Building on jcohn88’s post from Friday, which looked at the primary results in Boston on a precinct-by-precinct level, I took advantage of some lousy weather on Saturday to look at town-by-town results in the governor’s race statewide.
By now most of us have seen the above statewide map, courtesy of WBUR, showing who won each town. By my count this map shows that AG Coakley won 220 of the Commonwealth’s 351 cities and towns outright and tied for first in six more (four with Steve Grossman and two with Don Berwick; more on ties at the bottom of the post). Steve Grossman won 80 towns (74 outright and six ties for first) and Don Berwick placed first in 51 towns (48 outright, 2 tied with Coakley, and 1 tied with Grossman).
I’ve found such maps to be interesting but of limited use in a three-way race, so I’ve gone ahead and made a spreadsheet and generated some more maps for your viewing pleasure. The goal is to show where each candidate did – or didn’t – have support and to identify some trends.
Martha Coakley
The sitting AG, of course, was the winner last Tuesday with 42.4% of the vote, compared to Steve Grossman’s 36.5% and Don Berwick’s 21.1%. As the map below shows, she did well just about everywhere and truly poorly almost nowhere.
The key for the map is as follows:
Good towns: Dark Blue: 60%+, Blue: 50-59.99%, Light Blue: 40-49.99%
Medium towns: White: 30-39.99%
Bad towns: Pink: 25-29.99%, Red 15-24.99%, Dark Red: Below 15%
The “Coakley Corner”: Coakley received over 60% of the vote in 10 communities. Except for Tolland, on the border with Connecticut west of I-91, all of them were in the northwestern corner of the state, where she grew up.
Majority rules: But Coakley won between 50 and 60 percent of the vote in another 36 towns, ranging from the liberal stronghold of Provincetown (59.0%) down to the adjacent towns of Brookfield and North Brookfield, each of which gave Coakley exactly half of the votes cast with Grossman and Berwick left to fight over the other half. Among the 50-60% towns was Coakley’s longtime residence of Medford (55.1%) and particular stronghold was Bristol County.
In all, the AG won an absolute majority in 46 municipalities in a three-way primary with three valid candidates. That’s impressive.
Winning where the votes are: Even more impressive, Coakley had the great good sense to run well in vote-rich municipalities. She placed first in 18 of the top 25 towns by votes cast. Moreover, she beat Steve Grossman by at least 10 points in the first 14 of those 18.
Coakley also placed a very-respectable second to Grossman in Peabody (where she received 41.1% of the vote), Weymouth (39.8%), Framingham (39.5%), and Quincy (36.1%). She finished third only in Newton (hometown of both her opponents, where she still polled just under 25%), neighboring Brookline (26.9%), and Lexington (30.7%).
City Slicker: As these figures would suggest, Coakley did very well in the state’s major cities. Jcohn88’s work showed Coakley’s strength among communities of color in Boston. I have not looked at other cities at the precinct level, but it appears those results were replicated across the Commonwealth.
You may recall that I posted a while back about turnout patterns in 16 cities across Massachusetts with high numbers of non-white voters, as well as younger and poorer voters, where turnout varies greatly from a Presidential year to a non-Presidential year. Turnout was fairly low in most of those cities this time around, but Coakley swept them.That’s right: she placed first in all 16:
- Coakley won an absolute majority of the votes cast in seven of my 16 cities: Lawrence (58.7%), Chelsea (58.2%), Springfield (52.2%), New Bedford (51.8%), Fall River (51.3%), Brockton (51.3%), and Lynn (50.2%).
- She scored between 45% and 50% in another four: Worcester (48.3%), Lowell (48.2%), Fitchburg (47.9%), and Boston (47.2%).
- She emerged first in closer races in Salem (44.3%), Pittsfield (43.7%), Holyoke (40.7%), Somerville (38.7%) and Cambridge (37.3%).
- Note that Grossman finished second (a fairly distant second for the most part) in all of my 16 cities except Cambridge and Somerville, where significant progressive communities threw support to Don Berwick.
- I really should count Malden in my group, and Coakley won an absolute majority there as well (50.4%).
Receiving over 45% of the vote in 12 of the state’s 17 most urban communities is a solid showing in a three-way primary. The question is whether Democrats can boost turnout in those cities in November.
Blue good, red bad: Coakley’s topline number was 42.4% and that support was broadly spread out across the state. As shown by the sea of blue in Coakley’s map:
- She was above 40% in 216 of 351 towns, those towns representing 63.5% of the total votes cast.
- She also was above 38% in another 36 towns.
- Coakley placed first in 196 of the 216 towns where she received at least 40%. Her highest second-place finish was in Dracut, where she got 43.1% but finished 28 votes behind Steve Grossman.
A look at my Coakley map will show you that particular areas of strength were her home region of NW Mass. (more below), the cities (more below), Central Mass., and the Cape. She may have appeal in Republican-leaning places after all.
While beating 40% in many, many towns, she didn’t do really badly in very many places:
- Coakley did not finish with under 15% of the vote in a single town in the state.
- She received under 30% in only 17 towns. Other than Newton and Brookline, her opponents’ home turf, and the curious case of Upton (more below), they were all in Western Mass., mostly smaller towns dominated by Don Berwick.
- Coakley finished third in only 10 towns: Newton, Brookline, Lexington, Wayland, Alford, Stockbridge, Monterey, Rowe, Westhampton, and Hadley. In most of those communities she wasn’t far behind the second-place finisher.
The unfilled blocs (30-39.99%) on the map show that even where Coakley finished behind Grossman (South Shore and southwest of Boston) or Berwick (the hill towns west of Northampton), she managed to rack up enough votes to score in the 30s and minimize the damage.
Steve Grossman
The Treasurer’s map, far from being a treasure map, tells the tale of a candidate who was a few points behind in huge swaths of the state and did really poorly in the west.
Good towns: Dark Blue: 60%+, Blue: 50-59.99%, Light Blue: 40-49.99%
Medium towns: White: 30-39.99%
Bad towns: Pink: 25-29.99%, Red 15-24.99%, Dark Red: Below 15%
The 413 blues reds: The most striking thing to me on the Grossman map is the sea of red west of the Quabbin. It’s truly shocking for a candidate who did so much to build the Democratic Party in Western Mass. to do this badly there. In this election, he found himself the odd man out in both the Coakley Corner (NW corner where the AG grew up) and the Berwick Bloc (liberal Pioneer Valley towns where the doctor ran strongest).
Broad support in the East: East of the Quabbin, Grossman’s map is not that bad. He hit 40% – a good enough figure to win this primary – in 88 cities and towns. He was within 3 points of 40% in another 56 communities. This shows me Grossman was not just a regional candidate the way Barry Finegold and Tom Conroy proved to be.
No running up the score: Whereas Coakley won over 50% in 46 cities and towns, Grossman broke the 50% mark only in the heavily-Jewish Democratic stronghold of Sharon. Berwick’s presence on the ballot almost certainly cost him a big score in his hometown of Newton (Grossman 47%, Berwick 29%, Coakley 25%) and next-door Brookline (Grossman 40%, Berwick 33%, Coakley 27%).
In the end, Coakley bested Grossman by more than 20 points in 44 communities across the state (including huge wins in Western Mass., and wins between 20 and 30 in cities of Springfield, Lawrence, and Chelsea). Grossman turned the tables on her in only Newton and Sharon. Coakley beat Grossman by at least 10 points in a whopping 135 municipalities, he beat her by at least 10 in only 13 towns.
Close but no cigar: Proving that we had (1) a close race, and (2) a lot of small towns with low turnout, Grossman and Coakley were separated by 25 or fewer votes in 119 of Massachusettts’s 351 cities and towns. Of those towns, Coakley won 85 and Grossman 29. They tied in five (more on that below). The top two candidates were within 5 percentage points of each other in an almost-identical 114 towns. Coakley won 61 of them, Grossman 48. 5 still were tied. Comparing Grossman’s map to Coakley’s will reveal broad areas like Central Mass. and the Upper Cape where, consistent with the statewide final score, she broke into the 40s but Grossman was stuck in the 30s. Just a bit behind in too many places.
Martha’s (and Don’s) Vineyard: Definitely not Steve’s. Grossman finished last, and with under 30 percent, in all six Vineyard towns. Coakley and Berwick finished 1-2 on the east side of the island (Tisbury, Oak Bluffs, Edgartown), while Berwick and Coakley were 1-2 on the west side (West Tisbury, Chilmark, Aquinnah).
The island town of Gosnold (Cuttyhunk and Elizabeth Islands) is technically part of Dukes County. There Berwick won with four votes, Grossman and Coakley earning three each. So I guess Grossman did crack 30% somewhere in Dukes County after all. Believe it or not, as we shall see below, Gosnold didn’t have the lowest turnout in this primary.
Beating Berwick: Grossman placed ahead of Don Berwick in 265 of the 351 towns, and they tied in another four. Grossman surpassed Berwick by at least 30 points in 19 towns (almost all between 128 and 495); by at least 20 points in 127 towns; and by at least 10 points in a whopping 223 towns, including virtually all the larger cities. In the top 25 cities by votes cast, Grossman topped Berwick by at least 10 points in 21. He beat him by 7.3 points in Lexington. Berwick topped Grossman in Cambridge, Somerville, and Arlington.
Berwick beat Grossman in 86 towns. I’ve mentioned Cambridge, Somerville and Arlington, but most were smaller towns in Western Mass. Berwick won big over Grossman (and generally over Coakley as well) in his Pioneer Valley and Berkshire strongholds. No way to know what this race would have been like with only two candidates, but Grossman’s support across the state was far broader than Berwick’s.
Don Berwick
Good towns: Dark Blue: 60%+, Blue: 50-59.99%, Light Blue: 40-49.99%
Medium towns: White: 30-39.99%
Bad towns: Pink: 25-29.99%, Red 15-24.99%, Dark Red: Below 15%
Did best in the West: Dr. Berwick’s best area of the state was in Amherst, Northampton, and surrounding towns, which I’ve called the “Berwick bloc.” He topped 50% in 14 towns (compared to Grossman’s one) and nine were here, with another four clustered together in the southern Berkshires. Berwick scored in the 40s in 23 additional towns, all in the west except for Concord, Lincoln, and three on Martha’s (and Don’s) Vineyard.
I was not terribly surprised by this show of strength. At the convention Berwick took 51 of 121 delegate votes from the Berkshire, Hampshire, Franklin, and Hampden district (Sen. Ben Downing) and 76 of 124 in the Hampshire, Franklin, and Worcester district (Sen. Stan Rosenberg), his two best showings.
Berwick also did well in another “west”: Metro West. At both the convention and in the primary vote, Berwick’s performance was middling in Sen. Jamie Eldridge’s district, but he was considerably stronger in Sen. Barrett’s district next door. Speaking of Senate supporters, Berwick did well in Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz’s district at the convention, but that did not translate into votes, suggesting an urban problem.
Failure to gain traction: If Berwick was very popular where he was popular, he was not popular at all anywhere else. The deep red on the map shows that he failed to reach 15% in 58 towns (in two of them he didn’t earn a single vote). He was below 20% in a total of 170 towns, and below 30% in 265 towns.
The map’s red tide shows a candidate who didn’t get much support anywhere other than his Western Mass. and Metro West strongholds. In only a few towns outside those regions did he hit 30% (unfilled) or even 25% (pink). Berwick ran (a mostly distant) last in well over 200 towns.
Berwick not only didn’t do well in conservative towns in Central Mass., the Merrimack Valley, or south of Boston, he also did very badly in urban Massachusetts. Some of his worst towns in the state were Fall River, New Bedford, Brockton, Lawrence, Lynn, Chelsea, Revere, North Adams, Malden, Fitchburg, Lowell, Worcester, Springfield. In all of these places he was at 16% or worse. Take out JP from the Boston results and the same is probably true there as well.
Odds and Ends
This primary had some quirky aspects. Let’s check some of them out.
A disburbing omen?: The total number of votes cast in the Democratic primary for governor was just over 539,300. The total number of votes cast in the Democratic primary between Ed Markey and Steve Lynch for U.S. Senate last April 30 was 539,827.
Of course, the June 25 general election turnout in that race was on the order of 26%, with only 1.17 million votes cast. That was far below the 2.25 million votes cast in the January 2010 special election between Martha Coakley, who may be the next governor of Massachusetts, and Scott Brown, who’s almost certainly not going to be the next U.S. Senator from New Hampshire. It also was far below the 2.29 million votes cast in the 2010 gubernatorial election.
I’m disturbed that slightly fewer votes were this primary, even with multiple other contested races to draw people in, than were cast in the special election primary last April. I’m concerned it’s a harbinger of dismal turnout in November. Dismal turnout usually hurts Democrats, but as we saw with Markey-Gomez, sometimes when it’s really, really dismal it means Republicans stayed home too.
Fit to be tied: As has been hinted throughout this post, in a surprising number of towns two Democratic candidates for governor received the exact same number of votes this primary. In ascending order of unlikeliness:
- Gosnold: As previously mentioned, Coakley and Grossman each received 3 votes. Berwick blew them away with 4.
- Hawley: Grossman and Berwick each received 8 votes, Coakley 23.
- Rowe: Grossman and Berwick each received 11 votes, Coakley only 7.
- Tyringham: Grossman and Berwick each received 14, Coakley 25.
- Lanesboro: Coakley and Berwick each received 54, Grossman 44.
- Buckland: Coakley and Berwick each received 69 votes, Grossman 46.
- Lakeville: Coakley and Grossman each received 191 votes, Berwick 84.
- Lunenberg: Coakley and Grossman each received 241 votes, Berwick 99.
- Southboro: Coakley and Grossman each received 257 votes, Berwick 177.
- Billerica: Coakley and Grossman each received 1,127 votes, Berwick 425.
I’m really impressed by Billerica. It’s not every day you see two candidates in an exact tie with over 1,000 votes each.
Oh, wait, there was one other tie…
Pitching a shutout:The town of Monroe, along the Vermont border, is very pretty and very sparsely populated. Most of the time, it seems, it’s very politically divided as well. Coakley beat Scott Brown by one vote there in 2010, with one vote going to the libertarian. Brown stormed back to edge Elizabeth Warren by one vote in 2012. Charlie Baker beat Deval by the huge margin of two votes in 2010.
This time Monroe, which had the distinction of the smallest vote count in the Democratic primary, had no such internal conflict. It’s in the Coakley Corner and all five votes (yes, five) cast in town were cast for the local girl. Grossman and Berwick: goose egg. Dr. Berwick also was shut out in Tolland, on the Connecticut border, where Coakley beat Grossman 11 to 7.
All told, eleven towns had two candidates tied. Coakley and Grossman – 5, Grossman and Berwick – 4, Coakley and Berwick – 2. In seven of the eleven (noted in blue), the tie was for first place. In the others – like Monroe – it was for, ahem, second.
In addition to the eleven ties, there were a fair number of towns with candidates separated by only one or two votes. You’ll have to look them up yourself.
Anybody’s ballgame: In raw votes it’s almost impossible to beat Gosnold’s 4-3-3 split for closeness. But due to the small sample size the percentages are skewed. The town with the smallest spread between first and third in terms of percentage was Harmony’s Needham: Coakley 33.9% (1,254), Berwick 33.5% (1,236), Grossman 32.6% (1,204).
That’s close!
Joining Needham in the candidate-bunching winner’s circle are:
2. Mark Bail’s Granby: Coakley 34.2% (140), Berwick 34.0% (139-told you there were towns with 1-vote differentials!), Grossman 31.8% (130).
3. New Marlboro: Berwick 35.6% (37), Coakley 32.7% (34), Grossman 31.7% (33-another 1-vote difference).
Honorable mention to the much larger Easthampton: Coakley 35.1% (478), Berwick 34.0% (463), Grossman 30.9% (420).
What’s up with Upton?: In all of maps I generated, the town of Upton just next to Hopkinton and Milford stood out like a sore thumb. According to WBUR’s numbers, Berwick did very well there (in fact, won an outright majority) despite getting crushed in all the neighboring towns. It’s the only town in the area where Berwick did great and both Coakley and Grossman did badly. This was so strange I wasn’t WBUR’s numbers were accurate, so I went to the town’s website. Sure enough (sorry for having doubted you, WBUR), Berwick took almost 57% of the vote there.
Upton is very nice, but it is not to my knowledge a liberal bastion. Gomez beat Markey there 59-40, Brown beat Warren 61-39. You get the point. Deval won there in the 2006 primary, but by no more than he did anywhere else.
I wonder what caused this? A super-organizer there? Something in the water? Did Berwick save someone’s life there or save a clinic? Anyone with any ideas or knowledge, please clue me in.
**********************
And that, folks, was our 2014 Massachusetts Democratic Gubernatorial Primary, by the numbers. Prior to September 9, I had a vague notion of doing something with the Attorney General’s race. But with a map that looks like this:
There’s not much to do except offer congratulations to Maura Healey for an overwhelming victory.
I posted five images into this post — or I thought I did — and they’re not showing up. I guess I did something wrong but the post really needs the images.
All of the images are in the BMG media library. What do I do?
Yeah we have a technical problem with the images going on. For now, I’d suggest using another image host – flickr or something like that – and then linking them from there. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Photobucket to the rescue!
I don’t know where else this was true, but that might be attributable to the fact that Tolman had access to a field office in Lawrence, which was really Marcos Devers’.
Sort of like Mondale barely keeping MN in 84′.
And thanks Fenway for the gubernatorial breakdowns. What does that tell us about the state of the party going into November?
It’s hard to generalize too much based on such a low-turnout affair, but I tend to think it means we have a nominee with broad geographic support. I was most impressed by how few towns Coakley was under 25%. Although Berwick was pretty far behind C & G, this was not a 48-45-7 kind of primary. There were three arguably credible candidates. In a dead-even three-way race is 33.33%, of course. That she was within 8 points of that pretty much everywhere, and 8 points ahead of it in most communities, bodes well. Newton, Brookline, Amherst – the places where primary voters strongly preferred another candidate (or 2) — are Democratic strongholds and will go big for her in November.
Democrats generally need urban turnout, and having a nominee most urban primary voters supported will help with that. Her strong performance on the Cape and in Central Mass. indicates she may do OK there as well. I don’t expect her to beat Baker in Barnstable or Leicester, but she might cut into the margin and that will help.
Lower turnout than last year’s special seems very bad. I’d be interested to see how that could impact the questions.
My instinct is that the pro-casino repeal voters are more likely to come out than the pro-casino voters (except for labor).
Same goes for paid leave. I think the pro forces are likely to be more animated.
She just vaulted herself to the head of the pack for the next open primary for Governor or Senate.
Thanks for ruining my day…
There is still a lot of time before that plays out, after all, Deb Goldberg had a fairly strong showing as well, and we know a lot of rising stars sat this cycle out (Curtatone, Driscoll, Wolf, Chang-Diaz, Eldridge, and Walsh might be viable next time around). Politics is all in the timing, and it’s hard to argue hers is now and Tolman’s is over.
Hard *not to argue her’s is now and Tolman’s is over.
When I was looking at the Boston precinct-by-precinct results, I noticed that Goldberg won all but 7 precincts in Boston outright, tied in one, and only lost six. Pretty impressive.
…I asked before the primary about what makes Healey so bad in your mind that you would consider leaving the state.
I think Coakley will do a lot to show whether the AG to higher office path is doable or desirable in MA.
Healey is no doubt a fantastic lawyer and should make a strong AG, but her commitment thus far seems very much to being an attorney. I’m not sure that’s the most desirable characteristic for more general pols.
It’s one of the many issues I have with Coakley for Governor. There’s an inherent conservatism (in terms of risk-taking, not necessarily left/right dynamics) to a lot of her positions that’s sometimes found with attorneys. And I say this as someone with a law degree. That characteristic makes less sense as governor, and certainly as a legislator than it might as AG.
…until now.
Deval Patrick, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John Kerry, Mike Dukakis, William Weld, Paul Celluci — heck, even Scott Brown– Are. All. Lawyers.
Nobody, in the history of everybody, ever said that simply being a lawyer was a reason not to elect somebody to an office other than AG. Candidates have been accused of being bad lawyers, or crooked lawyers… but nobody ever — EVER— said that just being a lawyer was a disqualifier.
Thus do I call bullshit. And I’m pretty sure the one you are bullshitting most is yourself.
While doubleman’s comment was somewhat ambiguous on this, I think his main point wasn’t that being a lawyer was a “disqualifier” (which wouldn’t make much sense since the vast majority of politicians in this country since the Founding have been lawyers). I took the comment as suggesting that practicing attorneys may not be as good politicians as others, perhaps because of an inherent conservatism.
On this, he may have a point. While of course there are plenty of attorneys who have gone on to the governorship and beyond, many (perhaps more) successful lawyer-politicians have not had an attorney background/mindset, such as Obama and Dukakis.
It may well be that politicians who practice law for a living are in fact different than others without this background. One relevant data point: It seems, sensibly so, that those with an attorney mindset are drawn to the AG position — and yet, historically, AGs have had less success successfully running for the governor’s office. (Which is somewhat surprising given that the AGs’ office offers the most high-profile platform in most states other than the governor itself.)
I should have been more clear that it was about those choosing to practice as a career and seek legal-related positions, with an eye toward considering the AG to higher office path.
(Sorry, meant to uprate comment.)
… ’cause most of the aforementioned lawyers I’ve listed were, at one point, practicing law as a career… including the former Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the Clinton Administration, the Hon Deval Patrick.
But I would categorize that as far more of a political position than a legal one. Were he a senior staff attorney there through a change or two of the political positions, I would think otherwise.
… I do not think a particular person or temperament suits itself to the AG position and no other. In fact, I think it is the opposite: the definitive nature of the AG’s office, where positions not only require firm commitments but are fought over in the public arena, provides a whole heaping helping of candidate: the profile is one of public servant in the mud and the muck and, frankly, not many people want to see that. There is much in Martha Coakley’s tenure to applaud. There is much to disparage. This is not because Martha Coakley is a particularly polarizing person but because the position if a raw and open one and every decision they make, good and bad, is judged to a fare-thee-well, both in a court of law — literally — and in the court of public opinion. Don Berwick and Steve Grossman, were either of them the sitting AG these past eight years, would not garner the excitement and loyalty they presently enjoy because they will have had to make decisions about peoples lives and then would have had to defend those decisions as Martha Coakley has done, for good or for ill.
In fact, I will go so far as prophecy: Eight years from today, Maura Healey, will ‘enjoy’ much the same relationship to the electorate as Martha Coakley does today.
As well as being the nature of the job, the nature of the electorate is to desire a candidate opaque enough for the voter to cast upon him/her projections of good will, righteousness and clean living. There is no possible way that a sitting AG can provide this opacity: it’s a messy –and transparently public — office. It’s not particularly messier than the Governors office… but if the Governor makes a decision and the lege shoots it down, it can be dismissed as mere ‘partisan’ politics and grumbling about so and so a speaker or such and such an amendment, yadda yadda yadda and the Executive ‘scapes whipping. “It’s all politics” is the operative principle. But if the AG decides to prosecute he/she must follow through with full vigor and acumen. Should she/he decide to prosecute against the publics taste she/he loses already. If they prosecute and lose, the public taste is validated by a judge and/or jury and blame redounds to the AG. If the AG prosecutes against the public taste and wins then a whole fury of disdain is come down. If he/she prosecutes in the public taste and loses, likewise the AG is blamed for not being AG enough… If the AG declines to prosecute — whatever the public taste– somebody will criticize the decision and for someone as amoral as, say, EBIII, they’ll take to whatever airwaves will have them and heap accusations. If the AG gets a plea it’s rarely satisfactory and again criticism. The street definition of ‘attorney general’ might well be ‘criticism generating machine…’
So it’s not a flaw of the person but a clear fact of the office and a clear characteristic of the electorate: we pretend we want people who’ll be prepared to make hard decisions and back them up, but when actually presented with just such people, we balk, looking instead to Dr Berwicks Magical Mojo and Patented Bedside Manner. This is not a knock on Berwick. It is a knock on the electorate who say they want Coakley until Coakley does something they don’t like. They turn to Berwick and will continue turning until he does something they don’t like and then it’s on to the next messiah.
I would argue an AGs actual performance as the head attorney for the state has very little barely on their popularity or electoral successes. In terms of the issues, Tolman had more substantive experience on the issues he thought the electorate would care about. But, it turns out they liked a fresh face, with spunk (or gumption as Bernstein called it), who had very warm and amiable ads alluding to her on court and in court performances. She stomped the better funded, better endorsed, and better qualified (in my view) candidate fairly decisively.
And if she continues to go after big financial fish and social conservatives she will play to both impulses of the party and get re-elected fairly easily and possibly nominated to higher offices. But, actual performance is irrelevant-it’s the impression that counts. And Coakley made a better one than her opponents, and Healey certainly did as well.
A future contest between her and Goldberg will be fascinating to watch.