President, women, new voters helped Warren win Lowell big

LOWELL — Cambridge Democrat Elizabeth Warren won over the Mill City in a big way on Tuesday, a dramatic improvement over her party’s dismal showing in the 2010 special election that saw Republican Scott Brown wrestle away the open U.S. Senate seat from state Attorney General Martha Coakley.

In the aftermath of Warren’s citywide 5,773-vote drubbing of Brown, Democratic Party campaign staffers not only marveled at her win, but also the margin of victory.

This, despite Brown’s crafty score in securing the endorsements of two of the city’s most popular Democrats in City Councilor Rita Mercier and state Rep. David Nangle.

Nangle, who won his own bid for an eighth term as he trounced Republican businessman Martin Burke, 9,125 votes to 2,454, did not return phone calls Wednesday requesting comment.

Mercier, a perennial ticket-topper in City Council races who out-distanced her closest competitor by nearly 1,200 votes in her last race, could not be reached Wednesday.

In 2010, Brown carried Lowell with 10,548 votes to Coakley’s 9,547. This time, his opponent out-slugged him, 19,678 votes to 13,905, as more than 62 percent of the city’s 54,753 voters participated in the election.

Jesse Bragg, deputy campaign manager for U.S. Rep. Niki Tsongas, said the Warren and Tsongas camps worked side-by-side in Lowell to drum up interest in the races.

He attributed the huge turnout to the presidential race at the top of the ticket. As for the Nangle and Mercier endorsements for Brown, Bragg said he thought the endorsements for Warren from other popular Lowell public figures like City Councilor Vesna Nuon and Mayor Patrick Murphy may have evened things out.

“Still, it’s near-impossible to tell what effect if any these endorsements have on a race,” he said.

The female vote, he said, likely played a bigger role. Bragg said both the Warren and Tsongas races “energized women” and added that only men and women “who had been living under a rock were not touched or reached out to in some way by both campaigns.”

Nuon said he didn’t think the endorsements of either Nangle or Mercier would factor at all in the Senate race. He remembered when Coakley lost to Brown in 2010 and said the Attorney General’s “ground game in Lowell was not nearly as mobilized as Warren’s.”

“She (Warren) reached out to everyone, especially the Asian community, and left nothing up to chance,” he said. “Young Asian voters just got out there, it was impressive.”

The most coveted voters in Lowell, Nuon said, were the thousands of freshly-registered ones who likely had no idea who either Nangle or Mercier were.

Nuon said he took about four days off from work to help kick the final leg of Warren’s Lowell campaign into overdrive. He said he was particularly impressed by the Asian turnout in Ward 4 and Ward 8.

Post-election data shows Warren claimed an average of 68.27 percent of the vote in the three precincts comprising Ward 4, a block spread out over the Highlands neighborhood.

The three Highlands precincts comprising Ward 8, just west of Ward 4, went to Warren by an average of 56.37 percent.

Warren’s most overwhelming numbers were registered in Ward 7, Precinct 2, site of the city’s Acre neighborhood, where she claimed a whopping 76.3 percent of the vote.

Brown’s only decisive wins came in Ward 1, where claimed 57.7 percent of the vote in Precinct 2 and 52.9 percent of the vote in Precinct 3, both of which are located in the more-affluent Belvidere neighborhood.

For Cliff Krieger, chairman of the Lowell Republican City Committee, he said he had “no insight except to say that the Warren machine must have done a better job getting out the vote.”

He acknowledged thinking the endorsements of Democrats Nangle and Mercier would boost Brown’s vote totals but said the large minority turnout was predominately pro-Warren, an observation that Nuon agreed with.

“We have not done a very good job of creating a philosophy and a message that resonates,” Krieger said about the overall health of his party. “Part of the problem in my mind is that the Democrats have captured the high ground on messaging.”

Follow Evan Lips at Twitter.com/evanmlips.