The Boston Globe has a list of the Fifth District election results by city and town, and I thought it might be instructive to see what that looked like on a map:
The results make sense. Barry Finegold won his hometown of Andover, and Jim Miceli won Tewksbury, which he represents. Jamie Eldridge won a group of small towns that overlap with his state rep. district. Eileen Donoghue won Lowell and the surrounding towns, including Methuen where she had the support of Sen. Steven Baddour (D-Methuen). Niki Tsongas was able to take the primary by racking up victories in Lawrence, Haverhill and Concord and coming in second in almost every community she didn't win (except Boxborough).
The general election for the seat will be October 16th, where Tsongas will face Republican Jim Ogonowski and three third-party and independent candidates. Tsongas will likely be the heavy favorite in that contest give the district's typical Democratic swing in Federal elections. Given that, it will be interesting to see how much the national parties get involved. Neither, I'm sure, wants to spend much money on a sure-win or a sure-lossm, and in particular Ogonowski must be careful that he doesn't get too heavily linked with President Bush or the national Republicans, neither of which are particularly popular in Massachusetts as a whole or the Fifth District in particular.
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