Philip W. Johnston , chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party: “If John had left the Senate, it certainly would have set off a game of musical chairs. Now that he’s not running, I think most people will stay where they are and wait.”
Scott Harshbarger , a former Massachusetts attorney general: “. . . you are losing the opportunity to have new people, new faces become involved at all levels of state and federal offices — as well as what it does to enliven and energize the party and the activists.”
When you have more than one party in action, seats are won and lost on a more frequent basis. Seats change hands because of conflict, ideas, and coattails. The power of incumbency is strong, but some seats change in the general election.
When you have only one party, seats are only lost in the primary. Because a primary is an election among “friends,” the stakes are high. Anyone who runs a primary challenge and loses is forever branded. In a state with only one party the loser is ostracized, never to return. People don’t mount primary challenges because, perversely, the stakes are higher than mounting a challenge in a general election.
One more quote: “‘Upward mobility is a lot more difficult in a state where one party is so dominant,’ Johnston said.” Taking it further: not only do we lose the opportunity to see new faces, but the old faces are mostly just standing in line. There is no disruption, no “rolling boil” that brings good, new faces to the top. There’s just the current office holders, grimly clinging to what they have and waiting for someone above them to move along.
Looking at the current landscape, only one of Massachusetts’s 10 representatives has retired in the last 10 years, and the senators are at 22 and 44 years in office. Are these really the best people for their offices? Or did they just get there first? With no real second party in the general election, and the huge risk/reward ratio in the primary, the status quo continues. Looking at the future, there isn’t really a prospect for change until 2012. That’s the year that Massachusetts will lose a congressional seat to population shifts and Kennedy’s eighth term ends.
Six more years of Kerry isn’t just six more years of Kerry. It’s six more years of everybody else, too.
Some on this site have argued that this calls for a revival of New England Republicanism: socially moderate, fiscally conservative, flinty but not bigoted. Others have suggested that this is an opening for the Greens or even the
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I think it means that we progressive Democrats should get more organized as Democrats so that we can win primaries and we never have an entrenched Finneran again.
…now that a united Democratic party has occupied almost all of the Massachusetts political sphere, it’s time to effect a de facto, if not de jure division?
I’ll give you an example:
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There was a special election for Golden’s seat in the MA House (18th Suffolk — Allston, Brighton, a bit of Brookline) in April 2005 IIRC. There were three strong candidates in the Democratic primary, none of which were currently elected officials:
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So, there was your primary fight. Mike Moran won, and has turned out to be more progressive than many thought he would be. Nevertheless, there was a primary, and it was between a more liberal Democrat, a so-called moderate Democratic candidate, a conservative Democratic candidate, a non-contender, and local folks lined up on one side or the other or the other-other.*
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It’s worth noting that after Mike Moran beat Tim Schofield by a few hundred (and Glennon by even less), the Schofield supporters did support Moran in the general, and Moran cruised to victory. He won re-election this past November easily over GOP candidate Russell Evans.
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With the exception of the pains caused by Greg Glennon, it was actually a great example of how divisions and primaries really do work. That being said, the problem remains: Moran is stuck behind some combination of Hart, Tolman, Barrios, and Walsh. Moran’s got nowhere to go until one of those guys move on, and they’ve got nowhere to go (save retirement/private sector) until they end up working for a Governor or find their way to US Congress. This is further exacerbated because State House and State Senate elections are both on even year cycles. If one were odd-year cycles, a state House rep could challenge in the primary for the state Senate, having his own job to fall back on.
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I hope that there are a number of good primary challenges in 2008, perhaps because of the health care and/or gay marriage votes.
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I realize this is a tangent off your main point, but I disagree with some of how you characterized the early 2005 18th Suffolk special election. (note: I was very active on Tim Schofield’s campaign)
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Schofield knew that people would see him as the gay marriage candidate because he is gay, so he deliberatly did not focus primarily on gay marriage. He focused on schools, health care, Democratic core issues like that, while emphasizing his identity as a liberal progressive by noting his support of abortion rights & gay marriage and opposition to the death penalty. Inside the district, among those voters who actually voted in the primary, I think he succeeded in defining himself in broader terms, not as someone focused on gay marriage.
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Mike Moran was the neighborhood favorite, who had run for the seat before, and who knew lots of people. He started out as a center-liberal sort of Democrat, soft in issues and strong on neighborhood connection. But over the course of the race he shifted more and more to the left, due to Schofield’s strong challenge, which came as a surprise to him. Basically, the more Schofield showed that he could draw supporters by running as a bold progressive, the more Moran came over to that side to try to keep some of them.
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In the end, with Schofield actually ahead but with most people not knowing that, Moran made a successful final pitch to progressives asking them to vote for him so as not to “split the progressive vote” and let Glennon (the very conservative Democrat) win. Moran painted himself as the progressive who could win, who was equivalent to Schofield on the issues (which he was not, but he was trying hard to appear that way). It worked (ironically, by splitting the progressive vote almost 50/50 and giving Glennon his best shot).
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It is because of how Schofield won, and what Moran had to do to win the race, that Moran ended up a reliable liberal vote in the House. He knows that’s why he won, and he knows that’s what the voters wanted. I wouldn’t call that unexpected, or imply that it just sort of happened and we got lucky. We made it happen.
and I live in Moran’s district.
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Schofield knew…
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Yip. But, that didn’t change the voters’ perception that his real interest in running was w.r.t. gay rights. People believed that he’d be progressive on other issues too, but in my personal experiences there’s no question that gay marriage was an undertone in his campaign, not necessarily through any acts of Schofield’s own.
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Mike Moran…
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Absolutely. There’s no question that Schofield’s ability to court significant votes forced Moran to run more to the left. He has kept that kind of voting record since he’s been elected, too.
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In the end…
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I honestly don’t think Schofield was ever ahead. Moran had a huge advantage in the Boston part of the district (which is all but Brookline Pct 1), and I don’t think Schofield could have made it up. Moran was smart to try to siphon off Schofield voters with issues (moving left) and a pragmatic plea. While Moran wasn’t equivalent to Schofield on the issues, they weren’t far off and, interestingly, Moran’s actual votes are almost entirely how Schofield would have voted (by my estimation).
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It is because…
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Absolutely. I do think that the progressive activism on Schofield’s campaign — and its successes on that campaign — have helped keep Moran more left than he might have been otherwise.
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But that’s evidence that the primary worked. It effectively allowed the Democrats to line up from very liberal to conservative, and wind up with a representative who represents a big chunk of those people. It wasn’t luck – it was hard work and a system that allows this kind of outcome, and outcome that I think was a pretty dang good one.
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I don’t think Moran will ever be a progressive’s darling, but I do think he will reliably vote the “right way” on progressive issues. Even if he didn’t want to, he knows he doesn’t have much of a choice since a primary allowed the demonstration that the progressives of his district are plentiful and resourceful.
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My confidence in that claim exceeds 99%. It’s based on the voter ID numbers I saw at the office in the final week, the canvassing I did that weekend, and correlating what we saw in GOTV with those things. In precinct after precinct, Schofield got significantly fewer votes than confirmed IDs who had voted, and in the precinct I was working in and had canvassed, I knew that those were good solid IDs.
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It was obvious that a significant number of Schofield supporters wavered and switched to Moran at the last moment because they believed Moran’s claims (buttressed by the Globe endorsement) that he was ahead, and that number most definitely exceeded 33 voters (you recall that Moran came in 64 votes ahead of Schofield, so if 33 fewer voters had switched at the last moment, Schofield would’ve won). I believe that number was well over 100. It could’ve been over 200.
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That is true, and it marks that primary as a partial success. We got a good reliable vote out of it. What we missed out on was something even more important: an articulate & effective leader. Even Moran admitted, in a debate, that he wasn’t as smart as Schofield, and nobody mistook him for being as articulate and well-spoken as Schofield either. There are a lot of issues (such as public school funding & reform) where Schofield would’ve been developing new policies and proposing new legislation and helping other legislators learn and getting people to pay attention. Think of Carl Sciortino – I firmly believe that’s the kind of freshman legislator Schofield would’ve been.
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Only as well as a primary can work under the current voting system, where people are subjected to perverse motivations. It’s very clear to me that a) Schofield would’ve been the best legislator of the bunch, and b) Schofield has the most support among those people who voted in that election. If we had Instant Runoff Voting, he would likely have won, and I think the primary would’ve “worked” better.
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Allston-Brighton got a good Representative. I think they’re pretty happy with Moran (happier with him than they would’ve been if he’d won without Schofield’s challenge). But they missed out on the great Representative they really wanted, and could’ve had.
with two precincts. Voter after voter came through and three if not four of the poll watchers would all check off names. I came back later in the day and the same thing was still going on. The IDs were awful, across the board.
I saw & heard similar things. However, I had more to go on, because I’d been seeing how the numbers were coming in and doing a lot of canvassing repeating in the same areas, and correlating what I saw. I’m convinced that our IDs were much better than the other campaigns because we’d been repeating the same doors in the week before the election, and we’d covered more of our doors, and the other campaigns hadn’t. However, many of ours were wavering at the end, and in the final days, many of them switched. So what you’d see at the polling place is someone who had previously been IDed by Moran (or, less often, Walsh) who had been later IDed as a Schofield supporter, but who might actually be voting for Moran. So you’d often see two or three campaigns checking off the same name. The final result in most precincts AFAIK was that Moran outperformed his IDs and Schofield underperformed his IDs, which also strongly suggests late switches from Schofield to Moran. Given that that was the Moran campaign’s deliberate strategy, and that they did a great job of it, and that we heard that from some of our supporters, I think it’s a pretty solid case that that is what happened.
I’ve never worked on a campaign, so these terms are very eye-opening to me. What are ID’s and what does it mean that they were awful, and what do poll watchers do, and what are the names they are checking off?
When you go door to door, or you are on the phone, you give the voter your spiel and try to convince them to vote for your guy. If they love him and will absolutly vote for him, its a 1. If they like him and probably will vote for him, its a 2. Leaning against a candidate is a 3 and hell no I’ll never vote for that loser is a 4.
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Then, on election day, you have people sitting at the polls with a list of all your 1s and 2s (or just 1s). As they come in, you check off the names. When it starts getting later in the day you call the people who aren’t checked off yet and remind them to vote.
My memory is usually pretty good, so I am comfortable saying that Moran beat Schofield by 98 votes and Glennon by 102 or 103. It was a tough win, and had Moran not lived in the district his entire life and had he not run for the seat twice before, I think it would have been a Glennon victory.
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He was an aide to Golden, and had his full support. Plus, there is a group of 600 or so Russians living in a Jewish retirement home in the district that all vote as a block. Glennon, like his boss Golden before him, had them all locked up. Almost none of them speak English, and they all vote the way their leader tells them to. They are usually the margin that puts a candidate over the top.
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Towards the end of the campaign Moran did run a piece resembling an ad for a boxing match. On one side it showed past fights, with Moran the progressive splitting the vote and losing to the conservative Dem, Golden. The other side was the main fight of the evening, ie Moran v Glennon, and it implored voters not to split the progressive vote again and let the conservative slide in.
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The week before the election someone dropped Moran’s home neighborhood with an ad showing an endorsement for Moran from NARAL. It wasn’t Moran, and I’m fairly certain it wasnt NARAL. My best guess was that it was Glennon in a misguided attempt to show the people that he grew up with that he was out of touch with them.
Your numbers are wrong. Moran beat Schofield by 64 votes, and Glennon was another 32 votes further behind. so Moran & Schofield were closer than you remember, and Glennon & Schofield further than you remember. But it was very close all around.
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Glennon did indeed have the Russians. From what I remember, Glennon did as good a job as he could’ve, and got all the votes he could’ve. So the lesson I take back from the final results is that, given the campaign Glennon ran, he couldn’t have won, unless fewer progressives voted. Because as we can see, even with the liberal vote split very close to 50/50, the best possible position for Glennon, he still came in third! The number of voters who wanted a liberal candidate exceeded double what Glennon could get (even though he got the entire Russian bloc).
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Another thing it tells me is that Moran’s shrewd and successful tactic of convincing Schofield voters to switch to him was, ironically, getting them to do the opposite of what they thought they were doing. Because Schofield was actually well ahead, when Schofield supporters switched to Moran, what they were doing was causing the anti-Glennon vote to split, improving Glennon’s chances of winning. Despite that, though, Glennon just didn’t have enough votes to do it. No matter how the Moran & Schofield voters split up, he was not going to win.
What a charming picture.
Just ask the FBI agents who investigated.
I think so. Doesn’t that make more sense than having progressives vote Green locally and Democratic nationally.
–the senators are at 22 and 44 years in office. Are these really the best people for their offices–
Actually I think they are. They have a 100%/95 liberal voting record ( http://www.adaction…. ). IMHO, it is precisely because Kennedy can never become president that he doesn’t care about appealing to Ohioans of the country and votes 100% liberal. And now that Kerry finally realized he has no chances either, he will stop trying appealing to Ohioans (it doesn’t work anyway) and will again become the ultra-liberal senator. Maybe there are good people in the lower ranks of the Democratic party. But I, as an unenrolled liberal, don’t see the reason to change the senators – the current ones represent me quite well.
… Kennedy’s voting record and temperament before and after the 1980 election to better predict whether Kerry will in fact become more liberal.
…and then there’s leadership. Kennedy’s provided the latter on issues across the board. Kerry’s offered only the former, for the most part, imo.
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It’s one of the frustrations I have with incumbency here in Mass. I can’t really point to a vote that, for instance, my Rep Capuano has made that I strongly disagreed with. But dammit, I’d like to see him being more aggressive on a whole host of issues–using the relative safety of his seat to take on some challenges for the good of the country.
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(P.S. Congressman, you can start by cracking down hard on this Iraq misadventure.)
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The thing is, if they were always scrambling for donations and votes, I think they’d be less likely to play such a role. So I don’t know what the answer is.
I also believe competition is a good thing, and your assessment of the stagnation here is right on the mark. However, considering the influence of the national-level republican party on the local-level republican party, there’s no way that promoting “good republicans” here is going to get very far. Sure we might elect a handful of liberal R’s, but any attempt to break out into the national scene would be squashed like a bug.
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Now think of a different scenario… what if the Dems keep a strong centrist foothold, and the Greens and Republicans level out at either end of the political spectrum. I’d venture to bet that a state legislature that’s even 10%R/80%D/10%G would be MUCH more lively than the current 15%R/85%D. At 20%R/60%D/20%G there’s some real, healthy competition. At 25%R/50%D/25%G we’d have some truly amazing fireworks.
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You can’t get 25% G unless 25% of the districts have at least 33% G voters (and realistically, much more like 40%+). Since the Democrats are going to run in any district with significant green voters, you’ve got to find 40% of a district that will vote for a green instead of a Democrat. It just isn’t going to happen, since (a) the Dems do keep an eye on environmental issues, and (b) any particular Dem can always run to the left of the Democratic Party on green issues, thereby co-opting more of that Green’s platform.
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Hell, I’d love to see the libertarians work out a deal with the GOP to get some state rep seats. You want real fireworks:
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50%D, 20%G, 20%GOP, 10%Lib
This isn’t govenment camp where everyone gets a chance to play, its politics. This is just the way the system works. Politics isn’t a pure sport, its a game played by serious men. Our representatives bring experince to the table in Washington having been in office so long. How much influence does Senator Kennedy bring to the table because he’s been there for 45 years? And how much has he brought to Massachusetts because of his seniority? The same goes for Kerry and the rest of the delegation. Some new faces would only weaken our states stance on the national stage.
What does it say about progressives that we insist on judging on appearances? If we line up two progressives with the same views right down the line which is more progressive, the openly gay progressive or the plain progressive? More importantly when a primary between two candidates with the same positions is two years in the past why haven’t the loser’s supporters lined up behind the nominee? The problem isn’t with the primary system. The problem is us.
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Why is it so hard to believe that Representative Moran has always been pro-choice, pro-gay marriage and anti-discrimination of any kind? I worked on the campaign you are talking about. As Tim admitted later, Schofield and Moran had exactly the same positions. Moran did not shift left. He is and always has been progressive. I was at his NARAL endorsement interview. They endorsed someone they trusted to vote progressively. The votes he has cast since being elected back up that good judgement.
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Schofield’s primary tactics included a subtle smear campaign in which he painted himself as “more progressive.” Based on the responses he did a fine job. Moran’s tactics included bringing in the local base. He did that by focusing on local issues when he spoke to people in the neighborhood who might get behind his true feelings and progressive stances oin social issues. It worked.
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It was a vigorous primary between two progressives, a moderate and a conservative; the kind you would think speaks well of the primary system but here we are two years later. Allston-Brighton has a rep who votes progressively and you would think all the progressives would have gotten behind him by now. Silly me. Obviously the progressive thing to do is to never support good legislators like Representative Moran because he doesn’t look like we want a progressive to look. (Gasp, he’s a straight white male from a Catholic family…) No wonder the moderates have us beat.
*might not get behind his true feelings and progressive stances on social issues.