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.

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THE LAST FEW weeks have featured a dizzying array of analysis from people using polls to show President Biden is either within striking distance, out of striking distance, still in the race, definitely out of the race, competitive in swing states, not competitive in swing states, about as good as alternative candidates, much worse than alternatives, and everything in between. This has mushroomed into a battle royale for party leaders, interested super PACs, reporters, armchair forecasters, and even a stressful pastime for voters trying to figure out whether they think Biden should stay or go. 

At the moment, the side trying to edge Biden off, stage left, seems to be winning the argument and voters seem to be on their side. But polls can’t really settle the argument over whether that’s the right decision for three main reasons. 

First, analyzing polls in a close election can show you whatever you want to see and support whatever you want to say. There is no cutoff, no threshold a candidate must clear to definitely have a path to victory and no point of no return below which a candidate is doomed. Those still in Biden’s corner can adopt a familiar set of analyses to support their argument that he should stay in. Campaign pollsters are paid to find and highlight a path for their candidates to win and are very good at it. This kind of analysis helps candidates and campaigns make decisions, but as someone who has done it a lot, a lot of it is also non-falsifiable guesswork.

Analysts on Biden’s side would point to a mostly stable race where only a few things have to go right in a few places to push Biden over the edge and back to the White House. They can (and do) argue that Biden’s policies are popular, his values shared by more voters, and say they just need to get the word out to get credit from more voters. 

They can say voters haven’t tuned into the election as a clear two-way choice yet. They could say Biden is universally known and still close, and alternatives are not well known. As Dan Kanninen, the Biden campaign’s battleground-states director, told The Atlantic this week, “Once we do define that choice on the issues—on the record of Joe Biden, on values, on what Donald Trump represents—we move voters to our camp. We know the voters whom we have to win back favor us quite a bit more on all those fronts.” And they can say many candidates trailing by larger margins later in the process have gone on to win (including Donald Trump).

Those wielding the stage crook are using polls to show there is no path for Biden and that he should drop out, a point which can also be made with the same data and style of analysis. They can point to Biden trailing in swing states, running behind other Democratic candidates, record low approval ratings, the apparent immovability of most views of Biden and Trump, and the very widespread view that Biden is too old to do the job effectively for another four years. They can also show lesser known replacement candidates apparently polling better than Biden and new messaging avenues that would be opened with a replacement. 

Second, replacing Biden would be without historical precedent, with no reference points available for what might happen as the campaign unfolds. In thinking about a new candidate four months from Election Day, there is no model to run poll numbers through, no way at all to predict outcomes following a once in a lifetime event. Even models that have historical outcomes to rely on are built on just a few dozen presidential elections. Such as they are, the models do not show Biden’s cause as lost, with FiveThirtyEight’s model actually giving him a slight edge. A new candidate at this point introduces unpredictable variability in potential outcomes. Such variation could potentially go in either direction, with support for a new candidate soaring or plummeting.

The size of the shockwave a candidate replacement would unleash makes it impossible to assess ahead of time the impact on the candidates’ polling. Voters themselves have no idea how they would react to a new candidate and can’t tell pollsters what they would think even if they wanted to. They also don’t know what the events would look like, what the new and (by definition) lesser known candidate would do or say. It would also turbocharge media attention to the Democratic ticket throughout the rest of the cycle and immediately change the subject away from Biden’s age and the related palace intrigue. 

Third, a new candidate would introduce the very real prospect different likely voters would show up in polls, voters whose frustration with the current options is pushing them to the sidelines. Turnout is about more than how many doors each campaign knocks or which side prints effective mailers. It’s also about candidates whose very presence on the ballot pulls different groups of voters to the polls. Looking at Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley’s 2018 Democratic primary victory illustrates the impact it can have when a completely different electorate shows up. As of now, marginal and disaffected voters can’t predict what candidate might pull them from the couch and to the polls this year. 

When different voters opt into (and out of) the process, it doesn’t just change the candidate support figures in the crosstabs of the polls folks are obsessively poring over to make their points. It carries the potential of changing the size of different demographic groups who choose to participate. These changes can’t really be assessed by just asking whether voters would turn out if the contest included a candidate they know much less about. 

These imprecisions make Democrats’ crossroads all the more perilous. They must choose a course based on a map that really only shows where they are now and a blurry, half erased outline of what might be the path if Biden stays in. People with different interests are drawing the rest of the map in whatever shape they want, and saying it’s what the polls show. None are necessarily wrong, but none are clearly right.

Even at the campaign’s end, all of the predictions and pronouncements made at this stage can’t really be proven one way or another. Consultants, pollsters, party insiders, and media on the losing side of their assessments can always blame – or credit – the campaign, candidate, or external events for why their version of the map didn’t pan out. The almost unfathomable pace of news events also offers ample excuses for predictions gone wrong. 

Of course, with such a plethora of confident forecasters, some will almost certainly happen to guess mostly right and will be rewarded with years of consulting contracts and cable TV appearances. But for Democratic Party leaders trying to choose a path forward, there’s really no way of knowing who that might be. 

Steve Koczela is president of the MassINC Polling Group.

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NOT SURPRISINGLY, Joe Biden has a big lead over Donald Trump among voters in heavily Democratic-leaning Massachusetts, but results of a new statewide poll also show some intriguing other trends that mirror national surveys and could shape the outcome of the 2024 presidential contest. 

Among registered voters in the state, President Biden has an 18-point lead in his rematch against former President Donald Trump, according to a new CommonWealth Beacon/GBH News poll (toplines, crosstabs). But among “very likely” voters, Biden’s lead grows to 26 points. This wider margin would place Biden on par with recent Democratic presidential margins in Massachusetts. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried Massachusetts by 27 points, a touch higher than the 23-point margin for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection. Biden’s own margin was 34 points in his first matchup with Trump four years ago.  

The online survey was conducted by the MassINC Polling Group from March 21 to 29 among 1,002 Massachusetts residents. It has a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points.

The question of how many and which eligible voters show up will likely determine the margins both here, in deep-blue Massachusetts, and elsewhere, including pivotal swing states that will determine the outcome of the race. 

When it comes to turning out voters, Republicans are facing a problem they are not accustomed to: getting marginal voters to the polls. Among Trump supporters in Massachusetts, 80 percent call themselves “very likely” to vote, compared to 91 percent of Biden supporters. In other words, the voters less likely to turn out are a key source of potential Trump support. If they decide to stay home nationally, the impact could be substantial. 

In the past, less likely voters have tended to lean Democratic. A vivid illustration of how this has changed comes from polls of “unlikely voters” conducted by Suffolk University. In the 2012 wave of this national  survey, Barack Obama led Mitt Romney by 23 among registered voters who called themselves unlikely to vote. In 2018, the still to-be-determined 2020 Democratic nominee led Trump by 9 among the same group. In the latest wave of this survey, conducted in August of last year, Trump had a 19-point lead among unlikely voters, upending long-standing conventional wisdom about which way less likely voters lean. 

Another group less likely to turn out are supporters of independent or third party candidates (75 percent very likely to vote). Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presence in this year’s race could have a considerable impact if his current support levels hold and his voters show up. Kennedy, who is mounting an independent bid for president, is drawing 9 percent support among Massachusetts voters, similar to his level of support in national polls. His support comes more from younger voters and political independents. 

In the CommonWealth Beacon/GBH News poll, 12 percent of voters under 30 say they will back Kennedy, compared to 6 percent of voters 60 and older. Younger voters are traditionally a key Democratic voting bloc. In 2020, they handed Biden a 24-point margin nationally and played a key role in sending him to the White House, so losing a large slice to Kennedy would be a problem for the Biden camp.  

Whether young voters (or voters overall) maintain their support for Kennedy remains to be seen. In past elections, support for independent or third party candidates has often faded as election day approaches. In 2016, the Libertarian ticket was averaging 8-10 percent in polls even as late as the summer before fading in the fall and ultimately receiving about 3 percent of the vote. 

Looking beyond the head-to-head poll numbers, Bay State voters call a Biden-Trump rematch disappointing, exciting, and scary all at once, according to the new poll. The most common word voters used to describe their feeling about the race is “disappointed,” followed close behind by “annoyed.” These sentiments are most common among Democratic leaning voters as well as those thinking of sitting out the election. Trump supporters are more likely to call themselves excited, motivated, or interested. 

This split echoes national polling, which has found Trump tends to bring excitement to his own voters and dread among Biden supporters. A March poll from YouGov found 67 percent of Biden supporters say their vote was mostly “against Trump,” while 54 percent of Trump supporters said they were voting more “for Trump.” Adding this all up, Donald Trump voters are mostly excited to vote for him again. Joe Biden voters mostly are not, but will do so to keep Trump away from a second term. 

The demographic breakdown of the race looks mostly familiar, with women, people of color, and those with higher levels of education more likely to be for Joe Biden. Whether these general lines hold, and whether the margins underlying them shift are key dynamics of interest in this entire cycle. 

While we do not have large enough sample sizes in this poll to parse the question too finely, there is enough evidence at the national level to prompt the question of whether we are seeing key voting blocs shifting. Between 2016 and 2020 support for Trump grew considerably among Latino voters. Whether that shift continues and whether Black voters also shift somewhat toward Trump remain open questions. 

The election is heating up against the backdrop of significant concern about the stability of American democracy. Nearly three-quarters of Massachusetts residents (72 percent) call the current level of political tension in the country either a crisis or a major problem. This assessment extends to majorities across party lines, gender, age, income, and every other demographic we explored during the course of this survey. Voters think this level of tension carries a strong risk of escalating to violence, with most residents (64 percent) seeing that as at least somewhat likely, including majorities across party lines. 

The outcome of the presidential contest in Massachusetts is rarely in doubt, and this year is no exception. The poll shows the expected wide margin for a Democratic candidate. But beneath the surface are similar contours to what we see elsewhere that map out an unusual and unpredictable contest across the country. 

Steve Koczela is president of the MassINC Polling Group.

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VOTER REGISRATION UNDER party labels has been on the decline for years, but new figures show political parties in Massachusetts withering at a much greater rate than previously known, with nearly two-thirds of all voters now registered without a party designation. 

On a practical level, there is little benefit to registering under a party banner in Massachusetts, given the state’s semi-open primary system, where unaffiliated voters can participate in either party’s nominating contests. This has contributed to the long term decline of party rolls. But what was a steady decline of registered partisans is now a freefall due to new systems of registering voters.

If current trends continue, party registration will be so unusual that the two-party system will cease to be a useful way to group Massachusetts voters. So few voters will be registered with parties that a young registered Democrat will be an unusual sight and young Republicans will go on the endangered species list. 

Just before the presidential primary earlier this month, Secretary of State Bill Galvin announced that 64 percent of Massachusetts voters are not registered under a party label (the state uses the sometimes confusing term “unenrolled” for such independent voters). This figure is up from 56 percent in 2020 and 53 percent in 2016. Just 27 percent of voters in this reliably blue state are now registered Democrats, while only 8 percent are registered Republicans. 

These figures, amazing on their own, undersell the pace of change. Among the youngest registrants, those aged 18 to 20, an astonishing 92 percent registered as an unenrolled voter between 2020 and early 2023, the newest voter data file accessible for this analysis. 

This is an absolute explosion compared to seven years ago, when roughly two-thirds of the youngest voters registered were unenrolled. But the dynamic goes beyond just young registrants avoiding the two-party structure. Even older people registering recently are far less likely than folks of the same age to choose a party. 

A key driver of this rapid change is Massachusetts’ new automatic voter registration law, which went into effect in 2020. Rather than having to take steps to register to vote in person or by mail, citizens who interact with state government in a variety of ways are automatically registered to vote. Examples include applying for a driver’s license, enrolling in the state’s Medicaid program, or going through the Health Connector, the state-run marketplace for health coverage. But while voter registration has become largely automatic, party registration is not. 

What’s more, following an update to the law, as of 2023, the Registry of Motor Vehicles form does not have an opt-out box for voter registration. As the RMV website puts it, “applicants that wish to opt out may contact their town/municipality directly.” There is also no party selection mechanism on the license application, meaning everyone added to the rolls through this pathway is unenrolled. In theory, these voters can add a party preference online through the secretary of state’s website, or through their local city or town clerk, by mail or in person. But that option doesn’t seem to be bringing people back into parties. The upshot? Even more people will be registered to vote without choosing a party.

This comes through clearly when comparing party registration figures from the time since automatic voter registration went into effect with registrations from the 2016 to 2019, the years just before the changeover. 

The trend away from party registration has been gathering steam for many years. In the 1980s, only around 40 percent of Massachusetts voters were unenrolled. That figure crossed 50 percent right around the year 2000 and grew to 57 percent by 2020, when automatic voter registration went into effect. This corresponds with a long term movement away from formal party affiliation that extends far beyond Massachusetts. Automatic voter registration has accelerated this trend to breakneck speed. 

Moving forward, the growth rate of unenrolled voters is difficult to forecast precisely. Many of the state’s adults who were previously eligible but not registered have already been swept up in the automatic voter registration system since the law took effect. As time goes on, a larger and larger share of new registrants will be made up of either first-time registrants, or people re-registering after moving to a new voting location. It’s difficult to say how this might translate into specific percentages of unenrolled voters other than to say it will be higher than it is now. 

To be sure, this trend away from party registration does not mean Massachusetts voters are more politically independent. The state is as deep blue as ever, even with relatively fewer registered Democrats. The last few statewide and national contests have left Republican candidates covered in thick layers of shellac.

Because of the state’s overall Democratic leaning, automatic voter registration will likely have the odd impact of moving the unenrolled voter category to the left, reshaping a longstanding contour of the Massachusetts political landscape. In the past, unenrolled voters leaned to the right as a group when compared to the state as a whole. Republican candidates often drew more unenrolled voter support than their Democratic rivals. Now, with the vast majority of new voters not registering with either party, more voters who would otherwise have been Democrats are entering the unenrolled column. 

The implications and even the importance of this growth of unenrolled voters are debatable. Across the country, 19 states operate their electoral systems without a party registration system and still manage to hold competitive two-party elections. Voters in these states act like partisans anyway, speak like partisans, and vote like partisans. Who cares if there is no way for them to register their party preference? Massachusetts could opt to follow the lead of those states. 

Party registration data is also not as important to political institutions as one might think. With the rise of massive commercial databases of voters and consumers, campaigns across the country have plenty of other ways to figure out a given voter’s partisan leaning even without referring to registration. So if the state doesn’t need it for elections, and the party doesn’t need it for campaigns, who needs it? If its only function is to lock the 35 percent of voters in Massachusetts who are registered partisans out of the other primary, is that a good reason to keep the registration system going?  

On the flip side, there are plenty of reasons to think strong parties are valuable and should be nurtured. Our state’s system is still built around the idea that party membership means something. 

In an ideal world, parties help choose and vet candidates, build larger tents, and help avoid electing ideologues and extremists. Parties organize voters and build governing agendas or hold the majority party to account. Losing the traditional party structure might make our politics more polarized, not less. That alone would be an argument for doing something to save it from obsolescence. 

At the moment, party membership in Massachusetts is sort of like joining a secret society. You can go to meetings with other members, do the rituals, and speak the language. But at the end of the day, you really don’t get much. It doesn’t grant access to a primary ballot, since unenrolled voters can choose to vote in either party’s primary. Registered partisans can vote in party caucuses and participate in conventions, but vanishingly few folks choose to do so. 

Automatic voter registration has functioned as a social experiment on the importance of political parties. Three years in, it appears that voters simply do not care enough to take the extra steps needed to pick a party. The question now is, does party registration even matter at all? Unless the parties and policymakers do something, the current registration system is quickly headed for the dustbin.

Steve Koczela is president of the MassINC Polling Group.

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IN 2020, Massachusetts handed Joe Biden a 35-point victory over then-President Donald Trump, the second largest margin for the Democrat of any state. So it’s all the more remarkable that a new CommonWealth Beacon poll (topline, crosstabs) finds now-President Biden looking shaky in the Bay State, where just 47 percent of residents say they approve of the job he is doing in the White House. Nearly the same number (46 percent) say they disapprove. These figures echo other recent Massachusetts surveys, none of which carry good news for the Biden camp. 

Comparing his job approval to the 64 percent of the Massachusetts vote Biden got in 2020 yields a 17-point gap. Put another way, a huge swath of voters who cast their ballots for Biden don’t like what they see. That is different from the last Democratic president at the same point in his term, when Barack Obama’s job approval was still within 6 points of his vote total. Obama’s approval and favorability in Massachusetts were typically in the 50s and 60s. 

Digging into the numbers by party identification shows the shape of the challenge for Biden. He actually has just about as many fans among Democrats and independents when compared to other statewide leaders. But Republicans are almost completely against him, while Democratic statewide leaders in Massachusetts still have around a fifth or so of the state’s GOP in their corner. Additionally, Biden’s negatives are greater across all three groups compared to other leaders.

When it comes to national politics, Massachusetts is as blue as they come, and there is no suggestion that a Republican has a realistic chance of pulling off an upset and carrying the state in the 2024 presidential contest. However, modest ratings in Massachusetts portend dismal ratings in states where the election will be decided. 

Warren stable: Elizabeth Warren, who also faces reelection in 2024, remains about where she’s always been, with 51 percent offering positive reviews of her job performance, and 35 percent saying the opposite. 

Since early in her first term, Warren’s favorables and job approval have tended to be in the low to mid-50s, with her unfavorables in the 30s. In 2018, with similar numbers early on in the cycle, Warren ran up a 24-point margin against perennial Republican statewide candidate and perennial shellac-victim Geoff Diehl. 

Recent reports suggest difficulty recruiting a GOP Senate candidate for this cycle, and a recent poll showing Warren against a generic Republican finds her with a 25-point edge. 

Healey grows, slowly: Gov. Maura Healey is moving into a stronger position when it comes to her own numbers, with 54 percent approval and 28 percent disapproval. Earlier in her term, she struggled some with name recognition among less engaged voters, a challenge that hasn’t entirely gone away. 

Other polls we at the MassINC Polling Group conduct often just ask about political leaders by name, without job title. In a recent poll without job titles included, we found 10 percent said they had “never heard of” Maura Healey in addition to 18 percent who had heard of her but could not rate her performance. 

Sailing to a 34-point blowout victory last year (also against Geoff Diehl) followed by a lower profile start to her term has left more voters in the uncertain column than was the case for her predecessor. 

State Legislature coasts: Legislative delays, inaction, and half measures in the face of serious statewide issues are fairly common occurrences in Massachusetts. But when asked by journalists, legislative leaders can (probably truthfully) say they are not hearing the same urgency from their constituents. The state Legislature draws the approval of 49 percent of residents, with 31 percent disapproving of their job performance. This is lower than their 65 percent peak from a few years back but still adequate. 

Alongside a positive approve/disapprove ratio is the fact that there is very little chance of electoral consequences for legislative action – or inaction. Massachusetts has for several cycles had among the least competitive legislative elections in the country. Democrats currently hold 134 of the 160 House seats and Republicans claim just 3 seats in the 40-member Senate. With 72 percent of Democrats offering their approval for the body (11 percent disapprove) and lawmakers facing little chance of electoral opposition, there is not much chance any of them will be sent packing if they push consideration of a big bill off to the next session. 

Steve Koczela is president of the MassINC Polling Group.

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POLL NUMBERS for key Democratic leaders are sagging between apathy and anonymity, according to a new poll of Massachusetts voters by the MassINC Polling Group. 

Favorability and reelection numbers are tepid at best. Just 43 percent of registered voters hold favorable views of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (38 percent unfavorable). For newly elected Gov. Maura Healey, the figure is just 46 percent (22 percent unfavorable). Just 26 percent hold either a positive or negative view of House Minority Whip Katherine Clark. And for President Biden, despite shellacking Donald Trump by 34 points in 2020, just 23 percent of the state’s voters want to see him run again. (topline, crosstabs links)

This is not normal for Massachusetts. Not that long ago, Democratic leaders could count on pretty solid poll numbers here. Polls in the 2011-2013 timeframe often found Barack Obama, Deval Patrick, John Kerry, and Elizabeth Warren with consistently strong poll favorables, often clearing 6 percent. 

Despite these numbers, Democrats are at the height of their power in the state. Their grip on important elected offices is complete. They hold every statewide and congressional office and veto-proof supermajorities in both legislative chambers. And for some leaders, these poll numbers come with important caveats. 

Healey is newer to many voters and may yet climb in popularity. A lightly contested election in 2022 meant many voters didn’t tune in closely and haven’t developed views of her in either direction. As her term unfolds, she will have many opportunities to become better known to those who didn’t follow along as she sailed into office. 

As for Warren, despite low favorable numbers and just 44 percent for voters saying she should run again, she will be the odds-on favorite for reelection if she follows through on her recent sort-of-announcement. Elizabeth Warren won a thumping reelection in 2018, despite weak reelect polling early in that campaign. In January 2017, just 44 percent said they wanted her to run for reelection. 

Key to this dynamic is the fact that the Democratic primary has become the entire affair in many recent contests and Democratic voters are still with her. Among Democrats, 64 percent hold a positive view of her, and 65 percent think she should run again. Republican voters’ views of statewide candidates don’t matter until the party can prove itself capable of fielding palatable and electable alternatives. 

Affection does not mean reelection, as President Biden’s very weak reelection numbers show. While Warren can count on support from Democrats, Biden is in a different place as he looks ahead to 2024. Just 35 percent of self-identified Democrats say he should run again, even though 69 percent  hold a favorable view of him. 

Rounding out the slate of leaders in this poll, Clark, now the House Minority Whip and one of the most influential Democrats in the country, is all but unknown in her home state. Just 15 percent of Massachusetts voters express a favorable view of Clark, with 11 percent unfavorable. 

None of this suggests the MassGOP is on the verge of a resurgence. Torn into warring factions, some of which have wandered to the far edges of the political spectrum, the party will need to pull itself together and find palatable candidates before posing a broad threat to Democratic power in the state.

This poll shows that while Democrats may hold every office, their hold on voters’ attention and affection has weakened. There are other leaders who may grab the imagination of Democratic voters as time goes on. But for now, voters are less enthusiastic in their support of high-profile party leaders than was often true in years past. 

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THE PANDEMIC has put the spotlight on the classroom, with national and statewide test figures showing that students have lost ground in academic subjects. As schools prepare for the new year, a new survey finds Boston Public School parents also have other concerns, including the emotional well-being and physical safety of their children and the day-to-day basics like getting kids to school on time and having teachers to teach them.

In all, 44 percent say they are “very concerned” about their child’s physical safety, while another 25 percent are “somewhat concerned.” Parents express similar levels of concern about their kids’ emotional well-being (42 percent very concerned, 29 percent somewhat). Black and Asian parents are particularly concerned. Half or more of each are concerned about both emotional health and physical safety. 

Issues of physical safety within BPS schools have grabbed headlines due to several recent serious incidents. But, as Boston state Sen. Nick Collins recently noted, the day-to-day concerns go well beyond these stories. “As we know, young people can’t advance their learning goals and achievement if you can’t feel safe at school. And if you can’t feel safe in school, what’s the point?” asked Collins. “These concerns are not based on hyperbole. My office receives complaints weekly from families concerned about their children’s safety, largely incidents that don’t make the papers.”

Logistical challenges are also causing upheaval for families. Just 31 percent of parents whose children ride the bus to school say the buses were “always on time” the week before the poll was taken, while 24 percent report half or fewer were on time. Black and Latino parents are much more likely to report their kids ride the bus, meaning they are more impacted by this issue. Keeping classrooms fully staffed has been another challenge, with 39 percent of parents saying their children have had substitute teachers at least a few times a month. One-in-ten parents reported their kids had substitute teachers every day.

Academics are also a concern for parents, with only half (51 percent) saying they think their schools are doing enough for students who have fallen behind. While most parents (58 percent) say their children are on track academically, 24 percent say they have fallen behind. A third (33 percent) of parents with a student with an Individualized Education Program (IEP) say their child has fallen behind. Among parents who think their kids are behind, 57 percent think the schools should be doing more to help students catch up.  

Despite all of this, overall satisfaction with BPS remains fairly high, with 32 percent of parents saying they are very satisfied with BPS and 47 percent somewhat satisfied. This is largely in line with previous waves of the survey going back to November 2021. The new figures are according to the latest wave of our series of polls of BPS parents for The Shah Foundation going back to 2021. Earlier waves found modest declines in some measures. 

High satisfaction is not unique to Boston. In general, local schools are seen as doing pretty well, no matter where or when the poll is taken. These satisfaction figures often exist alongside very significant and well documented challenges. In Boston, the city narrowly averted receivership, with Mayor Michelle Wu committing to significant improvements. These are not new issues: problems with BPS go back a long way, and deep into prior administrations. 

But the persistent overall satisfaction can sap momentum for change. If it seems that parents are largely satisfied, there will be less public pressure on the system to address problems that, by the city and state’s own admission, need to be addressed. Political leaders are less likely to take on longstanding and seemingly intractable issues until they are forced to. 

On the bright side, if the opportunity presents itself, parents appear ready to engage. Overwhelmingly, parents say they want to be involved: 82 percent report wanting to be “very engaged” with their children’s education. But only 46 percent say that BPS enables them to be that engaged. Just 28 percent strongly agree their feedback is valued by BPS, and 34 percent strongly agree BPS makes it easy to share concerns. 

 If BPS were to engage more with parents and dig for specific feedback, they may find that parents hold more complex views than the overall satisfaction numbers suggest. Communications are a strong point for BPS in this survey: 50 percdent of parents strongly agree that communications they receive from the district are clear and easy to understand. Using those communications to address parent concerns and share plans for improvement would be a good starting point. 

Steve Koczela is the president of the MassINC Polling Group.

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AMERICA IS DOTTED with remnants of economies of the past. Think gold rush towns, factory cities, rail towns, and coal towns, to name a few. All served their purpose, and either evolved into something else, or slowly collapsed. 

Now, the durability of remote and hybrid work poses an increasingly grave threat to Boston and other downtown areas. With COVID infection rates plummeting and more and more offices open, remote workers could come back now if they wanted to. But surveys consistently show a large swath of remote workers are just not interested in returning, particularly not full time. A new Pew survey finds the majority (59 percent) of workers who say their jobs can be done remotely are working from home most or all of the time. 

Downtown economies are built around massive daily inflows of workers. That flow slowed dramatically when COVID began, and remains far below pre-pandemic levels. Boston will need to find another way to fill vast empty spaces in the hulking monuments to an economy that no longer exists. 

It’s not just surveys that highlight the risk. We also have real world experience to point to. Remote workers didn’t come flooding back to Boston at any of the moments when they could have. They didn’t return in that blissful period after the vaccine rolled out but before the Delta variant hit. They haven’t come back as Omicron has faded, or not in large numbers anyway. 

More troubling still are the reasons remote workers give for not wanting to come in full time. It was one thing when fear of the virus was the main barrier. In the early days of the pandemic, many offices were closed as a precaution, and workers with the choice to stay home largely did so. 

Now, most remote workers (61 percent) are staying out because they choose to, not because their office is closed or unavailable (38 percent), according to the Pew Survey. A tracking poll from Morning Consult shows the last time more people felt uncomfortable in the office than comfortable was February 2021, just as COVID vaccines were becoming widely available. 

Even though their offices are largely open and they are comfortable going there, remote workers are still not returning. Among these workers who stay home by choice, the Pew survey found three quarters (76 percent) say a preference for home work is a major reason they continue to do so. This percentage has increased since 2020, as workers gained more remote work experience. 

This preference developed very early on in the pandemic and increased as time went on. Our surveys in Massachusetts found 60-70 percent of the workforce expressing a preference for permanent remote work at least a few days a week even in 2020. Among the Kendall Square tech workers, the figure rose to 78 percent as of  August 2020. Far from tiring of remote work as the pandemic wore on, more and more workers have grown to prefer it. 

Companies have also adjusted their plans and expectations. The heady early days of planning a sweeping reopening are gone. Multiple employer surveys in Massachusetts have shown the vast majority plan to offer remote and hybrid work as a permanent option. 

Put this all together, and even as case counts bottom out and other in-person activities roar back to life, offices remain eerily quiet. The Boston Globe reports Downtown Crossing foot traffic still at a third of pre-pandemic levels. MBTA ridership hovers around half what it was 2 years ago. Even these figures don’t tell the story. Foot traffic figures are boosted by tourists and students. MBTA ridership includes the same groups as well as essential workers and others who cannot not work remotely. 

Perhaps the best (and most alarming) read on the impact of remote work comes from actual presence at the office. As the Globe reports, “The number of people actually going into the office is down even more, roughly one-seventh of what it was in the Before Times, based on information from building security firm Kastle Systems.” 

Even the articles that describe people returning to the office are mostly talking about coming in at most a few days a week rather than full time. Surveys consistently show very few workers with a choice will come in every day. Our Kendall Square survey pegged the figure in the single digits, as did a repeat survey in August 2021. 

It all adds up to one thing. There’s no going back to normal, mainly because it’s not normal anymore. The normal of 2020 may as well have been 1920 or 1820, for the chances of returning to it now. Normal for 2022 is where large swaths of the workforce have the choice to work remotely and are taking it. Normal now includes 8 or 10 less hours of commuting each week, hours workers can instead devote to spouses, children, hobbies, or well … anything. 

After two years on Zoom, coming into the office now requires an out-of-the-ordinary level of effort just to start the workday. For many people, commuting requires an extra and unpaid hour or two a day to travel to and from the office. It brings the risk of major delays in either direction, a very common occurrence on Boston’s worst-in-the-nation roads, and decrepit transit system.

That’s where the existential risks to downtowns come into focus. Every day an individual worker stays remote means 1 less possible work lunch, 1 less potential attendee at an after-work event, less drinks with coworkers or clients at downtown bars, less dry cleaning downtown, fewer haircuts…just less everything. Put another way, 1 day out of a 5 day work week is a 20 percent loss of downtown time for that individual. And that’s just the workers who come in at all and who work at companies that maintain their office presence. 

It also compounds on itself. As fewer people come downtown, there are fewer reasons to come downtown. With most of the workday at home, setting up meetings and events gets harder. Getting people to travel in just for a lunch event? Forget it. A power breakfast? Get serious. 

Government officials from Mayor Michelle Wu to President Biden are feeling the urgency. Biden urged a return as a part of his State of the Union address last week. Mayor Eric Adams of New York City famously urged a return to the office, saying, “You can’t stay home in your pajamas all day!” 

Whether long term-remote work is good or bad for productivity, profits, and office culture is for others to debate and perhaps for time to tell. What matters for now is that workers think a considerable amount of remote work is good for them. It’s very clear they can, in fact, stay home in their pajamas all day, no matter what Adams might wish.

Companies can decide to enforce five days in person if they choose to. But in doing so, they will be choosing from a much smaller labor pool than if they allow what employees now expect. Any changes from here are a disruption to what is now normal for employees with two years of remote work under their belts. They have built new lives around what is now normal. Many workers won’t return for full time work because that’s not a normal thing for them anymore. 

As workers and companies settle into the new normal, the shadows across downtown are lengthening. Maybe this time we’ll beat the sunset of obsolescence, thinking of new and ingenious solutions to the coming office space crisis. Lab space, housing, event space, and other uses all have their proponents. Recognizing the threat and the need for rethinking is a first step. Just wishing for a return to the past or berating remote workers won’t change the fate of places built for times gone by. 

Steve Koczela is the president of the MassINC Polling Group, a subsidiary of MassINC, the parent company of CommonWealth.

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WHO WON AND who lost yesterday? Of course, there are the candidates who put themselves and their ideas out there for voters. They all were winners for democracy, though the hard reality of election results will brand some winners and others losers. But beyond the candidates, every election brings another set of winners and losers. These are the people whose actions in the run-up to the election meant they, too, had a lot riding on its outcome. Here’s a quick look at some winners and losers whose names weren’t on any ballot. 

WINNERS 

After the results reporting debacle in the Boston mayoral preliminary, activists decided to take matters into their own hands. Enter Matt McCloskey from West Roxbury, who lined up volunteers to report results from every precinct in the city and organized them into a Google Sheet. The Open Elections Results Portal left the Associated Press in the dust, with precinct-level results posted and updated continually starting soon after polls closed at 8 pm. It also enabled others like The MassINC Polling Group and Rivera Consulting to build maps and models, respectively, off the data. 

Early passengers on the Wu train must be blowing its whistle today, including City Councilor Lydia Edwards, Suffolk County Sheriff Steve Tompkins, and state Reps. Aaron Michlewitz and Mike Moran. Now Michlewitz and Moran have the harder task of negotiating Wu’s agenda, much of which requires sign-off from Beacon Hill.

Former congressman Michael Capuano and current Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley locked horns in their race three years ago — but they agreed on a winning candidate in the race to succeed outgoing Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone: City Councilor Katjana Ballantyne, who cruised to victory over fellow City Councilor Will Mbah. 

Thomas McGee opted not to seek reelection as mayor in Lynn — but he backed the winning candidate to take his spot, Jared Nicholson. 

Diversity. On a night that saw historic gains for people of color nationwide, Asian-American Michelle Wu became Boston’s first non-white elected mayor. Holyoke got its first Latino mayor in Joshua Garcia, Northampton elected an African-American woman and man to City Council while Delmarina Lopez became the first person of color to sit on the Chicopee City Council. Worcester city councilor-elect Thu Nguyen, who is of Vietnamese descent, became the first non-binary person ever elected in Massachusetts. In its first election since changing the voting system in response to a lawsuit by minority groups, Lowell elected six people of color to the school committee and city council.

Rivera Consulting. Boston finally got a taste of what a campaign’s internal vote tally looks like, with a nifty (and public) tracker from the wizards at the Boston-based political consulting firm. Far from relying on raw vote counts without context, the spreadsheet showed what Wu and Essaibi George would need in each precinct to remain competitive based on where they were expected to do well. National elections have had this for a while. This was a first for Boston.   

Pollsters. Four polls, including one from MassINC Polling Group, were released after the Boston mayoral preliminary election, showing winning margins for Michelle Wu of between 25 and 32 points. With the Boston Elections Department showing an unofficial margin of 28 points, the polls were right on (if we do say so ourselves). They also showed the shape of Wu’s coalition, and brought early attention to ways Boston’s politics had changed, well before votes were cast.

Former mayor Ray Flynn can pop the champagne, Miami Dolphins-style, because he retains the record for the highest vote total in a modern Boston mayoral election (“modern” meaning after the city’s population cratered in the 1960s and 70s). As Ari Ofsevit points out on Twitter, Wu’s 91,000 votes is the most since Flynn racked up nearly 130,000 in 1983.  

METZA METZA

Gov. Charlie Baker wasn’t exactly a winner or a loser, landing somewhere in between. He raises most of the money for the Massachusetts Majority super PAC, which spent nearly $260,000 on candidates in 19 municipal races, according to its latest report. Of the 19, 13 won and six lost. Two of the losers were former or current Republican legislators running for mayoral positions — Donald Humason in Westfield and James Kelcourse in Amesbury

Baker is weighing whether to run for the third term, and now he needs to contend with an energetic new Boston mayor, with a landslide mandate, who wants to make big changes to the MBTA. Transportation advocates have long sniped at Baker for neglecting transportation, and now they have a prominent voice in the mayor’s office to push their agenda forward. The bromance Baker enjoyed with former mayor Marty Walsh may be gone, but keep in mind Wu needs Baker’s help to get many of her big agenda items through Beacon Hill. So Wu will have to find common ground, one way or another, with the man in the corner office.

LOSERS 

The two similar sounding super PACs that dumped nearly $2 million into the Boston mayor’s race on behalf of Annissa Essaibi George, with a chunk of it devoted to unfounded attacks on Michelle Wu. The biggest losers: New Balance’s Jim Davis, who poured more than $1 million into the losing cause, and former Boston police commissioner William Gross, the face of the effort in TV and newspaper ads.

The Associated Press: Their election night vote count in the Boston mayor’s race lagged so far behind as to be irrelevant. The crowd-sourced count was the one drawing attention from election night watchers. The campaigns also had data well ahead of the AP, conceding defeat and declaring victory well ahead of the AP’s official declaration. 

Former mayor Marty Walsh. Walsh famously stepped on Michelle Wu’s campaign announcement last year before being tapped to serve in the Biden cabinet. Wu might have gotten a measure of payback by winning Walsh’s home precinct in the Lower Mills section of Dorchester. Walsh did not endorse either candidate in the race, but fellow Dorchester resident Annissa Essaibi George was widely seen as closer to the Walsh orbit, and Walsh’s mother appeared with Essaibi George at her Savin HIll polling place yesterday.

“We have real serious concerns about Michelle Wu,” Michael Ross, a former Boston city councilor now practicing real estate law, told Globe columnist Shirley Leung before the September preliminary, giving voice to a view among some business types that Wu would crush the city’s development boom. The mayor-elect may have serious concerns now about any projects Ross is trying to fast-track through City Hall. 

Rev. Eugene Rivers lobbed a last-minute grenade at Michelle Wu, issuing a press release over the weekend leveling a wildly untethered charge of racially discriminatory lending practices against Wu’s husband, whose name he misspelled, and the bank where he works, and demanding that Wu denounce the practice or withdraw from the race.  

The post Who were the winners and losers (besides the candidates)?  appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

VACCINATION MANDATES are sweeping across the country, both in the public and private sectors. They have produced a great deal of anxiety in public conversation, and polls in recent months suggested mandates would lead to mass firings and resignations among unvaccinated employees.

But that doesn’t seem to have happened so far, and the divide over vaccine mandates may be much smaller than it appears.

When push comes to shove, people have almost all gotten their shots rather than lose their jobs according to available media accounts. Our analysis of news articles about companies who have lost employees shows the numbers who have lost their job appears to be less than 1 percent of the company’s workforce on average. (Spreadsheet available here.)

In conducting this search, we found news accounts of 17 large organizations where resignations or terminations occurred. All but 3 of the organizations experienced under 1 percent turnover due to the requirements, with median turnover at 0.6 percent.  

Here in Massachusetts, the State Police union grabbed national headlines claiming “dozens” of officers have submitted resignation paperwork. It’s hard to say what “dozens” refers to, or what the precise number is they are claiming. The Boston Globe later reported that a police spokesperson clarified that just one trooper has said he will retire out of a total force of 2,200.  

Many news headlines and tweets cite the raw numbers of people who quit with no larger context. A headline from NBC blared, “Nearly 600 United Airlines employees face termination for defying vaccine mandate.” These days, that’s all the fodder needed to launch an online culture war. But the article itself noted the airline employs 67,000 people, meaning just 0.9 percent will actually lose their jobs. That number was later reduced even further, to just 320.

This misleading pattern repeats itself over and over again. Politics is very often the search for the right denominator, and news organizations are failing to highlight the actual level of job losses. 

It must be noted there is not a great deal of available data yet and most of what there is focuses on health care systems, where vaccination deadlines have come earlier than for other businesses. But what data there is shows remarkable consistency, and gives no support to the predictions of mass resignations. 

We examined recent news articles citing total numbers of employees who have resigned from specific employers. We then found estimates of total employees for each organization to determine the share of employees who actually quit or were terminated. 

Some of the alarm circulating through the media came from surveys exploring the potential impact of vaccination mandates. Surveys showed a large slice of unvaccinated workers saying they would rather quit than get the shot. A June Kaiser Family Foundation survey found 42 percent of workers who were unvaccinated at the time said they would keep their jobs, and 50 percent would leave. A Washington Post/ABC poll from September pegged the figure at 42 percent. From what we can see so far, their predictions of their own behavior were not accurate. 

Public opinion researchers would be the first to tell you surveys are not perfect when it comes to predicting the future. Even in very low stakes situations, people are not good at predicting their own behavior down the road. In this case, the question about intent to quit over vaccinations is very high stakes. The decision impacts economic well-being, career opportunities, health, family relationships, and more. It is also very likely wrapped up in partisan signaling, given that Republicans have been much more outspoken in their vaccine resistance. With all of these conflicting forces into a respondents’ head at once, it’s not surprising that predictions were misleading. 

One thing that remains unknown at this point is the potential impact of religious exemptions. There’s less data on the number of people seeking such exemptions, and the court cases are mostly in their beginning stages. No major organized religion has noted objections to the COVID vaccine. 

It’s possible the resignation figures will change as vaccination mandates roll across more kinds of businesses. But at this early stage, the organizations for which data is public show very few have given up their jobs to avoid getting vaccinated. 

Steve Koczela is president of The MassINC Polling Group and a regular WBUR contributor. 

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