Pockets of Restiveness

Above, in a pivotal moment of the 1976 film Network, the character, news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch), exhorts his audience to resolve "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

A few high-interest primary races on Tuesday drummed up conversation this week -- like the tight race north of the Charles that might have had some remembering Florida circa 2000 counting hanging chads -- but most incumbents sailed through their contests to likely reelection despite ongoing frustration with the Legislature.

Of the Legislature's 200 seats, only 18 incumbents were challenged.

Preliminary vote tallies in the contested primaries indicated three sitting representatives were behind their opponents. But those stats are preliminary for a reason and numbers on Wednesday showed one had pulled ahead, and only two incumbents lost their primary elections.

The three reps in the headlines: Democrat Rep. Rady Mom of Lowell, Republican Rep. Susan Williams Gifford of Wareham, and Democrat Rep. Marjorie Decker of Cambridge.

All eyes were on Cambridge where Decker -- a self-proclaimed progressive, committee chairwoman for Speaker Ron Mariano and longtime ally of former Speaker Robert DeLeo -- was up against a 25-year-year-old Evan MacKay running at her from the left.

Decker was trailing MacKay by a paper-thin margin through Tuesday night, when MacKay claimed victory, and still behind into lunchtime on Wednesday, but never conceded. By late Wednesday afternoon, Cambridge's election division declared it reviewed hand-counted ballots that put Decker narrowly ahead of MacKay, for an apparently tight win in the election.

The race also raised eyebrows due to the Democrats who endorsed Decker as she ran against an opponent calling for more transparency. The list included Gov. Maura Healey, Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll, Sen. Ed Markey, and Congresswomen Ayanna Pressley and Katherine Clark.

And, of course, for Democratic leadership, who doesn't like incumbents to lose -- especially to candidates running on a platform of fighting legislative inefficiency and the unwritten rules of operation on Beacon Hill.

"Establishment politicians in the State House have created a crisis of democracy," a MacKay campaign ad says. "Our state government ranks dead last in transparency, and passes the lowest number of bills of all 50 states. My opponent is complicit with the broken system of backroom dealing and secret voting, which time and time again has betrayed working people. This has to change."

MacKay carried endorsements from Progressive Mass and Act on Mass, who touted a MacKay vote as a vote against the status quo after lawmakers failed to come to agreements this summer on several bills that even they had characterized as urgent.

So, what does it mean if one of the more powerful people in the Legislature almost lost her election on the issue of lawmakers not fulfilling all their promises -- or their constituents desires -- about what they hope to accomplish?

It may mean that those who were considering a run this year and opted against it missed an opportunity to capitalize. Though only two out of 18 won their challenges, that's an 11 percent success rate. Other incumbents might have been vulnerable.

And though plenty of Bay Staters are happy to complain about inaction, very few opted to run for office themselves and most voters went to the voting booth (if they visited it at all) without many choices to make this September.

MacKay seems willing to fight, however, and as of Friday pulled papers for a recount, according to The Boston Globe. It will come down to 41 votes out of 7,037 total ballots, a 0.58 percent margin.

While Decker fends off her challenge from the left, after eleven terms, Gifford was ousted from the House from the right. Gifford is also a leader in her party, the third assistant minority leader in the House, who has served under the golden dome since 2002.

Her challenger, John Robert Gaskey of Carver portrayed himself as an "outsider" and cast Gifford as "a 20-year-incumbent who has mostly 'gone along to get along' with the Democratic majority." He staked out positions opposing gender-affirming care, likening LGBTQ+ education in schools to "brainwashing children" and slamming state spending on shelter for newly arriving migrants.

Gaskey was supported by former state Republican Party chair Jim Lyons and candidate for governor, Geoff Diehl, both of whom have affiliated themselves with former President Donald Trump, according to the conservative news site Boston Broadside.

The Broadside article, which Gaskey's campaign page on Facebook reposted, wrote "The Freedom Fighters (the grassroots group organized by former MassGOP Chairman and long-serving state Rep Jim Lyons) scored huge Tuesday, with John Gaskey toppling Susan Gifford, the number three top RINO in Massachusetts. If you don’t know the players, let’s make this simple: Gaskey took out a liberal Republican-In-Name-Only, Democrat-Enabling Liberal Republican Rep. named Susan Gifford who held the seat, voting woke, for the past couple of decades."

He ran his campaign on a similar playbook as another southern Massachusetts Republican who fared decently well in this election: Kari MacRae.

MacRae, of Bourne, ran against Republican Rep. Mathew Muratore of Plymouth to represent the GOP in a race for an open seat in the Senate against Democrat Rep. Dylan Fernandes of Falmouth.

MacRae is farther to the right of Muratore, and among her, and Gaskey's, key points was the unfolding migrant crisis in Massachusetts.

"Career politician Susan Gifford voted to give billions of your tax dollars to illegals. VOTE TODAY for John Gaskey for State Representative to get her out of office. Request a Republican Ballot," says Gaskey's campaign page. "The migrant crisis will cost Massachusetts taxpayers $1.8 billion over the next two years."

The post accompanies an image with headlines about undocumented immigrants who had been arrested for violent crimes.

MacRae's campaign materials used similar language around Muratore not being a "real Republican," and the first issue on her campaign page is "illegal immigration."

"As your Republican state senator, Kari will work tirelessly to combat illegal immigration in the Plymouth & Barnstable district and across the commonwealth. Kari will support strict enforcement of existing immigration laws, including partnering with federal immigration officials," it says.

MacRae, a member of Bourne's School Committee, was fired from a job teaching at Hanover High School in 2021 over TikTok videos she previously posted commenting on critical race theory, gender identity and other topics.

The AP reported that Muratore led MacRae by 48 votes in the primary, and Muratore declared victory Wednesday morning -- but MacRae is collecting signatures for a recount, and is "deeply disturbed by the substantial irregularities in the Plymouth vote-counting efforts."

"The Plymouth Town Clerk informed us that about 1,800 early and mail-in ballots remained to be counted. There had been system problems. We were told the votes would be counted outside our view and posted on the Town Clerk's website at approx. 3 am. Vote counting in the middle of the night in my opponent's hometown. I had a 581-vote lead. What could go wrong, right? Well, surprise, surprise! I learned at 3 am Representative Muratore had substantially overperformed on his earlier results in Plymouth and now had a 53-vote lead," says a statement originally posted to her Facebook page.

Though Massachusetts lawmakers like to pride themselves in being above the interparty fighting of Washington D.C., the messy primaries this year seem closer to the Potomac than the Charles.

Meanwhile, the races show Massachusetts isn't the uniform blue state that some like to think of it as. Undoubtedly, MacRae couldn't win in Cambridge; and MacKay couldn't win in Bourne, unless voters got their names mixed up on the ballot. And while candidates may be pulling both parties away from the middle, in Worcester County almost 70 percent of voters are now unenrolled in either party, and that county may be the first in the state to cross that threshold.

As recounts sort themselves out, primaries come to a close and the next phase of election season dawns -- similarly, the next phase of another big news story is on the horizon.

Steward Health Care got the green light in court this week to sell six of its hospitals to new operators: the Holy Family Hospital facilities in Haverhill and Methuen are being bought by Lawrence General Hospital, Saint Anne’s Hospital in Fall River and Morton Hospital in Taunton will be bought by Lifespan, and Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton will go to Boston Medical Center. BMC is also buying the operations of St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Brighton and the state plans to seize that property by eminent domain, although the firms that control the land say they'll "vigorously challenge" the state's lowball $4.5 million offer.

The state is also coughing up a few hundred million to help ease the sales -- $417 million to be exact. For context, that's more than triple the cost of making community college permanently free for all students, over 10 times the amount going towards making regional transit authorities free for riders this year, and just under the amount spent on extensive early education and care grants, all landmark spending items the state has touted as some of their biggest wins.

As the keys are handed over -- and two hospitals' doors are shut -- some are now focused on a new chapter of the Steward story: accountability.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Ed Markey, Congresswoman Lori Trahan, 1199 SEIU and the Massachusetts Nurses Association held a press conference on Thursday about Dr. Ralph de la Torre, CEO of Steward Health Care, where the word "criminal" was used nine times.

Warren said she couldn't speak specifically to whether de la Torre has committed a crime. He hasn't been charged with any.

"But I can say, in the abstract, that anyone who takes money out of a corporation and uses it for personal gain and fails to report it as income and pay taxes on it would be in violation of the law, and anyone would ran a corporation that was taking money out for personal uses and not accounting for it properly in the bookkeeping would be committing a crime. It's a books and records crime," she said, while standing next to a sign with a caricature of de la Torre's face on a dollar bill that said "Where Is Ralph De La Torre."

In short: They're mad. And seem to want someone to do something about it.