Paul Giorgio: The Day After the Massachusetts Primary Election

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Paul Giorgio, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Today is the day after the Massachusetts Primary Election and as I write this we do not know who won.

Turnout was predicted to be historically low, so who came out matters. We can presume that Charlie Baker secured the Republican nomination for Governor. So the Baker/ Polito ticket will do battle with the winner of the Coakley-Grossman dust up. As of press time that was unsure. However going into the final days, Attorney General Martha Coakley had a secure lead over the State Treasurer Steve Grossman.

The down ballot races were too close to call. I don’t know statistically how many permutations there can be. Will it be Coakley/Kerrigan or Coakley/ Lake or Grossman/Lake or Grossman/ Kerrigan or did long shot Leland Chung break through.

The only two other races up were the Attorney Generals fight between Maura Healy and Warren Tolman. Each had strengths going into Tuesday primary. Tolman’s brother, Steve is the head of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, and brings most of organized labor to the Tolman party. Couple that with endorsements by the Governor, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and Worcester Mayor Joe Petty and you have the basis for a win.

Healy, the first openly Gay candidate for AG, brought her outsider position and the women’s vote.

Did traditional primary politics work?

If traditional primary politics worked, Tolman should have won. If outsider politics prevailed, like it did when Deval Patrick beat AG Tom Reilly 8 years ago, the Healy won.

Did gender politics play a role on Tuesday? If it did then Deb Goldberg should have won the nomination for State Treasurer to replace Grossman, because women may have come out to vote for Martha Coakley and Maura Healy and ended up voting for Goldberg too.

So what does this all mean for the November election? Let’s eliminate the down ballot races. The Democrats will sweep everything below Governor. Most people can’t even name the Republican candidates for Attorney General, Treasurer, State Auditor or Secretary of State.

Ed Markey, who won a hard fought primary and general election 2 years ago, should sweep over little known Hopkinton attorney Brian Herr.

Who is the next Governor?

The only question that remains is who will be elected Governor.

Charlie Baker who ran against Deval Patrick 4 years ago has teamed up with former State Representative Karyn Polito of Shrewsbury, who is very conservative. Does that peel some votes away from Baker, because of the recent Republican history of abandoning the seat? Usually, who the Lt Governor is doesn’t matter much, however with the GOP it does. Both Bill Weld and Paul Cellucci gave up the seat and Jane Swift didn’t even run for election. So in this case Polito’s very conservative politics matter.

On the Democratic side of the column, you have Steve Kerrigan, who is openly gay, Leland Chung, who is the first Asian to run statewide and Mike Lake who ran for State Auditor four years ago.

Coakley will be trying to become the first women elected on her own to the Governorship. Neither Coakley nor Baker is awe inspiring. There will be no Deval Patrick lofty rhetoric coming from these two. So it will be about mechanics. Can the Democratic Machine turn people out in November. It’s a big machine, from State Representatives to members of Congress. If you then, through in organized labor and women’s groups and gays and people of color, you see the uphill fight the GOP has.

I believe that Grossman and Baker are both evenly matched. Both claim business backgrounds and will run as managers, not leaders.

The soup pot called Democrats

So if Coakley is the nominee, she will bring women to the dance, who want to see the glass ceiling in Massachusetts broken once and for all. In fact you could end up with four women running statewide, which helps Coakley. You could also have an openly gay man or an Asian. All of these things go into the soup pot called the Democratic Party.

Unfortunately for the Republicans except for Kayrn Polito, you just have a bunch of bland white guys. The question is: can you actually build on that and win in Massachusetts?

Paul Giorgio is a longtime Democratic Party Activist who has worked on numerous campaigns. He was a Lead Advance Person for President Clinton & Vice President Gore. He was Deputy Director of Special Events for President Clinton’s first Inauguration. He has been elected a delegate to numerous Democratic National Conventions and recently served as one of President Obama’s representatives on the Platform Committee. In 2013 he was chosen as a Presidential Elector. He is the President of Pagio, Inc., publishers of Pulse Magazine, Vitality Magazine and Worcester Medicine.