Via Political Wire, Rasmussen says Reilly and Patrick still beat Healey and Mihos almost identically:
When voters consider a three-way match-up, Democratic Attorney General Thomas Reilly leads with 34% support over Republican Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey’s 27% and Mihos’s 21%. Mihos has gained a couple points since our last election poll in Massachusetts, Reilly has lost four.
With lawyer Deval L. Patrick as the Democrat, Patrick leads 34% to Healey’s 27%, and Mihos gets 19%. Again, that’s a two-point gain for Mihos, four-point loss for Patrick. Healey has also gained a couple points in this match-up.
Before Mihos jumped in, Reilly led Healey 49% to 27%, Patrick led Healey 41% to 31%.
No Gabrieli yet, I see. Interesting that Mihos would seem to eat into the Dems’ numbers the most. Anyone got some wild n’ crazy hypotheses?
It is because socially liberal, fiscally moderate voters have defined the past four gubernatorial elections. Silber almost won with that message. Weld, Cellucci, and Romney did win. (Although they governed differently than they ran.) These voters are looking for a home and they do not feelcomfortable with the Democratic Party. Reilly makes the strongest case as the Democrat who can earn their support. We need to make a home for these voters if we want to win.
Reilly turned of a significant set of the socially liberal voters that predominate in this state by positioning himself as the more conservative Democrat. Especially with gay marriage, which is the “sexiest” issue serving as a symbol of who is socially liberal this year. Reilly is seen as a gay marriage opponent. Politically, that was a very bad move (though he didn’t realize it at the time, just as Kerry didn’t realize how politically damaging voting for the Iraq war would be; polls can be misleading).
…the same numbers for Patrick? It appears that Mihos is eating into Patrick’s support at a similar rate.
IMHO, has less to do with Mihos than we might suspect. As LG, we see and hear Healey more in the news than we do the other candidates and during a time like this (a “downtime” between the caucuses and the convention), it doesn’t surprise that the candidate who picks up points is the one who gets the most free media. Many, many voters are still not paying attention to this race.
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As for the socially liberal/fiscally moderate voters, I agree with MaverickDem’s point about bringing them back into the party, but I strongly disagree about Reilly being the best one to do that (I’m a Patrick delegate). Deval can offer the voters more assurance that he will not support cronyism and wasteful spending because he will not be perceived as a Beacon Hill hack — Reilly will have much more trouble on that score. I feel that many independent fiscally moderate voters in MA are not anti-govt. spending or taxes per se; rather, they’re uncomfortable with those things because they see their money being wasted by a hackocracy — voters in this state were willing to approve the Clean Elections Law, even though it cost money, because they thought it would save money in the long run by reforming government. These voters will be more comfortable with Deval than with Reilly.
Patrick, I enjoyed your post, even if I disagree with your conclusion.
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Right now, the majority of voters are anti-tax, at least when it comes to the income tax. I agree with you that some of those people (perhaps even a sizeable portion) might support “better” spending sometime in the future, but that notion is premature. Voters are awfully smart. They want to see improved discipline before they give state government even more responsibility with their money. For four straight gubernatorial elections, they have been telling Democrats, “We do not trust you to run the state’s finances on your own.” That is why Democrats should support returning the income tax rate to 5.0% – as Tom Reilly has called for – and prove that we can do a better job of managing state government. We need to neutralize the tax issue and earn back the public’s trust on state finances. Then we can begin a discussion of how to better allocate state resources, including what we do and do not need. Voters will not accept putting the cart before the horse.
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You correctly point out that voters approved the Clean Elections Law, but who wouldn’t vote for something called “clean elections?” It sounds like mom and apple pie. Once voters witnessed Clean Elections in action, there was barely a peep from the general public about its demise. Perhaps Tolman was a bad test drive, but voters generally saw the program as wasteful. The support for Clean Elections is markedly tepid compared to the strong, consistent support for returning the income tax rate to 5.0%. Even late-entrant Chris Gabrieli recognizes the wisdom in taking this issue off the table.
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You seem to infer that Tom Reilly will be perceived as a “Beacon Hill hack.” This seems to be a strong sentiment among many Deval Patrick supporters, but I don’t believe it is shared by the general public. It seems to arise from a mistaken notion that incumbency equals insiderism. Ask any elected official on Beacon Hill if Tom Reilly is considered “part of the gang” and they will laugh. Tom Reilly has never “played ball” and, in fact, challenged the icon of Beacon Hill insiders when he had the audacity (so they said) to say that Billy Bulger was wrong to protect his murderous brother from law enforcement’s efforts to bring him to justice. It literally earned him boos at the Democratic State Convention. Quick trivia question: how many endorsements has Tom Reilly received from the Democratic State Party in contested elections? The answer: 0. Tom Reilly has never been and never will be the Democratic establishment’s candidate because he is far too independent.
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Meanwhile, Deval Patrick is clearly the choice of liberal party activists. And why shouldn’t he be? He courted them early and often in order to gain the instant network and credibility that comes with their support. While Patrick has, to his credit, brought some new people into the process, they are not alogether different than the liberal activists who have always dominated the Democratic State Party. So, you think the independent, Unenrolled voters who have decided every gubernatorial election since 1990 will be more comfortable with the party’s liberal candidate than Tom Reilly? To believe that rejects every message that the voters have been sending us for the past 16 years.
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Respectfully, I believe Tom Reilly is far better positioned to win back the corner office than Patrick.
If you’ve been reading here for a while, you probably already know my fairly low opinion of polls, particularly early polls. We are starting to get into the part of the campaign where polls do mean a little something, but when we’re talking about predicting who will get support after the primaries from which groups of voters for what reason… forget it. Ignore this poll. My comment has nothing to do with it. It’s my educated guess about how voters will react to the candidates, in response to the previous commenter.