Bill Galvin is out. (Hat tip: Fray.)
Why did he bail – and why now? Who knows? Galvin is an odd bird, the ultimate insider trying to play the populist card, periodically grabbing headlines by taking on HMOs, the P&G/Gillette merger, and other big economic targets. He’s been known as the “Prince of Darkness” on Beacon Hill for years, though no one seems to be exactly sure why (one theory is that it was his alleged habit of dropping dimes to Howie Carr when he had a particularly juicy tidbit to pass along). He’s been hinting at a Gov run for almost as long, but has never quite managed to pull the trigger. Plus ca change ….
This will, of course, make life much, much more difficult for Secretary of State candidate John Bonifaz, who now will be facing an incumbent, formidable, well-known, and well-financed primary opponent. Let’s hope he can make it interesting, though count me among the skeptical – my guess is that with Galvin staying put, this race fades way into the background as the much more hotly-contested races for Governor and Lt. Governor heat up.
a tough call for Galvin to make. With Patrick forming a strong base of new and energized supporters from scratch and Reilly being, well, Reilly, it was looking tough to get in.
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Ultimately I think Galvin may have pulled strongly from both the Patrick and Reilly camps, but in the end I think this speaks well for the emerging Patrick camp.
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I for one am pretty excited about the election coming up. The primary, as it is now, is shaping up to be two very different candidates with very different stances on issues like Marriage Equality, the Death Penalty, and now the role of government as whole–I mean did, you see that absurd tax stuff where Reilly basically agreed with Mitt on rolling back the income tax??? Come on!!! We have our cities and towns choosing between teachers in the schools, cops on the street, or raising property taxes, and you want to pass the burden even more? We need vision and leadership and not placating to Republican ideologies.
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Oh and sorry, Tom, in case you figured it out, that tax rollback idea killed any hope of me buying that progressive sounding email you sent out. You almost had me wondeirng if you really were for some stong ideals. Almost.
I know a guy whose kids go to that school. Man, it’s going to be a sh*tstorm!
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I heard about Galvin deciding against running but not the pro-Romney tax cut rhetoric. I already wasn’t a Reilly gal for so many reasons. Now I can definitely say that I will be supporting Patrick.
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(Yes! You heard it here. I’m endorsing Patrick. An official announcement will be forthcoming…)
If there’s one politician in this state who is impossible to figure out, it’s Galvin. He must enjoy being the insider’s insider as Sec of the Commonwealth, no other way to explain it. Or he has some confidence issues. No doubt he would have pulled some from both the Reilly and Patrick camps, making for a much more interesting primary.
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Thankfully, this means no Cam Kerry running for Sec either.
he is the Prince of Darkness. Maybe the bright light of the Governor’s race would cause him to burst into flames or something.
my guess is that with Galvin staying put, this race fades way into the background as the much more hotly-contested races for Governor and Lt. Governor heat up.
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I very much doubt that. John Bonifaz is the Howard Dean of this campaign. I don’t know if he will win or not, but one thing he won’t do is quietly fade into the background. Yes, he’s a mostly-unknown running against a big name with party backing … that’s what Dean was at the beginning of the presidential campaign. Bonifaz has a lot of history of real accomplishment and inspiring work, a bold and exciting platform, and a way of capturing people’s interest when he speaks. He’s extremely intelligent and he understands election issues deeply, at the technical and legal levels, while still able to talk about them in straightforward common-sense terms. And he can talk values well. Of all the candidates running for any office in Massachusetts in 2006 that I know of (and I mean any office), he’s the one who has really captured my interest and attention. I’m going to work as hard as I can to get him elected. I’m not alone, and the reasons he’s got me are the same reasons he’s got a powerful core of other political activists with him already. It will only grow.
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Election reform is a hot issue. People remember Florida 2000 (and “Secretary of State Katherine Harris”). People remember Ohio 2004 (and John Bonifaz was lead counsel for the Ohio recount). Why don’t we have same day registration for elections in Massachusetts? Because nobody has asked that question in a major statewide campaign yet.
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Beating Galvin will be hard, but doable. Putting this candidacy in the limelight, won’t be so hard.
Sorry, but election reform is a hot issue to the tiny minority of people like us who are freakishly obsessed with these sorts of process issues. No one in the real world cares about election reform.
We must be living in different countries.
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Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 were huge national stories. The Voting Rights Act sunsets are starting to get press and that will only increase. The number of little grassroots groups organizing around election reform everywhere I go on the country is staggerring. When Bev Harris spoke in Cambridge a few months ago she drew an overflow crowd of hundreds, with hardly any advertising or press. In 2003 & 2004 Dean said paper ballots and voting machines was an issue that random people spontaneously brought up to him at just about every single campaign event. Later when DFA, MoveOn, and a few other organizations had a petition about it, they drew hundreds of thousands of signatures in a very short time. Jesse Jackson, and his son the Congressman from Illinois, are campaigning for a constitutional amendment protecting the right to vote.
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Last year California decertified voting machines used in much of Southern CA and it was a big story in the news there. This year Georgia tried stringent ID requirements for voting, which got overturned as a violation of the Voting Rights Act, and that was big in the news there. Now the Supreme Court is reviewing Texas’ redistricting. State by state by state, a crescendo builds up, and just about everyone has heard something about it.
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Here in this state, Common Cause came just a few thousand certified signatures short of qualifying the redistricting ballot question, but they did collect nearly a hundred thousand signatures from residents of Massachusetts. The most popular progressive elected official in the western half of the state, Peter Vickery, who is a household name for most anyone out there who may run for delegate or vote in the primary, is also executive director of Mass Voters for Fair Elections. At last year’s state convention I handed out this flyer about IRV to hundreds of delegates. We got about 320 signatures from delegates (with more time, we could’ve gotten a lot more).
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Election reform is a very hot issue among people likely to be convention delegates, which means a good chance for a strong vote for Bonifaz at the convention. It’s also a hot issue among people most likely to vote in state primaries. And it’s something with a lot of media hooks, and a lot of latent references to things people have been hearing about. It is not a narrow niche process issue anymore, not by any stretch. And it certainly won’t be once a candidate for statewide office makes their campaign be about it.
If you thought that Ohio 2004 was a big deal to most of your country, then I think we are, in fact, living in different places. In my country, people are more concerned about a girl who went missing in Aruba than whether their vote gets counted — unless it’s a vote for American Idol, of course. Look, I’m the first to admit that we’re freaks for following this sort of thing. Most people can name more of the Friends than they can state legislators. Election reform is not on their radar screen because it’s too complicated or too technical of an issue. If they think about it at all, it’s in a “didn’t we do something about that?” way.
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And Ken Blackwell? Isn’t he the guy that makes those worst-dressed celeb lists?
I’m with sco. Howard Dean wasn’t running against an incumbent in his own party – and he was running for the highest profile office in the country. HUGE difference from what we have here. And while I think sco might understate the extent to which people care about election reform in general, I think sco’s right that people don’t perceive a serious problem in Massachusetts. Fact is, Galvin has done some good things – he got rid of punch cards and took us to optical scan way before anyone outside of Palm Beach County knew what a butterfly ballot was. I hope that Bonifaz can generate some interesting conversations about election issues – he’s obviously an accomplished guy, and I, for one, would enjoy the discussion. But a serious threat to Galvin? Nah.
This will sound glib and dismissive, but so be it: John Bonifaz seems like a genuinely smart, interesting guy with a terrific résumé. But there is no way in hell he’s going to get elected Sec. of Commonwealth running against the Iraq war. That’s the kind of message clutter we can really do without. If he’s against the war, he should run against our reps who voted for the Iraq war resolution: Meehan, Lynch, etc.