karynnj]

and who said the country would have been better had he become President?

I tried to find statistics on Kerry's approval in the black community. I looked at Survey USA's site because they do give results by that demographic. However, they don't in MA because blacks are 5% of the state's population, making the sample size too small to be meaningful. I have never seen a Democrat get less than 80% of the black vote - anywhere.

I think that Kerry should reach out to the black community and he has, but the size of the AA community is such that the minute possible difference between him and Kennedy - if there is one ends up being far less than a 1% difference in the final vote. (To get there, you would have to assume Kerry gets 80% of the black vote - unlikely as he got 81% of Boston's vote - and that Kennedy got 100%, losing none. This is .2 * .05 = 1%. Mathematically, if his only motive was to get a higher vote, he would spend very little time with this community.

I don't know MA well enough to comment on the communities chosen, but I would guess that he and his office are not just throwing darts at a dart board. At the risk of being completely wrong, here are the places he has gone. He had one in North Hampton, which I think is Western Massachusetts, liberal, but over feeling ignored. The next was on Cape Cod. From the articles on the last election, this is an area of relative Republican strength - though they lost the open seat, it seems like without Perry's ignoring the sexual abuse of a minor, they would have won. The third was in Waltham - which is 10 miles from downtown Boston according to wikepedia.

I would guess - and this is going from what I see in NJ, not MA - that likely needs the most attention by all Democrats, not just Kerry - are working class Whites. This is the group that Obama spoke of as "bitter". I know this group - I grew up in a lower middle class suburb of the steel mills. Back when I was young slightly less than half the class went to college and the guys in the other half got jobs in the steel mills. These are the people we need to keep or win back - across the country. We also need to work to keep our advantage with Hispanics.

Another group worth reaching out to - especially in MA - is the college kids. From my daughter's comments, there are many who are more libertarian than liberal. In 2008, they were all with Obama - but the alternative was the legacy of Bush. In addition, the college kids are the bulk of the activists.