The voter turnout in Burlington and in Billerica was appalling. Neither candidate connected well in those towns, and the “win” in them is at default level in my view. Sean Garballey won Arlington by a good thousand votes – but lost the election in Lexington where Rep. Jay Kaufman threw his influence and supporters towards Cindy Friedman. 7668 votes cast! Really, folks? In a District where State Committee Candidates can poll 28,000 votes [ I know because I once did so before I walked away from party politics to deal with deaths of those I love, ill health, and a general sense of disappointment with the duopoly parties and their ownership by elites]. This squeaker of a win is nothing to crow about, and no shame for Garballey, either, who ran a good campaign and raised almost as much money as the winner, despite her elite support. I will hope that Cindy Friedman will be a good senator, and grow in understanding and supporting certain issues that matter to me like access to justice, use of court fees to balance the budget on the backs of the poor and our prisons as debtor prisons for unpaid court fees – and in fact incarceration as a substitute for providing mental health treatment. Over 70% of the inmates in MCI Women’s prison have major mental health diagnoses [not the 25% claimed by Friedman at a debate]. Time will tell; it always does.
Criminal justice reform advocates in the 4th Middlesex like Amber can take heart from the fact that Senator Donnelly was a co-sponsor of a bill to eliminate court fees for indigent people (as is Rep. Garballey), and the lead sponsor of a bill to limit the use of cash bail, which keeps many poor people in jail while awaiting trial.
The reality that there is NO community mental healthcare network and that many incarcerations are in fact “housing by arrest” and that the ONLY “care” available for those suffering mental health issues is via incarceration drive our high prison rates, our opium epidemic [self medication! So called.] and the 28% increase in removal of children from their homes. It is not just “criminal justice reform’ but the abandonment of the poor, those suffering from chronic illness including almost total abandonment of those with what is called “mental illness” [who are now treated about the way they were in the 1800s in terms of inpatient treatment – prison!] and not just “criminal justice reform” – the loss of what were once good working class jobs in manufacturing, the collapse of retail employment due to the growth of online shopping, the failure to train our own citizens for the 90,000 or so mid tech jobs by rendering technical training unavailable in high school and having housi9ng costs and out orphaned public higher education systems unaffordable to those who need them. No pats on the back for Massachusetts – our child poverty and homeless rates and failure to support public higher education or retrain those whose employment paths have gone poof are, frankly, embarasing for a state that claims to be a Democratic majority state – but then the national Democratic party has long ago walked away from working people in my opinion – what safety net?
Apology for the typos! I need to remember to draft comments offline and then copy paste them. The system would not let me correct my “typed in the heat of the moment” typos.
Turnout as percentage of 2016
Arlington – 28%
Lexington – 18%
Woburn – 7%
Burlington – 7%
Billerica – 6%
Not everyone was eligible, since registered Rs couldn’t vote, but still pretty pathetic. One of my friends didn’t vote because he saw “three generic dems” with “no daylight” between their policy positions. He’s a Bernie supporter.
What would it take to satisfy your friend? I agree about little daylight, at least between Garballey and Friedman since I don’t know anything about Stewart, but that was because they were both quite progressive it seemed.
If one of the candidates had taken a strong stance in defense of the pot law the voters passed that would have won him over, or if, more broadly, someone had articulated a strategy for making the Legislature solve problems effectively. (He’s not a big fan of the chummy “go along to get along” attitude of the Legislature, which he usually describes as “corruption” when we talk about it.)
One thing about this election, the timing was pretty bad.
Pretty tacky of that Donnelly guy not to take that into account, then.
Whoever set the date could have. A week earlier would have been better.