BY NOW YOU may have seen the New York Times map of the United States covered with tiny, red arrows pointing to the right, like weathervanes. The map shows the shift in the vote in this year’s presidential election compared to 2020. The sea of red arrows pointing right mark counties where Donald Trump’s share of the vote increased since 2020. The smattering of blue arrows, showing where Vice President Kamala Harris made gains over Joe Biden’s vote four years ago, barely register. 

Make no mistake, 2024 was a bad election for Democrats. But it wasn’t as bad as that map, and the accompanying takes, make it out to be. That’s because the 2020 election was an outlier, a high water mark for Democrats that should not be used as a yardstick for future contests. Here in Massachusetts, this year’s results are much more on par, in terms of turnout and outcome, with every other presidential election so far this century besides 2020. In that way, they represent more of a reversion to the mean than a shift to the right.

Probably the best explanation for the strong Democratic showing in 2020 is the simplest: Trapped at home and frustrated with Trump’s COVID response, Democrats voted in huge numbers, swamping past turnout records. The pandemic was by far the number one issue in 2020 exit polls, far outpacing the economy, and two thirds of Massachusetts voters thought Biden would handle it better. With COVID in the rearview mirror, turnout is back to normal, and voters, as they did the world over, punished the incumbent party for post-pandemic inflation.

The 2020 spike in turnout here in Massachusetts is obvious when comparing it to other presidential elections. The chart of raw vote figures shows this most clearly. The overall trend is a steady increase in total votes, interrupted by a huge spike in Democratic voters in 2020. If any of these elections were being compared to 2020, they would look like a rightward lurch. The red arrows on that national New York Times map are pointing more away from what happened in 2020 than at what happened this year. 

Harris won Massachusetts by a 24.5-point margin based on mostly complete but still unofficial counts. That’s down sharply from Joe Biden’s 33.5-point landslide four years ago, but in line with a conventional Democratic margin of victory for a Bay State presidential contest. Indeed, Biden was the only candidate with a margin over 30 points over the last 7 presidential contests.

In many ways, 2024, looks closer to 2016 than 2020. This year saw slightly more total votes than 2016, and so accordingly both candidates received more votes than in 2016 in most towns. It’s the towns where Harris and Trump lost votes that tells the clearest story of what changed this cycle. 

Harris lost votes in the state’s biggest cities when compared to 2016. In Boston, she got 15 percent fewer votes than Hillary Clinton did in 2016; in Springfield, 18 percent fewer; in Holyoke, 20 percent. In Fall River, which Donald Trump won outright, she got 20 percent fewer votes than Clinton in 2016. In the Latino-heavy cities of Everett, Chelsea, Revere, and Lynn, she underperformed 2016 by 17 percent to 25 percent. 

Harris also underperformed in towns with large college populations. Her vote total was down 28 percent  compared to 2016 in Amherst, home to the flagship UMass campus, Amherst College, and Hampshire College. Harris still got 10 times more votes than Trump there, who also lost votes there compared to 2016. Still, the decline in votes for Harris may signal a protest against the Biden administration’s policy on the Israel-Hamas war. 

Trump also got more votes in most communities across the state compared to 2016, including in the major cities where Democratic votes declined. Trump’s biggest loss of votes came in Amherst (down 31 percent). Everywhere else he lost votes it was less than 10 percent of his 2016 total, mostly in liberal and well-off suburbs north and west of Boston, including Belmont, Concord, Lexington, Carlisle, Acton, and Melrose. He also saw declines in Provincetown and other towns at the tip of the Cape, and a few towns in Western Massachusetts. All these losses were smaller, both as a percentage and in terms of raw votes, than Harris’s double-digit declines in the cities.

Trump also gained raw votes in many of the cities where Harris lost ground, especially those with sizable Latino populations. The shift of the Latino vote towards Trump began in 2020 and accelerated in 2024, both nationally and here in Massachusetts. Lawrence, the state’s most Latino city, has already received much attention for its shift towards Trump. 

Looking at the raw vote totals underscores how dramatic that shift was. In 2024, Trump got 8,447 votes in Lawrence, more than double the 3,535 he got in 2016. Harris, by contrast, won 12,016 votes, down more than 7,000 from Clinton’s total in 2016. To be clear, Harris still won Lawrence, but the drop in her margin of victory, there and in other cities, should be a cause for concern for the state’s Democrats.     

To be clear, 2024 was a bad election for Democrats. But just how bad depends on what it’s compared to. Putting aside 2020 as an outlier and looking at 2024 through the lens of 2016 reveals real challenges for Democrats on what has traditionally been their home turf: big cities with racially diverse populations. That’s plenty for Democrats to focus on as they figure out how to adjust to a second Trump administration in Washington.

Steve Koczela is president and Rich Parr is senior research director at the MassINC Polling Group.

The post To understand 2024 results, hindsight is not 2020 appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

TWO YEARS AGO, in a post-election column here, I caught blowback for criticizing Elizabeth Warren for costing Democrats a House seat. Our senior senator had backed a progressive challenger to a longtime Democratic incumbent in Oregon who failed to pass all the progressive litmus tests. The “Warren Democrat,” Jamie McLeod-Skinner, knocked him out in the primary but went on to lose the general election and in the process help Republicans narrowly take the House.

We are back again in a narrowly decided House, too close to call with a slim advantage likely for Republicans. But there is a happy ending to the Oregon story for Democrats. While McLeod-Skinner ran again this cycle, Warren did not endorse and she lost to a more moderate Democrat in the primary. Janelle Bynum went on to defeat the GOP incumbent, will be the first Black woman to represent Oregon in DC, and is keeping a flicker of hope alive for Democratic control of the House. 

So, kudos to Warren for showing that progressives can pick and choose their fights. 

Which brings us to the dynamics of the presidential election in which Donald Trump won all seven swing states. Coalitions changed, and with them election results. That was true even in deep blue Massachusetts, where Trump became the first Republican nominee to carry Fall River in 100 years.   

Democrats face two major structural headwinds on the path to regaining a majority coalition. 

First is governance in blue states, which have not exactly created a progressive utopia in recent decades. To use the slanderous Republican term, the way that “Democrat-run” cities and states manage housing stock, transportation, cost of living, and education is not attracting new voters to the cause. It is driving voters to leave blue states for red states, or start voting Republican while remaining in blue states.

Massachusetts was among the five states where voters moved most to the right this election, along with fellow wealthy blue states New York, New Jersey, and California.

To our fellow Americans, Massachusetts remains synonymous with progressivism. We have the highest rate of self-identified liberals in the country and play an outsized role in debates over the direction of our nation. The country sees the prohibitively expensive housing and cost of living, brutal traffic, and other shortcomings that lead to wealthy blue states losing our share of the national population.

And it is not random population shifts: People are moving from blue states to red states. And the loss of population has greater electoral impact than just congressional seats that are being pulled from blue states through decennial reapportionment. It is damaging to the Democratic brand. 

There is no shortcut to improving quality of life in blue states. A broad reform movement is required to significantly shift the experience of blue state governance. Promising cross-ideological approaches like the “Abundance Agenda” have emerged to tackle the cost of housing and energy by mixing progressive prioritization of human welfare with more libertarian instincts on regulation. In Massachusetts, that is already manifesting itself in a significant push for more abundant housing that is reducing regulation while overriding excessive local control. Those are fights worth having.

The second problem is interest groups that dominate the party coalition by practicing a politics of subtraction, whereby policy purity tests seek to narrow the big tent required for progressives to wield power nationally. This is the tent-shrinking path that Warren took two years ago in Oregon, but largely avoided on the campaign trail this year as Kamala Harris worked to pivot away from the leftist policy positions she took in her brief presidential run in the 2020 cycle.

While Harris tacked significantly to the political center in the four-month sprint, her short-lived 2020 presidential run was animated by her efforts to appeal to the left in a crowded primary field. On some issues, such as fracking, Medicare For All, and mandatory gun buybacks, Harris was explicit in abandoning prior unpopular progressive positions. On many others, from the Green New Deal to electric vehicle mandates, she simply refused to answer. 

During the progressive surge of the past decade, a case was made that a heightened contrast between MAGA populism and litmus test progressivism would cause a coalition realignment that favored Democrats. Back in 2016, Chuck Schumer famously said, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”

That math, obviously, has not worked out that way.

The Massachusetts version is that, in presidential races since 2016, Democratic nominees went from winning Lawrence by 67 percentage points to winning by just 17 points. 

From 2016 to 2024, Democrats lost 50 points in Lawrence, but gained three points in Wellesley. While that is surely not a good trade for a political party seeking to win elections, it may not be a bad one for progressive groups looking to fundraise. 

It is now social media clicks and foundation cash, not votes, that drive much of the key entities comprising the Democratic ecosystem. When people refer to “The Democratic Party,” what they typically mean is the sum of interest groups, not the formal party structure. Political scientists have termed this dynamic “Hollow Parties,” where weak formal institutions are overrun by outside groups.

The most stark example of policy litmus tests from such groups is found on policy questionnaires from nonprofit and political groups.

In 2022, then-candidate Maura Healey refused to even fill out the candidate questionnaires from the two most prominent Massachusetts groups of this type, Progressive Mass and Our Revolution.

This could hypothetically have cost Healey support. As Progressive Mass leader Jonathan Cohn said at the time, “Progressive groups are filled with people who are the types of people who end up being activists on campaigns and active in organizations.” 

But, as Politico’s Lisa Kashinsky noted in the story about Healey’s decision, there was also a potential  downside to completing the surveys that she avoided: “Her policy questionnaire answers could have been used against her,” she wrote.

The purpose of the modern progressive policy questionnaire is at odds with the purpose of a political party, which is to win. There would be no point in the ACLU or Progressive Mass asking where candidates stand on policies that are broadly popular. The point is to separate the merely progressive candidate from the completely pure candidate who is willing to take unpopular stances that appeal to a small but organized part of the primary electorate.

Kamala Harris faced significant headwinds, weighed down by Joe Biden and the post-pandemic dynamics that have felled incumbents around the globe. But when it came to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on swing state ads, the Trump campaign elevated Harris’ 2019 responses to the ACLU candidate questionnaire to demonstrate her fidelity to a broad range of progressive litmus tests.

In rejecting progressive litmus tests in her gubernatorial race, Healey was prioritizing those who pay the price for electoral defeat: the most vulnerable in society. Trump’s second victory will primarily hurt those who progressive advocacy groups are organized to defend. Progressive groups are often organized to defend the poor and marginalized, but seeking maximalist policies that lose elections can have the opposite impact.

These are good faith places where the balance is difficult to strike. Maura Healey took a hardline stance on immigration in June, but this week is pledging to use every tool to fight Trump deportations. Healey is picking which fights to have, balancing electoral and governing pressures to be able to deliver on behalf of the vulnerable.

The current coalitional heavyweights in the national Democratic Party focus too much on enforcing policy litmus tests that narrow the coalition, and do not focus enough on improving governance of blue states. These are the politics of subtraction, and the policies subtracting population and power from blue states.

These are distinct problems with different solutions. Massachusetts demonstrates the promise and peril of both, and a potential path forward for prioritizing the fights that can lead back to a majority party.

Liam Kerr writes the WelcomeStack.org newsletter, and is co-founder of WelcomePAC, which supports Democratic candidates in center-right districts and advocates for a big-tent Democratic Party.

The post The politics of subtraction appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

DONALD TRUMP HAS made significant inroads among several traditional Democratic Party constituencies, cutting into Democratic margins among Black and Hispanic voters. A new paper looking at his gains among Hispanic voters puts forward a provocative argument to explain some of that movement. 

It contends that Hispanic voters who hold socially conservative, anti-LGBTQ views but might otherwise have voted Democratic have become turned off by Democratic politicians’ use of the gender-neutral term “Latinx,” which is being used “to explicitly include gender minorities and broader LGBTQ+ community segments.” 

Based on their analysis of a set of population surveys conducted in recent years, Marcel Roman, an assistant professor of government at Harvard, and Amanda Sahar d’Urso, an assistant professor of government at Georgetown University, say Latinos are less likely to support a politician who uses the term “Latinx” in their appeal to voters. 

They say the move away from Democratic candidates using the term appears to be driven by the subset of Latino voters who hold negative attitudes toward the LGBTQ community and is not based on a broader reaction against the new term, which first began to appear about 20 years ago. 

“We find that backlash is not driven by concerns related to respect for the Spanish language or anti-intellectual beliefs – that Latinx is a bourgeois, coastal, white imposition on working-class Latinos,” Roman said in an interview. “The reason why it generates backlash against some aspects of the Democratic Party is it’s a signal of inclusivity toward LBGTQ+ and gender non-conforming” members of the Latino community.

Their paper also digs into Hispanic voter patterns in areas where they say the use of Latinx has had particularly high “salience,” measured by the level of internet search activity, which Roman and d’Urso say serves as a reasonable proxy for its presence in the political discourse of local candidates. Among Hispanic voters with negative views toward LGBTQ people, they found that there was greater movement toward Trump from the 2016 election to the 2020 election if they lived in areas with higher Latinx “salience.” 

Nationally, there was about an 8 percentage point swing toward Trump among Hispanic voters from 2016 to 2020. Biden still captured a majority of Hispanic votes four years ago – 61 percent, according to one estimate – but if the movement by Hispanic voters toward Trump continues in the current election, it could be ominous for Democratic chances. 

The paper says use of the term among Democratic politicians surged in recent years. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren both used it in the 2020 presidential campaign, and Joe Biden used it in a 2021 speech on Covid vaccine compliance. Among Democratic members of Congress, the study says, just 10 percent used Latinx in social media posts during the 2015-2016 session, but by the 2019-2020 session fully half had done so. By contrast, they say, not a single Republican member of Congress has invoked the term on social media. 

Amid his harsh rhetoric toward immigrants, Trump has nonetheless won support among Hispanic voters who don’t see themselves in those attacks. 

“The us-versus-them framing has long characterized political alliances, across the ideological spectrum,” the New York Times said in a story Tuesday on Trump’s appeals to Black and Latino voters. “But Mr. Trump has been far more direct than any recent presidential candidate in inviting Black and Latino voters to be part of the ‘us,’ so long as they acknowledge that there is a ‘them.”

Underscoring the findings by Roman and d’Urso on the power of anti-LGBT views among a swath of Hispanic voters is Trump’s explicit attempt to win support on the issue. 

“In one of the Trump campaign’s most widely broadcast Spanish-language television ads, attacking Ms. Harris for her support of transgender medical care for immigrants, it closes with ‘Kamala Harris is with them. President Trump is with us,’” the Times story said.

Roman said Democrats appear to have recognized the electoral costs that may come with use of the term Latinx. “The Democratic Party has kind of course corrected,” he said, with Harris and Biden not using the term since early 2021. “The Democratic Party at the national level recognized it may do more harm than good,” he said. But Roman said some “damage may be done” already in terms of the association of the term with Democrats. 

Based on his findings, Roman said abandoning the term Latinx is a strategically smart move by Democrats. For his part, however, Roman sees the term as a welcome evolution in language precisely because of what it signals. “I think, in general, inclusive language is good,” he said. “It’s not the phrase that’s the problem. It’s that people hold queer-phobic attitudes – that’s the problem.” Shifting that reality, he said, is “a much larger undertaking.”

The post Study finds use of gender-neutral ‘Latinx’ by Democratic pols is costing them votes appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

THE TEAMSTERS union has twice roiled the race for the White House this year, first when its leader, Sean O’Brien, a Medford native, muscled his way into a speaking role at the Republican National Convention and then again this week when the 1.3-million member union said it won’t be issuing an endorsement for president.

At the national level, the union has a history of bucking the rest of the labor establishment. Notably, the Teamsters endorsed Richard Nixon for president in both 1968 and 1972, and was one of two unions to back Ronald Reagan. This year’s no-endorsement decision is also revealing internal strife, as former leader James P. Hoffa, who has previously sparred with O’Brien, called the move a “failure of leadership.”

When a union declines to issue an endorsement at the national level, that typically frees up the locals to make their own picks. Kamala Harris’s campaign on Wednesday was quick to tout endorsements from locals in battleground states such as Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin.

But what of the Massachusetts locals, in particular Local 25, where O’Brien got his start? They’ve stayed quiet this week.

The local, based in Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood, is where O’Brien revved up his career, driving heavy equipment at age 18 before becoming its president in 2006.

In the Harris campaign’s email blast to reporters about Teamsters in battleground states earlier this week, there was also a link to a Facebook post from a Teamsters official who noted that O’Brien’s “hometown nemesis,” John Murphy, is backing Harris. His union, Dorchester-based Local 122, endorsed Harris shortly after Labor Day.

O’Brien still has strong ties to Local 25, as well as Massachusetts. He sits on the board of directors for Massport, the agency that runs Logan International Airport, and he’s been spotted around town hobnobbing with the state’s top elected officials. The local, the largest in New England with 12,000 members, was an early supporter of Michelle Wu when she ran for mayor in 2021, as well as Maura Healey when she first ran for attorney general in 2014.

A phone message to Local 25 went unreturned Thursday, and a request for comment through its public relations firm, Regan Communications, was declined. Given how central the local is to O’Brien’s biography, it’s fair to speculate that the local will likely do whatever O’Brien wants. Its active Facebook page did not mention this week’s national news.

Local 122’s Murphy called the lack of an endorsement at the national level “bewildering,” while acknowledging there is a “sizable chunk” of Teamsters who back former president Donald Trump. “Our union is a reflection of the American population, with different stances on issues and different politics,” Murphy said in a phone interview. “But as labor leaders we’ve got to take positions that are in the interests of everybody, even if some members might disagree with it.”

New gun law in the ballot firing line

Parts of a sprawling new gun law are already being challenged in court, but a coalition of Second Amendment advocates say they are getting closer to potentially stopping the whole thing in its tracks.

An initiative dubbing itself the Civil Rights Coalition – a group of gun rights supporters opposing the recent gun reform legislation that dramatically retooled firearms laws in Massachusetts – announced in a press conference Thursday that they are more than halfway to collecting the signatures needed to suspend the law until it could reach voters via 2026 ballot referendum to repeal the law.

“We’re literally in unprecedented waters here. There’s never been gun control legislation like this passed anywhere else in the country,” said coalition chair Toby Leary, a co-owner of Cape Gun Works in Hyannis. “And we want to let the people of Massachusetts know they could wake up on October 24 and be a felon, having done nothing different.”

Gov. Maura Healey celebrated the law’s passage earlier this summer, calling it “the most significant gun safety legislation in a decade.” It expands “red flag” laws, adds to the list of sensitive spaces where guns are not permitted, includes new ways to combat untraceable “ghost guns,” and enables new licensing rules after the US Supreme Court scrambled the state’s prior permitting approach in its 2022 Bruen decision. 

The Massachusetts Gun Owners Action League, a local affiliate of the National Rifle Association, filed suit in federal court shortly after the law passed because, according to GOAL executive director Jim Wallace, there “is no hope for any help within the Massachusetts court system.”

That suit is targeting certain licensing requirements laid out in the new law, arguing that they are unnecessarily burdensome and unconstitutional.

Repeal processes are a sprint. This year, a repeal effort would need to submit 49,716 certified signatures to the Secretary of State’s office within 90 days of the law passing to both suspend the law and put it on the ballot in 2026. To simply put the repeal option on the ballot, the campaign would need to submit 37,287 signatures to local clerks by the October 9 deadline and then to the Secretary by October 23. 

Taking it to the ballot is far from a guarantee that the law will be overturned. Less than half of all repeal efforts have succeeded in the state, and the two efforts to repeal but not suspend laws since the turn of the millennium – striking down transgender anti-discrimination protections and a new drivers license eligibility for immigrants without legal proof of residence – both died at the ballot box.

Some laws, however, are not eligible to be repealed via referendum. According to the Secretary of State’s office, if the law is an “emergency declaration,” it cannot be repealed on the ballot. It is not clear if Healey will act to fill an emergency preamble for the gun law, which was passed without one by the Legislature. 

Leary said the signature gathering is being done by volunteers only, and is an awareness campaign as much as a repeal effort. ”There’s no time to sleep,” he said. “We have about three weeks to get almost 50,000 signatures. We’re well on our way to getting there,” Leary said. “We really need to call awareness, because most people don’t even know it happened.”

The post Political Notebook: Teamsters throw new wrench into election appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

IN A CAMPAIGN that has been light on policy specifics and clear goals, Kamala Harris laid down an audacious marker in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. “We will end America’s housing shortage,” she declared. 

Harris has gone further than that feel-good platitude and put a number on her housing vow, saying her administration would build 3 million additional housing units over four years. 

While the run-up in prices and ongoing shortage of supply has catapulted housing onto the national agenda to a degree not usually seen in presidential contests, the issue has been front and center for years in Massachusetts. The state has among the highest housing costs in the country, and everyone from business leaders to left-leaning housing advocates says the situation is making the state unlivable. 

That has people focused on housing in Massachusetts paying particular attention to the ideas getting floated in the presidential race. Do those folks think Harris’s plans could make a difference? 

It all depends, say housing experts here. At the heart of that uncertainty is the basic law of supply and demand. 

Harris is proposing to make available $25,000 in downpayment support for first-time homebuyers, a program her campaign says could help 4 million new buyers over four years. That would be welcome news to households now struggling at the margins and locked out of the market. But on its own, pushing more buyers into the housing market runs the risk of only driving prices higher, as more people compete for a limited pool of homes. 

“If it were just giving buyers incentives on the demand side, the danger is you’re just inflating a market that’s undersupplied and overheated,” said Clark Ziegler, executive director of the Massachusetts Housing Partnership, a statewide affordable housing organization. 

But Harris’s plan couples funding for first-time buyers with incentives for more housing production. The plan includes a proposal for what the Harris campaign calls a “first-ever” tax incentive for builders of homes sold to first-time buyers, and it calls for a $40 billion “innovation fund” to spur affordable housing development at the local level. 

“It’s really good because it’s not just on the demand side,” Ziegler said of the proposal. “That, I think, is the secret sauce to make things work.” 

Striking the right balance of supply and demand incentives will be key, said Andrew Mikula, senior housing fellow at the Pioneer Institute. “It’s tricky,” he said. Mikula said it’s easier at the federal level to goose the demand side with things like the proposed first-time-buyer subsidy than to ensure more supply, since construction decisions ultimately are made at the local level. 

Rachel Heller, CEO of the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association, a statewide housing nonprofit, said it’s very encouraging to see housing get more attention at the national level. If Massachusetts has the unenviable distinction of being one of the places with the most severe crisis of housing affordability and supply, she said, we have also been in the lead when it comes to policies aimed at addressing the problem. 

Harris’s plan “mirrors a lot of the steps that we’re taking here in Massachusetts,” said Heller. She said the state has also set a firm production goal – calling for 200,000 new units to be built by 2030 to meet demand. Meanwhile, the MBTA Communities Act calls for local zoning to allow for more multi-family housing, while the state also has a downpayment assistance program, offering $30,000 to $50,000 to eligible first-time home buyers. 

Former president Donald Trump has sent decidedly mixed messages on housing. He’s talked about opening up federal land for housing construction, and early in his first term in office, his HUD secretary, Ben Carson, said local communities could get more federal grants by easing restrictions on apartment construction. 

By 2020, according to free-market-oriented Reason magazine, Trump made a 180-degree turn, vowing on the campaign trail to block any moves to end single-family-only zoning that might threaten the “suburban lifestyle dream” with lots of apartment construction. 

“I keep the suburbs safe,” Trump said in a rally this month in Michigan, adding that his policies would “keep illegal aliens out of suburbs.”  

In describing Trump’s reversal of course, Reason’s Christian Britschgi invoked the “YIMBY” acronym, which stands for “Yes, in my backyard,” adopted by pro-housing advocates to counter the NIMBY resistance to new development. 

“During his first term,” writes Britschgi, “our first developer president went from proposing solid YIMBY-inflected policies to running for re-election as the nation’s NIMBY-in-chief.” 

The post Could Harris make a dent in housing crisis? appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

WHILE PRESIDENT BIDEN faces unprecedented calls from within his party to step down as the Democratic nominee, members of the Massachusetts delegation who are headed to the national convention in Chicago appear largely supportive of Biden staying at the top of the ticket, according to a new survey.

The survey of delegates, conducted by the MassINC Polling Group for Commonwealth Beacon, ran from Friday through Monday. The survey coincided with an assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump that upended American politics and overtook a focus on – and widespread Democratic teeth-gnashing over – Biden’s age and ability to beat his Republican opponent in November.

Responses show a Massachusetts delegation mostly supporting the president (62 percent), while about 15 percent of respondents said Biden should drop out and another 23 percent said they were unsure or preferred not to say.

The survey allowed for open-ended comments, and nearly all who offered comments, whose responses were anonymized, expressed firm support for the president and took shots at what they see as a media unduly focused on the age issue. If elected to a second term, and if he serves out the full four years, Biden would leave office at the age of 86.

A majority of Democratic voters nationwide now say they think Biden is too old for a second term.

“Instead of focusing on the signs of aging in Biden, the media should focus on Trump’s lies, malapropisms, illogical statements, and hateful messages,” one delegate wrote. “We need the media’s cooperation in revealing Trump to be the immoral threat to democracy that he is.”

Another added: “In general, members of Congress calling for the President to withdraw when he’s already said he intends to stay in the race is counterproductive and weakens the nominee unnecessarily.”

Massachusetts Democrats will send 116 delegates – 92 of which are pledged to Joe Biden – and eight alternates to the party convention in Chicago in late August.

Just over 50 delegates began the survey, with 42, or 36 percent of the total, completing it in its entirety, weighing in anonymously on their presidential preferences. The numbers are not necessarily representative of the delegation, but they are illustrative of what’s on their minds.

Some may have been wary of giving their view, even with the promised anonymity. Publicly, Massachusetts Democrats have sent mixed messages to the Biden camp, with Gov. Maura Healey saying the president should “carefully evaluate” whether he can beat Trump. Congressmen Seth Moulton, Stephen Lynch and Jake Auchincloss have raised concerns about Biden after the disastrous debate in June, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren backed Biden in her public comments.

A significant number of the delegates have ties to Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s administration and political operation. “I hear a lot of excitement about wanting to make sure we are getting to the point where things are official,” Wu said this week. “And I think the stakes remain as high as ever in terms of the need for this Democratic ticket to be successful.” She added that she continues to support Biden as the nominee.

“This survey puts some hard numbers to the speculation and offers a window into what delegates want when names aren’t attached,” said Steve Koczela, president of the MassINC Polling Group. “There’s no recent precedent for the situation the party is in, so it’s hard to apply any conventional wisdom to the numbers. But, intuitively, it seems like Biden would want more of his own party insiders thinking he will win and pressing for him to stay in.”

The debate over Biden’s ability to weather a grueling campaign left the headlines only one day into the survey period. On Saturday afternoon, an attempted assassination at a Pennsylvania rally injured former President Donald Trump’s ear, killed one attendee, and critically wounded two others. 

The days after that saw admonitions to lower the political temperature, with calls for Biden to drop out muted by statements of sympathy for the victims that segued into Democrats calling for better gun control and charges from Republican elected officials – including now vice presidential pick J.D. Vance – that the party’s characterization of Trump as a threat to democracy “directly led” to the rally shooting. Investigators have not yet established the gunman’s specific motive.

The debate over Biden appears to be resurfacing now. Days before Democratic National Convention members were scheduled to meet and expected to take a virtual roll call vote to nominate Biden weeks ahead of the convention, some Democrats, including Moulton, are pushing back on the plan. While not outright calling for the president to step aside in favor of another candidate, the opponents argue the vote would unnecessarily cut off opportunity to consider non-Biden alternatives.

Alternatives exist, with 67 percent of respondents identifying Vice President Kamala Harris as the candidate they would be most likely to support should Biden drop out, followed by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer at 33 percent. Harris is also the candidate they believe has the best chance of defeating Trump in November at 53 percent.

Other possibilities include California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michelle Obama, and Pete Buttigieg, drew support in the low teens. The response to former Gov. Deval Patrick was underwhelming – just three delegates who responded to the survey said they were open to considering him.

The Democratic delegates surveyed also offered a rosier assessment of Biden’s chances than current neck-and-neck polling suggests, with 64 percent of the delegates who responded to the survey saying they thought Biden is more likely to win the race.

The post Mass. delegates explain why they’re backing Biden in new survey appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

SHEER ELATION consumed the Boston Common on Saturday afternoon as more than 1,000 people danced and cheered Joe Biden’s election as president. Kamala Harris, who made history as the first woman, black, or person of South Asian descent to be elected vice president, was celebrated on several signs.  

Screams of glee rose from the crowd whenever a US Postal Service truck drove by. Sometimes the driver would honk back. Cars, motorcycles, and trucks slowly inched along, windows wide as drivers blasted music, honked horns, and waved, often blocking traffic. 

One masked woman climbed atop a street light and remained there, waving a Biden flag and dancing, as the sun went down. A young man climbed atop another and popped open a bottle of champagne, spraying the crowded, which cheered and egged him on.  

A little girl sat atop of her father’s shoulder’s clutching a filled-in electoral map with “Biden Won!” written on it. Queen’s “We are the Champions” was sung, along with Miley Cyrus’s “Party in USA.”  

Others stood silently behind masks, simply holding signs. Andrea Cavazos was holding one that read, “Immigrants, we get the job done,” a phrase that has been shared widely by the cast of the musical “Hamilton” during Trump’s first term to counter his anti-immigrant policies.    

“I didn’t trust him handling COVID,” Cavazos said about Trump’s handling of the pandemic. Cavazos, who is Mexican-American, said she has been worried for years about the many executive orders Trump has issued to alter immigration policy. 

“Everything —DACA, the asylum policies, separating families at the border, those are all things Biden can change with executive powers,“ said Cavazos, who used to work with legal aid organizations assisting immigrants. 

David Wells whizzed up Charles St. on a longboard, holding a boom box high above his head to applause.  

“As a black and gay man, you don’t always feel represented in this country,” he said.  

Wells said that he’s been frustrated by the lack of White House response following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police officers. “Trump barely said anything about Floyd and we saw that man get murdered,” he said. 

The longtime South Boston resident has spent the week nervously refreshing Google for word of the election outcome.  

“I cried a little bit when I saw,” he said, he said of news that the race had been called. “First off, now we have our first black female vice president,” he said, “Second— I don’t have to say President Trump much longer.” 

* * * *  

 Earlier in front of the State House, a very different scene played out, as  angry, unmasked supporters of President Trump protested the declaration that Joe Biden is now the president-elect.   

A crowd of 50 to 100 people chanted of “law and order” over and over.  

“It’s ille–gal, it’s ille–gal,” cried a woman disputing Biden’s election.  

Joan, who refused to give her last name, called the election result illegitimate because of “voting irregularities” in Milwaukee and Pennsylvania, picking up on unfounded claims made by Trump of voter fraud. 

“Several of the precincts had more Democratic votes than voters registered,” she said. The claim that seven Milwaukee wards reported more 2020 presidential votes than registered voters has been disproven.   

Nearby, a man with a black Gun & Roses T-shirt and no mask interrupted an interview with her and yelled, “The media declared him the winner and the media lies!”  

Asked if she would accept Biden as president if he were to survive any recounts and legal battles, Joan said, “What I believe is going happen is that Trump’s going to win, because right now, we’re losing our rights under election law.”  

A man in a black Audi rolled by, holding up his middle finger to those gathered as a few Trump supporters held up theirs, while others flashed peace signs and others. The driver waved a mask at them as they yelled back. Nearby, people from both sides got within inches of each other’s faces yelling at each other before one man kneeled in front of the Trump supporters, holding up a gay pride flag.  

A woman yelled “Donald Trump is my president” and “voter ID!” in his ear.  

The post Election result draws tear-filled cheers — and jeers appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

AFTER FOUR TUMULTUOUS years under Donald Trump that upended countless norms of the US presidency and four days of vote-counting that kept the country — and world — on edge, Joe Biden was elected the country’s 46th president.

Victory came on the 77-year-old former Democratic vice president’s third run for the White House, and also swept into office California Sen. Kamala Harris, who will become the first woman to serve as vice president, and the first woman of color to win national office. Harris’s father is Jamaican-American and her late mother immigrated to the US from India.

News organizations on Saturday projected Biden to be the winner in Pennsylvania, the state where he was born, with its 20 electoral votes putting him over the 270 mark needed to win the presidency.

Biden was first elected to the Senate from Delaware 48 years ago today, becoming one of the youngest people to ever serve there, and he will now become the oldest person to ever take office as president when inaugurated, at age 78, in January. 

“America, I’m honored that you have chosen me to lead our great country,” Biden said in a tweet just before 12 noon on Saturday. “The work ahead of us will be hard, but I promise you this: I will be a President for all Americans — whether you voted for me or not. I will keep the faith that you have placed in me.”

Biden said Trump’s comment in August of 2017 that there were “very fine people on both sides” in reacting to demonstrators and counter-protesters at a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, led by white supremacists motivated him to make yet another run for president. Biden declared the race a battle to restore the “soul of the nation.”

His win ends one of the more improbable reigns in the White House and makes Trump, a divisive figure who played more on fears than hopes, only the fifth incumbent president defeated for reelection in the last 100 years. The last incumbent to lose reelection was George H.W. Bush, who was defeated 28 years ago by Bill Clinton. 

In a world of “alternative facts” — the not-ironically-uttered framing provided four years ago by Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway — the Republican former reality TV star sought to recast reality to his liking, starting with the effort to resize his inaugural crowd and ending with a flurry of campaign rallies where he downplayed the persistence of a deadly global pandemic, the mishandling of which dented his standing in the race. 

Trump was not conceding the race on Saturday and has vowed to pursue legal challenges to the results in several battleground states. His dangerous pushback against facts was in full gear in recent days as Trump launched a string of unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud, beginning before Tuesday’s election and continuing through the counting of mailed ballots in the days since. 

Four years ago Trump galvanized the support of white working-class voters as he tore the Republican Party away from its free-market bearings, railing against international trade deals he said hurt American workers. His election was part of a trend of right-leaning world leaders who have fashioned winning campaigns out of populist messages appealing to nationalist sentiments, often employing racist tropes or appealing to ethnic grievances. Biden vowed to win back white working-class voters while also energizing voters of color, and he was able to flip back three crucial states — Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — that Trump won in 2016.

In terms of ripple effects in Massachusetts, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has reportedly been lobbying for appointment as treasury secretary in a Biden administration. It’s unclear whether a man whose career has been defined by moderate Democratic politics — and coziness with the financial industry that has lots of credit card companies headquartered in Delaware — would tap a Wall Street antagonist for such a key post.

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh has been mentioned as a possible labor secretary, but he’s given no indication he’d be interested in heading to Washington. Biden has signaled that he would look for bipartisan representation in his cabinet were he elected. That could even land Gov. Charlie Baker on a list of potential Republican appointees. Baker didn’t support Biden, but he never backed Trump, either, declaring that he blanked his presidential ballot this year.

Massachusetts will no longer claim the only Roman Catholic ever elected president, as Biden now follows John F. Kennedy, 60 years after his election, in becoming the second Catholic to win the White House.

Biden emerged as the come-from-behind winner in a wide-open Democratic primary field. He had finished well back in the pack in several early primaries and his campaign seemed close to finished when he scored his first win in the South Carolina primary. Biden’s campaign was resurrected with the backing of the state’s leading Democratic black official, Rep. Jim Clyburn, and huge margins from the state’s large African-American voting bloc. Three days later he racked up more wins on Super Tuesday and was on his way to the nomination.

Former President Barack Obama, whom Biden served under for eight years, issued a statement saying he “could not be prouder” to congratulate the country’s next president and vice president.

“In this election, under circumstances never experienced, Americans turned out in numbers never seen,” said Obama. “And once every vote is counted, President-Elect Biden and Vice President-Elect Harris will have won a historic and decisive victory.” 

“I know he’ll do the job with the best interests of every American at heart, whether or not he had their vote. So I encourage every American to give him a chance and lend him your support,” Obama wrote.

Biden and Harris are scheduled to speak Saturday night from a stage outside the convention center in downtown Wilmington.

The post Biden trumps Trump appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

THE MOST BUZZED-ABOUT moment in Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate came when a fly perched on Vice President Mike Pence’s head for over two minutes, during which he was calling it an “insult” to police to claim that systemic racism against black people by law enforcement exists.

Pence’s debate with Sen. Kamala Harris took a far more traditional course than last week’s chaotic interaction between President Trump and former vice president Joe Biden. There was far more policy discussion this time around, with the coronavirus pandemic, trade war with China, climate change, Trump taxes, criminal justice, and abortion being mentioned.

But Pence and Harris often did not actually respond to the questions of moderator Susan Page of USA Today. At one point, Pence asked Harris if she and Biden would try to pack the Supreme Court with their own nominees if Amy Coney Barrett is approved as a justice. Harris responded by criticizing judicial appointments occurring just before an election, something she had previously done when asked what she would want California to do if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

In what the Washington Post said could have been considered a “self-critique,” Pence said “I just want the record to reflect, she never answered the question.”

Page asked Pence about how he and the president would help Americans with preexisting conditions to have access to affordable insurance if the Affordable Care Act, which includes coverage of those conditions as a key tenet, is thrown out in a court battle the administration initiated.

The vice president dodged the question, saying, “President Trump and I have a plan to improve health care and protect pre-existing conditions for every American,” but didn’t elaborate on a plan.

Page also asked the candidates about whether they had conversations with their running mates about what would happen if the president becomes disabled. Under the 25th Amendment, a president could be declared “disabled” and removed from office by the vice president acting with a majority of the cabinet.

Pence, apparently sensing the question was inspired by the recent diagnosis of Trump with COVID-19, pivoted to talk about how the administration will have a vaccine by the end of the year (something health officials say won’t be available to the public until 2021), and that Harris is undermining public confidence by criticizing the administration on vaccine creation. Harris similarly didn’t answer Page’s question, talking instead of the moment Biden asked her to join the ticket.

Harris scored points when she mentioned the 210,000 American deaths from COVID-19, and how Trump and Pence were aware of the nature and seriousness of the pandemic early on, but downplayed the significance at first.”Can you imagine if you knew on January 28th, as opposed to March 13th, what they knew, what you might’ve done to prepare?” she asked.

Page followed that up by asking Pence why the US death toll, as a percentage of the population, is higher than that of almost every other wealthy nation on Earth. Pence, the head of the administration’s coronavirus task force, focused his response on Trump’s February ban of foreign travelers from mainland China. What he didn’t add was that thousands of Chinese, Americans, and travelers from other countries still arrived to the US from China for three months following that.

That analysis of the early pandemic response came the morning before the New England Journal of Medicine said in an editorial that US leaders have failed to respond to the challenge of COVID-19. The publication urged voters not to reelect President Trump, the first time in its history that the prestigious medical journal has taken a stand in a presidential election. “They have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy,” the editors said.

The two candidates had two very different, pointed strategies to the debate. Pence took the road of running out the clock, a filibuster method of sorts, as Joanna Weiss called it at WBUR, while looking quite serious and poised. Undecided voters on CNN later called the approach “confident.”

It seemed that Harris anticipated Pence’s many interruptions to her answers, pausing several times to look over and say ““Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking,” just to have him look back over and continue. He interrupted her twice as many times as she interrupted him, the first time when she was responding to Pence’s claim that Biden will raise taxes “on day one” of his presidency.

Marketwatch reports that those moments are resonating for women online, many of whom empathize with the many moments men have interrupted or spoken over them in professional settings.

The post Pence-Harris debate more traditional appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care doesn’t want the government to take over the entire health insurance business – at least until after he retires –  but he sees some advantages to the movement seeking an expansion of Medicare so that government-backed insurance covers everyone.

For one, Harvard Pilgrim CEO Michael Carson thinks Medicare for All – a rallying cry among many Democrats – is part of an important discussion to have. For another, Carson said, the best plan is a middle way that involves more collaboration between the government and private insurers.

Carson shared his thoughts about potential changes big and small to the health care marketplace with Paul Hattis, an associate professor at the Tufts University Medical School, and John McDonough of the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, during the “Health or Consequences” Codcast.

McDonough asked Carson about California Sen. Kamala Harris’s endorsement of a system to eliminate private health insurance.

“Let’s wait until I retire,” Carson joked.

In seriousness, Carson said he thinks a combination of approaches is likely the best path forward.

“At the end of the day, it’s a joint solution. I don’t think it’s a single-payer, government programs, no-private-health-insurance organization solution. I think it’s a combination,” Carson said.

Carson, who was profiled recently by the Boston Globe, is a former soccer player and US Air Force veteran who grew up outside of Frankfurt. Part of Carson’s reticence about a completely government-run health insurance system appears to stem from his upbringing. Carson recalled that his mother, when they were living in Germany, would receive a limited number of certificates to see the doctor.

“Going to a program like that is going to mean changes in how we access health care, because if we just think it’s free health care and access is unlimited, those costs are going to spiral really out of control,” Carson said.

Under Carson, who took over at Harvard Pilgrim last year, the company is looking to expand its business with government programs and the insurer could possibly re-enter the state’s Medicaid program, MassHealth, he said.

Carson also discussed the proposed merger between Harvard Pilgrim and Partners HealthCare, which fell apart last year. Noting Harvard Pilgrim’s joint-venture relationships with three hospital systems in New Hampshire and some risk-sharing deals with providers in Massachusetts, Carson said the discussions with Partners stemmed from consideration about how best to serve the insurer’s members.

“There were lots of benefits that could have come from that,” Carson said of the now-scuttled merger idea. “It’s not easy just to slam a provider and a health insurance company together,” Carson said. “It didn’t come together at the time.”

Carson also reported that, after some “tough financial years” between 2014 and 2016, when insurers were adjusting to the Affordable Care Act, Harvard Pilgrim has had two good financial years in 2017 and 2018, owing both to overall market conditions and also to tighter cost management at Harvard Pilgrim.

The post H-P chief: Medicare for all debate is good appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.