The blog Offensive Politics has done some in-depth analysis of the recent Senate special-election upset in Massachusetts, comparing the results of victorious Republican candidate Scott Brown to those of the unsuccessful Republican Presidential candidate John McCain in 2008. It’s pretty clear that Brown out-performed expectations with Democratic voters, but this chart of the change in Democratic voters from 2008 to 2010 makes the contrast stark:

You can find more charts, and the data and R code to reproduce them, at the link below.

Update 10:56: Political scientist Boris Shor has also analyzed this election, concluding that Scott Brown is more liberal than current Senate Republican Olympia Snowe and congressional Republican challenger Dede Scozzafava (who lost her primary amongst claims she was too liberal). Incidentally, Boris relies on the big-data capabilities of REvolution R Enterprise for Windows to make these analyses possible.

Offensive Politics: Mapping MA election results