Primaries

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Today we will discuss the recent primary elections! We will be covering what happened with the state house representative seats, talking a little bit about the governor's council, and what it's like to run a second time as a challenger.
We'll also get into the system that we have in Massachusetts and why it is so broken.

This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 59. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Mass. Our goal is to help people transform state politics: we investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to incorruptible mass. Our mission here is to help us all transform state politics because we know that we could have a state legislature that supported the needs of the vast majority of the residents of our beautiful commonwealth. And today we are going to be going over the primary elections that just happened a little bit over a week ago.
We will be covering what happened with the state house, the state rep seats. We'll be covering a little bit about the governor's council. We're talking a little bit about what it's like to run a second time as a challenger.
And then we'll talk a little bit about the system that we have in Massachusetts and why it is so broken. As we love to talk about!  
Before we do, I am going to have my illustrious co hosts introduce themselves. I will start with Jordan.
My name is Jared Berg Powers. I use he/him and I have many years experience – I realize I have 31 one year's experience working in elections, many of them in Massachusetts.  And yeah, I don't know. Excited to be here. Talk about it.
Good. It's not turning you off. You're not leaving.
It turned me off already. Like I just, I'm just stuck here. There's nothing else I can do.
You'll never be able to leave. Yeah. Yeah.
We will not let you. And Jonathan?
Jonathan, he and his joining from Boston. You'll see me be walking through downtown Boston.
And I have many years in like issue and electoral campaigns, but not quite as many as Jordan. If you flip the number, the numbers of those, it's close to what I have of the 31. It gets close.
And I am Anna Callahan. She/her coming at you from Medford. I can say that I have both lost an election and won an election.In that order. Thank you. Which is the right order to do it.
And so I'm very excited for us to talk about elections here and primary elections in particular, which are so, so important in Massachusetts. Let me start by saying that many people, we know that a lot of folks who listen to this podcast are a little too deep in politics, right. Very deeply involved.
But most, the vast majority of people do not vote in the primaries. And unfortunately, in a one party state like we have, where most of the races, if they have a challenger at all, it's going to be two democrats running and not a Democrat versus a Republican in the general election. Primary elections are incredibly important.
And I just want to encourage everyone who listens to this, not only to vote yourself in the primary elections, but to encourage your friends to vote in the primary elections to do some canvassing for primary elections so that we can improve the actual sort of democratic, small d democratic turnout in primary elections. That's the first thing to say. Jordan, were you gonna jump in? 
No, I agree. We need more people to vote. I guess I'll just say really quickly what we know from the data is that the people who have availed themselves of the changes to making it easier to vote have mostly been older, whiter and more conservative than the average citizen. So think about that.
When you think about who is coming out to vote. They're starting to look more…or my other favorite stat, that on average in Massachusetts, most of the people who vote for school committee, on average, don't have, no longer have kids in school.
Right. Like they're already aged. Most of their kids have aged out of the school system.
So just about, we need more people to engage in this level. Cause that's where change happens. Absolutely.
And the changes in terms of making it easier to vote, that all happened during COVID. So this is a very recent change that happened. And we are now finally getting the statistics on how that changed voter turnout. So thank you for that.
Let's go ahead and dive in and let's talk about the state rep races. Let's see. I'll have you each do one.
Who wants to take Tara Hong? I'm happy to talk about either one of them. Just let me know which one to do. Tara, jump in.
Okay, so, yeah, so this was an exciting race of somebody running a second time and winning. Tara Hong, who was running in Lowell against state representative Rady Mom and managed to win by, I think it was like almost 200 votes. Lowell has like depressingly low turnout, but I believe it was around like 1195 to around 1000, if I remember correctly, in the final outcome, like a 47% to 40% Tara, 24 year old first Massachusetts state legislature legislator born in the two thousands, which is wild to think.
It makes me feel super old. But Tara is someone who's been engaged in Lowell with a number of organizations like the Cambodian Mutual Assistance association. Lowell votes, I think had done work with the Massachusetts... on a volunteer basis.
The Massachusetts Education Justice Alliance is active with kind of progressive Massachusetts chapter Solidarity Lowell has been very much so a part of like civic kind of civic organizing and progressive organizing in Lowell since kind of being a college student is also kind of being a college student there and grew up in this, like, grew up in the city. Family had come over from Cambodia that he ran two years ago against Rady Mom, lost very narrowly.
I forget the exact number. It was maybe around like 50 votes or something like that. That was the ultimate margin between him and Rady Mom where there was a third candidate in the race and there had been a history of whenever Rady Mom would have a challenger that there would be a third candidate in the race.
How did that happen? Right. Imagine and somebody from in Lowell. What's interesting is that local politics, you have a lot of salience to cambodian domestic politics in Lowell because of the large kind of refugee population there.
And then two years ago, the person who filed papers on literally the last day to take out papers to run was from the same fact actually, I think critical of the cambodian government that Tara was from and was able to siphon enough votes to keep Representative Rady Mom George, Representative Rady Mom, who I might add, has one of the strangest profiles of a state legislature legislator being a conservative, pro cop, pro gun former buddhist monk who runs a massage parlor. 
But Tara, Tara, after he, after he narrowly lost two years ago, somebody who made a commitment to staying active in having the groups in the community that he was a part of and continuing to show up and to be present so that he would be kind of having conversations, being recognized, et cetera, and to be in a position to run a second time. And it was very exciting to see that he won.
Ran both on a clear case where being he was present in the community and that type of kind of constituent service work, but also on strong progressive values, particularly hitting Rady Mom and the lack of transition transparency in the state House and how little the incumbent legislatures poll was delivering. And so it is very exciting to see somebody narrowly lose but make that commitment to staying involved and building on that for next election. Running on clear values, directly speaking to voters and winning.
It's always heartening when you see the case studies of that. Yes, yes. Yeah.
Just what we're going to talk about running again. But actually, Tara is a good example of one of the ways you win. So just two years ago, Tara Hong lost to Rady Mom.
Rady Mom got 1030 votes. Tara Hong got 974 votes and the third party person got 356. So Rady Mom successfully sort of pulled people aside this time around.
This past election, Rady Mom got 1010. So he lost 20 votes. But his, so his vote was the same.
But, but Tara Hong got 1191 votes and there was still another person who got 300 votes. So what? So what Tara did was Tara added to the 970 votes, he had about two, almost 300 voters that didn't vote the last time that voted this time. And so total votes cast increased by almost 200 votes overall.
So you had both less siphoning. Right. And also Tara added voters as a way to sort of win an election.
So I think staying involved all those things, continuing to doorknock, continuing to be active like that made a difference in the race. And the other thing that I think is like it's also helpful that he was able to keep his coalition because Rady Mom supported the cambodian government that's been accused of authoritarian things and genocide. And so also there's just this divide in the electorate of people who either support that government or don't.
So there's also a hardening of terrorist faction against ready mom because they are ideal. Not everyone who voted for, for Tara voted because of this issue. But there is a core of people in, in, in there.
I don't know how many people, but it is a core. Having done some door knocking for him where I went to a door and somebody asked me where Tara was on this issue. Like it was not.
And I, and I had to know, like I had to know door knocking for him about the cambodian government, its election and where Tara came, which was not on the side of the government and the authoritarians, but rather on the side of the people who are protesting it. Wow. So that was, that really is a great story of success of a progressive who ran two years ago, super young, ran two years ago, did not win, ran again, fantastic campaign, did all the right things and this time won against a long term incumbent.
So now we're going to go to what I think is still a heartening story, but unfortunately with a. Yeah, with not the ending we were hoping for. That Evan Mackay, who, you know, is many things, but among them was the president of his union of graduate student unions at Harvard. And, you know, was running a campaign against one of the longest standing and one of the more powerful folks.
Powerful is giving too much credit considering how much everyone hates Marjorie Decker in the building, I would say perceives herself to be powerful in a building of people who also secretly wanted her to lose because they all hate her. That is so interesting. Okay, interesting.
Well, this is in Cambridge in a hyper progressive district. Her way, you know, her stick is she votes progressive on issues, but then, you know, does all of the things that leadership asks her to do in terms of leadership power. But I am going to go ahead, Jordan, and let you talk about this whole race and everything in it.
So if you want to take it away, please. Yeah, I actually think so. I'm a little more removed.
So it would be great for Jonathan Cohen to talk about the race, but I'll start off by giving some background to the story a little bit. So when I say that, I want to be precise. So Marjorie Decker wins an open seat election in which she doesn't have a formidable opponent.
She threatens everybody who tries to run against her. She yelled at every one of the members of the mass alliance board in her first time running, Georgia, the then director was like, what is this? Like, who comes to an interview and yells at people? And that really set the tone for the way she interacts with people all the time, which is, um. She said to me on one occasion that, like, what is progressive is what I decide is progressive, and you don't get a say, and neither does anyone else.
Like, she really sees herself as the arbiter of progressivism, the arbiter of what should and should not pass. And the only voice that matters, she has systematically stabbed other members on the back for her own power.
She has constantly gone through staff because she has such a toxic work environment. And it's what the irony is.
It's all actually to lead to her not actually being effective because no one wants to work with her. She only has one go to mechanism for legislating, which is to yell at people. That's what she does. She yells at people. I don't like what you said. I'm gonna yell at you.
My daughter used to call her the mean lady who calls you and yells at you. I would just literally put the phone down on speaker and just, like, ignore her while she would just rant in raid for 20 minutes about something she didn't like, and that everyone has this story. Everyone has this story of how she treats human beings and also how totally ineffectual she is.
So I think it's important to give that, because her story is that she does what she needs to to stay in the building, but, like, is super effective in the building, but, like, things that are tangible that people care about. She doesn't pass. She doesn't use that power for actually maintaining.
She uses that power and votes on non progressive things. So I think it's really important. She says one thing and does another.
She says she's four things and kills them in the background. She says that she's for legislation and does not support it. She says she'll say to people's faces one thing, and then she will, and then she will vote another way and then say either I had to or no, that's not really how it voted. Right. She'll try to obscure what actually, what we could see with our own eyes.
Right. She does many of the things that we recognize as damaging and problematic that, like, Donald Trump does, but she gets away with it because she self perceives herself to be progressive, says that she's progressive. And other people sort of just listen, are like, yes, she's progressive.
Like, she's in Cambridge. Of course she is. But, like, you can't, if progress, like, if progressive should have some definitions, like, again, it's all gray, everything.
But it should, it should be some basic things like believing in taxing rich people to pay for things she voted for tax cuts. It should be for systematic changes to the way that people's lives functions. She consistently opposes or does not advocate for any of those things.
She does not support making, putting some sort of, making it easier for people to rent, to stay in their homes, to. Like, she does not believe in any sort of guardrails for private, for private, for private, for corporations owning apartments or any of those things. Right.
Like, she does not actually support any of these things. She does support things that are easy for Democrats to support in Massachusetts. Things around personal autonomy, things around reproductive choice.
Right. Will vote the right way on environmental issues. So again, I think we need to bifurcate the sort of story that gets told about her and she tells about herself in the reality.
But that story that she tells about herself is successful in an environment where the only time people get communicated about their state rep is leading up to an election. Right? So you get this, like, bizarro scenario where the Boston Globe is like, you know, the system is broken. People are literally have committees where no one, where no work happens and then endorses somebody who's a part of that system from, from, like, in heart and mind in every possible way.
Right? Like, and I don't know, like, you're trying to make sense of that as a regular voter. You're like, well, maybe she's not a part of that system. The Boston Globe has, like, dubbed this expose.
So you just, and there's no other reporting. There's no other telling you what they're doing, how she's not answering local people's emails, how she doesn't respond to people. They're never interviewing the hundreds of people she's yelled at.
Like, like, no real reporting happened. So people don't have any contacts for any of these things that are happening. They only know the story she tells them.
And I will, I will you run an election in it? I will do it and say this one thing, which is that I got to see her mailers, that, of course, she has tons of money, so her mailers went out to everybody, and her mailer was all about how transparent she is and that she, you know, bastion of transparency and how much she's fought for it. Fascinating, because that literally was Evan's number one, you know, one of his number one talking points. But, Jonathan, why don't you give us a little bit more detail about the race? And then also the, The ending. 
Yeah. Like, Evan had won, and then there was a recount, and then.
Yeah, can do one thing that you were just noting as well. One thing that I thought was an impressive sign of the field operation and messaging from the Evans campaign is voters on the doors. And many, not all, I'm sure, but a number of voters on the doors recognize those mailers from Decker in the final weeks as her directly responding and trying to cover in response to what Evan was saying.
So recognizing that it wasn't actually an example of somebody actually touting a strong record that they had, but somebody seeing an area that they're being successfully kind of criticized on and responded accordingly, I think it was very much like Trump saying, I'm not weird. Yeah. Like, it was.
It was fascinating. Like, I was impressed that people picked up. So one thing I can say a few things.
I was talking about this race earlier, is one of Evan's campaign. Evan ran a kind of a very impressive field operation that both had clear message to people. In addition, particularly in a district like Cambridge, where people expect Massachusetts to be leading on every single issue and to be able to speak and communicate why we aren't and why the incumbent is actually a part of why Massachusetts isn't doing what voters may have already thought that Massachusetts had accomplished and the way in which the systems of power work.
And I think that the campaign did a very good job of educating voters and viewing that as essential to the work of a campaign, it was also, on a number of times, people had commented on the doors. Both one, how many times people from the campaign had already been by, sometimes positively, sometimes annoyed. But as I often say that, I forget, who is the person to first note this.
And maybe I heard this from you, Jordan, quoting somebody else. But if you need to annoy the easily annoyable to make sure that you're actually reaching, like the everyday voter who will not have, even. Will probably still not even know an election is happening. 
That's me. That's my quote.
Thought so. And also the number of people who noted having actually spoken directly with Evan and having. Which I thought was also great from having worked with a number of campaigns over the years.
You always love it when the candidates themselves actually do, like knocking doors and being involved. That can't be said of every candidate. But if candidates are knocking on doors and they are having engaged conversations with voters that those voters remember.
And so whether they were like an undecided at first, that you go back to them later, either Evan or a volunteer, and are able to, like, kind of try to seal the deal with them. And I think it was the strength of that field operation and the message that the race was as close as it was as kind of Anna stated before it ended up being a 41, Sadly, the incumbent held on by 41 votes with somewhat of like a rollercoaster of a few days where on election night.
And this also speaks to, I think, the need for better, I'll start with a need for better communication from elections departments about what ballots are being held in central tabulation. Because it was something I saw in Boston, where now, because of mail ballots and the fact that cities will often like to hold ballots, maybe from like the last week, centrally, rather than having to do all the sorting and send them, the ticker tapes that you get from the polls on election night can be sizably different than the final result because there are other ballots being held.
So you had a situation where the ticker tapes from election night showed that Evan was actually up by a few hundred votes. Yep. And then when Cambridge actually posted a final but, like, unofficial count that evening, it was actually down to a lead of 40 votes for Evan.
With Cambridge having some ballots still left to cast. Still left to count, which happened the next day, where they went through provisional ballots, overseas ballots, as the day of dropboxes. And because of the strength that Decker had with the overseas ballots, flipped it from the 40 vote margin for…
Exactly. Flipped those to a narrow, almost mirroring margin for herself. The thing I would point out, I pointed out somebody for.
But what's striking in this case is that Decker, in this case, had almost spent almost four times as much money as Evan did. She had the endorsement of Maury Healey, lieutenant governor, like Governor Maury Healey, Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll, Senator Ed Markey, like Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley and Katherine Clark, many more organizational endorsements. She's been in the state house for twelve years and was in the Cambridge city council for 14 years prior to that, and has, even if not as many as she might, when I know, has, like, not insignificant accomplishments.
And the only reason at the end of the final count, she won was because of a massive lead with people who didn't even live in the district at the time of the election. It could not be, and you could not. It could not have been reached, and we're likely not following.
I thought it was a. I mean, it really. That is an incredibly well run campaign.
Challenger campaign. To be able to be able to do that. Yeah.
And that was, I think, like, all those votes. Like, there's no way you can reach those people as a challenger. Ultimately, it's hard.
If you're. If you've been in office for 26 years, you can probably find out. You probably know who the professor stationed abroad in Europe or people at their summer homes are.
You might know them from those years of work. And that's. That's something where you really don't have that in the same way as a challenger.
You would not have knocked on their door or called them. They would not have come to an event. So that was.
That stuff was ultimately a shame. But also, still, at the end of the day, a wild case, like elections so often get told by the narrative of the win, whether at the small margin or a large margin. But in this case, where, despite Decker winning, 21 voters changing their minds would have been an entirely.
Would have. Would have flipped the outcome. Yep.
I know. Well, let's. Let's go ahead and move the conversation to, um, running for a second time, right.
If Evan decides to run for a second time. There were a couple of folks who ran two years ago who ran again this cycle. Progressives that challenged incumbents that did not win this cycle either.
And I think it's pretty interesting to look at what you think when you're a candidate, what you think your second time around is going to be. Right? And I think a lot of people come into their second election cycle as a challenger, and they assume that things are going to be the same. They assume that the people who voted for them are going to continue to vote for them, and all they have to do is build.
They assume that things have not changed. And I think you have to accept that it is a whole new election. And I would love for you guys to chime in.
Jordan, why don't you jump in with what you think can really be helpful for people running for a second time, the same seat. Second time. Yeah.
The first thing is, you know, it's not a rerun of the race. But people think of it as it is. People think the voters themselves think there isn't, there's an, there's an implicit thing you're saying when you're running again, which is you made a mistake.
And voters don't like to be told that they make a mistake. They don't like to be told that they're bad judges of character. And so when you're rerunning, you actually tend to lose voters because you're basically saying your neighbors, your friends and you, you don't know what you're doing.
I'm going to rerun to just like make it clearer that you're making a mistake. And it's just a really doesn't, it's implied in the rerun. And so you have to have a story about why you're running again.
That's a, that's absolutely different and about the future. And it has to tell voters that it's, that the decision they made in the past was okay. So you need to say something like, you need to say something like, you know, I understand, I wasn't planning to run again, but this thing happened, or, you know, I ran and they promised all these things on the voting, on the trail, and then they voted the opposite way.
They did the opposite. Like, clearly me running, they promised one thing and did another to try to get things that I'm running because they lied to you. But you need to be able to, like, say this person's a liar.
Like, they will, and they will continue to lie. Right. Like, that's the key is you need to take, you need to take head on the idea that there is a reason for you rerunning and not that voters have made a mistake.
Right. Like, you need to let people into that process. Just simply rerunning again is not, it's actually telling the wrong message.
And the other way that you can win if you're running again. And I always tell people, you usually need to do both, is you need to add voters like Tara did. You either, you need to, you need to find people, you need to figure out how to tell the people who are rerunning again that it's, that you're not just running to run like that.
You have a plan like that you are gonna do it this time and you're gonna do it this way. And then you need to do those things to add new voters. I always encourage when somebody's rerunning again, I say you need to both have a story to vote to voters about why you're rerunning and you need a story about, like, and this is, again, if you're head to head with the same person.
So also, you know, if you're running at large and you don't get on, that's a different story. But you need to have a story about why it is you're running again and why it is that they, and then you also need to figure out, are there voters who didn't vote the last time that you can encourage and add to the pool to increase your chances of coming out with a victory. And that's really the key to success.
Yeah, I would just say one other thing, which is that when I was running, I was aware that there were people who were going to vote for me simply because I was fresh and new and they didn't see me as someone involved in the political system. That's a, you know, maybe, is it 10% of voters? It doesn't matter. Even if it's like 5% of voters, those people are going to view you differently when you're running a second time.
They're going to see you maybe as a little bit more in the political system you want. You know, you're not going to always appear the same way to people when you run a second time as when you ran the first time. That's just a little thing.
And, Jonathan, do you have some advice as well? Yeah, a few things. One, building off what Jordan said, it's one thing that I've asked candidates in interviews is the dynamic of you need to kind of retention, persuasion and expansion of what ultimately you need to do if you're running again in both and like both, the incumbent is looking to do that and a challenger is looking to do that. That if you both got vote totals from last week, whether you won or you lost, you need to, you're trying to retain the same people and make sure that the people who voted for you last time still vote for you again.
And then if you didn't win as well, or if you're an incumbent who did win and looking to build up a margin, you presumably need to flip people who voted for the other candidate last time. And then you also need to get people who didn't vote because, like the, there is an easy way that people have, like an easily way to assume that every turnout from one election is going to be the same as the turnout for the next election, that it's just the same group of people coming to the polls again. But people die.
People move, people age into the electorate. People get motivated by some other race on the ballot and come out one year, and then they're not motivated to come out for the next year. And so that's always a fascinating thing when there's that inherent churn that makes you have to do multiple things.
And the other thing that I feel when it comes to people running again that some people might not realize is how many people probably forget entirely whom they voted for, like, one day after they vote. And so that's why they're like, even just that simple work of retention isn't as easy as it might assume because that assumes that, like, everybody who voted for you was, like, amazing. I love them.
They're my idol. I fully remember who they are the entire, like, days, weeks, months, years after the election when that's not inherently the case. Great.
We are. We're running a little long, so let's see if we can wrap up some of these other things quick. I just wanted to mention the governor's council because, hey, governor's council is important.
It matters to folks who are incarcerated, who are on parole, who are in the system, who are in danger of going into the system, who have family members in the system, who have community members in the system. There are a lot of people impacted by the governor's council. So do either of you guys want to jump in about either Mara Dolan or Stacey Borden or just the governor's council in general? Sure.
In terms of examples of somebody running again, that was a case with Maura Dolan, who ran against Marilyn Devaney. Marilyn Devaney is somebody that there's too many stories to share about. So I will because we're running along and not go through them, but has been on the governor's council since being elected back in 1998 and has had many people run against her over the years, and they've never been successful.
And yet two years ago, Mara Dolan came, as came the closest of any of her challengers losing. I believe it was like a 51 49 race between them two years ago, and Mara decided that she was going to run again. And one thing that both to her credit, she ended up being one of the few people who actually beat an incumbent this year.
She won like 52%, 48% ousting, kind of ousting Maryland, which is both one a sign of the impressive work that she put in, particularly in lowering the number of people who blanked the race, was one thing that you pointed out recently as an interest when you're realizing that not just the people voting at all, it's people who vote in every specific race, and if nobody knows about what an office does, they're likely to just blank the office. And you then trying to get people trying to oust an incumbent or trying to get people to actually affirmatively not just vote for you, but make them actually, like, make sure that they care enough about the race and office itself. Where she.
But at the same time, as a demonstration of the power of incumbency, like Mara Joel, and she had the globe, she had the Globe editorial board. She had Senator Markey. She had, like, Shahan McGovern, Presley, Clark, like, basically every single elected official in the district, a number of the democratic committees across the district, and almost like, a very number of unions.
Maryland had basically no organizational endorsements and no real voter outreach operation in despite. And, like, Mar was very good at kind of being everywhere. And despite that, on the pure power of the incumbency, it was still only a 5248 victory.
Wow. But a hard fought one. Yep.
Anything else before we go on? Yeah, just really quickly, that you should care about the governor's council. It's a place that's been long over that's been overlooked, and what's happened is that the people overseeing our justice system have been terrible. There are hacks.
There are people who care, who don't think about the sort of ways in which our system is only just for poor people and people of color. It hasn't really held the people who oversee this system accountable. It's not interested in going after any of the real big crimes that there are.
Wage theft, people sort of stealing people's homes, banks stealing people's homes. You know, all this is sort of systemic issues, but they're fine to go after people who basically do small things. And so, you know, the governance council is one of the ways in which we can have people who have their eyes better on the society as a whole and think about overseeing them.
And, um, having good people there matters. Um, and so Maura's victory matters because her background as a defense attorney and public defenders and do and other work she's done matter. Um, other people who have run also matter for those reasons.
And, like, it's a really big victory. Um, and it's also just really says something about, again, sort of the power of, like, I know what I'm doing that you would vote for, um, to be so many times, despite her being unhinged, but also despite the many visible ways in which, if we lived in a society where there was justice for everybody, people would look into this, into police. Now there's movies of police cover ups that have happened in these districts.
And just, there's no accountability for any of these things. And it's just a constant reminder about how bad the system is. But, yes, care about the governor's council.
It's one of the ways in which we intersect with the, with. It's one of the. I think one of. I think it's a really great thing we have, that there's an elected body that oversees our judges, but we have to care about it to make it matter. Right. And then just a final couple points.
Just wanted a quick mention to folks that we do have the, as we have the least productive state legislature in the country, we also have the least competitive state elections in the country. You know, all the incumbents win, in part because nobody runs against them. And with that, I am going to turn to you, Jordan, because I know, yes, this is my big.
This is my big issue, my big Piccadillo about this system is that one of the things that's so frustrating about the way, so just really quickly, the way the state house works is there is a promise that no one will make you vote for anything. That no one will make you vote for something, um, that you don't want to vote for, essentially, or, um. That's the implicit promise.
Um, and the. The incumbent. That they will.
That the speaker will protect you. The speaker will give you resources. We'll give you, um, polling support, will give you all sorts of support.
They'll raise money for you so that you can spend four times as much as your opponent. Um, the incumbents will. They'll protect you.
So if you don't what they call, spot their, your opponent, which means ask them to vote on things that they may not want to vote for, then they will promise to. To protect your back, that they'll also protect you. But that system is only working for conservative.
Vote for conservative reps. Conservative reps aren't. Are not being asked to.
You know, they are passing conservative things like, they passed a tax cut for billionaires. They're not doing things that, that make it. That strain conservative reps to do something hard.
Right. Like, they're not making that same sort of request of conservative voters. Right.
You're asking Marjorie Decker in Cambridge to vote for a bill that's totally abhorrent to her, to her electorate and abhorrent to generally, like, a tax cut that, like Donald Trump would love. Like, that's a. Like, most progressives have a hard time defending those sorts of things, but you're not doing it on the other side.
You're not passing legislation and, like, asking, you know, asking conservative reps to do similar hard things to just support it because the leadership wants. And then on top of that, when they do run for reelection, we had incumbents who are progressive door knocking for terrible state reps. And you're just like, they would never door knock for you.
They would never fundraise for you. They don't like Rogers and all these other people. They're not going to, they don't care if they lose a progressive member.
They don't care if Marjorie Decker goes. They have said as much to me. It's not just my, like, guessing.
They have said it. They were just like, oh, too bad. They don't care about.
And so the, so the system that currently exists of protecting progressive candidates are progressive legislators are going to continue to get challenged in the system. They're going to continue to be the ones who people get mad at because they're so out of, because they're the ones that are so out of step with what's actually happening, or more importantly, not happening in the state house, which is that nothing's happening in the state house. Right.
So they're the most out of step with their voters. And they're being, so they're bearing the cost of this system. They're, and they don't get things for it.
They're a cheap date. They're not, they're not wielding power by being the people who are doing all the door knocking, doing all the fundraising and being the ones to ask to vote against their own values. Trisha Farley Bouvier is quoted in the press opposing tax cuts.
She then voted for, she then voted for like, and said, like, oh, they're great. And when asked what was the difference, she said, oh, some things change. Nothing changed.
But she just, she had an honest opinion about a bill that was bad, made the mistake of saying so on her values, and then was forced to speak back the speaker and voting for it. And so, like that sort of asymmetry, the progressives need to wake up. You are bearing the cost of this system and getting nothing for it or next to nothing for it.
The things that you're passing are like, they are. They are. They are.
They are just, they are. As a famous, like, Lonnie Grenier book, they are gas masks on the canary instead of, like, fixing the mine, fixing the air. Like, you are literally mitigating harm at the edges of the harm, like, the smallest being the literal canary.
And, like, miners and everyone else are dying. You're just missing the forest of the trees and continuing to go and say, like, look at all the gas masks we have these tiny, tiny birds. Like, look at all these little things.
Look at these saplings we're giving you. It's just like, look around. People are angry.
It's gonna cost you. It's gonna come up. And it's just a really, it's just frustrating.
Yeah. Jonathan, last. No, I think, I think that Jordan said it well.
Made me think that even how, like, I'm sure that when it comes to the more progressive state legislators are the ones who will be hearing from their constituents, much more so about anger with the, like, incompetence and lack of action at the end of the legislative session. So they bear all of that, but then, but then go along to protect colleagues who had never, never reciprocate for them. Yeah.
My final word is just, it's sad that we're pretty excited that we got one progressive, 160 people in there. We like the one, I mean, that's, that's real sad that that's the stage we’re at. Yeah.
The one thing I would also say that was kind of disappointing with this election cycle, that there were a number of races where literally, what, they didn't even have contested primaries for open seats. And it's one thing for there to be nobody running against an incumbent, but it's, and it will be. It's like no knock against any one person who wins by being the only one in their seat.
Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad. Sometimes they're anywhere in between. But it's a sad state of democracy where a seat opens up and only one person runs.
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