After the Senate voted Wednesday to keep the state’s cap on charter schools in place, the head of one of the state’s teachers unions told the State House News Service, “I’m doing super-well right now.” But the unions aren’t the only ones feeling super good after Wednesday’s charter vote. Charlie Baker, the Republican candidate for […]
Gubernatorial politics
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State GOP puts its money where its mouth is
The Massachusetts Republican Party is on the verge of throwing its financial weight behind Charlie Baker‘s gubernatorial effort, even as Baker fends off a primary challenge from Mark Fisher. The move is the latest in a line of slaps and slights directed at Fisher, a tea party longshot who has been embroiled in a legal […]
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Casino repeal could become the issue of the 2014 election
The race for governor is still young, but so far, it’s a contest that’s lacked both star power and sizzle. Early polling shows that the race hasn’t registered with voters. It’s possible that the hottest point of contention in November won’t come from the gubernatorial candidates themselves. Instead, the real heat in November will surround […]
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The declaration of independents
Massachusetts has a large, and growing, block of independent voters. They call out like a siren to ambitious outsider politicians, ambitious individuals who set out to vanquish partisan politics. These efforts have always ended with the outsider feeling lighter in the pockets, and the state’s two-party system still fully in place. Jeff McCormick, a Boston […]
Posted inPolitics, State House News Service, The Download
Baker 2.0 taps Polito
Charlie Baker 2.0 has learned two important lessons from Charlie Baker 1.0. First, he had to lighten up. Second, he needed to appeal to women voters who were turned off by his angry persona. The Republican gubernatorial candidate has worked to fix the first issue by stressing his father-husband-Red Sox fan bona-fides and sporting broad […]
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Baker’s one-two punch
Charlie Baker took some heat from Democrats for announcing his run for governor in a video, but the strategy appears to have worked perfectly. The good-guy image Baker cultivated in the video carried over into the press event he hosted at his Swampscott home on Thursday, allowing him to get out his I’ll-be-different-in-this-election message far […]
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Gubernatorial Darwinism
There is a sort of natural selection to the shaping of a political race and Massachusetts voters are beginning to see the electoral circle of life. Within a 24-hour span, the state’s gubernatorial field gained one and lost two candidates. There’s still room for more to get in and opportunities for others to get […]
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State GOP looks to 2014
The state’s Democrats kicked off their gubernatorial hunt last week with a convention in Lowell. The Republican answer came more quietly, in the form of a meeting and conference call among Charlie Baker, Scott Brown, Bill Weld, and Ron Kaufman. The Globe’s Jim O’Sullivan reports today that top Massachusetts Republicans huddled quietly last week to […]
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Patrick draws line in the sand on local aid funds
Gov. Deval Patrick may be a lame duck, but he has plenty of political fight left in him this budget season. The annual spectacle of dysfunction over local aid funding is even more complicated this year: The governor has decided to strong arm Beacon Hill lawmakers over a long-term transportation revenue package by forcing municipal […]
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Gubernatorial free-for-all fully underway
Inertia consumes the bulk of Massachusetts’s political power structure. Democrats dominate the Legislature, which is one of the country’s least competitive. The party doesn’t have to sweat to stuff pols into virtual lifetime jobs in constitutional offices that normally open up only upon retirement, or a shot at the corner office. But for all the […]