Q. Why is a good debate tonight important for Gabriel Gomez?
A. Because organizing for 2014 is right around the corner. If he is going to have a future in Massachusetts politics, he’ll need to consider whether to turn the organization he’s put together toward a run for a state office. A strong performance tonight can help.
The contours of this race have not shifted at all over the past few months. Indeed, faithful readers of my colleague’s posts will note that the contours of this race have been in place since well before John Kerry headed to the State Department. Professor Duquette has written rather extensively on the issue of turnout, party coalition, and issue alignments in Massachusetts.
This race always favored the Democratic nominee regardless of who the Republicans nominated.
But from the moment Gomez entered the race, the hope among many was that he was the next Scott Brown. The analogy only ever worked if one assumed that it was Brown the candidate who was solely responsible for the 2010 special election win.
In reality, Brown was an excellent candidate who was well situated to benefit from an unusual constellation of issues and national trends that have not been brought together since in Massachusetts politics. Candidates and their campaigns do matter and Brown was able to take advantage of an amenable climate in late 2009. Thus did Brown pull off a stunning victory.
Once.
When Brown reentered the political fray in the 2010 general elections, putting his personal popularity on the line, Republicans lost every statewide and congressional race.
That was just 10 months after winning the Kennedy seat. Voters still liked Scott Brown but were not listening to him. Two years after that, again while generally liking Brown, they turned him out of office.
In some ways, then, Gomez is the next Scott Brown. But then he’s also the next Charlie Baker and Bill Weld. He’s generally liked and will do well among independent voters.
But Massachusetts elections are not simply a smaller version of national elections. Holding one’s base and winning independent voters is a recipe for national success but that rule does not apply for Massachusetts Republicans. Their base is an insignificant minority of the Massachusetts electorate. Gomez can hold his base–the Boston Globe has Gomez winning 88% of registered Republicans versus only 83% of registered Democrats supporting Ed Markey—and win independent voters and still lose by double digits.
Again, the Globe has Gomez winning 51% of unenrolled voters. That’s an impressive figure for a first time candidate who has faced a barrage of negative advertising. But it isn’t nearly enough.
Scott Brown won independent voters in the 2012 race by 18 points. Not enough to stave off defeat.
Democrats in Massachusetts can lose the opposition vote and lose the independent vote and still win by double digits. This makes them (irony alert) more like George W. Bush in 2004 who defeated native son John Kerry despite losing the independent vote. Bush’s team simply found more Republicans to turn out.
Does that mean it’s a fool’s errand for national GOP figures to fund and embrace Gomez? The ever perceptive Salena Zito took the GOP to task recently for essentially ignoring Gomez.
No overtly opinionated conservative bloggers have gone on the cable news shows to push for donations and noise for Gomez. No conservative talk-show hosts have given him the royal treatment — which is interesting, because he is everything outside-the-box they claim to have been looking for, and then some.
She’s right to hit them on the nose with this. Perhaps they simply don’t want to spend money on a race a Republican cannot win. I differ with Zito on the competitiveness of this race but find her critique compelling.
Every major Republican on the Massachusetts stage over the past few decades–Weld, Cellucci, Malone, Swift, Romney, and Brown–has had political grooming in successive lower offices and/or has suffered defeat and later emerged successful.
Investing in Gomez in this cycle is not likely to have made much of a difference though it would have enabled him to push back more aggressively and perhaps tighten some of the polls. But it would have been an investment in 2014 here and a recognition that the national party is willing to open its wallet to a ethnic Republican who brings diversity to a party badly in need of it.
