THIS WEEK, Sen. Cory Booker held the Senate floor for a record-breaking 25 hours to protest actions taken during the first two months of the Trump administration. The New Jersey Democrat said the harm being caused demanded action that would call out the administration and show a willingness to fight back.

Polls of Democratic voters show that Booker’s resolve fits the mood of Democrats nationally, and especially here in Massachusetts, who have grown frustrated with a perceived lack of fight from their representatives in Congress.  

A new MassINC Polling Group poll of Massachusetts voters finds that 62 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents want Democrats in Washington to “mainly work to stop the Republican agenda.” Only 27 percent want Democrats to mainly work with Republicans.

The poll was carried out from March 17-20, immediately after 10 Senate Democrats, led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, joined Republicans in allowing a vote on a funding bill that avoided a government shutdown. 

The 35-point gap in favor of resistance to Republicans is much larger than when CNN asked the same question of Democrats nationally earlier in March. CNN found 57 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents favored opposition, versus 42 percent who wanted cooperation.

Even with the tighter margin, those numbers are a reversal from when CNN asked this question during the first Trump administration. In September 2017, 74 percent of Democrats wanted cooperation, and only 23 percent wanted resistance.

Democrats are clearly in a fighting mood. The same CNN poll found that only 63 percent of Democrats held a favorable view of the national party, likely driven by the feeling that not enough was being done to oppose the new administration. A separate Economist/YouGov poll from March found that 71 percent of Democratic voters felt Democrats were “not doing enough” to “resist actions by Donald Trump that they disagree with,” up from 60 percent in February. 

Given that Massachusetts is one of the deepest blue states, it makes sense that it would be firmly in the vanguard of the resistance to Trump. The challenge for the state’s all-Democratic congressional delegation is that the overall Massachusetts electorate is not exactly mounting the barricades.

Among all voters – Democrats, Republicans, and independents – 48 percent want Democrats in Congress to work with Republicans, while 40 percent want opposition. (MassINC Polling Group asked this question of all voters; CNN only asked it of Democrats, so there isn’t a national comparison here.) 

Unsurprisingly, 87 percent of Massachusetts Republicans and Republican leaners want Democrats to work with Republicans. But so do 50 percent of the remaining independents who do not lean towards either party. These independents are also less likely to follow the news closely.

While 45 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of Republicans say they are following the news about the Trump administration “very closely,” only 27 percent of independents say the same. Independents are not wholly tuned out of political news, but they are more likely to pay less attention. 

How voters feel about that news also shows a strong partisan split. The poll asked voters to pick three emotions from a list to describe their feelings about national politics right now.

The clear top three for Democrats are “angry” (52 percent), “fearful” (48 percent), and “ashamed” (47 percent), followed by “frustrated” (37 percent) and “anxious” (32 percent). 

Republicans, by contrast, are feeling “optimistic” (45 percent), “patriotic” (25 percent), and “motivated” (23 percent). Following these, there is a long tail of ambivalent and negative emotions. “Satisfied,” “inspired,” “proud,” and “satisfied” (all 19 percent) run into “conflicted,” “frustrated,” and “anxious” (16-17 percent). One in 10 Republicans report feeling overwhelmed or exhausted. Even the least popular option, “ashamed,” garners 5 percent of Republicans. This pattern suggests that Massachusetts Republicans are more divided in their opinions than are Democrats. 

Independents again split the difference. They feel more negatively than positively, as Democrats do, but express a broader range of responses, more like Republicans. In place of a clear top one to three responses, they have six to eight: “Anxious” and “ashamed” top the list with 32 percent, followed by “frustrated” (31 percent). But independents are also feeling “exhausted” (29 percent), “conflicted” (28 percent) and “overwhelmed” (21 percent) at higher rates than Democrats and Republicans.  

Feeling exhausted and overwhelmed may explain why more of these independent voters have tuned out from the news, which may weigh on how they want Democrats to react.

Overall, about half (51 percent) of Massachusetts voters who are paying “very close” attention to the Trump administration want opposition from Democrats. Among those paying less attention, 53 percent want Democrats to work with Republicans. That pattern holds even among Democrats: 76 percent of Democrats who are following the news very closely want opposition. Among Democrats paying less attention, that drops to about half.  

Democratic lawmakers are clearly hearing from their party faithful that they need to do more to resist the Trump agenda. The challenge for them will be balancing that impulse against the desire for bipartisanship from the rest of the electorate — and against the limits of their resistance as the minority party.  

John Gee is research manager and Richard Parr is senior research director at the MassINC Polling Group.

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AS MASSACHUSETTS CONTENDS with an enormous crisis of housing affordability and availability, building more homes to bring supply into alignment with demand is essential. Even when market conditions are good, this has been a challenge for the state, with housing starts lagging far behind what’s needed to support a growing population.  

But things are poised to get even more difficult. The number of housing units permitted has already fallen by nearly 30 percent over the past three years, and the housing construction pipeline could become even more constrained by Trump administration policies if tariffs on materials and reductions in the immigrant workforce drive construction costs even higher.  

Against that backdrop, it will become even more important to find ways to make more efficient use of the state’s existing housing stock. That’s where there’s a role for the Special Commission on Senior Housing, which was created by the Affordable Homes Act signed last year by Gov. Maura Healey.  

The commission held its first meeting in late March. As it works to recommend policies, programs, and investments to expand the supply of housing for seniors, devising strategies to help older adults move into smaller homes should also be high on the commission’s agenda.  

Effective downsizing strategies would give more seniors the chance to live in homes that are easier and less expensive to maintain, while freeing up larger homes for Millennials and Gen Z-ers stuck in one- and two-bedroom apartments. To be sure, not every senior will want to downsize. It is just as important therefore to put equal thought into approaches that help seniors who want to stay in larger homes plan for how to maintain them, both for their safety and well-being and so these homes can eventually be passed down to the next generation in relatively good repair. 

A comprehensive plan that gives seniors in larger homes a variety of options makes sense. But it can also be a fraught topic. Two decades ago, then-Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey drew blowback with the mere suggestion that helping “overhoused” seniors move to smaller quarters fit with Gov. Mitt Romney’s prudent approach to smart growth. 

At the time, it was dubbed “smart policy and bad politics,” but with the right approach it doesn’t have to present that challenging tradeoff.  

In hindsight, Kerry Healey was right to start this conversation more than 20 years ago. Census data reveal the extent to which this problem has magnified over the years by giving us a look at who has traditionally lived in the state’s family-sized homes across the generations.  

In 1980, only about one-third of older households (those headed by an adult who was 65 or older) occupied a home with three or more bedrooms; today, more than half of households headed by an adult age 65 or older still live in these family-sized homes.  

We might chalk this trend up to homes generally getting larger in recent decades. But the data show a striking pattern—younger households in Massachusetts are far less likely to occupy a family-sized home today than they were four decades ago.  

Over 70 percent of the 36-to-45-year-old cohort had a home with three or more bedrooms in 1980. Now the figure is down to around 60 percent for this age group. For 26-to-35-year-olds, there has been an 8 percentage point decline in family-sized home occupancy since 1980. Those in their prime childrearing age today live in three-bedroom homes at about the same rate as the 65+ cohort did four decades ago.  

To a degree, these patterns reflect recent generations delaying marriage, putting off having kids, and ultimately giving birth to fewer children. But those trends are endogenous to the housing market problem: The inability to afford housing is shaping household formation decisions and it is certainly changing the mix of family households in Massachusetts through migration.  

With school enrollments falling and workforce challenges looming, it is important to recognize that the largest share (26 percent) of family-sized homes in Massachusetts are now occupied by those in the 65 and over age bracket. If the same share of older Massachusetts residents were living in family-sized homes today as in 1980, Massachusetts would have an additional 142,000 properties with three or more bedrooms for young families to occupy on the market.  

Of course, this would mean more seniors living in existing smaller homes. But to put that number of family-sized homes in perspective, consider that the Healey administration has said 222,000 new housing units are needed over the next decade to stabilize the market and rein in costs.  

To be sure, many seniors are just fine with their larger homes, and no one should pressure these residents to make a change. But two decades after this issue was raised and briefly became the subject of public debate and scrutiny, anecdotal reports suggest many older adults want to downsize.  

The new commission can provide much needed leadership by helping us better understand the various obstacles faced by seniors who may wish to make a move. Maybe it’s moving costs, tax and estate planning concerns, or the idea of packing and setting up camp somewhere new is just too overwhelming. It could also be that they don’t want to leave friends and loved ones behind, and there is a lack of smaller housing units in their communities.  

A quick public opinion poll could give housing leaders a better handle on these issues and help guide policy recommendations. With limited resources and many challenges, data insight to make smarter decisions has become even more paramount as we work to tackle the state’s housing crisis on multiple fronts.   

Ben Forman is director and Elise Rapoza is senior research associate at the MassINC Policy Center.

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TWO THINGS CAN both be true, and that was on full display when new results were released last week from national student achievement tests. 

“Massachusetts ranks #1 in national education assessment” trumpeted the headline on the press release from Gov. Maura Healey’s office. The Boston Globe headline in its print edition told a decidedly different story: “National test shows little recovery in Mass. schools.” 

WBUR captured the mixed message in its headline, “Mass. leads in reading and math scores, but still lags pre-pandemic levels.” 

Massachusetts 4th and 8th grade students placed first in the nation in math and reading on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test given to representative samples of students across the country that allows for direct comparison of student performance in different states. The state reclaimed the top spot on all four tests for the first time since 2017. 

But it did so against a dismal backdrop of overall achievement in US schools that is woefully below where it stood before the pandemic. What’s more, Massachusetts has been on an even longer slide down, with achievement levels starting to fall well before the pandemic school disruption. 

While our relative ranking may still put us on top compared to other states, education analysts at the Urban Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit focused on upward mobility and equity, say it also can be misleading to judge states entirely by their NAEP scores because they serve such different student populations. The share of lower-income students a state has, for example, or how much of its student population is made up of Black and Hispanic students, can all affect overall state scores, since these groups historically perform worse on achievement tests.

For a decade the Urban Institute has issued a report that adjusts state scores based on their demographic make-up. In the 2024 analysis, Massachusetts falls to fifth place in 4th grade math and fourth place in 4th grade reading after the demographic adjustments. We maintain our top spot in 8th grade reading even after demographic adjustment but fall to second place in 8th grade math. 

“Massachusetts does produce good outcomes with the kids they have,” said Matt Chingos, vice president of the Work, Education, and Labor Division at the Urban Institute. But the state’s demographics also “favor” higher NAEP scores, he said. According to the Urban Institute report, 42 percent of Massachusetts students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch compared with 57 percent of students in Florida, 60 percent in California, and 75 percent in Louisiana. 

What people often want to know in comparing NAEP scores, said Chingos, is whether one state has better schools than another. The scores can’t directly answer that, he said, but the demographically adjusted scores “get you closer” to answering that than just looking at the unadjusted raw scores.

“The more you’re trying to inform judgements about what schools are contributing to student success, the more useful the demographically adjusted scores become,” said Marty West, a member of the Massachusetts state board of education who also sits on the NAEP governing board. “Just as you wouldn’t want to compare scores in Lexington and Lynn, and based solely on that data conclude Lexington schools are more effective, we shouldn’t do the same thing among states whose demographics differ dramatically.” 

That said, West emphasized that “what ultimately matters to kids is their unadjusted scores,” since those measure whether they are on track to graduate with the skills needed for college or career success. 

While Black and Hispanic students in Massachusetts score higher than their peers in most other states, there are huge racial achievement gaps among Massachusetts students. On the 4th grade math test, for example, Black and Hispanic students both score 30 points lower than white students. Hispanic 4th graders are tied with those in Connecticut for the largest gap with white students of any state.  

Education Secretary Patrick Tutwiler acknowledged those gaps at a recent press conference, where state leaders not only boasted about the state’s No. 1 ranking on NAEP scores but emphasized the ongoing learning setbacks from the pandemic. “While today’s results are not quite where we want them to be – we want to be No. 1 for all students –- there is recognition of the work to get there,” Tutwiler said, touting the administration’s focus on early literacy among other efforts. 

West pointed out that concerns about flagging student achievement Massachusetts long pre-date the pandemic. “Scores have not been moving in the right direction for more than a decade now and have fallen substantially from our prior peaks in 2011 in reading and in 2013 in math,” he said.

West said the score that gave Massachusetts the top ranking in 8th grade math on the 2024 NAEP test would have landed us in 30th place in 2013. “That’s how much scores have fallen in Massachusetts and overall,” he said.

Massachusetts has been the overall top performing state on NAEP since 2005. But math skills that include basic statistics help explain why focusing on that misses the bigger story. 

“The only reason we haven’t lost our top ranking,” said West, “is that scores have been slipping for much of that period nationwide.”

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FROM NEW YORK to Bangkok, the Associated Press frequently breaks news as its reporters throw themselves into stories.

But the story of the not-for-profit wire service’s future plans for Massachusetts State House coverage – and the question of whether they expect to fill a now-empty seat in the press gallery – is apparently still being written after the departure of a longtime AP veteran. Steve LeBlanc, who covered the political rise of governors and the nitty-gritty of state budgets totaling tens of billions of dollars, quietly took a buyout from the news agency earlier this month, one of many to do so.

The AP, which turns 179 this year, has seen its share of budget pressures, layoffs, and unrelenting change brought about by technological upheaval. The agency still has “several” journalists in Massachusetts, a spokesman said Thursday, but did not provide a specific headcount.

The AP’s own media reporter noted, when the agency announced it was looking to cut eight percent of its staff in the weeks after the November election, that AP no longer claims to be the world’s largest news gathering organization and “doesn’t reveal the size of its staff.” Months before the election, AP was rocked when two newspaper chains, which like other major news outlets were paying for the services AP provides, said they were dropping the agency.

“One of the things that was always a source of pride and a real source of power and authority was its 50-state footprint,” said Glen Johnson, a former AP State House bureau chief before leaving for the Boston Globe and then the US State Department. “A big driver of that was its presence in all 50 state houses. The reality is, though, with the contraction of revenue industry-wide, the AP, like most other news organizations, has been forced to cut back its staff and reshape its priorities. In this day and age there’s a huge emphasis on digital and video coverage, and that is now the top priority for the AP in each state.”

That’s meant a shift away from coverage of state politics over the last several years, but Patrick Maks, the AP’s spokesman, said in an email they do still have a reporter covering the Legislature on Beacon Hill. They also plan to add another reporter to their team based in Boston. He did not respond to a follow-up question about whether that meant someone would be taking over LeBlanc’s desk in the press gallery on the fourth floor.

“There’s no substitute for being physically present where news happens and in a state house, there’s few things more powerful than being able to confront a newsmaker in person and at times other than official events. That only comes from proximity to power,” said Johnson, the former AP bureau chief who tag-teamed state politics coverage with LeBlanc under the golden dome.

“Some of the biggest stories I got as a state house reporter came because I bumped into somebody unexpectedly or saw something that I otherwise wouldn’t have seen,” he added.

While empty seats are a common sight inside the press room nowadays, not all news outlets have disappeared. Reporters from the Boston Herald, the Worcester Telegram, GBH News, WWLP-TV of Western Massachusetts, Axios Boston, Politico Massachusetts, and Springfield-based MassLive all regularly take a seat. The State House News Service, an independently owned wire service that’s been around since the 1890s, has about a half dozen reporters next door, and WBUR has one. The Boston Globe has an office down the hall, located directly above the governor.

The Associated Press has had reporters on Beacon Hill for at least as long as State House News, according to State House Press Association records. “There have always been Massachusetts political leaders on the rise and the AP’s State House bureau chronicled that pretty closely,” Johnson said, listing off names like Tip O’Neill, the US House speaker who sparred with President Ronald Reagan; US Sen. John Kerry; and governors like Mike Dukakis, Mitt Romney, and Deval Patrick.

LeBlanc, Johnson’s former colleague who took the buyout, was there for the Romney and Patrick years, and the governors who followed. He declined to comment when reached via phone on Thursday. 

For people who know LeBlanc, it wasn’t surprising. He doesn’t like fanfare, preferring instead to cover the issues affecting people, as Johnson put it, from Pittsfield to Provincetown. “People in Massachusetts may not realize it, but Steve LeBlanc was a true public servant,” he said.

When the candy man meets the tax man

Gov. Maura Healey wants to salt sweets with a new tax.

The budget proposal her administration rolled out this week subjects candy to the state’s 6.25 percent sales tax, among other proposals. Just 11 states, including Massachusetts, exempt candy, according to WBZ.

Healey’s press release on the budget plan avoided mentioning the measure, as did the budget proposal’s executive summary. Governors are typically loathe to talk taxes, unless they’re talking about cuts. But tax hikes also don’t necessarily hurt reelection prospects, as Gov. Deval Patrick showed in 2010, a year after he increased the state’s sales tax to the current rate, up from 5 percent.

Healey was adamant with reporters on Wednesday that removing candy’s exemption is not a new tax. “What this is doing is simply saying when you go to the grocery store, instead of having candy treated like a purchase of bread and eggs and milk – essential groceries – that candy is now going to treated in the same way as when you go to the bakery in the back of the grocery store and pick up cupcakes for your kids,” she said.

News outlets didn’t buy it. From the Boston Globe to WBUR, the headlines noted the proposed new tax. (They also went with the larger bottom line for the budget, $62 billion, rather than the Healey administration’s preferred $59.6 billion, which does not include spending of millionaires tax revenue.)

Doug Howgate, the head of the business-backed Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation who closely analyzes budget proposals, said applying the sales tax to candy is a tax change.

Asked directly whether it’s a tax increase, Howgate’s answer was simple: If you buy candy, it is.

Whether the Legislature bites will be seen in the coming months as they put forward their own budget proposals, before hammering out a final version for Healey’s approval in the summer.

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THERE WAS TALK of no new taxes, fixing the MBTA, and cutting red tape, all while avoiding direct references to Donald Trump.

That was Charlie Baker in his 2017 State of the Commonwealth speech, delivered while the moderate Republican governor was still in his first term and casting wary glances at Washington.

That was also Maura Healey in her speech on Thursday night, as the moderate Democratic governor wades through her first term and braces for Trump’s return to the White House. “I assure you we will take every opportunity to work with the federal government in any way that benefits Massachusetts, and I also promise you we will not change who we are,” she said.

On the education front, Healey announced the formation of a council to come up with a statewide high school graduation standard, after voters last November nixed passage of the MCAS test as a graduation requirement. 

She also touched on the problems within the state’s emergency shelter system, strained by a wave of migrants on top of Massachusetts residents grappling with homelessness. Healey has pitched to the state legislators residency requirements as costs have ballooned. The federal government, she added, must pass a border security bill, which Trump had Republicans deep-six while he was campaigning for a second term.

“I want to be absolutely clear: We are dramatically reducing costs, and we have, and will, prioritize Massachusetts families. In 2025 we’ll get families out of hotels for good,” Healey said. “We’re going to keep working with the Legislature to reform this system. Massachusetts taxpayers should not, and cannot, continue to foot the cost.”

And like Baker’s move to reduce regulations and overhaul the MBTA, Healey pledged that her economic team will review all business and licensing regulations in the first three months of the year, and she touted the general manager she hired, Phil Eng, and his wipeout of the T’s slow zones.

Earlier this week, Healey announced an investment of $8 billion over 10 years into the state’s transportation infrastructure, including a significant infusion of cash for the T, coming from the existing millionaires tax approved by voters in 2022 and closing the agency’s budget gap before it would be forced to implement layoffs and service cuts.

But the T itself offered a reminder of how far it has to go before it’s a fully functioning transit system that can draw people out of their cars and into reliable trains and buses: As Healey delivered her speech inside the State House, the agency was reporting delays.

A Mass. bitcoin strategic reserve?

The debate over states jumping into cryptocurrency – digital currency widely known as bitcoin – could now be coming to Beacon Hill.

State Sen. Peter Durant, a Republican from Worcester County, has filed a bill that would set up a “bitcoin strategic reserve,” arguing bitcoin has gone mainstream. The state-level idea is under consideration in Texas and Pennsylvania. President-elect Donald Trump indicated last year he wants a national reserve, similar to the government’s oil reserves.

Durant’s bill would allow some of the Bay State’s $9 billion rainy day fund to be put into cryptocurrency, and places the state treasurer in charge of the Massachusetts reserve. The bill also institutes a 10 percent cap on how much the treasurer can invest. “It’s not like we’re saying divest everything and put it into bitcoin,” Durant said. “But we do believe it does make sense as a portion of the commonwealth’s portfolio.”

Durant called himself a fan of crypto, and when asked if he has any bitcoin, he chuckled and answered, “more than some, less than others.” Others, like legendary investor Warren Buffett, have called it “rat poison,” or like US Sen. Elizabeth Warren, they’ve called for regulations.

Durant acknowledged he hadn’t yet spoken about his proposal to Deb Goldberg, a Democrat and the state treasurer since 2015.

A Goldberg spokesperson said the treasurer has not yet taken a position on crypto. “When asked, our office will review and offer feedback on this particular bill,” a spokesman said in an email.

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THAT JOHN KEENAN isn’t anybody’s idea of a rabble-rousing bomb tosser is, in some ways, exactly the point. 

The eight-term lawmaker cuts a moderate political profile among the 35 Democrats who dominate the 40-member state Senate. When he speaks on the floor, it’s usually in the carefully modulated tones of a lawyer with decades of experience in the often plodding ways of public office, starting with a stint on the Quincy Zoning Board of Appeals while still in law school. 

Yet the 60-year-old lawmaker caused a minor stir last week when he was the only Democratic state senator who did not vote to reelect Karen Spilka as Senate president. Keenan voted “present” in the roll call to choose a leader for the new two-year session. In a statement he issued after the vote, Keenan said he held back support for Spilka “because changes are needed” in how the Senate goes about its business. 

The changes he wants would hardly seem to constitute a radical remake of a deliberative legislative body charged with carrying out the people’s business in a representative democracy. But Keenan’s views – and willingness to rock the boat to make his point – made him stand out in a Legislature that has become increasingly inclined to operate out of public view and has seemed to thumb its nose at long-standing calls for greater transparency and public accountability. 

Keenan says the failure to meet the biennial deadline for reporting out bills, waiving rules when they’re inconvenient, and the failure to pass joint rules with the House have all eroded public trust. His biggest concern, however, centers on the growing tendency to pass big pieces of legislation by unrecorded voice votes, with lawmakers often not even given enough time to read lengthy bills before they’re quickly gaveled into law. 

“If people don’t trust the way we make laws, how do they trust the laws we make?” Keenan said in an interview.

Spilka has defended her leadership in recent days by pointing to a set of big bills passed in the last session, covering everything from economic development and climate change to veterans services and free community college. “We have had a historically productive two-year legislative session,” she told reporters following her New Year’s Day election to another term as Senate president. 

Keenan doesn’t take issue with that claim. The “product was good,” he said of the legislation passed in the last session. “They were important bills and it was good they made their way to the governor’s desk,” he said. But the process, he said, is severely wanting. 

Keenan said it’s not unusual to hear from constituents with an interest in a pending bill and have to tell them it recently emerged onto the Senate floor with little advance notice and has already been passed. When they then ask how he voted, “I have to say I didn’t vote on it,” Keenan said, explaining to constituents that a bill was passed by a voice vote with no roll call taken. 

Keenan said the Senate took close to 700 roll calls during its 2015-16 session, but recorded just 252 in the session that just concluded and roughly the same number in the two-year session before it. He said the striking decrease has been the result of more bills passed by voice vote and more bundling of often unrelated issues in big omnibus bills. In either case, he said, the result is “we are less accountable to our constituents.”

The short-circuiting of process has gotten so extreme, Keenan said, said lengthy bills on health care (64 pages) and pharmaceutical coverage (46 pages) emerged from conference committees in late December and were brought to the floor for votes without even the usual presentation in a Democratic caucus where members typically get briefed on complex pieces of legislation and can ask questions about their content. 

“The more quickly we move without regard to the process, the more people we represent lose faith in the process, and not just in the individuals that represent them but in the institutions that serve the Commonwealth,” Keenan said. 

For evidence of that, Keenan said, one need look no further than the November ballot question authorizing the state auditor to audit the Legislature, which 72 percent of voters supported. “I do think that the public’s voice is being heard. I think the ballot question certainly crystallized the issue,” he said.

While Democratic leaders of the Legislature characterized the ballot question as an affront, Keenan viewed it as a helpful prod and is a rare Democratic lawmaker who says he voted for it. 

Keenan said he shares concerns that have been raised over “constitutional boundaries” – that the audit law be used to encroach on separation of powers issues. But he thinks there are areas the auditor can explore, including procurement processes and workplace harassment policies, without stepping over that line, and that the vote sends a broader message about flagging public confidence in the Legislature. 

That message seems to have been heard on Beacon Hill, where Spilka and House Speaker Ron Mariano have both, in recent days, sought to race to the head of the transparency parade the ballot question helped set in motion and declare themselves its leaders. 

When asked about Keenan’s protest vote for Senate president and the concerns he has raised, Spilka’s office pointed to her speech last week to senators after being elected to a new term as the chamber’s leader. 

“I am committing to a series of changes that will build upon the Senate’s commitment to an open and transparent process of legislating,” she declared. 

Spilka outlined a set of reforms she plans to pursue, including making public the votes of all senators in joint committees and calling on the House to do the same, moving up the bill reporting deadline the first year of each two-year session, and continuing work on a “digital press room” on the Senate website to make information more readily accessible to the public. She also said she’ll also encourage conference committees – small panels of House and Senate members that meet to work out differences between versions of bills passed by the two chambers – to “work toward more openness in committee meetings,” which typically carry out all their discussions in closed-door sessions. 

Keenan said he’s glad to see all the attention suddenly being paid to how the Legislature operates. “I think there is a way to get to a good product and make sure the process is participatory and reflective of the views of the Legislature and the public,” he said. “I think it remains to be seen whether there is substantive change or change that is nibbling around the edges.” 

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BY NOW YOU may have seen the New York Times map of the United States covered with tiny, red arrows pointing to the right, like weathervanes. The map shows the shift in the vote in this year’s presidential election compared to 2020. The sea of red arrows pointing right mark counties where Donald Trump’s share of the vote increased since 2020. The smattering of blue arrows, showing where Vice President Kamala Harris made gains over Joe Biden’s vote four years ago, barely register. 

Make no mistake, 2024 was a bad election for Democrats. But it wasn’t as bad as that map, and the accompanying takes, make it out to be. That’s because the 2020 election was an outlier, a high water mark for Democrats that should not be used as a yardstick for future contests. Here in Massachusetts, this year’s results are much more on par, in terms of turnout and outcome, with every other presidential election so far this century besides 2020. In that way, they represent more of a reversion to the mean than a shift to the right.

Probably the best explanation for the strong Democratic showing in 2020 is the simplest: Trapped at home and frustrated with Trump’s COVID response, Democrats voted in huge numbers, swamping past turnout records. The pandemic was by far the number one issue in 2020 exit polls, far outpacing the economy, and two thirds of Massachusetts voters thought Biden would handle it better. With COVID in the rearview mirror, turnout is back to normal, and voters, as they did the world over, punished the incumbent party for post-pandemic inflation.

The 2020 spike in turnout here in Massachusetts is obvious when comparing it to other presidential elections. The chart of raw vote figures shows this most clearly. The overall trend is a steady increase in total votes, interrupted by a huge spike in Democratic voters in 2020. If any of these elections were being compared to 2020, they would look like a rightward lurch. The red arrows on that national New York Times map are pointing more away from what happened in 2020 than at what happened this year. 

Harris won Massachusetts by a 24.5-point margin based on mostly complete but still unofficial counts. That’s down sharply from Joe Biden’s 33.5-point landslide four years ago, but in line with a conventional Democratic margin of victory for a Bay State presidential contest. Indeed, Biden was the only candidate with a margin over 30 points over the last 7 presidential contests.

In many ways, 2024, looks closer to 2016 than 2020. This year saw slightly more total votes than 2016, and so accordingly both candidates received more votes than in 2016 in most towns. It’s the towns where Harris and Trump lost votes that tells the clearest story of what changed this cycle. 

Harris lost votes in the state’s biggest cities when compared to 2016. In Boston, she got 15 percent fewer votes than Hillary Clinton did in 2016; in Springfield, 18 percent fewer; in Holyoke, 20 percent. In Fall River, which Donald Trump won outright, she got 20 percent fewer votes than Clinton in 2016. In the Latino-heavy cities of Everett, Chelsea, Revere, and Lynn, she underperformed 2016 by 17 percent to 25 percent. 

Harris also underperformed in towns with large college populations. Her vote total was down 28 percent  compared to 2016 in Amherst, home to the flagship UMass campus, Amherst College, and Hampshire College. Harris still got 10 times more votes than Trump there, who also lost votes there compared to 2016. Still, the decline in votes for Harris may signal a protest against the Biden administration’s policy on the Israel-Hamas war. 

Trump also got more votes in most communities across the state compared to 2016, including in the major cities where Democratic votes declined. Trump’s biggest loss of votes came in Amherst (down 31 percent). Everywhere else he lost votes it was less than 10 percent of his 2016 total, mostly in liberal and well-off suburbs north and west of Boston, including Belmont, Concord, Lexington, Carlisle, Acton, and Melrose. He also saw declines in Provincetown and other towns at the tip of the Cape, and a few towns in Western Massachusetts. All these losses were smaller, both as a percentage and in terms of raw votes, than Harris’s double-digit declines in the cities.

Trump also gained raw votes in many of the cities where Harris lost ground, especially those with sizable Latino populations. The shift of the Latino vote towards Trump began in 2020 and accelerated in 2024, both nationally and here in Massachusetts. Lawrence, the state’s most Latino city, has already received much attention for its shift towards Trump. 

Looking at the raw vote totals underscores how dramatic that shift was. In 2024, Trump got 8,447 votes in Lawrence, more than double the 3,535 he got in 2016. Harris, by contrast, won 12,016 votes, down more than 7,000 from Clinton’s total in 2016. To be clear, Harris still won Lawrence, but the drop in her margin of victory, there and in other cities, should be a cause for concern for the state’s Democrats.     

To be clear, 2024 was a bad election for Democrats. But just how bad depends on what it’s compared to. Putting aside 2020 as an outlier and looking at 2024 through the lens of 2016 reveals real challenges for Democrats on what has traditionally been their home turf: big cities with racially diverse populations. That’s plenty for Democrats to focus on as they figure out how to adjust to a second Trump administration in Washington.

Steve Koczela is president and Rich Parr is senior research director at the MassINC Polling Group.

The post To understand 2024 results, hindsight is not 2020 appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

IT’S NO SECRET to anyone working in journalism that the industry is in flux, to put it gently. And here at CommonWealth Beacon, this fall has also been a time of transition completely apart from the usual and unusual political shifts each November. Last week, we said goodbye to our editor of 16 years – Bruce Mohl – and welcomed Laura Colarusso into the role.

I (Jennifer) tend to be the main podcaster of our crew here at CommonWealth Beacon, so when it came time to introduce readers to our new editor, we thought Laura and I might just have a conversation on The Codcast about journalism and its modern role. 

It’s a chance for you to get to know her, and a chance for me to pick her brain about the way she’s thinking about our small but mighty newsroom heading forward. Her vision of journalism as a fundamentally public service profession stood out from the jump.

“I think the focus of journalism should be to help people better understand the world around them, make informed decisions as citizens, and create, ultimately, a community,” Laura told me. “I think the service part of public service is really key, because it’s about creating knowledge and information that serves a community, however that’s defined. That’s what I mean in theory, but for CommonWealth Beacon, I really think it means telling people about their government and what the government is doing for them, but also how their tax money is being spent, and how the policies that the government puts into place ultimately affect their lives.”

It can be useful to think of the journalist as something of a scientist, she said. 

“I think really implicit in this is the idea that there’s a rigorous adherence to ethical standards and treating the reporting process almost like the scientific method,” she said. 

Laura comes to us after more than three years at Nieman Reports, which is the Harvard University Nieman Foundation magazine focused on the journalism industry. Before that, she was digital managing editor at GBH News and a digital opinion editor at the Boston Globe.

It was helpful to me to hear how Laura’s decades in the field – called to journalism after college and by now having worked in “everything from television to newspapers, magazines, radio, and digital-only, and covered a wide variety of topics from the military, to climate change, to the gender pay gap, to local politics” – have shaped her journalistic ethos and her approach to seeking out important stories. Below are a few excerpts from our conversation, which you can listen to in full here. 

On “objectivity” in journalism:

“To me, objectivity is not the right word. I know that there’s a big debate about it in our industry right now. I think trying to sum it up in one word is really unhelpful because people are going to have their biases, but if you’re focused on the reporting process itself, and you’re making sure that you’re talking to a range of people, that you’re contextualizing the information that you have … then I think you have a pretty rigorous reporting process. And you might actually come to a place where it’s not balanced, you don’t have two sides equally weighted, but you have something that is somewhat objective because you’ve gone through a process that allows you to really interrogate yourself, your biases, and the information that you’re gathering.”

On a story coming together:

“I think I’ve just sort of developed a sense for what an audience is for a particular publication and what a good story would be for that audience. I hope it’s not corny to say that when a good story idea comes together, there’s a small spark of joy. The story meeting is my favorite part of my job. I love getting together with reporters, editors, just bringing the group together and bouncing ideas off of each other. … And then, you know, there’s also a bit of panic or terror, because once we know we’ve got a good story idea, I don’t want anybody to beat us. I’m really competitive that way. ”

On trends in the journalism industry:

“One thing that I somewhat worry about is trading off innovation for reporting. Technological innovation is so important in so many aspects of life, and in journalism too, but I think sometimes we think that the innovation is gonna get us out of this crisis because we can do good reporting with fewer journalists. And we can – technology has helped us with that to a certain extent – but at the end of the day, if we go back to the public service aspect of the job, I think that it is very community-oriented. And you need people in communities. … Maybe you might have a financial paper that can write up an earnings report with AI, but that’s not going to help you create that bond with a reader or a listener or a watcher that allows them to feel like you’re a trustworthy news organization.”

On coverage in Massachusetts:

“Every state has seen a decline in the number of news organizations. I think we might be slightly better off than others. … But Massachusetts isn’t unique in that in the areas where there’s less population density, where there’s less wealth, it’s harder to keep local news organizations. So you tend to see more rural communities not have coverage. … One other nuance to get at here is even when you still have a news organization, sometimes they’re ghost papers or ghost organizations where it might be a national chain that owns the paper and it’s really more of a regional hub. So they’re not doing local news – they’re doing sort of regional news that’s pulled in from a lot of different places because they’re trying to save money. Maybe they have one reporter or one editor on the ground, but they don’t actually have news people there covering the local community.”

On hope for the industry: 

“When the hard work is done, the reporting definitely breaks through. I’m thinking of the New York Times and the New Yorker’s exposés on Harvey Weinstein. That launched a movement. ProPublica shined a light on the ethics scandals at the Supreme Court. … The student newspaper at the University of Florida uncovered how the president, Ben Sasse, had been making all these sweetheart deals with friends in Washington and that his office’s budget had grown by some factor that was quite large. So there’s still a lot of really good work being done. I think I take comfort in that, even when the industry is facing pretty difficult headwinds, polarization in this country is real and it’s something that we all are grappling with. There’s still really excellent work being done that is breaking through and making change. And I think the more we focus on that, the more we focus on what we can control, the better off we’ll be.”

For more with CommonWealth Beacon editor Laura Colarusso – on covering the Pentagon after 9/11, what Walter Lippmann can teach us about modern journalism, and responsible reporting in an era of diminished media literacy – listen to The Codcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

The post CommonWealth Beacon’s new editor on public service journalism appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

WHEN JOHN DEATON speaks, he wants voters to see Charlie Baker. Elizabeth Warren is trying to make sure they see a potentially decisive vote for whoever emerges as Mitch McConnell’s even harder right successor as Senate Republican leader.

Deaton’s game plan was clear from the opening exchange on immigration policy in Tuesday night’s debate against Sen. Elizabeth Warren. “There’s only one extremist on this stage tonight, and it’s Elizabeth Warren,” her Republican challenger said. “I’m a moderate, centrist, common sense candidate.”  

Deaton is a Never Trumper who says he plans to cast a write-in vote for president – possibly for the state’s popular former two-term governor.  

If you close your eyes when listening to him, it’s hard to picture Baker. As governor, Baker tried to maintain a modulated tone as he brought his wonky, problem-solving approach to state government, eschewing the hard edges of partisan fights whenever he could. A brawling cryptocurrency lawyer who grew up in abject poverty in a Detroit hamlet, Deaton’s rapid-fire delivery feels more like a succession of right and left hooks, rhetorical equivalents of the actual punches he threw – and received – in the hardscrabble youth he describes in his memoir, Food Stamp Warrior. 

But Deaton’s biggest challenge isn’t his sharp differences from Baker in style and bearing; it’s the different office he’s seeking. HIs views wouldn’t put him that out of step with the moderate impulses Massachusetts voters have shown in recent elections for governor, but his party label has become a non-starter when it comes to who the state’s electorate sends to Washington. 

Apart from Scott Brown’s brief, two-year hold on a Senate seat after winning a January special election at the peak of the tea party movement, it’s been 30 years since Massachusetts voters sent a Republican to Congress, and polls suggest they aren’t about to break with that trend now. 

A new UMass poll shows Warren leading Deaton, 56-30, a margin similar to that seen in a CommonWealth Beacon poll last month. 

Deaton, a first time candidate up against a seasoned pol who has won two statewide races for Senate and waged unsuccessful bid for president, largely held his own against Warren in their hourlong face-off, cosponsored by WBZ-TV and the Boston Globe. 

He ripped her for not voting for a bipartisan immigration reform bill. “You don’t let perfect get in the way of good,” he said, suggesting the bill would have at least made progress in addressing the crisis at the border. 

Warren said she’s been willing to seek bipartisan compromise on all sorts of measures, and said she first voted for an immigration reform bill in 2013. She said her vote against the recent bill came after Donald Trump implored Republicans to reject it and it was clear that it was not going to pass. “I did not buy a ticket on a boat that Donald Trump had already sunk,” she said. “By the time we voted on this one, we all knew the bill was dead.” 

He vowed to be an unyielding voice for abortion rights in the Senate, despite Warren’s effort to suggest he is no more trustworthy on the issue than the succession of Trump Supreme Court nominees who said in confirmation hearings that they would respect precedent, only to quickly toss Roe vs. Wade overboard after joining the court.  

For all their back and forth on particular issues, Warren knew she held what is probably the winning card in the race. 

“Look, this is about Senate control,” she said at one point, arguing that a vote for Deaton would be a vote to let Senate Republicans set the agenda on everything from abortion to environmental policy and gun regulations. 

With just one more debate scheduled in the race – tomorrow night in Springfield – Deaton doesn’t have a lot of opportunity to win over voters, nearly half of whom had never heard of him in last month’s CommonWealth Beacon poll. 

Underscoring the further challenge facing any moderate Republican in the state, as Deaton works to convince voters that he’s a “centrist, common sense candidate,” former state GOP chair Jim Lyons, who now leads a disaffected rump caucus of Trump-backing Republicans, shot out a message saying he’s even worse than Warren. 

“Deaton isn’t worthy of our money, our time, or our votes,” Lyons wrote in a missive to his followers, shared yesterday by Politico’s Lisa Kashinsky. 

The good news for Deaton is that Lyons’ views are only shared by a small slice of the state electorate. The bad news is that his efforts to convince the much broader group of voters who will decide the race that he’s a reasonable Republican alternative to Warren just don’t seem to square with how they see Washington working these days.

The post A feisty Deaton fights to claim middle ground  appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

THE SWITCH AT the top of the presidential ticket has given an added boost to the already considerable Democratic advantage in Massachusetts. A new CommonWealth Beacon/WBUR poll of likely voters in the November election finds Vice President Kamala Harris leading former President Donald Trump by a 28-percentage point margin (toplines/crosstabs). 

That’s a big jump from the 18-point lead enjoyed by President Biden in a CommonWealth Beacon poll in March, when he was the presumed Democratic nominee, and seems to reflect the surge of enthusiasm seen nationally for the Democratic ticket after Harris replaced Biden.  

Among likely Massachusetts voters, Harris is the choice of 59 percent while 31 percent say they’ll vote for Trump. When the poll includes those leaning but not yet fully committed to a candidate, each gains 1 point, with Harris favored 60-32.  

Harris and Trump also split voters who initially favor some other candidate. When those voters are asked to pick one of the major-party nominees, Harris leads 63 percent to 35 percent.  

The poll was conducted by the MassINC Polling Group from September 12 to 18 among 800 likely Massachusetts voters and made possible through a grant from the Knight Election Hub. It has a margin of error of 4.1 percentage points. 

Harris’ performance is a dramatic improvement over Biden’s performance in the March poll. Then Biden led Trump 46 percent to 28 percent. An 18-point lead would be impressive anywhere but deep blue Massachusetts, where it was an early sign of the persistent lack of support that culminated in Biden’s departure from the race after the first presidential debate in June.  

Harris’s 28-point margin, if it holds, would track with Hillary Clinton’s 27-point win over Trump in 2016. Biden defeated Trump by 34 points in 2020, the largest Democratic blowout in Massachusetts since 1964, when Lyndon Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater by 53 points, 76-23.  

Harris’s overall strength in the Democratic stronghold is not surprising, but it is also remarkably comprehensive, with the vice president favored over her Republican opponent by nearly every measure and subgroup in the poll. Harris leads Trump in every geographic region of the state and among every demographic subgroup in the poll except two: self-identified Republicans and men under the age of 45. She is winning among men overall (50-41), but there is a substantial gender gap, with Harris leading among women by an astonishing 47 points (69-22). 

A majority of voters (58 percent) have favorable views of both Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. By contrast, 58 percent have an unfavorable view of Trump, and 61 percent have an unfavorable of his vice-presidential pick, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. The fact that so many voters have an opinion of both VP picks only months after their introduction to the national stage is a sign that the electorate is tuned in and paying attention.  

Harris is preferred over Trump on every candidate attribute tested in the poll. When asked which of the two each statement better describes, 60 percent or more think Harris is “mentally sharp” (62-25), “likely to follow the law” (62-25), “expresses a positive view of future of America” (61-28), and “is a person of strong moral character.” Majorities think Harris will “represent all Americans” (58-29), “keep America safe” (55-36), and “seems like someone you can relate to” (55-21).  

The only two attributes where Harris’s edge dips below a majority are crucial ones, however. Harris leads Trump by 12 points on “knows how to manage the economy” (48-36). And the two are neck-and-neck on the question of who “will bring real change to Washington” (39-35); 20% of voters thought that statement described neither candidate.  

These two attributes may be the key to the race in more competitive states. In Massachusetts, 55 percent of voters say that jobs, wages, and the economy matter most to their presidential vote, the top issue tested. And 50 percent say the country is headed in the wrong direction, suggesting a preference for change over continuity. 

But for now, the change that seems to have made the most difference in the state is the one at the top of the Democratic ticket, with Kamala Harris poised to repeat recent Democratic dominance of the presidential race in Massachusetts. 

Richard Parr is senior research director at the MassINC Polling Group.   

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