Chris Christo/The Boston Herald via AP
Gubernatorial candidate and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey addresses the audience at a watch party, Tuesday, September 6, 2022, in Boston.
After two terms as the state’s top law enforcer and legal advocate, Maura Healey, the Democratic candidate for governor of Massachusetts, is no stranger to the Bay State legislature and its major players: House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka. Along with their lieutenants, most have served for many years even before Healey came on the scene as attorney general in 2014. Barring a political supernova, Massachusetts voters will send Healey to the statehouse, where she will have the built-in advantages of experience and familiarity that incumbent Charlie Baker and Deval Patrick, the last Democratic governor, lacked when they came into office from the private sector.
In the Massachusetts legislature, what the leaders want, the leaders get. They fiercely guard their own legislative priorities, which range from moderate to conservative. They ride herd over a compliant rank and file who fear the wrath that might yank any defiant ones out of committee chairs and into basement office exile. They refuse to make joint committee votes public and deep-six bills on greater transparency. Above all, they preside over an institution that conducts business so leisurely that lawmakers in a full-time state legislature end up cramming significant amounts of business into the waning days of a session.
Major climate legislation got done this year, but a multibillion-dollar economic development bill stalled in the end-of-session logjam.
“The way I describe the Massachusetts legislature’s evolution over the past decade is that they have gone from doing things that are actively harmful to things that are woefully insufficient,” says Jonathan Cohn, policy director for Progressive Massachusetts, a statewide political advocacy group. “There is a certain type of conservatism bred out of inertia, risk avoidance, lack of engagement on policy on an individual level and the fact that the most powerful interests militate in favor of the status quo. Not an outright ‘big C’ conservativism like a Republican legislature, but a status quo bias in operation.”
This reality on the ground belies the state’s reputation as a progressive la-la land. There are strong regional variations in Bay State basic blue. Broadly speaking, Boston and some western suburbs runs a deeper shade of blue, thanks to the leftward shift in the past several years led largely by progressives like Mayor Michelle Wu. As a region, western Massachusetts leans progressive. The far northeast, southeast, and central areas, however, lean moderate to conservative.
In Massachusetts, the closer the state gets to the trifecta of Democratic control, the further the legislature moves from the kind of life-altering change that makes a difference for the seven million state residents. Policymaking warps into unrecognizable forms when it runs into the internal partisan sniping in which Democrats excel. Healey will have to pivot from being a national agenda-setting activist attorney general to a chief executive who must arm-twist fellow Democrats who like lawmaking the way it is, including legislative leaders who revel in showing governors that they are the real power brokers in the building.
That inertia is magnified by notoriously uncompetitive legislative elections. This year, more than half of the incumbents in the 200-seat legislature are running unopposed, ensuring the preservation of long-serving Democrats in a quasi-permanent Democratic supermajority. One of the few encouraging signs for the institution is a new class of freshman lawmakers that will include more people of color. During the 2020 census redistricting process, state lawmakers embraced diversifying the predominantly white body, adding a total of 19 House and Senate majority-minority districts, with four of those districts having no incumbents.
In the Massachusetts legislature, what the leaders want, the leaders get.
Healey has been angling for the governor’s office for years and, with superior name recognition and fundraising pull, she dropkicked her only prominent challengers out of the race long before the September primary, trouncing Sonia Chang-Díaz, a Boston state senator who remained on the ballot, by a 72-percentage-point rout. If she wins, Healey would be the first woman elected governor and, perhaps, one of the country’s first two lesbian governors. (Tina Kotek is the Democratic candidate for governor of Oregon in a too-close-to-call contest.) Her Republican opponent, Geoff Diehl, a former state representative and habitual office seeker turned Trump acolyte, had a somewhat tighter contest against Chris Doughty, a first-time candidate, a moderate businessman.
Healey leads Diehl 52 percent to 26 percent, according to a Suffolk University/Boston Globe/NBC10 Boston/Telemundo poll. She has a nine-percentage-point advantage among independents.
The winner won’t lack for challenges. Eye-popping housing costs and transportation issues have simmered and flared under the past three governors: Charlie Baker, the popular Republican governor who opted out of running for a third term; his Democratic predecessor, Deval Patrick; and Patrick’s predecessor, Republican Mitt Romney—all of whom came into office with ambitious transportation plans and governance reform proposals.
Despite mountains of studies available to them, however, Massachusetts governors have somehow seemed unable to fathom how serious these problems are and, especially, how they will drag down a governor’s agenda.
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, Boston’s regional transit network, is the crisis generator that invariably finds a way to deliver some catastrophe, usually not long after a new governor’s swearing-in—Charlie Baker wound up with a system collapse after a series of harsh winter storms and appointed a fiscal control board to bring order. On the rails and in the streets, though, the delays, accidents, fires, passengers injuries—including one death—continued and the feds swooped in. A ballot question that would reduce fiscal pressures on transportation (and education) with a four-percentage-point tax on incomes over $1 million is on the November ballot. Today, the only hope that riders have is that the federal government takes the entire system off the state’s plate in the short term to wring some of the dysfunction out of the system. A June MassINC Polling Group survey of likely Democratic primary voters found that 59 percent of those surveyed wanted the next governor to make “big, bold change” in transportation, which came in second only to clean energy as the state issue that they considered most important.
Housing is another longtime trouble spot. Soaring rents and single-family home price tags have spread across the state from Boston, forcing people to rule out moving to the smaller cities and towns two and three hours west of the state capital. The simple solution—more housing and more housing near public transit—meets fierce resistance in suburban locales fixated on keeping out people of color and families with children of any color that presumably threaten property values and tax bases.
With Baker, America’s most popular governor is out the door, and it is not surprising that Healey gave him a shout-out not once but twice in her primary victory speech. Having some of that Baker patina rub off may spell sellout for some, but those gestures bow to the reality of nearly three million independent voters, 60 percent of the electorate, who outnumber Democrats and Republicans and who kept Baker in power.
If Healey faces even the slimmest threat, it comes in the shape of voters eager to weigh in on a ballot question that calls for repealing the law enabling undocumented residents to have driver’s licenses. (Baker supports a repeal.) A June Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll found the question breaking down on predictable partisan lines: Democrats overwhelmingly opposed the repeal, while Republicans strongly supported striking down the law. The gap narrowed among the crucial independent bloc, however, with 51 percent in favor and just 37 percent opposed. Another June poll, this one from the University of Massachusetts Amherst/WCVB, with a larger sampling, found that a plurality of voters supported repeal, with a high number of voters still undecided.
Even so, Republican Diehl’s course runs steeply uphill, especially now that Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has inserted himself into the race with his road-to-the-White House stunt—sending undocumented people to Martha’s Vineyard. He is unlikely to campaign on the “rule Massachusetts with an iron first” slogan bequeathed to him by Donald Trump. He has already adopted the general-election tack-to-the-center strategy that served Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) so well on his way to his 2021 victory. But trying to slither to the center undetected may not be as smooth a move for Diehl today as it might have been before Dobbs and Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) decision to introduce a national abortion ban into the midterms conversation at a time when Republicans want to keep inflation and the economy at the top of voters’ consciousness.
Where does this environment leave Healey as the likely incoming governor? Attorneys general are usually circumspect about their political leanings. Healey stayed in that lane, except where she had widespread support, as she did on such issues as voting rights and reproductive rights. In keeping with her moderate outlook, she has not used her campaign platform as a breakout opportunity to telegraph her legislative priorities, which lawmakers might want to drive a stake through early on.
There are no high-profile new initiatives across 12 issue areas she checks off on her campaign website. Her calls for reform are more of a greatest hits collection of familiar Bay State aspirations: increasing the housing supply, more dense development situated near public transit, new leadership and better governance at the MBTA. In short, it is a broad and understated platform, delivered as if she was trying to keep expectations in check while appealing to both centrist and liberal voters.
“Under a Republican governor power resides within the legislature, they set the agenda: They can ignore whatever the governor asks them to do because, at the end of the day, they can pull together the votes for what they want to do regardless,” says Cohn. “[A] Democratic governor assumes that the legislature should pass the Democratic governor’s priorities, which takes power away from the Speaker and away from the Senate president.”
Accordingly, Healey’s battles won’t end in November.
This post has been updated.
