Shira Schoenberg’s excellent CW piece about Karyn Polito’s political future is thorough and fair. Lt. Governor Polito has been a good Lt. Governor to Charlie Baker. Under different circumstances, and despite her former profile as an aggressively conservative Republican legislator, Karen Polito could have been an excellent candidate for the Corner Office in 2022. Unfortunately for Polito, her gubernatorial ambitions in the short term are very likely to be frustrated by forces entirely out of her control.
One of the most unique aspects of the Massachusetts Governor’s Office is the reliance of aspirants and occupants on the approval of legislative leaders on Beacon Hill. The most important factor for the fate of Republican candidates for governor, in particular, has nothing to do with them. It’s whether or not Beacon Hill Democrats choose to rally around the Democratic nominee for Governor, something that they have not always been willing to do in the recent past.
For Polito to win the corner office in 2022, she would need Beacon Hill Democrats to be either bitterly divided as they were in the 2002 general election that put Mitt Romney into the corner office, or generally unenthusiastic about their party’s nominee, as they were in 2018. Based on her effective positioning so far, Attorney General Maura Healy appears poised to prevent the first circumstance and while the second is not entirely out of the question, it too seems very unlikely at present.
Beacon Hill Democratic leaders have no problem with Republican governors per se because Massachusetts politics isn’t a left-right affair, but rather an insider-outsider one. The problem for Polito is that having sat firmly on their hands in 2018, effectively dooming the chances of their party’s progressive gubernatorial nominee (who was that guy?), Beacon Hill Democrats will be under considerable pressure from progressives to take back the corner office in 2022. One of the benefits of Republican Governors for Democratic leaders on Beacon Hill has long been that they help them marginalize far left progressive activists whose disdain for transactional politics can make them more trouble than they’re worth. This is a lesson Beacon Hill Democrats taught to Governor Dukakis in 1978 that the future political science professor learned well enough to be elected again in 1982 and 1986.
Karyn Polito seems to have done almost everything she could and should have done to earn the big promotion. By most accounts she has proven competent, willing, and able to suit the political needs of Democrats in the legislature, but thanks to the stable genius dismantling the credibility of the G.O.P. nationally (and the unstable Trump toady presently running the MassGOP into the ground) Beacon Hill Democrats would have a much harder time sitting on their hands in 2022, whether or not Trump remains president. Even though the insurgency powering ideologically rigid progressive Democrats in other states isn’t actually happening in Massachusetts, where the Bay State’s lone “Squad” member on Capitol Hill, Ayanna Pressley, is no A.O.C., Beacon Hill acquiescence to a third straight GOP Governorship in the wake of Trump could well be one Republican too far for Beacon Hill Democrats.
The bottom line for Polito is that, barring unforeseeable changes between now and 2022, her next best chance at the corner office might not be until 2030.