The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, by the account of its own citizens, is not what it was. Four years into the governorship of Maura Healey, only 15 percent of likely voters say the state has become a better place to live. Forty-two percent — the largest single bloc — say it has gotten worse. Taxes are too high, say 55 percent. The economy is fair or poor, say 58 percent. Utility bills and heating costs are the loudest grievance at kitchen tables from Millbury to Newbury. And yet, with two weeks to Election Day, the governor stands on the edge of a landslide.
Yes / A new Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll, conducted over five days from Wednesday to Sunday among 500 likely voters, gives Healey 59 percent against 36 percent for her Republican challenger, Mike Minogue, a former executive at the medical-device firm Abiomed. Fewer than 4 percent remain undecided, even after two televised debates. There is, the numbers suggest, almost no one left to persuade.
Anyone who has watched elections in unhappy countries knows this configuration: the people grumble, the ruler shrugs, and the ruler wins. Discontent is necessary for an opposition but never sufficient. Something must be done with it, and in Massachusetts this autumn the discontent has found no vessel.
The wrong messenger
Minogue has run on the very complaints the poll confirms — the state, he argues, is too expensive and insufficiently governed — and he has spent freely to say it, more than $6.1 million in the last month alone, much of it on near-constant advertising. Still, about 21 percent of voters surveyed told the pollsters they had never heard of him. Of those who had, 33 percent viewed him unfavorably, against 28 percent favorably.
His campaign made one calculation that has proved ruinous. As the Globe reports, Healey has tied Minogue to President Trump at every turn, pointing to her rival’s donation of hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump’s second campaign and insisting the president is “on the ballot.” The tactic works because the ground was prepared: nearly three in four Massachusetts voters hold an unfavorable view of Trump, whose mass deportation campaign and sweeping tariffs have shadowed the race, and more than 60 percent say a Republican candidate with a history of voting for or supporting Trump would be less likely to win their vote — or disqualified entirely.
David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, told the Globe that much of Minogue’s message was “validated in this poll.” The error was the man carrying it. Minogue, Paleologos said, misjudged “how toxic his proximity to President Trump would be.”
“Minogue’s got the right messages, but he’s the wrong messenger at the wrong time.”
There is an old irony in this. A challenger spends a fortune to become known, and succeeds only in becoming known for the one thing that dooms him.
Whose fault, anyway
The poll’s most revealing number may be the one about blame. Asked who bears the greatest responsibility for the state’s economic condition, 34 percent of voters named Healey and 33 percent named Trump — a statistical tie, inside the survey’s margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points. The governor and the president are, in the voters’ ledger, nearly equal debtors. It is a peculiar mercy for an incumbent: the discontent has a second address, in Washington, and much of the mail goes there.
Brian Julin, a 55-year-old Democrat from South Hadley who works at a local university, is one of the 42 percent who say Massachusetts has declined. He lays the decline largely at the federal door. “Higher [education] is an export industry the size of soybeans, and we’re losing a lot of our actual export capability because foreign students are not coming here as much,” he told the Globe.
“I’m not going to say it’s entirely the federal government’s fault, but it’s mostly the feds’ fault.”
Elizabeth Michaud, a 48-year-old unenrolled voter from Salisbury who works as a professional astrologer, finds the “cost of everything… unbelievable,” yet blames the Trump administration for worsening affordability — and fears its permissive approach to artificial intelligence, which threatens even her own livelihood, because, as she put it, “people are talking to it like it’s their counselor.” Her verdict is the race in miniature: “I just want to vote for people who are against Trump.”
Even Healey’s supporters register their qualifications. Daniel Leahey, a 70-year-old Democrat from Newbury, credits the governor with doing “a good job” overall but faults her caution on housing and state spending. “She’s a true politician, so I don’t feel like she’s taking enough bold initiatives because she doesn’t want to offend people in the party,” he said. Then, the bottom line: “I certainly couldn’t vote for the opponent. The fact that [Minogue] supports Donald Trump, that’s a non-starter for me.”
The heating bills that dominate this race are no abstraction — the governor herself reached into clean-energy funds last winter for relief, declaring an energy emergency as heating oil climbed 70 percent in a year. Healey and her fellow Democrats pin the high costs on Trump’s tariffs and the ongoing war in the Middle East; Minogue pins them on the governor and promises to run the state with a businessman’s hand. Angela Goodney, a 57-year-old Republican from Millbury, is with him. “Anything’s gotta beat Maura Healey,” she said — before conceding she is “hopeful but skeptical,” since it “seems like everybody always votes Democrat in this state.”
Down the ballot, the same weather
The poll finds no shelter for Republicans anywhere on the statewide ticket. Senator Ed Markey leads John Deaton, a personal injury attorney running for the second cycle in a row as a Republican who says he has never supported Trump, by about 60 percent to a figure nearly 30 points lower — and 45 percent of voters have never heard of Deaton at all. Even renouncing the president, it seems, does not buy a Massachusetts Republican an introduction.
Attorney General Andrea Campbell leads Michael Walsh by more than 54 percent to 28. Secretary of State William F. Galvin commands 67 percent against Anne Brensley and stands to collect a record ninth four-year term — a tenure approaching the longevity of a Central European party secretary. Treasurer Deborah Goldberg is ahead of Elizabeth Dionne 58 to 24, and Auditor Diana DiZoglio leads the Libertarian Al Ozonoff with 62 percent.
So the Commonwealth grumbles and renews its leases. More than half the voters still say the state is headed in the right direction, which is how democracies often reconcile the two findings at once: things are worse, and the alternative would be worse still.