When I want to know what’s about to happen in Massachusetts politics, there’s no better place to turn than my colleague Professor O’Brien. Her August 2 post, Ayanna Pressley: Harbinger of Change to MA Democratic Party really stands out. But I’ve been thinking even more of her July post, Massachusetts Senate Race Diehls-In Trump Immigration Policy: Will It Work? It considers Geoff Diehl’s Trumpian position on immigration but the post is really about who we are in Massachusetts.
Professor O’Brien recounted that Diehl was clinging to President Donald Trump and ramping up his own anti-immigrant message. A WBUR poll found that only about half of state Republicans opposed Trump’s family separation policy and 37% of likely GOP voters were okay with separating families. Professor O’Brien also recalled that when Governor Deval Patrick announced that Massachusetts would accept unaccompanied minors during a 2014 refugee crisis, there was strong racial backlash against his decision. Here is how Professor O’Brien closed her post:
But the degree to which Diehl chips into Warren’s lead will have much to do with his readiness to walk in-step with Trump on immigration and how this motivates Massachusetts Republican base voters and potentially resonates with white unenrolled voters. A test for Massachusetts liberalism, and our decidedly mixed record on issues of race and ethnicity, is thus at play in Warren v. Diehl.
And today we do know that the race will be Warren v. Diehl. I agree with Professor O’Brien that Senator Warren will keep the seat, but Diehl’s primary victory raises another question taken up by Sean Philip Cotter of the Boston Herald in GOP in identity crisis? Party split over state Republican leaders.
Not only has Diehl prevailed, but Scott Lively got 36% of the vote in his primary challenge to the most-popular-governor-in-America-except-the-Massachusetts-Republican-Party, Charlie Baker. Lively, a man for whom the term “deplorable” would be a reputational upgrade, got 27% of the party faithful at the state party convention. And Diehl is exulting that the activists are overthrowing the GOP establishment.
It isn’t as if Baker hasn’t been trying to hold this off. At the 2014 state convention, the party tried to deny Tea Party challenger Mark Fisher a spot on the primary ballot, contending that Fisher had not received 15% of the convention vote. The problem was that Fisher had gotten his 15% and weeks later the party ended its ham-handed effort to deny him his ballot position. Fisher received 26% of the primary vote against Baker. Lively, an even worse candidate, did Fisher nine points better.
In 2016 Baker pushed conservative Chanel Prunier out of the Republican National Committee, replacing her with more moderate State Representative Keiko Orrall. He used $300,000 of dark money to evict conservatives from the Republican State Committee, securing control of the party apparatus. This so outraged the Boston Globe that it editorialized against his fund raising practices in Baker needs to be transparent on shadowy dollars.
(I’m stumped here because I’m trying to remember if there wasn’t somewhere else in 2016 where dark money was pouring in that the Globe could have written about? Maybe a ballot issue or something? It’ll come to me. On we go).
It’s also true that Diehl is an ultra-orthodox on the one issue that unites all Republicans, tax cuts. But Governor Baker signed into law $800 million in new taxes in a “Grand Bargain” compromise that averted several ballot questions while giving wins to both Democrats and business. It’s the sort of thing Frank Sargent would have done but it isn’t what the modern Republican Party does anymore. We older political scientists have a term of art for what Baker did – it is called “governing.”
Diehl has recently been touting his endorsement by the NRA as well as braying to build the wall and cleaving to Trump. And should we rest easy that anti-immigrant fervor can’t be a winning issue here in Massachusetts? Trump won the Massachusetts primary handily, and white union voters can be attracted to the Republican side as Scott Brown showed in 2010.
Is Trump-Diehl the future? Or in other words, can the road to victory in Massachusetts once again be paved by a candidate who can “put all the hate groups in one big pot and let it boil”?
Excellent articles