I just read that the Mass state senate is 83% Democratic and the state house is 76% Dem. These are overwhelming numbers. Yet most of the recent governors, including Weld, Romney, and the current one, have been Republican. This strikes me as highly unlikely. Can anyone explain what is going on there?
This came up in connection with the possibility of choosing Warren and VP candidate and having a Republican named as her successor. The peripatetic Scott Brown, maybe?
The Democrats have nominated some spectacularly bad candidates in recent years. And Republicans in MA are extremely moderate compared to their national brethren. There’s really not much more to it than that.
Maybe the citizens of Massachusetts are intelligent enough to understand it does not matter [necessarily] if a person is a Democrat, Republican, Independent, or whatever - rather it is the person they should vote for.
I’m the same way. In the past I have liked both Democratic and Republican presidents/governors/elected officials. That is until Bush Jr. came along! (I did like Bush senior though and I also like Obama.)
It’s not that unusual. New York City had 20 years of Republican mayors despite an overwhelming Democratic population and almost-unanimous Democratic city council.
You mean MA Republicans are not much like TX Republicans? In* this* state, I’m a Yellow Dog Democrat…
This baffled me, too.
It’s not really that baffling. People hated David Dinkins and the Democrats repeatedly ran a succession of really unappealing candidates. Giuliani and Bloomberg were outside the hopelessly corrupt local political machine and had stellar reputations (Giuliani as a prosecutor and Bloomberg in business/philanthropy.) They were also both social moderates.
In terms of the legislature - the MA Republican party is pretty weak - 84 Democratic members of the 160 total member MA House, and 18 Democratic members of the 40 total member Senate ran unopposed in the last election. To be fair, 16 and 2 Republicans ran unopposed as well.
The problem the Democrats have had with big ticket nominations, IMHO, was that the state was so totally controlled by the Democratic party that getting the nomination became a matter of courting the party elite, not the people of the state. So Coakley, O’Brien, and Harshbarger were nominated because the party “owed” it to them, not because they’d appeal to the general public. Coakley especially - after her loss to Scott Brown she was a terrible nominee.
As a further point, over half of the registered voters in MA are “unenrolled” meaning they don’t register as Democratic or Republican. So there’s much less feeling of voting for “the party” in big elections.
BTW, if this occurs, MA would have a Republican Senator for a very brief period. Without rehashing the entire process (which spawned many threads on this board), MA law for replacing a Senator mid term went from:
Up to 2004 - Governor appoints a Senator until the next general 2 yr election, then a new Senator is elected to complete the term. So in this case the appointed Senator could serve anywhere from 2 yrs to 1 day.
2004 - 2009: Special election within a few months to replace Senator, Seat remains vacant until then. Newly elected Senator fills out the entire remainder of the 6 year term.
2009 - current: Special election within a few months to replace Senator, governor appoints replacement who is only in office until that special election. Newly elected Senator fills out the entire remainder of the 6 year term. So in this case the appointed Senator could serve only a few months.
So when Ted Kennedy died - Paul Kirk was appointed Senator and served for 4 months when Brown was elected, and Brown served out the 2 yr 11 month remainder of the term.
ETA: There’s nothing preventing the legislature from changing the law again BTW, to either removing the currently Republican governor’s power to appoint a replacement, or restricting it in some way to prevent him from appointing a Republican. Should the situation come up and they do so, I suspect it will generate more threads in Elections & GD.
It’s not top ten, but Mass. is up there in terms of gerrymandering, which probably adds a few points to the legislative skew.
Yes. One Republican governor of recent years implemented single-payer healthcare years ahead of that Democrat scoundrel in the White House. (Then essentially tried to claim he hadn’t, on the big stage.)
The hilarious thing about the law is that the governor is only supposed to appoint a replacement if it’s an “emergency”. (Which in theory sounds like a reasonable restriction.) The funny part is that Patrick basically said the very fact of being down one senator is an emergency in and of itself so therefore he was within his rights to appoint someone.
Anyway for those that wondered this whole pub governor thing started with Weld who basically got into office because he got to run against Silber (talk about someone being tone deaf) and then he got to pass it on to Cellucci then on to Swift. (Who all were pretty moderate.)
For completeness sake, I should also mention that when John Kerry (whose presidential run in 2004 started all this) resigned as Senator to become Sec. of State in 2013, Gov. Patrick appointed Mo Cowan as interim Senator, who was succeeded by Ed Markey after the special election a few months later. Since everyone involved was a Democrat, there was no fanfare.
To be fair to Weld, he did win a second term against the unobjectionable but unremarkable Mark Roosevelt, by an 80-20 margin.
California is rumored to have a habit of electing governors that are of the opposite party to the majority of the state legislature - so they can keep an eye on each other. I haven’t checked out the history of it, so it might not really apply to more than a few years. And it definitely doesn’t apply now. But that’s one possible motive for splitting parties. Basic distrust of politicians with power.
Since 2000, West Virginia’s been much the same way – bluer than blue in virtually every statewide office, but when it’s time to vote for president, the Democrats don’t have a chance in hell. But in the past couple of years, the Republicans have started making some pretty serious inroads. They’ve flipped both houses of the state legislature and the congressional delegation is slipping that way as well.
The answers are interesting and, I guess, convincing. The only thing that surprises me is that when the party insiders choose candidates, electability is generally a prime consideration. That’s the reason for the super-delegates after all (which, suggests the Votemaster, will likely be dropped for 2020). If they choose astoundingly bad candidates, they should be replaced.
Just for the record, what I heard Romney say is that medicare should be handled on a state by state basis rather than by the feds. He didn’t deny that it came on his watch. And there is an argument that had it been done on a state by state basis, some might have done it better.
I remember seeing some sort of chart in govt. class in college that basically said that Democrats in Texas are probably somewhere to the right, or at least overlapping with Republicans in states like MA.
You even see this within the state; the Republicans from the big cities aren’t typically the batshit crazy ones; it’s those guys from the sticks who have brain damage from pesticides and fertilizer. Or maybe it’s brain parasites from cow manure…
The problem in Massachusetts has been that the party is somewhat insular and not always connected to the average citizen. While local officials can get elected based on established relationships and little competition, at the statewide level a good opponent can connect to the citizenry in ways that defy party unity.
Deval Patrick was a good candidate and a good politician - he probably could have been elected to another term as governor. The 2010 races showed that Charlie Baker was a good candidate and that Coakley was a bad candidate. But that didn’t seem to matter when the 2014 election came around and as a result the Dems lost again.
I live in Texas. I don’t see the Democrats here as being particularly conservative - they seem to be nearly as liberal as any Democrats in any city in America. They are left-wing for sure, especially in Austin.
Not only that, but the infighting inside the party can hurt a statewide candidate. In the special Senate election after Kennedy’s death, Boston mayor Menino’s preferred candidate Mike Capuano lost to Coakley in the primary. Rumor swirled for weeks that a pissed off Menino essentially refused to campaign for Coakley, or let her use his powerful get out the vote organization in Boston, leading to a lower turnout and her ultimate loss.