All right, I'm appalled by the results of the special election yesterday in Massachusetts. I'm a liberal Democrat who did not want a Republican to take over the Senate seat long held by Ted Kennedy.

At the moment, I'm in California, and I voted absentee last week for Martha Coakley, the Democratic challenger, when the polls started to look grim.

But I was never very excited about the Coakley campaign. I didn't vote for her in the December primary. I'm going to say right now that sometimes feelings matter, regardless of what my intellect has me doing in the voting booth, and my heart told me she would lose.

 Apparently a whole lot of other Massachusetts voters followed their fears and resentments rather than lawyerly, intellectual arguments.

Here's the thing: During a time in which debate over major health-care reform has been fierce and the outcome will affect a large piece of the state economy, when unemployment is high and banks keep getting hand-outs, the Massachusetts guy and gal on the street have a whole lot to be unhappy about.

The Democratic Party—and the highly educated Obama administration—ignore these feelings at their peril.  Not just because the average voter is stupid; in Massachusetts, in particular, where local debates often have far more heft and emotional fireworks than presidential debates, assuming this is not only wrong; it's clueless about what gets voters steamed.

The "cognitive shortcuts" voters use—as political scientists like to call the tendency of people to vote based on what a friend says or an angry group of neighbors waving signs at a street crossing—may be based on plenty of horse sense. Voting on your gut isn't always wrong.

Democrats in other parts of the country may think Masschusetts voters are idiots or have temporaily lost their liberal sanity. As someone who arrived here in 1990, I can tell you that voters in this state are far from homogenous. Massachusetts has long been enmeshed in Democratic machine politics and working-class resentment of the white-collar elite. 

There have been a string of Republican governors during my time, including Mitt Romney.

The whole Henry Louis Gates-cop fracas this past summer should also have alerted Democratic observers to the brewing town vs. gown resentments. These days, race and economic class can't be looked at separately.

And when a nominee during the run-up to a special election assumes she'll just walk into it and doesn't go out and talk to people and feel their pain, maybe she really doesn't deserve to be a Senator from this state.

Brian McGrory, a Boston Globe columnist, started pinning Coakley to the wall for not pressing the flesh, even when she was still the front-runner.  Last week, McGrory opened his "Race Is in a Spinout" with this:

"Martha Coakley made a jaw-dropping declaration earlier this week at the only live televised debate in Boston that she has deigned to do. She said, and I quote, 'I’ve traveled the state and met tremendous people.'’’

 If she did, it was under the cover of darkness, with an assumed name."

He went on to say, "Voters are smart. They want their next senator to take on all comers, to be aggressive and passionate in pursuit of such a critical office at a singular time. In Coakley, they see someone who hasn’t earned their support."

I don't always agree with McGrory, but in this case he's right. The only silver lining is that a new Democratic challenger can face Scott Brown a few years down the road. Mike Capuano, I hope you're listening.