Boy, did the wheels come off of this one! Despite having to fend off Deval Patrick’s excellent campaign… well, that was the problem. Reilly didn’t treat Patrick like a serious opponent until it was too late. With scandals over using his office to cover up for a friend’s family and not vetting his runningmate (that lasted 24 hours) combined with the feeling that he was just the next in an assembly-line of Democratic gubernatorial losers, and his massive warchest meant squat.

Shunning the ‘turnaround’ attitude of Romney’s ’02 campaign, Healey decided to go nuclear with some hard-hitting ads. And as entertaining as that can be, leveling shocking allegations against a Democrat probably struck a chord too familiar with an electorate that felt George W. Bush would no longer be president if voters hadn’t bought into some outrageous swift-boating. She didn’t stand much of a chance anyway, but the campaign’s tone made it even worse.

The anointed Republican challenger ended up thirty signatures short of making the primary ballot at the deadline. It was probably for the best that his campaign was put out of its misery.

This was a race run on pure hype. Samiyah Diaz was a fresh-face in Republican circles: a 28 year-old black-hispanic Muslim single mom. And she was supposed to make a serious effort to oust the financially-embattled longtime state Sen. Diane Wilkerson. Instead she got crushed. Can we really blame Diaz for it? After all, Wilkerson won by a similar margin when she had legal woes before. But brining her margin down to 71% from 75% is nothing to be proud of.

A lot of people thought O’Brien was poised to break the Republicans’ 12-year old kung-fu grip on the corner office, but once again, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee let the state’s center-left-leaning electorate splinter. She let Romney dictate the terms of the race, and her rebuttals against him were too little, too late.