A couple weeks back MassINC pollster Steve Koczela analyzed his most recent poll of Massachusetts residents in THIS CommonWealth article. Fascinating findings and excellent analysis. The question posed by Koczela that the data can’t answer (yet) is: Why are Democratic elected officials in the state less popular than their election margins and history suggest?
I have a theory. In Massachusetts popularity and power have an unusual relationship. Though he was the most popular governor in America for most of his eight years in the corner office, Charlie Baker was never able to leverage that popularity to take charge of the state house’s “big three.” On Beacon Hill, power trumps popularity, thanks to the myriad of cultural, institutional, and structural dynamics that insulate state house pols exceptionally well from public scrutiny and accountability.
The MassINC poll seems to show that Massachusetts residents’ attitudes too reflect this counter-intuitive relationship between popularity and power among their elected officials. The latest MassINC poll shows Senator Warren’s less than stellar popularity. Biden’s too. To his credit, Koczela assures readers that Warren remains an “odds-on favorite for re-election,” though he stops short of explaining exactly why. This is also to his credit because he does not go beyond what his data tells him. I, however, am “theorizing” 😉 and remember that when Warren dispatched Scott Brown on Election Day in 2012 by a comfortable margin, polls indicated that Scott Brown was the most popular elected official in the state. The MassINC poll also seemed to have bad news for President Biden. Though only 23% of Bay Staters surveyed want Joe Biden to run for re-election, like Warren, he too is a shoo-in for re-election in the Bay State.
What’s going on here? Do Massachusetts voters’ attitudes about their (Democratic) elected officials reflect an unusual love-hate relationship between the state’s Democratic public officials and their constituents? Could it be that the state’s Democratic elected officials relationship to voters parallels the relationship between the state’s major professional sports franchises and their fans? Despite the winning ways of the Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics, and Bruins, Bay Staters take a backseat to no one when it comes to critical feedback and pessimism about its teams and players, but they also never fail to return to the stands, social media, and water coolers to root for their teams and brag on their players at gametime.
As you ponder this remember that Scott Brown and Charlie Baker both enjoyed considerable popularity among Massachusetts residents, yet neither one was able to translate that popularity into great power in office. Both were essentially at the mercy of Democratic legislators. The new Democratic governor will probably never match Charlie Backer’s run of popularity, but then again her clear and constant signaling of her willingness to accomodate Beacon Hill leaders as governor suggests that she understands how overrated popularity is in Massachusetts politics.
There are plenty of cultural, institutional, and structural reasons for the “exceptionally” unusual relationship between popularity and power in Massachusetts, all of which are thoroughly discussed in the MassPoliticsProfs’ latest tome, The Politics of Massachusetts Exceptionalism. Nonetheless, more attention (from scholars and pollsters alike) to the attitudes and assumptions of average Massachusetts voters is needed to more fully grasp the political mating rituals of the wily Masshole.