The coverage of the Bay State’s gubernatorial election this year is both business as usual and just a bit surreal. A Globe headline in today’s paper illustrates my point. It reads “Charlie Baker says he’s been tough on Trump when it matters. Is that enough for Mass. voters?” Average Massachusetts voters have taken no great pains to evaluate the two major party candidates for governor comparatively or substantively, nor have they been inundated with campaign material compelling them to do so. Jay Gonzalez has neither the money nor the human capital to wage a serious challenge. Baker will be re-elected (I assume) because the state’s Democratic political establishment wants him to be re-elected. If they didn’t, the Democratic nominee would have the financial, political, and human capital to win.
Average Bay State voters have and will take the cues given to them by the state’s organized and established political actors because they are political consumers, not political activists. Organic or grass-roots anti-Trump energy will make the margin of Baker’s victory slimmer than the polls indicate, but without the organized opposition of the state’s Democratic establishment Baker’s re-election is all but certain. Therefore, Charlie Baker’s answer to the question quoted above is exactly right as long as you understand that he’s talking about “when it matters” to his political fortunes not when it matters to policy advocates of all stripes.
This gubernatorial election is no different in this regard than any other in the last several decades when a GOP governor has sought re-election in Massachusetts. The Democrats who control Beacon Hill with veto-proof majorities in both chambers of the legislature have given the incumbent what he needs to be re-elected by not encouraging their donors to give to their party’s nominee and by not spending their political capital on defeating the incumbent. Everyone on Beacon Hill understands that Baker’s easy re-election is based on his willingness to play ball with Democratic leaders. None of the Democratic officeholders in the state who have explicitly endorsed Baker will be shunned or punished for it because the party’s legislative leaders want Baker to win. Democratic leaders are not opposed in any substantive way to the Democratic nominee. They are merely uninterested in changing horses because they are getting what they want from the incumbent, namely sufficient cooperation on policy making and useful political cover from their party’s most strident ideological activists. For better or worse, Massachusetts politics is not a left-right affair. The state’s individualistic political culture, embraced and exemplified by average voters and politicians alike, produces an insider versus outsider politics that greatly frustrates moralistic insurgents and ideologues left and right. Beacon Hill Democrats allow GOP governors to be re-elected because it’s useful and they get away with it by not resisting candidate-centric campaign narratives in races for the corner office. Beacon Hill Democrats do not rely on attorneys general, secretaries of state, treasurers, or auditors to give them political cover from progressive special interest pleaders, which is why the GOP candidates for these offices this year couldn’t be picked out of a line up by average voters and will all lose their races next week by large margins. GOP governors, on the other hand, have to cooperate to survive and when they do Democratic leaders have an easier time protecting their power and advancing (if incrementally) a liberal policy agenda.
Everyone treating this gubernatorial election like it will actually turn on serious assessments of the candidates or on policy disagreements are kidding themselves. Whether or not you think Charlie Baker has been a good governor, he has indisputably been a politically smart governor who has avoided alienating the Democrats who control the state legislature. Even before he had the job Baker was savvy enough not to attack Democrats with any real enthusiasm, despite a probation scandal that provided ample fodder during his 2014 campaign. Massachusetts Statehouse elections are insider versus outsider affairs that, as such, favor Democrats in all but one race when a Republican governor is seeking re-election.