The lower 49 are getting all the ink for flushing the toilet on Trumpism. Not so much true-blue Massachusetts, which was expected to shun anything MAGA-related, and did.
But while the defenestration of eight-term Billerica Republican Rep. Marc Lombardo, has drawn attention mostly for the tender age of the 19-year-old Democratic selectman who beat him, it deserves closer scrutiny as a harbinger of Beacon Hill’s future.
“I wasn’t running as a partisan,” says Daniel Darris-O’Connor, who beat the seemingly entrenched incumbent by just 438 votes out of 18,245 cast in a town that often breaks narrowly for Democrats but was one of the few to back Trump in 2016. “I ran on bringing professionalism back. My opponent was simply not willing to do the job.”
Lombardo won his seat easily in 2010 amid the Tea Party wave that helped Scott Brown win the infamous U.S. Senate special election. He was unopposed in most of his subsequent re-election campaigns.
But like a motionless lobster in a tank, Lombardo began to stink. While still Middlesex County’s most Irish-Catholic town, Billerica was changing as a younger, more diverse mix of families were drawn to the relatively affordable home prices and access to commuter rail.
Meanwhile, Lombardo was compulsively playing to the far-right cheap seats. His Twitter feed is a steady drip of celebrations of ICE, evisceration of Maura Healey, denunciations of “the Green New Scam,” transgender baiting, and other staples of the Trump playbook.
And Lombardo’s ideological venom wasn’t limited to Democratic targets. He flopped badly in a 2024 bid to unseat House Minority Leader Brad Jones, who he later claimed had “conspired [with] Beacon Hill Democrats to sabotage the Mass. GOP, GOP candidates and the taxpayers” because he is “bought and paid for.” A Jones supporter, Rep. Paul Frost, alluded to Lombardo’s rep as a Beacon Hill no-show when he told the Herald: “Marc Lombardo would actually have to come into the building and advocate for people to vote for him to do the job. He brings nothing to the caucus and has brought nothing to the caucus.”
But Lombardo’s surfing of the Trumpian wave finally hit the rocks during a Sept. 24 debate with Darris-O’Connor on the Billerica town cable channel.
The challenger supported a moratorium on AI data centers “until guardrails can be set”; the incumbent opposed it, saying “we shouldn’t punish technology companies.” When challenged on his status as a reliable vote against abortion rights, Lombardo called it “a very tired and very poor attempt to characterize me as someone who doesn’t like women.”
Darris-O’Connor linked the incumbent’s spotty record steering state funding to Billerica to his “far-right” politics and baiting of GOP leadership: “It’s important that we have cooperative relationships, collaborative relationships. You don’t have to agree with everyone on everything but you can’t be disagreeable.” The response: “I want people to know that their representative Marc Lombardo was never a yes man. He never compromised.”
The closing statements summed it up nicely. Darris-O’Connor offered a positive, forward-looking message focused on town residents: “My politics haven’t been about very divisive cultural or political rhetoric, it’s been about getting things done for our constituents.” Lombardo insisted that “experience matters, life experience matters, professional experience matters.”
Apparently, there was significant Billerica fatigue with the Lombardo experience. And a plurality of voters in arguably the most conservative corner of Middlesex County seem to have contracted the same illness as voters all over the country — they’re sick of the right-wing’s trolling and looking for results, not b.s.
