Shortly after the polls closed on primary night, we dialed up the two state major-party chairs for some fresh hot general-election spin.
“Massachusetts is not a place for Donald Trump and for his values and what his type of leadership is going to bring,” said Democratic Chair Steve Kerrigan. “What you saw tonight was the completion of the total takeover by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement of the Massachusetts Republican Party. We look forward to putting Maura Healey and Kim Driscoll's record for the last four years up against what Donald Trump has been spewing in Washington and what Mike Minogue has been talking about.”
For GOP Chair Amy Carnevale, the election will be about “the issue of affordability and what it means to be a resident of Massachusetts, struggling to make your ends meet, struggling to pay your electricity bills, hoping your kids can afford to stay here when they graduate college, and those are all issues that Mike Minogue will be talking about headed into the November election. The residents are feeling that affordability crisis, and Donald Trump is a sideshow that is talked about by the Democrats to distract people from Maura Healey's record as governor over the last four years.”
No surprises there, or in the primary results beyond the usual thimble-full of upsets. But if there is to be a November surprise here in incumbent heaven, it will come at the hands of the 600-pound gorilla of Massachusetts politics, the independents, now up to a whopping 67% of the electorate.
History suggests a Republican statewide candidate has to win about 60% of them to prevail. According to the most recent survey (from June) of the unenrolled by Dave Paleologos at the Suffolk University Political Research Center, the local polling gold standard, that means John Deaton and Minogue will have to nearly double their current independent pull.
How can they do it?
For Minogue, Carnevale’s strategy of waving off the Trump factor as a “sideshow” to Healey’s alleged incompetence seems problematic. The Suffolk poll shows 68% of independents think the nation is on the wrong track; only 46% say the same of Massachusetts. Seventy-one percent of them rate the state economy good or fair, with just 23% terming it “poor.” Almost a third of them hold Healey “most responsible” for the state’s problems, but the same number blame the Legislature, opening the door to an argument she could have done more if they let her. And the 12% who finger Trump as the culprit — a number the Healey campaign will look to boost in tandem with national Democratic efforts to do the same — narrows the pool of independents available to the GOP.
In a recent WBZ interview, Minogue was intent on attacking the alleged “corruption” of Healey and “the one-party system in Massachusetts.” Independents might respond to that case, if he can make it stick. But the Suffolk poll found they weren’t especially focused on Beacon Hill news; if 53% couldn’t cite a “signature achievement” of Healey’s, chances are they’ll also need a ton of reminding of Healey-era “scandals.”
And when the debate turns to corruption, Healey has a ready rebuttal. It rhymes with “chump.”
On that front, Deaton has more plausible deniability. Confronted with the Republican’s vocal criticisms of the president and the fact that he’s never voted for Trump, Kerrigan was reduced to painting Deaton as a carpetbagger who “blew in from Rhode Island just to run against Elizabeth Warren, and stuck around to run against Ed Markey.” Sorry, Michelle Wu (a Chicago native) and Maura Healey (born in Maryland, raised in New Hampshire), no blow-ins need apply.
But Carnevale’s theory of the case seems equally specious. “The fact that Ed Markey, who's been in office for 50 years, had a challenge in the Democratic side I think shows that Bay State residents are really ready for a new voice,” she said. Perhaps the magnitude of Markey’s defenestration of Seth Moulton hadn’t sunk in yet.
Perhaps the most daunting thing for the challengers about the primary results was the way they reinforced both parties’ status quo. Independents here have erased the chalk before, electing three relatively moderate Republicans governor and sending Scott Brown to the Senate.
But Bill Weld, Mitt Romney and the late Paul Cellucci aren’t walking through that door, as Rick Pitino might put it. And Markey is no Martha Coakley.
Uphill battle, commence.
