The MA Democratic Party is holding its caucuses over the next few weeks, to choose up delegates for the state convention on 5/30. The delegates often will declare their support for one candidate or another, if there’s a contested primary. The Ed Markey campaign in particular is putting high priority on the caucuses, as a show of organizational strength going forward. If you can see John Walsh’s fingerprints on this, good for you — back in 2006 this very site was the reporting spot for caucus results that showed Deval Patrick was for real.
The list of caucuses and dates are listed on the MassDems website.
Anyway, the Markey campaign is claiming victory in the following places:
SOME FINAL RETURNS AVAILABLE AS OF 4 PM:
BOSTON WARD 20—MARKEY WINS
MALDEN—MARKEY WINS
LYNNFIELD—MARKEY WINS
BRIDGEWATER—MARKEY WINS
ROCKLAND—MARKEY WINS
FITCHBURG WARDS 2, 5, 6—MARKEY WINS
SUNDERLAND—MARKEY WINS
PROVINCETOWN—MARKEY WINS
BOURNE—MARKEY WINS
CHATHAM—MARKEY WINS
BELMONT—MARKEY WINS
CONWAY—MARKEY WINS
LOWELL WARDS 1, 2, 6, 7, 9, 10—-MARKEY WINS
BARRE—MARKEY WINS
WESTMINSTER—MARKEY WINS
YARMOUTH—MARKEY WINS
Sounds good for him — I don’t know how the other places went, either for Joe Kennedy or not reporting yet. If you know something hold forth in the comments!
All 12 elected delegates in Yarmouth were Markey. 2 of 3 in Chatham.
If this translates into campaign volunteers, I guess it’s good for Markey. But the primary is not going to be decided on the basis of an endorsement at the convention.
If anything, though, strong party support works against Markey’s brand as a maverick.
I don’t recall Markey ever claiming he was a maverick vis-à-vis the party.
The sense in the room at Lowell was that overall the candidates pretty much split down the middle. I also attended Tyngsborough and Carlisle caucuses today. The former had just enough attendees to fill the slate; the latter had decent turnout, but no contested balloting. Neither appeared to have Senate campaign organization in play.
Just a point of info-these are caucuses for pledged delegates to the state convention and candidates need to meet the 15% threshold to get on the ballot and the convention may endorse, but that’s symbolic since the primary electorate will determine the nominee? I just want to clarify their role here, since it seems different from the caucuses we hear about in presidential news.
Since there are only two candidates, the convention WILL endorse by default since one will get the majority. I will be shocked if either does not make the 15% to get on the ballot. You are correct that the primary ultimately decides, a recent example of the discrepancy being Josh Zakim being endorsed for Secretary of the Commonwealth, but Bill Galvin ultimately being the nominee. The endorsee is entitled to party assistance and to state that fact on the ballot. Many of the elected delegates will not be pledged.
Nothing “symbolic” about the 15% hurdle is your not a political insider. Ask Shannon Liss-Riordan.
We’ve already felt the implications of the caucuses, with the withdrawal of a candidate who felt she could not garner 15% of the party insiders elected at the caucuses to attend the convention.
The old boy network (with plenty of women participating) wins out agin.
That’s not why she dropped out and conventions aren’t all party insiders.
I think a better question is whether this produces electable nominees. I think Gonzalez and Massie played their entire campaign to the convention hall and got crushed when real voters had their say. I frankly see Maura Healey doing the same thing if she ultimately campaigns against Baker.
I think it scares off more first time candidates and participants than it invites in. So while it’s nice to have nostalgia about Deval (who just unceremoniously drooped out of the 2020 race after netting 0 delegates), the structure should be reformed so that median voters have a say too, not just the hard core activists of the party.
They DO have a say! C’mon, by now you’ve been around long enough to respect the process a bit more than that (or at least stop making false claims). The primary still governs and if you can’t 15% of the not-so-hardcore party activists you’re not getting very far anyway. Besides, as a candidate I would find a convention of a finite number of delegates a lot less daunting than a statewide popular campaign anyway. There is not enough correlation to make a case either way to argue that convention either helps or hurts our nominees.
Dan Cohen, a long time progressive political strategist, would strongly disagree with you. The process definitely discouraged Joe Avellone, Juliette Kayeem, and other potential Democratic candidates from competing to the convention. Setti Warren stopped his campaign before that step as well. All were more than capable of beating Baker.
This Senate primary lost Scott Pemberton and now Shannon Liss Riordon, a black man and white woman respectively, who did not have the resources to run the kind of campaign to to get on the ballot.
This has nothing to do with the party at all, but I still have no idea how Trump can run his company (and run taxpayer tabs to it!) from the White House, but Dan Wolf has to choose between his little airline and running for Governor. A choice Baker did not have to make as Harvard Pilgrim CEO.
State primary voters have been denied the right to choose from a wider pool of diverse candidates who opted out before there was a vote. It really mirrors the national primaries that way. Just like Obama is cited as the reason to keep Iowa, so is Deval as the exception to the rule that insiders kiss the ring while outsiders stay outside of it.
Wait a second! Avellone and Kayyem DID last until convention. They did not get a ticket out of convention, but if you can’t get 15% there’s not much chance of primary victory either. Setti Warren would have made it past convention just fine (He had John Walsh, after all), but did not have money to continue. Progressive political strategists aren’t exactly process experts themselves. Convention operations are a lot less expensive, and arguably more grassroots based, than statewide ad wars. Pemberton and Liss-Riordan were up against two big names – not their fault, just reality, and don’t cite irrelevant race and gender matters. I really expect you of all people to at least get your facts straight!
Both would have been better contenders than Coakley, the insiders favorite. Both would have gotten enough signatures to qualify. It’s a process that’s hostile to first time candidates and Beacon Hill outsiders. I think it hurts our competitiveness in the general. Me of all people is a hard core political junkie who has had zero desire to go to one of these things.
@ zero desire:
I have to say that my one experience way back near the dawn of creation — when Ed Markey was the upstart outsider running for a seat in the House — made me never want to return.
I don’t even remember what was so bad, other than sheer tedium. I just know that I’ve never been remotely tempted to attend another one.
My understanding is they were very different back then.
Both DID get the signatures to qualify. Since the deadline for that is before the convention they could not have participated in convention if they had not. (Grace Ross, for example could not contest Deval Patrick’s re-nomination at the 2010 convention because she did not get the signatures, and BTW why is a convention threshold unreasonable but a signature threshold isn’t?) I don’t know that they would have been better general election candidates than Coakley, but I can’t imagine them beating her in a primary. Plus, if we must accept the premise that convention is a gathering of insiders then Steve Grossman and not Martha Coakley got the convention endorsement that year. I’m sorry that you’ve elected to play the cynic rather than join the fun. The correlation between insiders and convention success is not actually that strong.
Almost by definition political conventions is all party insiders. I suppose you don’t consider yourself an “insider”. And the timing her withdrawal–her campaign was trying to get people to run as delegates–and her citing “obstacles to running” points to the convention. Of course, the prospects of running against opponents with access to millions of dollars from the donor class, Im sure was another hurdle.
It was money that caused her to withdraw, plus she was just plain up against two big names. I’m on the state committee so I suppose do qualify as an insider, but I chaired a ward caucus on Saturday at which at least two of the three delegates have never participated in the past, and from your comments I’m guessing you never have either. I really wish people who criticize the process knew what they were talking about!
Since your definition of “party insider” is “someone who attends political conventions”, then of course your perception is that all the attendees were political insiders.
Have you ever been to one yourself? Have you ever attended a caucus?
It takes money — big money — to compete against marquee names like Ed Markey and Joe Kennedy III, even more so when one is an incumbent.
It seems to me that donor count and average donor wallet size is the determining factor, far more so than insider/outsider status.
That’s still a huge problem in our democracy and one the ostensible Democratic Party should be working to resolve rather than defend.
Oh, I agree completely. I’m certainly not defending it — to the contrary, I want to explicitly name it so that it can be addressed.
I’m just saying that this is a problem of wealth concentration, not insider/outsider status.
In my view, false narratives like the insider/outsider meme distract attention from the core issue of wealth concentration.
Last I checked the Dems were the party more likely to try to ameliorate the impact of money.
I don’t know the results caucus by caucus, but looking at (clearly unofficial!) results on social media — total delegates at the end of the day yesterday were: 137 Markey, 107 Kennedy.
Notably, most of the elected delegates for Kennedy were first-time delegates/caucusers, new to the process. Looks like there’s some excitement out there. And, no matter who you’re supporting, increased voter involvement seems like great news for democracy! Looks like win-win on that front!
The Democratic State Convention had a brief moment of relevancy. It started when progressives used the 1981 convention to launch a behind-the-lines attack on the King administration as the Dukakis re-election campaign geared up to take on the man who had bumped him from office. We kicked ass, organized a Progressive Caucus and convinced the convention to adopt a platform that was extraordinarily progressive. We knew that it was about using the convention as an organizing tool, not the platform, so we flooded the caucuses. MarDee, Kathy K, John and Gerry McD were fantabulous as our unofficial field generals.
After the success of the Re-Match in 1982, we doubled the size of the DSC and pushed out the King people, many of whom went to the GOP. The convention played an important role for a few election cycles but it and the enlarged DSC became as useful as tits on a bull. Nobody in the voting public cares about the convention. I quit the DSC when it lost relevance.
The DSC is useless because in the age of money politics, a bunch of self-aggrandizing wannabes who cannot deliver even 100 votes mean nothing.. Let’s face it: if you are elected in a DSC caucus, it is because you cannot win a real election. There is no longer any reason to waste significant resources on the convention or the party. If you are a candidate in play, for example Deval in his first run, you use it as an organizing tool and take over the party to keep out the opposition. The platform means shit unless it is built on a genuine grassroots statewide movement.