State House News Talks Election Results with Watchdogs

Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance's Paul Craney and Act on Mass.'s Scotia Hille (left to right).
Paul Craney / Scotia Hille

State government watchdogs
kept an eye this week on how Massachusetts fared through a presidential
election, and on what the flipped legislative seats and voting trends
could mean for the Bay State's future.

Massachusetts
voters overwhelmingly voted for Vice President Kamala Harris for
president, and easily kept the Legislature's Democratic supermajority —
but more of them than ever cast their ballots for now-president-elect
Donald Trump, and the Massachusetts Republican party grew its ranks in
the state Senate. By a huge margin, voters supported ballot Question 1, a
transparency measure meant to allow the state auditor to audit the
Legislature.

How
do those results impact the outlook on Beacon Hill? Scotia Hille,
executive director of Act on Mass, and Paul Craney, a spokesperson and
board member for the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, have some ideas. Act
on Mass is a non-profit focused on transparency and accountability
issues within the Massachusetts State House; Mass Fiscal is a non-profit
focused on fiscal responsibility, transparency, and accountability
within state government. The two groups work as state government
watchdogs with different partisan leanings.

In
post-election conversations with the News Service, Hille and Craney
reflected on the results of Massachusetts' legislative races, the trends
they think stand out, and the will of the voters.

Hille
and Craney spoke with the News Service in separate conversations, but
were asked the same questions. These interviews have been edited and
condensed for clarity and length.

Q:
On Tuesday, the MassGOP gained a seat in the Legislature when Kelly
Dooner won the open Third Bristol & Plymouth Senate race.
Republicans flipped House seats, and Democrats flipped some, too. What
are your initial reactions to those legislative results and what do you
think they represent?

Scotia Hille:
I think the biggest result here is that Massachusetts is continuing to
re-elect a Democratic supermajority, and that's reflected both in our
choices in the Legislature as well as the result that you see on the
presidential stage. For as much as those wins represent something, the
Democrats also flipped seats, and we're still delivering a Democratic
supermajority. We still had one of the highest margins in the
presidential race for Democrats in the nation, and we didn't swing to
the right as far as some of our peer states did, like New York or even
Rhode Island. I think that what the result represents is that
Massachusetts voters are looking for change. We also saw that the
legislative approval rating dropped this year, and that voters are
voting for pro-transparency measures such as Question 1. I think it's
clear that Massachusetts voters are looking for something different than
the status quo, but they're looking to get that from the Democratic
Party.

Paul Craney:
Candidates like Kelly Dooner and Justin Thurber, they ran in districts
that Trump generally performs pretty well in, which is helpful for the
cause. I know for a fact that Kelly really worked hard, she was very
[active] on the Taunton City Council, so she had a lot of built-in
advantages.

You
also have Massachusetts just seeming to want to hit the self-destruct
button at every every step of the way, with raising taxes the last
couple of years and giving away an abundance of taxpayer money and
benefits to illegal immigrants and migrants that are coming to
Massachusetts. Voters, I think, are feeling very frustrated with their
state government, and were probably willing to send some messages in
people like Kelly Dooner and [Justin] Thurber and some of the
Republicans that held on [to seats] — they wanted to have some checks in
the State House because they realized, this is the first cycle where
you don't have a corner office that's Republican. You need to get some
people in there that are willing to say no or stop or slow down, or ask,
"Why are we doing this?" So I think all these things kind of cut in the
favor of Republicans this time.

I
do think there was more of a focus this time on where there were some
opportunities and everything kind of just came together. I will say
also, four years ago, the pandemic was still going. Election laws [were]
kind of being tested around the country… and we didn't have that this
time. There was a lot more stability in what elections are going to look
like, so I think for the MassGOP, they were able to anticipate what
Election Day would look like.

Q:
There is very apparent renewed energy from MassGOP, whose leaders have
said this was a "historic" election for the party in Massachusetts.
There's also clearly still a Democratic supermajority in the state, and
some are saying those shifts don't really mean much. Do you think that
renewed energy is valid, and should Democrats be paying attention to
those small shifts?

Hille:
I think it's clear that Democrats need to do more to work on the
priorities that turn out our voters. House Speaker Ron Mariano [released
a] statement, he said this is "a wake up call" for Democrats to
re-center the priorities that made people turn towards Republicans. I
think I would be really curious to see what those priorities are,
because I do think that we should be talking more [about] and passing
more things on housing affordability, the things that make it difficult
for people to live in Massachusetts, and I don't think that those need
to come from a Republican standpoint. I think unfortunately, the people
that were kind of banging the drum on those issues in this election
might have been Republicans, but I don't think that that means that that
has to come from the GOP.

Craney:
I think it sets it up for change for sure. Massachusetts is not one of
the states where you'll see a big wave, but if you look at Rhode Island
and Connecticut, they actually lost Republican seats in the Legislature.
So the fact that Massachusetts actually gained a seat is noteworthy. I
would encourage Republicans in the Legislature and Republican Party
staff that they should continue to try to strive to win more elections
years from now. And obviously, years from now, it's going to be a litmus
test on Maura Healey's four years, so candidates should be prepared to
contrast themselves with how Governor Healy is leading the state years
from now, and provide a better plan forward. That includes, obviously, a
Republican governor's candidate.

Q:
Throughout this election, Massachusetts' Republican leaders mostly
stayed in-state, campaigning and canvassing for local candidates. Top
Democrats spent a lot of time doing that out-of-state both for Kamala
Harris's presidential candidacy and for New Hampshire's Democratic
gubernatorial candidate Joyce Craig. Do you think those campaign
choices, on either side, impacted the results?

Hille:
Yeah, definitely. For better or for worse, Mass. Democrats have been
complacent. They haven't been making sure that the fight stays in
Massachusetts, and because we have the least competitive elections in
the country, because so few incumbents in the House face any meaningful
primary or general election challenge, a lot of people focus their
attention elsewhere. I think that voters sense that and feel left out of
the conversation. And so for me, a path forward includes more
competitive elections in Massachusetts and people having more of a sense
that they have a stake in what's happening here as well.

[More
competitive elections] has to mean more competition within the
Democratic Party. We have a Democratic State House leadership that is
quite conservative compared to where the electorate is, and so for me,
that has to look like more primary challenges. We saw a couple
interesting races in the primary this year — Tara Hong unseating
incumbent Rady Mom, that was one of incumbents that lost their seats
this year. Representative-elect Hong was running on both transparency
[and on] being a full-time representative. It was a message that was
directly challenging the status quo in the State House, and we saw that
that was effective. Also in Cambridge, of course, we had Evan MacKay's
campaign in the primary that was really challenging representative
Marjorie Decker on the issue of transparency, and that was closer than
anyone ever thought. The primaries that were especially competitive were
the ones that centered the issue of transparency, that centered the
problems of the status quo at the State House, things not getting done,
and you're seeing that resonate with voters.

Craney:
I don't think Maury Healey cares about a few legislative seats. So for
her to stay in the state to campaign, I don't think that was ever a
possibility. Maura Healey [is] very politically partisan, so she wants
to elect Democrats. I also think she put a calculation together that,
you know, her administration is very reluctant or hesitant to want to
lower taxes or eliminate taxes. There's a significant economic
competitive wedge right now with Mass. and New Hampshire. It's
everywhere. You see it all the time. Instead of wanting to try to
compete with New Hampshire, I think her team realized [they had] an
opportunity to elect a governor who supports raising taxes, and that's
one way to make Massachusetts look a little bit better if you have a
governor who wants to bring back some tax hikes to New Hampshire. Joyce
Craig publicly was saying she supported bringing back the income tax on
the interest and dividends — that repeal for that tax was accelerated
when Massachusetts passed the millionaires tax. The Legislature in New
Hampshire accelerated that phase-out so that they can try to compete
with Massachusetts taxpayers [moving to] Florida. That's how much
they're preying on Massachusetts.

Healey’s
team probably looked and said, "Hey, maybe we can get a pro-tax
governor in New Hampshire, which will make us look a little less bad."
And that all blew up in their face. This whole thing of "Don't Mass up"
in New Hampshire definitely resonated with southern New Hampshire, which
very much rejected Joyce Craig. She even lost her own city that she was
mayor of. I think the point difference was nearly 10 points.
[Republicans] picked up seats in the New Hampshire legislature, they
have a five-to-one majority in the Governor's Council. This is a
repudiation of Massachusetts and how we're doing things.

Q:
Massachusetts saw a larger percentage of Bay Staters vote for Donald
Trump than the last couple of times. What do you make of that?

Hille:
I definitely think that it's a time for the Massachusetts Democratic
Party to do some soul-searching. Voters are starting to wake up to the
fact that despite having democratic majorities in the Senate, in 2023 we
were ranked the least effective Legislature in the country. You have
progressive priorities that have sat on the table for years and years
and years, and especially going into something like a Trump
administration, I'm going to be really curious to see if the Democratic
supermajority that we re-elected is going to be effective in passing
things that were raised during the last Trump administration — like last
last Trump administration, they wanted to respond with policies such as
the Safe Communities Act, kind of taking additional steps to protect
Bay Staters from some of the policies that a Trump administration
expects to put in place. It's going to be interesting to see if they can
get some of those priorities across the table. I think that, to be
honest, the Massachusetts House hasn't been delivering on the
progressive priorities that they're elected for, and voters might be
paying attention.

Craney:
The data is still coming in, but it certainly appears that Trump’s
overall numbers in Massachusetts look a lot like what a Republican gets
in Massachusetts pre-Trump. He got 36.5 percent and Harris got 61.3
percent. For comparison’s sake, Mitt Romney, former governor of
Massachusetts, got 37.5 [percent] and Obama got 60.7 [percent], so you
can see it's very close. Compare that to four years ago, when Trump was
defeated against Biden — Biden got 65.5 percent and Trump only got 32.1
percent. And then Trump versus Clinton, he only got 32.8 [percent]. So
there’s quite a jump. The caveat is that [Secretary of State Bill]
Galvin hasn't certified elections, so those numbers could change. But it
certainly seems like, from what you can see right now, the Trump
numbers in Massachusetts were pretty good… I also think the issues
really were in [Republicans'] favor this time. This time, compared to
four years ago or even eight years ago, people could really kind of
understand what Trump means, because they remember the four years and
what a Harris-Biden, or what a Harris-Walz administration will look
like, because they saw Harris-Biden for four years. So I think it was a
little bit more tangible and a little less in theory. Voters can
remember the last four years versus the Trump administration's four
years and make their own determinations.

Q:
Your organization focuses on government accountability and
transparency, and you've rallied behind state Auditor Diana DiZoglio's
Question 1, which passed with over 70 percent voter support. But there
are questions about how that question proceeds — what do you think that
path forward looks like?

Hille:
The voters delivered a clear mandate that they demand more scrutiny
from the state Legislature. And if it means that our State House leaders
are going to have to make that argument in court about why voters don't
deserve access to that information, I think that's as good a place as
any to have this conversation. There is legal precedent for the auditor
auditing the Legislature, it has been done before in the history of
Massachusetts, and they only started claiming this constitutional
exemption in the 1990s. The voters demanding a change to that statute to
give the auditor the power to audit the Legislature is more a
reaffirmation of historical audit trends. Question 1 [seems to have]
passed in every single town in Massachusetts. That means not only did it
pass with an overwhelming majority of the vote, but a cross-section of
Massachusetts communities think that the Massachusetts state Legislature
needs to be more transparent. This is not a partisan issue. The most
progressive communities in Massachusetts, and also the most conservative
communities in Massachusetts, and also middle-of-the-road communities
are demanding that the Legislature open its doors to scrutiny.

It's
not a coincidence that we are unique among other states in our lack of
transparency and also unique in our lack of competitiveness. The fact
that Massachusetts ranked 50th this year for the eighth election in a
row in competitiveness has a direct link to the fact that we are very
frequently ranked bottom among states in our transparency, and that
we're the only state in which all three branches of government exempt
themselves from public records law. I would say that the lack of
transparency makes it very difficult for voters to make an informed
choice about who their representative is and if they're truly delivering
on election priorities, because we have to take their word for it —
that means that when election [time] rolls around and your rep hasn't
taken that many consequential votes, people just have to assume that the
promises they're making [align with] the things they did. It can be
difficult for a challenger to really point to things in an incumbent's
record and say that they made the wrong choice, because we often don't
know what our legislators are actually voting on.

Craney:
I think it's funny that there are questions of how this moves forward,
because the only reason there was a ballot question is because
[lawmakers] were resisting it. We have to remember that some of these
ballot questions require an act to change the Massachusetts law — this
potential ballot question is just trying to compel the Legislature to
follow the law. They could easily make this ballot question invalid
simply by saying to the state auditor, "Hey, come on in. We'll do an
audit. Let's work together." But the fact that they resisted it so much,
and even leading up to Election Day, the speaker publicly started to
float the idea to media that he may repeal it depending on how big of a
landslide it is, just shows you the real question about this whole thing
is not about implementation, but what is it that they're hiding? An
audit doesn't go in there and change their behavior. An audit goes in
there and says "these are things you should do to change your behavior,
to be in compliance with general, standard audits."

When
DiZoglio got into office and started to raise this issue again, you
have to remember the political environment at that moment. You had the
governor, the Senate president, the House speaker, the attorney general,
and, for whatever it's worth, the Boston Globe, all coming up pretty
hard against this concept. That's a lot of what I would consider
powerful political organizations saying, "Let's squash this thing."
[Mass Fiscal] stood with the auditor to help advance it.

They
don't [repeal questions] often. [There was] the income rollback of 2000
[that got enacted] 20 years later, for it to go down to 5 percent. And
the other one I can think of was in the year 2000, that said if you make
charitable contributions, you should get a state tax deduction off of
it. That passed with about 70 percent of the vote, and the Legislature
[suspended] it. If I remember correctly, Charlie Baker did enact it
right before he left, but again, that took 20 years. So will this be the
third thing they don't take action on in my lifetime?

Q: Did anything else stand out to you about Nov. 5 in Massachusetts?

Hille:
A frequent response that we hear from representatives about why they
can't afford to be more transparent with us is that they want to protect
their colleagues that are in purple districts from taking heat from
conservatives for a particularly controversial vote. With this election,
we saw only a couple of seats flipped, [which] I think revealed, as
many of the elections have revealed, that that argument doesn't hold a
lot of water if. If reps need to be protected from controversial votes
from somebody, it's clearly not from Republicans, because they're not
really taking much heat for those.

I
would also say looking forward to the next legislative session,
something that I'm curious about is the election of the speaker. We're
expecting Ron Mariano to run again, but there have been whispers all
around including in a speech made by Bob DeLeo that it's potentially
during this session that House Ways and Means Chair Aaron Michlewitz is
poised to assume the speakership, maybe. It'll be curious to see if they
rely on a playbook that they've done before, which is that Ron Mariano
gets re-elected in January, and then a few months later, announces that
he's taking another job, and then a snap election is called — that's a
strategy that they did with Ron Mariano's election when Bob DeLeo was
leaving the speakership in 2020. Obviously, using that strategy rather
than having an open speakership election at the beginning of the
legislative session means that any potential challengers have a lot less
time to prepare, kind of allowing the speakership to operate more like
succession than actually kind of a democratic election within the
membership.

Craney:
I think Questions 4 and 5 are very interesting. The psychedelics — we
legalized marijuana, we legalized gambling, and this seems to be the
first time that Massachusetts started to tap its brakes on this stuff.
Obviously the "no" side was vastly outspent, but the election wasn't
even close, so I think a lot of people actually thought about this
pretty critically. I think that that says a lot about the Massachusetts
voters — people like to say Massachusetts is pretty liberal, and maybe
that's true on how it elects its partisan officials. But when you start
looking at ballot questions, [voters] think critically about this.

Question
5 with the restaurants — usually raising the minimum wage polls very
highly with voters, and this is one of those other examples where voters
may have strong feelings about raising the minimum wage, but when
confronted with the reality of "Wait, there's an economic cost to this?
My favorite restaurants are going to shut down or they'll be a lot more
expensive, or the wait staff won't have tips anymore?", they realize,
no, this isn't good. I think it shows that Massachusetts voters on these
ballot questions, they're not knee-jerk liberal responses, these are
very moderate — I would actually argue right-of-center — outcomes.

One
other thing — look at New England voters. Vermont, home of Bernie
Sanders, like Massachusetts, home of Elizabeth Warren, these are very
liberal partisan officials. But like Massachusetts [had], Vermont has a
Republican governor, they're willing to vote for a check on state
government. Phil Scott, who's probably the most liberal Republican
governor in the country, campaigned very vigorously against the clean
energy standards for home heating, which is exactly what we're dealing
with in Massachusetts. He made this a huge central theme of his
campaign, and he supported candidates in the Legislature who agreed with
him. They flipped the lieutenant governor position, they knocked out
the Democrat, and now he has a Republican running mate for lieutenant
governor. And they picked up [five] state Senate seats and [nearly] 20
legislative seats. This is Vermont, and they ran on the economic cost,
the ratepayer revolution that Senator Michael Barrett always warns
about. I would say Vermont is definitely the canary in the coal mine for
New England. As these New England states pursue these very stringent,
expensive, arbitrary mandates on how we heat and power our grid, Vermont
is showing that voters have pushback on this. They care about the
environment, but they're not willing to inflict all this economic pain
on themselves, as Massachusetts is pursuing right now. It could be a
tremendous political issue years from now for the governor's race and
these legislative races.