#2022-20 September 9, 2022

Healey, Diehl Win Governor Primaries Will Face-off in November; Campbell, DiZoglio, Driscoll, Galvin Take Statewide Dem Primaries

On primary Tuesday, Republican primary voters opted for Trump-backed candidate Geoff Diehl (R- Whitman) as their choice for governor of Massachusetts, kicking off a nine-week battle against the Democratic ticket of Maura Healey (D- Boston) and Kim Driscoll (D- Salem), the latter of whom emerged Tuesday from a three-way primary to be the party’s lieutenant governor nominee.

Healey, who has been the state’s attorney general of the last eight years, cleared the gubernatorial field after she entered the race in January and has been able to campaign freely since Senator Sonia Chang-Díaz (D- Boston) ended her Democratic primary campaign in June.

The corner office is up for grabs by virtue of two-term Governor Charlie Baker (R- Swampscott) and Lieutenant Governor Karyn Polito’s (R- Shrewsbury) joint decision announced last December to not seek a third term for their popular Republican administration.

Driscoll, the mayor of Salem since 2006, got into the lieutenant governor’s race in January promising a “new focus from Beacon Hill” on the needs of cities of towns.  She bested two members of the Legislature in the primary, defeating both Senator Eric Lesser (D-Longmeadow) and Representative Tami Gouveia (D- Acton).

Attorney General

Former Boston City Council president Andrea Campbell also emerged Tuesday night as the victor from what had been a contentious primary of Democrats vying to replace Healey as attorney general.

The primary for attorney general divided Democrats more than any other race this year.  Healey backed Campbell to take her place and spent the crucial days leading up to Tuesday’s primary campaigning with Campbell.  U.S. Senator Ed Markey (against whom Liss-Riordan briefly ran in 2019), U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley and four former AGs also sided with Campbell.  Liss-Riordan, a labor attorney from Brookline known primarily for the high-profile lawsuits she has brought against major corporations on behalf of workers, got the backing of U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, and former Boston Mayor Kim Janey among a bevy of major union endorsements.

Campbell will face Republican Jay McMahon, who had no opposition in his party’s primary Tuesday, in November’s contest to succeed Healey as the state’s top law enforcement official.  McMahon was the GOP’s nominee for attorney general in 2018 and he took about 805,000 votes to Healey’s 1,874,000.

Secretary of State

For the second election cycle in a row, incumbent Secretary of State William Galvin easily dispatched a Democratic primary challenge.  The Associated Press called the primary in his favor about an hour after polls closed Tuesday.

Galvin is seeking his eighth, and potentially final, four-year term as the secretary of state, and pitched himself to voters as a reliable and effective elections administrator who now holds a senior position among elections officials nationally.  The Brighton Democrat was elected to eight terms in the Massachusetts House beginning in 1975 and could surpass former Secretary Frederic Cook’s record 28-year tenure in the secretary’s office if he wins in November.

Rayla Campbell is Galvin’s November opponent.  A Whitman Republican whose campaign has largely revolved around government mandates; Campbell had no challenger Tuesday as she locked up the Republican Party’s nomination.

Auditor

Senator Diana DiZoglio of Methuen was the only sitting legislator to win their statewide primary race this election cycle.  She bested Chris Dempsey of Brookline, a Patrick administration transportation official and one-time Bain & Company consultant who helped lead the grassroots movement to prevent the Olympics from coming to Boston in 2024, in the primary to represent the Democratic Party in the contest for auditor this November.

DiZoglio, a second-term senator who served three terms in the House before winning election to the Senate in 2018, has long been a vocal advocate for restricting the use of non-disclosure agreements on Beacon Hill and has clashed with Democratic leadership about how much time lawmakers receive to review legislation.

The Republican nominee for auditor, Amore, is the head of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and was the party’s 2018 nominee for secretary of state.  Amore, of Winchester, is a rare candidate to have the official endorsement of the outgoing Governor Baker and he has pitched himself as a Republican check on the Democratic Party’s supermajorities in both branches of the Legislature and potentially among constitutional offices.

Treasurer

Treasurer Deborah Goldberg of Brookline appears on track to cruise to a third term in office.  She drew no challenger from within the Democratic Party and the Republicans didn’t officially nominate any candidate for the position this cycle.

Assuming she is reelected in November, Goldberg would become the longest-serving state treasurer since Robert Crane, who served more than a quarter-century in the post from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s.  Goldberg was the runner-up in the 2006 Democratic primary for lieutenant governor, losing to Tim Murray.  She beat Republicans Michael Heffernan and Keiko Orrall, respectively, in her previous general election contests for treasurer in 2014 and 2018.

Candidates Of Color Seize Open Legislative Seats

Veteran Representative Marcos Devers (D- Lawrence) lost his reelection bid to Francisco Paulino (D-Methuen), a former Lawrence School Committee member and tax associate, on Tuesday, an otherwise successful primary election day for incumbents during which voters also effectively guaranteed the winners for nine open seats.

The 2022 cycle saw more turnover in the Legislature than two years ago, the result of a range of factors including the allure of statewide offices on the ballot every four years and creation of new incumbent-free districts in the decennial redistricting process.

Five Senate districts and 19 House races have open races this year, enough to guarantee that roughly one in every eight lawmakers sworn in for the 2022-2023 term will be new.  Two of those Senate races and seven of those House races feature only Democrats on the ballot, meaning the results are effectively sealed with Tuesday’s primary barring an unlikely successful write-in campaign.

Many of the presumptive newcomers to seats in the overwhelmingly white Legislature are people of color.  That includes Representative Liz Miranda (D- Boston), who is set to join the Senate after winning one of the most closely watched primary elections of the cycle.  Miranda beat out fellow Representative Nika Elugardo (D- Boston), former Senator Dianne Wilkerson, Reverend Miniard Culpepper and former teacher and corrections officer James Grant to represent the district, which at more than 75 percent has the highest share of residents of color in the Senate.

The other new senator voters picked Tuesday is Lawrence City Councilor Pavel Payano.  Payano won a primary to represent an incumbent-free, majority-minority district that includes Lawrence, Methuen and parts of Haverhill.  He is also a former School Committee member who worked as an aide to former Congresswoman Niki Tsongas before joining the Social Innovation Forum in 2020.  Voters also chose Lawrence City Councilor Estela Reyes to the newly created Fourth Essex House district in a tight race.In the most crowded field of the 200 legislative contests, speechwriter Jenny Armini of Marblehead topped a six-way primary for the Eighth Essex District representing the North Shore. Armini helped launch grassroots political organization ElectBlue, which worked to elect Democrats to Congress, following President Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election.

Also on the North Shore, Manny Cruz emerged victorious over two other candidates in a race to represent the Seventh Essex House district, which consists entirely of Salem.  Cruz is a member of Salem’s School Committee and a former Beacon Hill aide who worked for Representative Paul Tucker, the district’s current representative and newly elected democratic nominee for Essex District Attorney, as well as former Representative Juana Matias.

Voters in Boston chose community organizer Sam Montaño in a three-way primary for the Fifteenth Suffolk House seat, a reshaped, majority-minority district stretching from Mission Hill to Forest Hills.  Montaño, who is a member of the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Council, previously served in City Year and worked at a women’s shelter.  The presumptive state representative had earned the support of several prominent local figures including Chang-Díaz as well as the endorsement of the Boston Globe’s editorial board.

West of Boston, Priscila Sousa topped the race for the incumbent-free, majority-minority Sixth Middlesex House seat.  Sousa, an immigrant from Brazil, works in the solar industry and chairs the Framingham School Committee.

Another Brazilian immigrant, Brockton’s Rita Mendes, emerged victorious in the Eleventh Plymouth District, which is also a mostly nonwhite House district redrawn with no incumbent.  Mendes, a Brockton City Councilor, topped fellow City Councilor Shirley Rita in a showdown for the House seat.  She also works as an attorney and real estate agent.

Former Methuen City Councilor Ryan Hamilton was the only Democrat or Republican to pull papers for the Fifteenth Middlesex District, giving him the easiest path to the Legislature of the candidates effectively confirmed in the primary.

Michlewitz Ready to See Tax Relief Advance

Earlier this week, the House Ways and Means Chairman Aaron Michlewitz (D- Boston) said that the $2.941 billion figure the Department of Revenue reported last week as subject to Chapter 62F, the 1986 voter law that requires excess state tax collections be refunded, appears accurate and suggested Auditor’s Suzanne Bump’s confirmation by September 20 could break Beacon Hill’s logjam.

Moving forward could mean working to pass the numerous legislative and executive branch priorities that stalled out when the House and Senate ended formal session August 1 paralyzed by the recent revelation of Chapter 62F’s potential impact on the money at their disposal.  Baker said in late July, when the Legislature was down to crunch time for its economic development bill, that Chapter 62F would lead to probably north of $2.5 billion in returns.

Beyond the economic development bill topics -- hospital funding, money to support the state’s new climate law, millions in local project funding, and more -- Michlewitz sees plenty of other areas where the Chapter 62F money could be spent.  He expects the Federal Transit Administration’s safety investigation of the MBTA to require the state to spend somewhere in the billions of dollars range and also pointed to the Special Legislative Early Education and Care Economic Review Commission’s estimate that $1.5 billion is needed to stabilize the early education and care system and help it meet the needs of families.

The $52.7 billion fiscal year 2023 budget that Michlewitz co-authored represents a spending increase of more than $5 billion or nearly 11 percent compared to the $47.6 billion annual budget passed for the previous year.

August Collections Build on Record Tax Haul

The Department of Revenue collected more than $2.6 billion in taxes last month, an increase of $108 million or 4.3 percent over actual collections in August 2021 as fiscal year 2023 continued its strong start for the state’s coffers.

Through two months of fiscal year 2023, DOR has collected just more than $5 billion, and Massachusetts is running about $250 million or more than 5 percent ahead of the fiscal year 2022 tax collection pace that led to a multibillion-dollar surplus.  Last week, DOR reported to Auditor Suzanne Bump that it believes $2.94 billion from fiscal 2022 tax collections will be required to be returned to taxpayers under the Chapter 62F revenue cap law.

August is generally one of the least significant months for state tax receipts (average of 6.7 percent of annual revenue) and DOR cautioned against drawing conclusions based on the monthly results.  But so far, the continued strong pace of tax collections makes fiscal year 2023 appear likely to generate more than the $39.576 billion revenue expectation that the administration and lawmakers agreed to bake into the annual budget.