Steven Senne/AP Photo
People sign a banner during a rally in front of the Massachusetts State House, in Boston, in support of the Work and Family Mobility Act, June 9, 2022.
This November, Massachusetts voters will decide whether to keep or repeal the Work and Family Mobility Act, a law passed earlier this year allowing state residents who meet all competency qualifications to apply for a standard Massachusetts driver’s license, regardless of immigration status. A “yes” vote on Question 4 would keep the current law, while a “no” vote would repeal it. Republican Gov. Charlie Baker vetoed the bill; the Massachusetts legislature overrode the veto in June.
Instead of leaning into an immigrant justice message, the “Yes on 4” campaign is choosing to highlight the question as one of road safety. “One of the things that we’re trying to point out is that this is not about immigration. It’s about safety, and safety is a state issue. Immigration is a federal one,” said Franklin Soults, a senior communications strategist with SEIU 32BJ. This messaging is designed to appeal to conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans, who are a large part of the electorate—Charlie Baker has the highest approval rating of any governor in the country—to support keeping the law in place, even if they may not be supportive of immigration reform in general.
“For many voters, the idea that everybody who is driving should be licensed and insured just makes sense,” Progressive Massachusetts Political Director Jonathan Cohn told the Prospect.
Instead of leaning into an immigrant justice message, the “Yes on 4” campaign is choosing to highlight the question as one of road safety.
The Yes campaign is emphasizing the support of law enforcement and police chiefs across the state. A recent television ad released by the campaign, narrated by Lawrence Chief of Police Roy Vasque, explains that the driver’s license law “makes sure every driver on the road can be tested, licensed, and insured.” The word “immigration” is not mentioned once.
Massachusetts has already been in the national spotlight on immigration this year. In September, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis spent $12 million flying Venezuelan asylum seekers living in Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, unannounced. Presumably, his objective was to catch liberal Massachusetts residents in a moment of hypocrisy, assuming Democratic rhetoric around tolerance would not extend to their own communities. The island rallied to provide the migrants food and shelter. But if the state votes no on Question 4, DeSantis’s gamble could be seen as proven belatedly correct—that liberals support the rights of undocumented immigrants in theory, but not in practice.
Fair and Secure Massachusetts, the coalition working to repeal the law, is happy to tie the ballot question to right-wing fearmongering around illegal immigration. One of their most repeated talking points is that giving undocumented immigrants driver’s licenses would enable them to vote, channeling manufactured GOP outrage around the country.
Yes on 4 is anxious to distinguish between the largely anti-immigrant parts of the Massachusetts GOP that got Question 4 on the ballot and more moderate elements who could hold the key to victory. Gov. Charlie Baker has not publicly taken a position, despite vetoing the law this past June.
Jamie Eldridge, a state senator for the Middlesex and Worcester District and a prominent Yes on 4 endorser, was sued by the Massachusetts GOP this summer for allegedly intimidating petitioners collecting signatures to get the question on the ballot. “The anger that I saw from some of the petitioners screaming at people, spouting conspiracies, questioning election results … really shows where the Massachusetts Republican Party has gone,” he said in an interview with the Prospect. “I think it’s one thing to disagree on policy, but to try to use the courts, to try to use law enforcement to stop essentially a form of speech, was shocking to me … I’m hoping that’s a wake-up call to all of my colleagues, both Republican and Democratic.”
Fair and Secure Massachusetts has only raised around a quarter of what the Yes on 4 campaign has, and polling shows voters on average do not see the utility of repealing something once it has already become law. However, those who support immigrant justice in Massachusetts should be rightfully wary of the outcome, which remains somewhat in doubt. Recent polling for the governor’s race has Democrat Maura Healey more than 24 points ahead of Republican Geoff Diehl, suggesting a firmly Democratic electorate this cycle. But polls show that a more modest 49 percent of voters statewide support driver’s licenses for all, with 14 percent undecided.
Voters do appear reluctant to change what they perceive to be the status quo, which might be progressives’ saving grace in this election. But if the election night outcome is anything short of a blowout, conservatives could seize the opportunity to pass their priorities via statewide ballot questions in future elections, as they will rightly conclude that the Massachusetts electorate is not as invested in progressive ideals as their reputation suggests.
This has already happened in other states. In California, the rideshare industry spent over $100 million in 2022 on Prop 22, successfully repealing established labor law that required them to recognize rideshare workers as employees rather than independent contractors. The fast-food industry is actively attempting to collect signatures to repeal another California law that creates a sectoral-bargaining board for the state’s 500,000 fast-food workers. (Unions have accused signature gatherers of telling voters that the measure would increase the minimum wage, when for fast-food workers it would do the opposite.)
Rideshare corporations attempted to contest Massachusetts’s own labor laws, in a repeat of their success with Prop 22. The state supreme court struck down the ballot measure, but there is no stopping corporate interests in the future from attempting to use the same playbook and contesting any policy that doesn’t align with their interests.
Massachusetts is heralded as a progressive, safely blue state on the cutting edge of progressive achievements. But states with less comfortable majorities have passed bills that have languished for years in the graveyard of the Massachusetts legislature. The Work and Family Mobility Act was first introduced a decade before it passed, and with strong Democratic supermajorities in both houses of the legislature, the obstacle was other Democrats. This is not unusual; the Massachusetts State House is full of politicians who claim to be Democrats, who make appeals to their voters every two years about fighting for the Democratic agenda, who get elected thanks to the work of local progressive activists, and who then sit comfortably at their desks without making an effort to get even uncontroversial Democratic priorities past the finish line.
In the end, only seven Democrats in the House and five Democrats in the Senate voted against the Work and Family Mobility Act. But few Democratic state legislators are making the case for the ballot question on the campaign trail. Neither the Speaker of the House, Ron Mariano, nor the Senate president, Karen Spilka, has mentioned the ballot question or the law in official communications the entire time the question has been on the ballot. “Most Democratic legislators are focused on their re-elections and helping other legislative candidates,” Sen. Eldridge explained. But two-thirds of the state legislative races are uncontested.
This lack of official support is especially significant since the Yes on 4 campaign has faced a much shorter timeline than is typical for ballot questions. The signature collection and certification process ended just a few months ago. “The question was certified so late that the secretary of state didn’t even have time to put it in the voter guide,” Soults explained. “It is on the secretary of state’s website, but I’m not sure that [voters] understand they can visit it there.” What will happen on Election Day will come down to educating voters that the ballot question exists and driving up progressive turnout.
Despite these challenges, Cohn remains optimistic about the coalition behind the Yes on 4 campaign. “It’s important to make sure that your legislative campaigns are done in such a way that you build an organizing apparatus to not only win legislation but to protect legislation,” he said. “Passing a bill is the first step.”
