Just as the candidates will tell you, there’s a clear choice to be made in this year’s gubernatorial election, but it’s not about them. Mitt Romney and the Democratic nominee will get the headlines, but they’re only surrogates for more powerful forces. Bay State voters will really have to decide between Plymouth and Concord, and the radically different direction for Massachusetts politics each town represents.
At first glance, Bay State voters have been remarkably consistent over the past 12 years. The Republican Party has won three gubernatorial races–two of them, in 1990 and 1998, by the same 3.4 percentage points–and the Democrats have won just about everything else. But on a town-by-town basis, the voting patterns in 1990 and 1998 were strikingly different. Nearly half the state, including Plymouth and the fast-growing South Shore, became more Republican during the 1990s. At the same time, a not-quite-as-large section of the state, including Concord and the older communities of Metrowest, became more Democratic. The candidate who is able to keep one trend going while holding the other at bay will be our next governor.
For a while, the map seemed to be losing importance in American politics. Newspapers stopped canvassing county chairmen to forecast elections; instead, pollsters based predictions on demographic cocktails, using “Soccer Moms,” whether in Massachusetts or Utah, as more or less the same ingredient. Election nights once unfolded like baseball games, with candidates moving in and out of the lead as each precinct reported its numbers; now, television networks usually project the winners as soon as the voting stops, not bothering to tell us who won where. Of course, some elections are so one-sided that a roll call seems pointless. Think of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan’s 49-state blowouts–or, at the state level, the gubernatorial victories by unassailable incumbents Michael Dukakis in 1986 and William Weld in 1994. Such landslides became more common across the country during the 1980s and 1990s, suggesting that if a candidate came up with the right message, he or she could win votes everywhere. The Electoral College, like ward-and-precinct maps, seemed irrelevant to an increasingly mobile society.
Then came the presidential election of 2000. For months afterward, as lawyers tried to figure out who would be the next occupant of the White House based on county-level returns and challenges, television networks displayed their infamous red-and-blue maps, showing a country divided in half. Not only was the election close, but large sections of the United States moved in opposite directions, with both Democratic regions (the Northeast, large cities) and Republican areas (the South, small towns) becoming more partisan. Suddenly, the gender gap didn’t explain everything. Once again, geography mattered.
Massachusetts was a solid blue in the 2000 presidential race, with Al Gore carrying all 14 counties. But the state did not speak with one voice in the last gubernatorial election. Paul Cellucci simply did better in more places than opponent Scott Harshbarger did. Cellucci’s message (primarily, a vow to limit taxes and spending) and his persona (a go-along-and-get-along Beacon Hill insider) resonated in much of the state, including Lowell and other cities once thought to be reliably Democratic, even as it flopped in Lincoln and other communities that had been part of the Republican Party base for more than a century. This year’s election could produce similarly mixed results. And where votes come from can influence a governor’s agenda just as much as his ideology. A Democratic governor with a geographic base in Boston and Watertown may be inclined to put more money into mass transit, while a Republican chief executive who ran strongest in Carver and Chelmsford may be more concerned with widening highways.
But stereotypes about the two major parties don’t always hold. The Democrats, supposed champions of the urban poor and working class, have made steady gains in affluent, highly educated towns that support abortion rights and liberalized drug laws. The Republicans, expanding from their base in exclusive suburbs, have the momentum in older industrial cities where voters place bets on dog races and resent the taxes they pay on cigarettes. The parties are now crossing each other’s paths so much that we could see Democrats and Republicans alike appealing to cities and towns that have been left behind by the economic boom of the 1990s. But more likely, both parties will try to capitalize on their success in high-income communities–the Democrats staking out Metrowest while the Republicans mine the South Shore.
It’s conceivable that one of this year’s candidates will transcend regional differences. Romney’s early poll numbers hinted at a win big enough to take in the suburbs in all directions from Boston, if not the city itself. But just as it’s easy to overestimate how much a governor can dictate public policy, it’s tempting to exaggerate how much a gubernatorial candidate can alter the political landscape.
CommonWealth has come up with a map that explains this geography–not to predict the winner of the upcoming gubernatorial race, but to put the search for votes in the context of trends that are bigger than any one candidate. Based on recent election results, we’ve come up with 10 regions of roughly equal voting strength that each display a distinctive political character (see “Ten States“). They don’t look much like typical political jurisdictions, like counties or congressional districts; some are made up of cities and towns scattered across the Bay State landscape. But they embody one characteristic rarely found within neatly drawn (or torturously gerrymandered) political boundaries: true commonality of interest and viewpoint, as expressed by majority preference in ballots cast since 1990.
These 10 regions represent the true geographic spectrum of Massachusetts politics. Three are strongly Democratic: “Bigger Boston,” which includes the Hub and three adjacent communities; “Mini Metropolises,” which include the Fall River-New Bedford, Springfield, and Pittsfield-North Adams areas; and “El Norte,” which includes the immigrant-rich urban areas of Essex and eastern Middlesex counties. Three others lean Republican: “Cranberry Country,” centered in Plymouth County; “Stables and Subdivisions,” which stretches from Beverly to Boxborough; and “Interchanges,” taking in communities that straddle major highway intersections, including Haverhill, Marlborough, Attleboro, and Westfield. The remaining four are swing districts: “Shopper’s World,” which takes in Middlesex County between Routes 2 and 9; “Vacationland,” which joins much of western Massachusetts with the outer reaches of Cape Ann and Cape Cod; “Up and Out,” which includes most of Norfolk County and a pair of peninsular communities north of Boston; and “Movers and Makers,” which includes most of Worcester County.
In the tight 1998 gubernatorial election, each of our regions cast between 175,000 and 200,000 votes, and Paul Cellucci and Scott Harshbarger each carried five of them: Cranberry Country, Stables and Subdivisions, Interchanges, Up and Out, and Movers and Makers went with Cellucci; Bigger Boston, Mini-Metros, Shopper’s World, Vacationland, and El Norte (by less than one percentage point) with Harshbarger. In fact, there has not been a statewide contest in the past 10 years–including primaries and referenda–in which the winning side carried fewer than five of these districts. It might be possible for a candidate to win by running up huge victory margins in just three or four of these regions, but it would be a high-risk strategy.
In defining our 10 regions, we’ve tried to group together communities that, despite some political variance, seem to be headed in the same direction. For example, Democratic gubernatorial candidates carried the city of Worcester in all of the past three competitive elections (1978, 1990, 1998), but the party’s normal 3-2 margin in Wormtown became an alarmingly thin victory for Harshbarger. And so we did not include Worcester in a region of mid-sized cities (Mini Metropolises) that are more strongly Democratic, instead keeping it in the surrounding swing area (Movers and Makers), which is leaning increasingly toward the Republicans.
Worcester’s wobbly partisanship underscores the point that both parties have fragile bases in Massachusetts, at least at the gubernatorial level. And yet our analysis of voting patterns indicates that there’s not much of a middle ground in Massachusetts. One political cliché holds that the governor’s race will be decided in the suburbs, but that raises the question, “Which suburbs?” Some are trending Democratic, an equal number are trending Republican, and a few of them can be called bellwethers, siding with the winner, no matter the party (see “Ringing the bellwethers,” below). But there is no bellwether region. No matter how we carved up the map, we couldn’t come up with a coherent region that matched the preferences of the state as a whole–i.e., narrow Republican victories in both 1990 and 1998.
The complexity of the Bay State’s political terrain could lead to another exciting election night, but it may also make it difficult for the winner to claim a mandate. If one part of the state continues to head left and another part continues to trend right, a new governor from either party can expect resistance to any major policy changes. That might lead to a productive era of alliance-building and compromise on Beacon Hill. In the worst-case scenario, however, both sides would immediately look toward the 2006 gubernatorial race, hoping to steer the entire electorate decisively in one direction. Recent elections–not just since 1990, but over the past 25 years–suggest this would not be an easy task.
Redrawing the political map
The results from two gubernatorial elections show just how much the landscape has changed in Massachusetts. Almost half the state’s cities and towns, or 165 out of 351 communities, voted for one party in the 1978 election and then voted for the other party in the 1998 election. Republicans came out ahead on the deal: 107 municipalities switched from the Democrats to the GOP, while only 58 cities and towns moved in the opposite direction. As a result, Democrat Ed King’s five-point victory in 1978 morphed into a four-point victory for Republican Paul Cellucci two decades later.
In part, this shift in political base (actually, two opposing shifts) is the result of the major parties in Massachusetts slowly becoming more like their national counterparts–both ideologically and in terms of geographic strength. Over the last quarter century, the Democrats have contended with competing liberal and conservative streaks and urban-suburban tensions, ultimately becoming a party of moderate liberalism on both economic and social issues with its strongest base in cities (Bigger Boston, Mini Metropolises) and centers of immigration (El Norte). But to win elections, the Democrats need to score big in liberal-leaning swing districts (Shopper’s World, Vacationland) in the suburbs and hinterlands. The Republicans have gone through even more of an identity crisis, slowly giving up their patrician liberalism in favor of a more consistently conservative fiscal outlook and a social-issue stance that, while liberal compared to the national GOP, stays just to the right of Bay State Democrats. As it has done so, the Republican Party’s votes have increasingly come from Cranberry Country, the horse-and-bedroom communities of Stables and Subdivisions, and the conservative enclaves that have grown up at the intersections of major highways (Interchanges).
None of this sorting out, politically and geographically, happened overnight. For most of the 20th century, the Democratic Party in Massachusetts was identified as the working-class Catholic party, and not necessarily as the liberal party. Certainly, it was not considered uniformly liberal on civil rights–not when it included almost all the leaders of the resistance to school busing in Boston. The enduring allegiance to the party of Al Smith and John F. Kennedy among voters in smaller industrial cities was the chief reason that Massachusetts became the only state to vote for George McGovern in 1972, not allegiance to his liberal politics. McGovern easily carried the conservative-leaning Movers and Makers region even as his image as a left-winger doomed him in demographically similar areas such as Flint, Mich., and Allentown, Pa.
The Republican Party in Massachusetts spent most of the 20th century as the rural Yankee party, with more progressive stands on civil rights and a reformist bent (one that often took the form of curbing the powers of urban–i.e., Catholic–politicians). Thanks to such liberal candidates as Edward Brooke and Frank Sargent, the Bay State GOP remained strong throughout the 1970s in the affluent, highly educated towns of Shopper’s World, even as similar areas in other states–such as Marin County, Calif.–abandoned their local GOP over its increasingly right-wing candidates. As late as 1994, William Weld held onto this traditional Republican base in Massachusetts; four years later, it began crumbling beneath Paul Cellucci’s feet. For example, in Newton, which had continued to support Republicans in state races even as it voted Democratic in presidential elections, Weld’s 5,660-vote surplus turned into a 7,465-vote deficit for Cellucci.
The 1978 gubernatorial election was the last one to break along the old political (and geographic) lines. That year, incumbent Michael Dukakis lost the Democratic primary to Ed King, who favored the death penalty, opposed abortion, and promised to cut government spending and tax rates. His brand of conservatism proved to be surprisingly popular with Democratic primary voters in some of the state’s poorest communities. In Massachusetts, Reagan Democrats had a Democrat to vote for.
After winning the primary, King faced Republican liberal Francis Hatch. Hatch held onto the most reliably Republican parts of the state (including Shopper’s World and Vacationland, at that time), and he carried a few cities where McGovern had run strongly, such as Cambridge and Northampton. But otherwise, King pretty much kept the Democrats’ “McGovern coalition” intact. King combined the most Democratic regions in the state (Bigger Boston, Mini Metropolises, and El Norte) and the most culturally conservative regions (Movers and Makers, Up and Out, and Cranberry Country).
In 1982, Dukakis wrested the Democratic nomination for governor back from King, winning 54 percent of the primary vote. But King held onto many of the places where voter turnout jumped the highest, including a large section of fast-growing Cranberry Country. In the general election, Dukakis trounced the hapless Republican nominee, Boston Yankee John Sears. But there is one advantage to being on the losing end of a terrible defeat: You find out exactly where your strengths lie. Sears won only 10 towns that had gone for Ed King, and except for Westford, all were southern suburbs in Cranberry Country or Interchanges: East Bridgewater, Easton, Halifax, Lakeville, Norton, Raynham, West Bridgewater, Westwood, and Wrentham. All 10 stayed Republican throughout the 1990s.
Consolidating party bases
After an easy win for Dukakis in 1986, Massachusetts turned against the Democrats in 1990. That year the Republicans nominated Bill Weld, who broke with past GOP standard-bearers by adopting a solidly conservative platform on crime (promising to make prisoners “bust rocks” ), welfare, and taxes (backing a referendum to roll back the state’s income tax). Yet Weld went only halfway toward bringing the state party in line with the national platform personified by Ronald Reagan. He touted liberal positions on abortion and gay rights, and took a generally progressive line on the environment.
Still, this 90-degree rotation from Hatch’s platform might not have worked had Weld not been blessed with John Silber as his opponent in the general election. Silber largely reassembled the King coalition to win the Democratic primary, sweeping the South Shore and carrying such cities as Brockton and Worcester. By just about any standard, Silber was significantly to the left of King, campaigning strongly against the tax-cut referendum and promising to increase education spending. But his authoritarian personality grated against liberal voters, allowing Weld to retain almost all of the affluent, culturally liberal strongholds that had supported Hatch in 1978. Weld also held onto the 10 towns that had defected to Sears four years earlier, and he pulled away 57 more cities and towns that had gone for King.
Weld’s victory had the effect of cementing what have become the three most Republican regions in the state. King had carried 14 of the 38 communities in Stables and Subdivisions, doing especially well in the Merrimack Valley, but Silber couldn’t win a single town in the region. Of the 34 cities and towns in our Interchanges region, King had carried 10, but Silber came up empty-handed. The transformation of Cranberry Country was especially striking. King had carried 19 of its 33 towns against Frank Hatch, and Silber took all 33 against Frank Bellotti in the Democratic primary. But in November, Silber failed to carry any of them. Thus Silber took advantage of the fast-growing and increasingly conservative South Shore to wrest power from the Dukakis wing of the Democratic Party, only to have the same communities turn on him in the general election. (Silber argued that he would be more electable than a typical liberal Democrat, but he actually did worse than George McGovern in Norfolk, Plymouth, and Worcester counties.)
Weld’s re-election in 1994 was of minimal interest to political cartographers (he won all but four communities against Democrat Mark Roosevelt), but his departure from Beacon Hill set the stage for a closely fought election in 1998 that rearranged the political map still further. The Republican nominee, acting Gov. Paul Cellucci, wasn’t much different from Weld philosophically, combining tough talk on crime and taxes with progressive views on social issues. But the Hudson native was more in tune with the suburbs in our Interchanges region than Cambridge resident Weld had been. And he was blessed with another helpful Democratic opponent. Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, who projected a suburban-reformer profile, grabbed the Democratic nomination with little resistance from the King-Silber wing of the party, which seemed to have vanished from the earth. (Harshbarger carried all 14 counties in the primary, but he ran weakest in Plymouth County.) Harshbarger was clearly to the left of Cellucci on economic issues and, in contrast to Silber, his enthusiasm for taking the liberal side on social issues seemed genuine. Standing perfectly still, Harshbarger helped the state GOP complete the second half of its 180-shift to bring itself into alignment with the national party. Eighteen years after the ascent of Ronald Reagan, the Massachusetts Republican Party finally had a gubernatorial candidate who, while no right-winger, was more conservative than his Democratic opponent on both economic and social issues.
Cellucci lost four Shopper’s World communities that had flipped from King to Weld (Arlington, Randolph, Waltham, and Watertown) but he picked up 44 more King communities, including the cities of Brockton, Fitchburg, Lowell, and Quincy. And just as Weld had done with three other regions, Cellucci filled in gaps to create solid bands of red on our political atlas. In 1978, Hatch carried only 28 of the 56 communities in the Movers and Makers region. Weld brought the number up to 37, and Cellucci made it 55, losing only Worcester by a narrow margin. In the Up and Out region, Hatch carried only four of the 20 cities and towns, but Weld added nine more to the Republican column, and Cellucci made it a clean sweep. In Mini Metropolises, the state’s second most Democratic region in terms of party registration, Hatch got only 42 percent and Weld dipped to 40 percent, but Cellucci won 47 percent of the vote.
Overall, the geography of the 1998 election suggests that Cellucci was the political heir not so much to Weld as to King. One could say that Cellucci persuaded conservative Democrats to desert their party–except the evidence suggests they were heading in that direction anyway.
What kept Cellucci from achieving a more resounding victory was a shift toward the Democrats in some other parts of the state. Harshbarger carried nine of 13 communities that had flipped from Hatch to Silber (including Pittsfield, Springfield, and much of Martha’s Vineyard), and he took 49 more cities and towns that had been in Hatch’s corner. Outside of Swampscott, all of those pick-ups were in the three regions that have been trending Democratic. In Vacationland, only seven out of 109 cities and towns went for King in 1978, and 15 went for Silber in 1990. But Harshbarger won 48 of them, carrying the region overall thanks to wide margins in Amherst and Northampton. More important, in terms of adding to his statewide vote total, were his gains in Shopper’s World. King had carried four of the 18 communities there, and Silber was shut out completely, but Harshbarger won 11 of them, including vote-rich Framingham, Newton, and Waltham. Finally, Harshbarger pulled Brookline and Cambridge into his column, while increasing his party’s margins in Boston and Somerville (thus winning all four communities in Bigger Boston). All of these high-profile gains for the Democrats suggested that the party was solidifying its moderate-to-liberal base. Still, thanks to the long-term Republican gains elsewhere in the state, Cellucci could kiss off the college towns and streetcar suburbs and still come out on top.
Indisputably, the geographic strengths of each party have changed substantially since 1978. What’s not clear is whether the transformation is complete. The Democrats are stronger than ever in Bigger Boston, and the Shopper’s World and Vacationland regions seem to be heading their way, but the party’s hold on El Norte is shaky, and its margins in the Mini Metropolises seem to be shrinking (even as population losses make them less important anyway). The Republicans dominate Cranberry Country and Interchanges, and they have the momentum in Up and Out and in Movers and Makers, but they may have hit a ceiling in Stables and Subdivisions, and the GOP still loses every region to the Democrats in terms of party registration and votes for president. This year’s gubernatorial candidates are about to find out whether they have any power to buck these trends.
Following the fleet
Moving the electorate is often compared to steering an ocean liner. Changing course always takes longer than politicians think it will. After defeat, candidates often kid themselves into thinking they could have “turned things around” with another week or two of campaigning. Another decade or two is more like it.
It may be possible to steer the Massachusetts electorate using the right issues. The state’s high cost of living–particularly in housing and health care–affects voters in every region to some degree. A candidate with a sure-fire solution for either of them could push for a real majority across the state. Education reform, efficiency in government, and suburban sprawl are other issues that capture the attention of voters in all 10 of our political regions. But as our study of voting patterns makes clear, Massachusetts is also a diverse state, with different problems and concerns in each region. It’s really a fleet of vessels the candidate is trying to steer, and rarely are they pointing in the same direction.
We’ve already noted how the 10 regions break down in terms of partisan preference, but they also differ in other ways. Take population growth. The state’s slight gain in the 2000 census masks the fact that some towns experienced the kind of explosive growth associated with Sun Belt states, while other communities lost residents for the third or fourth decade in a row. Surprisingly, voters in both high-growth areas (Cranberry Country, the Interchanges) and zero-population regions (Mini Metropolises, El Norte) seem to be getting more conservative. Though they start out at different points on the political spectrum, they’ve all become increasingly Republican in gubernatorial votes, and they’ve shown increasing skepticism toward government when voting on referenda. It may not have been surprising that high-growth suburban areas voted for an income tax cut in 2000 and the abolition of rent control in 1994, but it’s significant that the state’s more depressed urban areas did the same. It’s as if all of these regions are united in a kind of “anxiety coalition”; they know they’ve got problems but they’re not sure state government’s the answer to solve their problems–whether it’s sprawl in Cranberry Country or the lack of high-paying jobs in the Mini Metropolises.
Meanwhile, liberalism seems to be on the rise in Bigger Boston, Shopper’s World, and Vacationland. Except for the beach communities of Vacationland, these are areas with modest population growth. These regions also have fewer school-age children than do other parts of the state, making for less pressure on schools, and their residents generally have shorter commuting times than do workers in Cranberry Country and other areas to the south of Boston. Though faced with fewer pressing problems, they nevertheless look more favorably upon government. These were the strongest three regions for an increase in the cigarette tax in 1992, the seat-belt law in 1994, and a 2000 proposal to redirect drug laws toward treatment rather than prison time. Could they be part of a “nanny coalition” in favor of activist government?
Party loyalties, ideology, and demographic factors all suggest different ways that the 10 regions could be divided this fall. Another possibility is that the regions dominated by the Boston media could go in a different direction than the rest of the state (i.e., Mini Metropolises, Vacationland, and Movers and Makers). This has happened in a couple of recent statewide primaries–such as the 1998 Republican race for lieutenant governor, in which former Boston radio personality Janet Jeghelian was competitive with Jane Swift only where the WRKO signal was strong. A similar result might occur in a gubernatorial campaign in which one or more candidates spend heavily on Boston television and radio. Then, too, a candidate who lavishes too much attention on our biggest city may alienate voters in other regions who are already sick of hearing about–let alone paying for–the Big Dig.
There are other wild cards. A candidate who favors casino gambling may play better in the Mini Metropolises, which need the jobs, than in Bigger Boston, which already cashes in on tourism. New highway tolls aren’t likely to be popular in the Interchanges region, but anything that will finance road improvements may be welcome in congested Cranberry Country. With the right set of issues, a candidate may be able to do surprisingly well in regions that seem to be moving away from his or her party.
The likelier scenario is that each major candidate in this year’s election will take the path of least resistance, trying to take advantage of existing regional trends. The Democrat may head west, focusing on towns that went heavily for Hatch but only narrowly for Cellucci (Lenox and West Stockbridge, Natick and Wayland), while Mitt Romney’s task is keep the GOP momentum going in places to that went heavily for King but swung against Harshbarger (Brockton, Quincy, Worcester). Both candidates will undoubtedly promise a fresh new start in state government, and each will have a natural backdrop for campaign commercials: Concord Green for the Democrats and Plymouth Rock for the GOP. You can watch all the debates and read all the position papers, but if you want to know the real priorities of each candidate, just look at their travel itineraries.