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| In his second run for governor, Charlie Baker is focusing heavily on crossover issues that appeal to independents and Democrats. |
Charlie Baker bounds into the Charlestown Knights of Columbus, where the once and future savior of the Massachusetts Republican Party finds a hall stuffed full of shamrock balloons and voters clad in green sweaters. Baker has given his Friday evening over to a local Saint Patrick’s Day banquet. Caterers buzz around him, carrying plastic tubs full of boiled beef, boiled carrots, boiled potatoes, and boiled cabbage. The food looks awful, but the jokes that come raining down from the podium at the front of the room are worse. It’s a scene only a politician could love. Baker works the room with abandon.
“Steve-o!” Baker bellows. “Hi, buddy!” The Republican gubernatorial hopeful claps little old ladies on the back, trades jokes with Congressman Mike Capuano, and dances a quick jig with Deb Goldberg, who’s running for state treasurer. He shakes the hand of Robert Travaglini, the former Senate president, and throws an arm around Suzanne Bump, the state auditor. He poses for pictures with anyone who will have him. He warbles along when the band plays “The Irish Rover.” The evening’s host, state Sen. Sal DiDomenico, congratulates Baker, the lone Republican in the room, for braving a crowd of 400 Democrats. Baker then takes the microphone and, in true Boston St. Patrick’s Day fashion, delivers a series of groan-inducing jokes. He pushes back when the crowd fails to respond to one about Whitey Bulger, exclaiming, “I thought that was pretty good!”
The Charlie Baker whooping it up at the Charlestown Knights of Columbus isn’t the Charlie Baker most voters remember. The old Charlie Baker, the one who lost his bid for the governor’s office four years ago, often came off as bitter, angry, and thoroughly unlikeable. Baker has jettisoned that other guy. Now he’s comfortable in his own skin. He’s spending a Friday evening working over 400 Democratic voters, and he’s actually enjoying himself. Which is good, because if Baker triumphs in his political turnaround efforts and captures the corner office in November, he won’t have many Republicans around to keep him company.
The Massachusetts Republican Party has long been a small bunch, depending on star power to combat the organizational and numerical brawn that the party’s Democratic rivals boast. But in the two decades that have passed since Baker first became a star inside Gov. Bill Weld’s administration, an already uneven playing field has tilted sharply against Massachusetts Republicans.
Massachusetts Republicans’ numbers are dwindling, both in the state’s power structure, and in the rank-and-file party enrollment rosters. And lately, as the national Republican Party has tacked to the right, local Democrats have been making hay by ignoring whichever candidate the Massachusetts GOP throws against, them, and simply dialing up generic attacks on the Republican brand.
Baker and his 2010 running mate, Richard Tisei, are the state GOP’s two brightest lights. The biggest electoral hurdle that each candidate faces is his Republican affiliation. But as Baker ramps up his second bid for the governor’s office, and Tisei lines up a second run at Congress, they’re taking markedly different approaches to winning in heavily Democratic Massachusetts. Baker is running a campaign that’s heavy on crossover issues that don’t have a Republican or Democratic solution. He’s trying to win independents and Democrats to his cause by floating above his party. Tisei knows there is no avoiding the partisan divide in Congress. So he’s decided to embrace the Republican label—but not the hard-right agenda that has increasingly come with it. An openly gay, pro-choice Republican, he’s pitching himself as the ultimate force for reforming his party from within. For each candidate it seems like a solid game plan, and probably the only one that gives them a fighting chance.
FLEETING GLORY
The Faneuil Hall crowd greeted Charlie Baker like a rock star, and Baker repaid them in kind: He extended his left arm, windmilled his right, and thrashed away at an air guitar. The moment became the defining image from Baker’s 2010 gubernatorial kickoff rally. The candidate and the crowd both overflowed with energy, and optimism. Everything else that followed was a letdown.
Baker’s 2010 kickoff rally at Faneuil Hall was a high water mark. Weeks earlier, many in the Faneuil Hall crowd had helped topple an entrenched Democratic political machine, and elevated an obscure state senator named Scott Brown to the US Senate. Now they looked poised to do the same for Baker.
The moment didn’t last. Brown’s 2010 Senate victory, and the surge of enthusiasm for Baker that followed, looked at the time to be sea change moments in Massachusetts politics. The speed and forcefulness with which they were reversed only underscores just how bad things have gotten for the Massachusetts GOP.
The Massachusetts Republican Party has been losing strength for 60 years. Party enrollment in the modern era peaked in 1954, at 29.5 percent, and it’s been ebbing ever since. (Data on party enrollment are only available going back to 1948.) Republicans now count slightly more than 11 percent of Massachusetts voters as members of their party. Democratic enrollment is also sliding downhill. But the state Democrats, unlike their Republican counterparts, still have the numbers to maintain a critical mass in state politics. Among major parties in the US, only Rhode Island’s Republicans command a smaller share of their state electorate. The Massachusetts Republicans are closer in size to some third parties, like Virginia’s Libertarians, than they are to other heavily outgunned major parties, like Utah’s Democrats.
Republicans held the governor’s office for 16 straight years, from 1991 to 2006, but haven’t been very competitive otherwise. Since 1970, only one Republican politician, former state treasurer Joe Malone, has held a statewide office other than governor or lieutenant governor. Malone, of course, has been out of politics for 16 years. Republican hopefuls for attorney general haven’t cracked the 40 percent mark on Election Day since 1986.
Meanwhile, Republican strength within the state Legislature has eroded greatly since 1990. Republicans hold far fewer House and Senate seats than they once did. They’re running fewer competitive legislative races, and losing more of the races they do manage to make competitive. The Massachusetts Legislature is now one of the least competitive legislative branches in the country.
And while the GOP once claimed at least a slice of the state’s congressional delegation, the party hasn’t been able to win a US House race since 1994. The contests since that date haven’t even been close: Since 1994, just three Republican congressional hopefuls have finished within five points of their Democratic opponents.
“Anytime you’re a Republican in Massachusetts, it’s almost as if you’re involved in a David and Goliath fight,” says Richard Tisei, the longtime state legislator who was Baker’s running mate in 2010, and who is now making his second bid at unseating Congressman John Tierney. “You really have to thread the needle perfectly in order to win.”
The erosion of the Republican base has made it more difficult for Republicans to thread that needle. The long Republican fade has coincided with an era of sharpened local partisanship in Massachusetts (see “The Blue-Red Color Divide in Massachusetts,” Winter 2014). The state now has far fewer towns that swing between the Democratic and Republican columns than it had a generation ago, and Democratic candidates have largely been the beneficiaries of this new partisanship.
Nor has the state Republican Party been able to match the organizational strength and discipline that Gov. Deval Patrick and the former Democratic Party boss, John Walsh, have instilled in their party. Patrick and Walsh have reoriented Massachusetts politics around grassroots organizing, and when the machine gets cranking, Republicans in Massachusetts don’t have the bodies to match the Democrats’ canvassing and turnout efforts.
The exception in this landscape was Scott Brown. The former state senator from Wrentham tapped a deep vein of populist discontent when he stormed past Attorney General Martha Coakley, and into the US Senate, in 2010. But the indefatigable sense of optimism Brown’s victory unleashed evaporated as Baker, the long-awaited Republican golden boy, became just one in a long line of failed Republican candidates—a losing politician who ran an uninspiring race.
When Tisei stood alongside Baker at Faneuil Hall, he’d never lost a race. He followed the 2010 letdown by coming up short two years ago in a closely fought congressional race on the North Shore. Tisei’s congressional defeat came alongside Brown’s drubbing at the hands of Elizabeth Warren. The loss swept Brown out of office—and eventually across the border to New Hampshire. He left Baker and Tisei behind, trying to regroup, trying to figure out just how a Republican politician competes in Massachusetts.
GOOD TIME CHARLIE
A round of beers hits the table at Charlestown’s Warren Tavern as Charlie Baker is winding into his pitch on education policy. He takes a sip of Harpoon IPA, and notes that because even poorly performing school districts have high-performing schools, it shouldn’t be asking a lot for struggling schools to lean on successful ones. He has big plans for extending the school day in the state’s worst-performing schools, but insists that Lawrence’s state-run school receivership shows that extended days shouldn’t cost much. He leads with arguments about school culture and leadership, and tries to bridge over the established fault lines of district schools versus charters, and teachers unions versus the world. He has another sip.
This is the new Charlie Baker. He’s relaxed, he’s likeable, he’s fun to drink beer with.
This is the new Charlie Baker. He’s a policy wonk, but it’s awfully difficult to find sharp edges on the guy.
Political operatives on both sides of Baker’s 2010 campaign panned it as gimmicky and ineffectual. He and his advisers misread Scott Brown’s Senate victory as a sign that Massachusetts was full of disaffected voters driving pickup trucks. They tailored their campaign (tagline: “Had Enough?”) around stoking outrage in this demographic. They were rewarded with 42 percent of the vote on Election Day. Afterwards, the people who know him best said they didn’t recognize the guy they saw campaigning. Baker relayed this last point while standing on the front lawn of his Swampscott home last fall, flanked by his wife and his dog, announcing his gubernatorial candidacy, as a campaign staffer passed out cookies to reporters.
Since his announcement last fall, Baker has gone shoe shopping with a Globe reporter in Framingham. He had a pint of Guinness with a writer for the alternative newsweekly DigBoston in Allston, where they laughed over the reporter’s unexpected enjoyment of a recent Baker campaign appearance (“So everyone thought,” Baker ventured, “‘Oh my God, he’s not an asshole!’”). He told a dirty limerick at South Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day roast. He’s doing his best to show that he’s not really the outraged robot who, in a notorious scene from a Boston magazine profile four years ago, froze up while attempting to kiss a baby, and instead gave the infant a respectful pat on the shoulder. When he stands up from his Harpoon and his education pitch, Baker meets a pair of voters, one of whom had seen him four years ago, at Red’s Sandwich Shop in Salem. Baker practically slugs the woman in the shoulder as he shouts about his love for Red’s: “That is a great, great place!”
“Running for office is hard,” says Tisei. “It takes a while to feel comfortable. I think Charlie’s there now. Last time, there were times when he wasn’t himself. This time, he has the right attitude.”
People close to Baker say his demeanor and comfort with retail politics aren’t the only improvements from four years ago. His political instincts are sharper now, they say. He’s running a more disciplined, more focused campaign than he did against Patrick. He’s shrinking the field of play, taking divisive issues from gay rights and abortion to guns and the environment off the table. He plans to take the fight to his opponents on a few issues: education, the economy, and leadership.
The Baker campaign’s narrow focus hews closely to the candidate’s resume. He rose to prominence as Bill Weld’s health and human services secretary, and as the budget chief for Weld and Gov. Paul Cellucci. He made his private sector bones as CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, and spent the years between gubernatorial runs at the Cambridge venture capital firm General Catalyst Partners. He serves on the board of the Phoenix Charter Academy Network, a charter school operator that works with at-risk youth in Chelsea, Lawrence, and Springfield. Baker’s at ease campaigning now because he’s not running on tabloid outrage; he’s running on policy he’s spent his life developing.
It also happens that, since it’s a rare candidate who builds a gubernatorial platform around mediocre schools, reduced economic opportunity, and broken budgets, Baker’s Democratic rivals are also full of talk about better schools, more jobs and healthy cities and towns. Baker is setting up a fall election that’s less about broad vision—since everyone’s vision involves literate kids and good paychecks for an honest day’s work—than it is about who can deliver on that vision.
Republicans win in Massachusetts, Baker says, by “making the case on things that people care about: jobs, the economy, schools, the achievement gap. Those aren’t Democratic or Republican issues. They’re a platform on which to build a great state, and a great life.”
When pressed on what makes him different from the Democratic field, Baker quickly hits familiar Massachusetts Republican talking points. He worries about the cost of running a business. He talks about taxes and the need to balance out the Democratic-dominated Legislature. He talks about putting checks on the size and scope of state government. But these points aren’t anywhere near the top of his stump speech. They take work to elicit. Baker isn’t campaigning as a generic Republican guy for governor. He’s campaigning, first and foremost, as Charlie Baker.
“When I’m out campaigning, it’s not as a Republican,” he says. “It’s as me. The overarching message for us, jobs, schools, communities, it’s all related. If you like what we have to say, it’s a question of, do you think I can do what I’m talking about? I can work with anybody. I can get stuff done. I hope that cuts across party lines.”
PARTY DIVIDE
Richard Tisei celebrated his wedding reception at a Boston steakhouse this past February. A week after the party, Republican activists passed a party platform that sounded a dog whistle at the slice of the electorate that would revoke Tisei’s marriage to his longtime partner.
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| Richard Tisei pitches himself as a counterweight to tea party elements in the House. |
Tisei is an openly gay, pro-choice, anti-tax pledge Republican, and his rematch against US Rep. John Tierney is the state GOP’s best shot of ending the party’s two-decade-long House shutout. Baker is a pro-gay, pro-choice Republican who speaks often of his gay, married brother. These two politicians are the state Republican Party’s brightest lights, and neither one wants anything to do with conservative social causes. But a full decade after the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, activists who control the state Republican Party apparatus are still clinging to social issues like same-sex marriage and abortion—issues that are politically toxic to most of the state’s electorate, and to the politicians who will carry the Republican flag in November.
Baker and Tisei’s party isn’t just small and shrinking. It’s also at war with itself over what it stands for, and that war threatens to undermine the party’s chances in November.
Democrats and Republicans in Massachusetts both engage in fights over policy and political philosophy. They both field candidates who disagree with planks in their party platforms. But the Massachusetts GOP stands apart for the recklessly self-destructive way its core activists have treated their party identity lately.
The new state Republican platform, overwhelmingly approved in February by the 80-member Republican State Committee, lauds “the institution of traditional marriage,” and contains tough language on abortion. The platform passed over the objections of state Republican chairwoman Kirsten Hughes, who saw its treatment of social issues as unnecessarily divisive. “I didn’t want it in there, to make [the party] less welcoming to anyone,” Hughes says. The platform’s plank on social issues, she adds, is “not representative of the opinion of our candidates, and it’s not the opinion I have.”
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| State Republican Party chairman Kirsten Hughes opposed a new party platform that dives into social issues like same-sex marriage and abortion. |
It is, however, the opinion of a group of conservative activists entrenched in the state GOP infrastructure. And as the party has shrunk, the activists who’ve been left behind have carried more weight, and have worked furiously to swing the party to the right. The crowd making noise over same-sex marriage and abortion is the same crowd that met Brown and Tisei’s 2012 losses with complaints that their candidates were insufficiently conservative. They wanted Tisei, who lost to Tierney by one point, to act more like Bill Hudak, the Boxford activist who finished 14 points behind Tierney in 2010. They’ve pressed the offensive, even though the shrinking of the formal Republican Party has made it increasingly reliant on independent voters. The latest salvo, the new state platform, is already rich source material for Democratic attacks on Baker and Tisei—even though Baker and Tisei have disavowed the platform.
“The purpose of politics is to win elections and shape government through policy,” says Dan Winslow, a longtime Massachusetts Republican operative, and former state judge and state representative. Conservative activists, he says, “can take principled stands, but if the majority disagrees, we end up with one-party domination. If we hang our hat on issues, not principles, that’s not a strategy for long-term survival.”
Gabriel Gomez, the former Navy pilot who lost a race for US Senate to Ed Markey last year, spent his campaign trying to push back against the perception that Massachusetts Republicans are dinosaurs regurgitating unpopular national Republican stances. That job becomes far more difficult, he argues, when episodes like the platform fight invite days of brutal press coverage. A platform that’s famous for trading in social issues, Gomez argues, “Distracts from things we are aligned with the people of Massachusetts on. There’s a fringe group of Republicans in Massachusetts who are out of tune. They’re insignificant, except for the fact that they’re extremely loud. They make the most noise, so they’re the ones people think of when they think of Republicans in Massachusetts.”
“Most people around here are fiscally conservative, but they don’t like the social issues, the way the Republican Party has branded itself nationally,” Tisei says. “A lot of people look to the national party and are just offended that there’s a party that wants to exert federal power over women’s health care decisions. Young people see a party that thinks it’s OK to discriminate against a group of Americans, and are turned off by it. That’s what’s hurt us around here.”
Tisei, who was first elected to the State House in 1984, argues that Bill Weld’s social liberalism insulated a generation of Massachusetts Republican politicians from the national GOP’s rightward drift. Republicans were able to run competitive races in the state, he believes, because there was a clear line between what the state party stood for and the policies national Republicans pushed. “People would give Republicans the benefit of doubt when we’d say, ‘We’re different,’” he says. “As [Gov. Mitt] Romney became more socially conservative, for whatever reason, he blurred that line. As governor, he was leading the fight against marriage equality in Massachusetts, and all of a sudden there wasn’t the difference. We lost it.”
THE INSIDE PATH
Republican politics feel tangential to Charlie Baker’s gubernatorial effort. He’s running as Charlie Baker, an affable budget whiz who’s focusing on broad quality of life issues that don’t belong to political parties. Tisei is taking a different path. Tisei is mounting his second challenge to Tierney by confronting the state’s Republican identity crisis head-on. Tisei knows that the national Republican Party is poison to most Massachusetts voters. He’s positioning himself as a force for reforming Washington Republicans from within.
Tierney’s district stretches from Billerica to Rockport, and from Saugus to Salisbury. It’s the most conservative district in Massachusetts. Barack Obama’s worst Massachusetts district in 2012 wasn’t the Republican-friendly 9th Congressional District, which spans Cape Cod and Plymouth County, but the 6th Congressional District Tierney represents. The district gave Scott Brown a 7-point margin over Elizabeth Warren, and Gabriel Gomez carried it over Ed Markey by 1.5 points. The Baker-Tisei ticket ran 8 points ahead of Deval Patrick in the 6th in 2010. But a bitterly fought race left Tisei one point shy of Tierney two years ago.
Questions about the international gambling ring Tierney’s in-laws ran, and the month-long federal prison stint his wife served, dominated the 2012 race. This time around, Tisei isn’t leading with gambling attacks. He’s offering up a sharp critique of the Affordable Care Act, claiming it has undermined Massachusetts’s own universal health care effort. He’s also contrasting his own years on Beacon Hill with Tierney’s lockstep loyalty to House Democratic leadership. “I’m going to get a lot of Republicans upset, I’m going to get a lot of Democrats upset, but I don’t care,” Tisei says. “We’ve seen it at the State House, with Democratic legislatures and Republican governors, that if you want to get something done, it’s really not hard.”
Scott Brown tried to make similar arguments about bipartisanship in his campaign against Elizabeth Warren, and now he parks his pickup truck in New Hampshire. But Tisei doesn’t look at the Brown-Warren vote tally and see a repudiation of bipartisanship; he sees Warren’s successful nationalization of their Senate contest. She turned Brown into a vessel for a host of Republican bogeymen, from climate-change denialists to anti-choice Supreme Court justices. Tierney employed the same tactic against Tisei, equating Tisei with the tea party, and then beating the tea party to a pulp.
“It was a very lazy campaign,” Tisei now says of Tierney. “It’s like they were shopping at Walmart, and said, ‘Give me the stereotypical campaign to paint the Republican as the extremist.’ The only mistake I made was thinking it’s so off the wall that nobody would fall for it. I thought it was a joke. I have to be the only gay, pro-choice, no-tax-pledge Republican being called an extremist.”
Tierney’s campaign is going back to the well. It welcomed Tisei to the race in January with a fundraising solicitation urging donors to help “keep the 6th district out of Tea Party hands.” After laughing off the attacks two years ago, Tisei has decided to turn them on his head. He, too, is nationalizing the race, and running for Congress by explicitly running against the tea party-dominated GOP. He’s decided that the key to overcoming Massachusetts voters’ qualms with Republicans isn’t to bury his party affiliation, but to run as a Republican change agent.
“I want to be a good congressman and represent the district, but I also think that within the Republican Party, I represent something different,” Tisei says. “Electing a Democrat who’s for marriage equality doesn’t really do anything,” he argues. Putting a gay Republican in the House, on the other hand, would push a conservative Republican Party in a new direction. “Republicans will be in control of the House for a while. If you don’t like the Republican brand nationally, it’s important to try to elect people who can help shape the majority”.