Just before polls closed, independent Senate candidate Joe Kennedy of Dedham confidently asserted that his presence in the race would allow Republican Scott Brown to win the election, saying “the chances of me being a big factor are probably pretty dominant.”
“If anything, I will help Scott Brown win the race. We know for a fact we are pulling a lot more (Martha) Coakley support than we are Brown support. So if he happens to do well, then part of that’s because of what we did here,” said Kennedy, who estimated that he would get 4 percent of the vote.
It did not turn out that way: with 97 percent of precincts reporting Tuesday night, Kennedy had pulled in just 1 percent, not enough to affect the outcome.
But Kennedy – who ran as an independent, but is a member of the National Libertarian Party – had much to say as this short, topsy-turvy special election campaign came to an end.
Though he was sent tens of thousands of e-mails from Brown supporters telling him to get out of the race, Kennedy said he never seriously considered doing so.
“When somebody belligerently hammers you with e-mails and all this other kind of stuff, you’re never going to support that person. You’ve basically assaulted me, and now you want my help. Why would anybody help anybody who doesn’t go about it politely?” said Kennedy, 38, who is a vice president at State Street in Boston, and took an unpaid leave of absence from his job to run his upstart campaign. “If they really wanted my endorsement, somebody from Scott Brown’s campaign or himself could have picked up the phone and given me a call, but they couldn’t be bothered to do that.”
He gave an interview at Dedham’s Halfway Café, where about a dozen supporters were gathered at 7:45 p.m. The candidate expected more people to roll in as the night went on.
Kennedy’s team was small, overall, for this election: campaign manager Dave Galusi said they relied on a core of 5 to 10 people, all unpaid.
Kennedy said a lot of people voted for Brown to stop the Obama agenda.
“This vote is not a vote for any candidate. This vote is a referendum on health care,” he said.
Kennedy said he believed he was pulling would-be Coakley supporters because his campaign received over 120 emails on election day alone from “people who were going to vote for Martha Coakley that decided to vote for Joe Kennedy,” compared to one such e-mail from the Brown side.
