ON A 90-DEGREE Monday in July, the place to be in Massachusetts politics was the Sinclair, a music venue in Cambridge’s Harvard Square.
Gov. Maura Healey and Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll were there. So were several top figures in the state Legislature. Mingling with assorted local activists and union officials, the Democratic heavyweights descended on the venue’s rooftop patio to show their support for Cambridge state Rep. Marjorie Decker, who was launching her reelection campaign for a seventh two-year term.
At one point in the evening, Decker raised her phone, taking a selfie photo with the sea of supporters smiling behind her, making sure the governor and lieutenant governor had prominent spots at the front of the frame, along with Aaron Michlewitz, chairman of the powerful budget-writing House Ways and Means Committee, and Sal DiDomenico, an assistant majority leader in the 40-member Senate.
Proximity to power is considered the coin of the realm in politics, the way to get things done. It’s something most elected officials are eager to tout, and Decker wasted little time before sharing the rooftop photo on social media and including it in her campaign literature.
To Evan MacKay, the picture is hardly something to brag about. Rather than evidence of Decker’s can-do record, MacKay thinks it tells a troubling story, one that forms the basis of the 27-year-old activist’s bid to unseat the veteran legislator in next month’s Democratic primary.
A self-described democratic socialist, MacKay is running at the liberal lawmaker from her left, saying Decker has become part of the problem on Beacon Hill, cozying up to powerful figures like those at her kickoff and defending the Legislature’s sclerotic top-down structure and notoriously opaque workings.
“You need to be able to work together with others,” MacKay said. “That does not mean selling out your district’s values or refusing to champion progressive legislation such that you can continue to ascend the ranks of State House leadership.”
MacKay is the latest in a string of challengers in recent years who have taken on incumbent legislators in liberal districts by tying them to the Democratic power structure on Beacon Hill and the dysfunction there. The challengers are trying to convince voters that proximity to power isn’t worth it if the price is loyalty to a status quo way of doing business that has come in for increasingly harsh criticism in recent years.
CHALLENGERS FROM THE LEFT
Decker, who won her seat 12 years ago after a stint on the Cambridge city council, represents a district that spans the city’s large wealth divide. It includes the multimillion-dollar houses outside Harvard Square, like the one Sen. Elizabeth Warren owns with her husband, as well as the public housing developments like the one Decker grew up in Cambridgeport.
Decker’s mother was a nursing assistant at a nursing home and her father worked as a security guard. The 52-year-old UMass Amherst graduate leans heavily into her working-class roots, saying that background has driven her commitment to lifting up those struggling the most to make it. In doing so, Decker pushes back at her challenger’s attacks, saying she’s stayed true to her progressive values.
“My platform is making sure that people who are struggling and in poverty have the resources that they need,” she says. “That’s through taxes, through budget choices, it’s through policy choices. And it’s through the experience I bring, understanding and being able to speak authentically, and not being told what people living in poverty need and what their experience is.”
Decker says her record is proof that she has delivered on those values. She points to her leadership role in passing two bills in the just-completed session – omnibus legislation focused on maternal health and a bill phasing out the use of toxic chemicals in the protective gear worn by firefighters, both signed into law by Healey earlier this month. “When I look at my record, even in the last week, I’ve never taken my foot off this determination to seek out how do we improve the lives of people in our communities,” Decker said in early August just after the Legislature recessed.
Since winning the seat of her late mentor and former boss Alice Wolf, Decker has methodically worked the levers of power to move up the leadership ladder. She was vice chair of a House committee on global warming under Speaker Robert DeLeo and became House chair of the Public Health Committee under the current speaker, Ron Mariano.
Decker says she’s used the clout she’s built to champion progressive issues Cambridge voters care about. But while most lawmakers in the overwhelmingly Democratic Legislature coast to reelection without opposition, liberal districts like the one Decker represents have seen incumbent Democrats face tough primary challenges from candidates who say they’ve been too beholden to the status quo.
In the neighboring district, which includes parts of Somerville and Cambridge, democratic socialist Mike Connolly, vowing to bring a more full-throated progressive agenda to the State House, toppled longtime state Rep. Tim Toomey in a Democratic primary in 2016.
But it was another election two years later, in Boston’s ultraliberal Jamaica Plain neighborhood, that shook the State House, when its highest-ranking Latino was taken out by a challenger, Nika Elugardo, who described herself as “super left.”
Jeffrey Sanchez didn’t just claim proximity to power; he was at the center of it as chairman of the budget-writing House Ways and Means Committee. Elugardo nonetheless convinced enough voters in the left-leaning district Sanchez had compromised too much and that she could do more to advance their progressive principles. She beat him by several hundred votes.
Sen. Julian Cyr, who represents Cape Cod and the Islands and who co-chairs the Legislature’s Public Health Committee with Decker, decried the strain of thought that has prompted progressive challengers to target liberal officeholders who fail their purity test. “There’s a bad habit in an element of the progressive movement in Massachusetts that tends to eat their own, especially women and LGBTQ candidates, and candidates of color,” said Cyr.
As the incumbent with plenty of endorsements and more than $100,000 in cash on hand, Decker remains the favorite to win. But she appears to be taking her first primary opponent since 2018 seriously. While her friends and colleagues were in Chicago, partying at the Democratic National Convention and taking in revived hopes of keeping the White House, she was in campaign mode back home, touting support from labor unions, environmental advocates and abortion rights groups.
Meanwhile, MacKay touts the support of Progressive Massachusetts and Act on Mass, which have been harshly critical of Beacon Hill, particularly as the end of session left plenty undone, from a climate change bill to an economic development package.
“One election is not going to bring the change that we need to make it more accountable and transparent to the public. But we have had the least competitive elections for several cycles and that has created a culture of complacency,” said Brenna Ransden, the acting executive director of Act on Mass. “If they’re not being challenged, they’re not being held accountable to their constituents.”
In an otherwise sleepy election cycle, with few incumbent lawmakers facing opponents in the September 3 primary or November 5 general election, the race is garnering outsize attention for a state rep contest. The Boston Globe editorial page weighed in on Tuesday, endorsing Decker. The paper praised her record of legislative accomplishments, while acknowledging that voters “have every reason to be frustrated with the state Legislature” and noting that she has “not been a notable champion of legislative reform.”
On the campaign trail, MacKay, who has pulled in nearly $70,000 as of the end of July, has kept up criticism of Decker, highlighting a campaign platform that has a “tax the rich” plank while decrying the tax relief package Healey signed into law in October.
The legislation expanded the child and family tax credit, and slightly increased the deduction renters can take. But some progressive activists were incensed that Healey and legislative leaders included a reduction in the short-term capital gains tax and changes to estate taxes through the tax relief package.
SEEDS OF ACTIVISM
Decker’s first experience with political activism came while she was a student at Rindge and Latin, the city’s high school. Decker started working with a group to educate people about the AIDS epidemic, partly through the distribution of homemade buttons and 1,500 condoms. That was also how Decker met Wolf, who was Cambridge’s mayor at the time. Wolf, who died last year at age 89, enjoyed telling the story of how Decker walked into her office, threw the condoms on her desk, and implored Wolf to help with the group’s educational outreach efforts.
Years later, by the time Wolf was running for her second State House term in 1998 – a hard-fought rematch against then-city councilor Anthony Galluccio, the runner-up by 90 votes two years earlier – Decker was her campaign manager and brought on several other women who were friends of hers. “It was a very ugly campaign,” Decker says. “There were certainly undertones of misogyny and ageism in that campaign.”
One of the local papers had endorsed Galluccio, a move that grated on Decker. The night of the election, when Wolf beat Galluccio by a much larger margin than in their showdown two years earlier, Decker got up to address the crowd, exuberantly declaring, “Alice Wolf won because ten women kicked their ass.”
The quote landed her on the front page of the Cambridge Chronicle. “I was freaked out by it,” Decker said of the attention her comment got. “It was a reaction to being a young woman, and watching this incredible woman, who I admired for so many years, who was so smart and brilliant and deeply, deeply committed… to see her really not get some of the support she deserved.”
After the quote ricocheted around the city, Decker remembers drawing boos from men at a local festival. But she also received a note of encouragement. “There was a legal services attorney who called me and said, ‘You need to run for City Council, and I will give you your first check,’” said Decker, who went on to run and win a council seat the following year, in 1999.
‘IT’S TOUGH TO SHOW WHO THE VILLAIN IS’
MacKay was just a few years old in 1999, born to a gastroenterologist and a biology teacher. MacKay arrived at Harvard University in 2015, a first-year undergraduate who had to that point been “a closeted LGBTQ kid in Florida.”
After studying sociology, computer science and statistics as an undergrad, MacKay, who goes by “they/them” pronouns, received their bachelor’s degree in sociology and master’s in statistics. They’ve stayed on to pursue another degree in sociology and social policy, in addition to serving as a teaching fellow to undergraduates. MacKay also worked to organize what’s become a 5,000-member graduate student union.
There have also been campus protests to attend, too, and phone banking for Democrats running for offices outside of Massachusetts. MacKay, who still lives on campus, recalls the exhilaration of one particular demonstration. When Martin Shkreli, a controversial former pharmaceutical executive, came to speak at Harvard in 2017, MacKay linked arms with protest organizers who objected to the invitation for him to speak. “You’re really feeling that strength with somebody right beside you,” MacKay said.
Trying to get people to pay the same level of attention to what the state Legislature is or isn’t doing, they said, has not been as easy. “I feel like I’m slamming my head against the wall because people feel like Democrats are in charge, like ‘Team Blue’s got this,’” MacKay said.
Beacon Hill’s lack of transparency prevents people from learning more about the dysfunction under the golden dome, according to MacKay, who joined with activists and State House critics in calling for committee votes to be public. MacKay said they and others have pushed to get Decker to back the policy, going so far as to put an advisory question on the 2022 ballot in her district and 19 others that asked lawmakers to vote in favor of such a change. The question passed overwhelmingly.
MacKay argued that progressive bills that have enough support to pass among lawmakers don’t end up moving because leadership decides to kill them. “It’s tough to show who the villain is,” they said, referring to the lack of public committee votes. “It’s tough to show who the obstacles are.”
To hear MacKay and other State House critics tell it, Decker is one of the “obstacles,” viewed as someone willing to go to the mat for House leaders publicly and privately, such as when she clashed with then-Rep. Diana DiZoglio, a critic of then-Speaker Robert DeLeo, amid a 2018 debate about nondisclosure agreements.
“She’s an enforcer,” one member of the Democratic caucus said. “She’ll come into the caucus, behind the scenes, as an enforcer for the speaker.”
Decker’s critics also point to her past interest in lucrative jobs beyond Beacon Hill, including the top job at the trade group MassBIO and the Cambridge city manager’s job. They’ve also sought to seize on the fact that Decker holds a second job, despite Massachusetts being one of 10 states with a full-time Legislature. According to state ethics filings, she earns six figures in a job at the class-action law firm Berman Tabacco, in addition to her $114,000 pay as a legislator.
Decker brushes off criticism of her second job, saying she produces for her district. “As long as I’m able to really be a part of solutions and delivering on those solutions both on an individual level and a systemic level, the fire that I’ve had since the moment I decided to run, it hasn’t waned,” Decker said. “It just keeps getting stronger.”
Decker defends how Beacon Hill works, saying it will always be frustrating to try to advance a cause through the legislative process, with everyone’s priorities competing for attention and action.
The policy wins may seem incremental, but “I know what those incremental changes mean in people’s lives, as somebody who has more than once gone through the couch cushions with my family looking for coins to try to get enough to get a loaf of bread,” Decker said. “I will always file legislation that goes for the big picture and then take the incremental progress along the way.”
Decker says her style is backed by the interest groups that dominate Democratic politics, in addition to top lawmakers who have endorsed her, like US Rep. Katherine Clark. “They’re not just saying ‘we support Marjorie,’” Decker said. “They’re saying that she is one of our most important partners in the Legislature.”
Added Cyr, her Public Health Committee co-chair: “If you want an effective and fierce advocate on a given issue, you couldn’t have anyone better than Marjorie in your corner.”
For MacKay, the 2018 race that ousted Sanchez, the Jamaica Plain budget committee chair, is a model for their campaign. Ayanna Pressley’s primary win over 20-year incumbent US Rep. Michael Capuano that same year is another, MacKay said over coffee in Harvard Square.
But yesterday’s insurgents can become today’s incumbents, and they are often inclined to close ranks around a fellow officeholder.
A couple of weeks after that coffee meeting, Pressley issued a list of primary election endorsements that included Decker. “Marjorie has consistently delivered for her constituents on issues of real consequence, including gun violence prevention, maternal health, addressing poverty, and housing,” Pressley said in a statement.
MacKay sought to turn the endorsement on its head, suggesting it’s a sign of their campaign’s strength. “We see that there’s an enormous circling of wagons from the establishment with regards to Representative Decker, who they see as vulnerable,” MacKay said.