baseball strike

Boston Herald opinion columnist Joe Battenfield and I agree on one thing for certain: the Mass GOP doesn’t appeal to Massachusetts voters, which makes state elections less competitive.

That’s where we diverge, though. In his article last week titled Massachusetts needs new political movement to save it from Democrats, Battenfield badly misses what makes the Republican party unpopular in Massachusetts, a symptom of the widening divide between old-school Republicans of yesteryear and the increasingly unmoored MAGA movement.

Broken clocks

Reading Battenfield’s article, I fully agreed with his diagnosis at least as far as about halfway through, for example:

Not only can the party not recruit candidates that are taken seriously, they can’t recruit voters. Just some 423,000 voters in Massachusetts of the state’s 5 million voters are now registered Republicans, less than 10%. They are dwarfed by 1.3 million Democrats and by far the dominant group of unenrolled voters, at around 3.2 million.

Unenrolled voters are ripe to be tapped, but the Republican Party can’t do it.

I think there’s probably an appetite for a “common-sense” Republican in Massachusetts among the general population, like we’ve seen with Charlie Baker and Mitt Romney. The rising cost of living is a powder keg that I believe could be trivial for the right candidate to tap into. And Battenfield touches upon this:

And the party has almost zero chance of winning a congressional seat, which are all controlled by Democrats.

Charlie Baker isn’t walking through that door. The popular former governor is making far too much money leading the NCAA to come to the rescue.

Look in the mirror

Here’s the critical issue: Republicans chased the Charlie Bakers out of the GOP in exchange for MAGA loyalists. Romney, for example, went from being a Massachusetts governor to Republican nominee for president to political pariah in the span of ten years. And in the article, we get a small clue as to what type of person drove that change:

Where’s President Donald Trump? Where’s Pam Bondi? Where are the national Republicans coming up to campaign?

Mr. Battenfield, those exact folks made a mockery of the Republicans that actually polled well in Massachusetts. Republicans closed the door on themselves, shot themselves in the foot, and now write articles asking who will “save” them from the Democrats.

The closing line is especially painful:

Maybe it’s simply time for another party in Massachusetts. Because this is not working.

This is the “another party”, and you’ve helped foster it. MAGA, in principle, is the antithesis of the stated Republican values Massachusetts residents historically tolerated. Small government, adherence to the Constitution, rule of law, and fiscal responsibility have been thoroughly stomped out by the Trump administration. None of these MAGA policies will save Massachusetts right now.

Help instead

I’ve been working on a few tools in my spare time to add visualizations, data, and quantitative analysis to the core issues facing Massachusetts right now. It hasn’t gotten picked up yet, and maybe it won’t, but my hope is that these tools may be used by civic advocates that know which levers to pull to advance positive change.

When I read articles like Battenfield’s, it makes me frustrated. What does this add to civic discourse? There’s no strategy here, there’s no call to action, there’s no novel contribution. It disregards what’s actually worked for the Mass GOP in the past in favor of reiterating the same sort of tired culture war slop we’ve waded through for ten years now.

Are authors such as this trying to solve the problems we face, or do they thrive in the chaos created by fanning the flames?