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Report: Baker won't seek third term next year
By adamg on Wed, 12/01/2021 - 9:34am
The Globe reports Baker is telling friends he'll hang it up next year.
So that means Massachusetts voters could get a choice between somebody endorsed by the Insurrectionist in Chief and whomever Democrats pick. Unless Karyn Polito decides to give it a go and can win in a primary run by the party officially headed by a homophobe who loves the former guy.
Update:
Karyn Polito won't be running, either, at least not for lieutenant governor:
After several months of discussion with our families, we have decided not to seek re-election in 2022. This was an extremely difficult decision for us. We love the work, and we especially respect and admire the people of this wonderful Commonwealth. Serving as Governor and Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts has been the most challenging and fulfilling jobs we’ve ever had. We will forever be grateful to the people of this state for giving us this great honor.
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Comments
charles baker
when you get federal time for running guns and stealing peoples credit card info its going to be difficult getting elected to that third term
Huh?
I must have missed that news.
It was on one very reputable Boston website
https://www.universalhub.com/2021/charlestown-man-gets-three-years-illeg...
Go Maura
Simple as that.
An almost sure bet
Not Maura, though she is a good bet. The almost sure bet (1/9 in horse racing terms) is that the next governor will be a woman. I've got Polito defeating Deihl, and assuming Healy jumps in, she'll dominate the Democratic field.
Karyn Polito
would have trouble getting elected to the Shrewsbury High Student Council.
Too many Karyn Polito videos
of her attending and speaking at "Tea Party" rallies.
The internet never forgets.
1/9 makes no sense
Tellers don't have pennies. Time for simulcasts to display 1/10.
Polito isn't running
Per the local news people.
Polito defeats Deihl?
Recent polls showed Deihl potentially beating Baker by 20 points and Baker’s most recent unfavorable number amongst GOP voters was 68%.
What path to the nomination do you see for Polito beyond going full Boebert/picking Mark Sahady as her running mate?
Mass GOP
"Baker’s most recent unfavorable number amongst GOP voters was 68%."
Did they poll the entire phone booth?
The last AG to step up statewide
I think was Ed Brooke.
There is probably a reason for that.
Ask Gov. Bellotti
or Gov. Shannon,
or Gov. Harshbarger
or Gov. Reilly
or Sen. Coakley.
My gg-uncle was a governor
My gg-uncle was a governor that was an AG. Paul Dever.
Polito also not running
Seems to open things up for Geoff "Raw" Diehl to lose to Maura Healey in the final.
In other MassGOP news, they lost a special state rep election in a district that has been Republican since before the Civil War (4th Essex).
https://www.gloucestertimes.com/news/local_news/belsito-tops-snow-in-4th...
Good riddance.
Don’t run for President.
Baker for Pres
Charlie Baker would be an awesome GOP president, as current members of the GOP go.
Baker probably wouldn't get my vote but I'd much rather him than Trump 2.0 or any of Trump's protégés.
Anyway, it doesn't matter. He'd never win the nomination no matter how right he shifted. Romney doomed GOP candidates from Massachusetts for a while.
An “awesome” GOP president…
…is like saying “least racist klansman”. Sure, better than the others, but at the end of the day both Baker and the klansman are members of organizations dominated by white nationalists who excuse violence and favor insurrection.
Given the option
I would take Baker over the Biden administration, which is a lot closer to the Trump clown car than most people are being honest about. I'd also take Jared Polis, or a number of other moderate governors (though I'll hand it to Biden for finally making the hard if botched choice to get out of Afghanistan and reduce the drone strikes - now if only his domestic policies had any clue)
In either case, here's hoping that whoever gets elected MA governor doesn't go chasing the tax and public sector financial policies of Illinois, California, and New York.
As for Baker, I always hoped he'd be able to resurrect some sanity in the GOP but I imagine campaigning in a largely one-party state, that which is your opposition, with little support from the brain cancer affecting the national party is overwhelmingly exhausting.
We should all want a healthy state of competition between two largely rational parties, which we have anything but right now on either side. The wing nuts are completely running both into the ground (which, Democrats are likely in a rude awakening come 2022 at this point)
“Biden is just like Trump!”
We all see many terrible hot takes each day, but this one is a top-notch terrible take. And we can pine for a “healthy” two party system all we want, but it will do us the same as pining for a time when money grows on trees.
Radical MAGA, fascistic white nationalism is the mainstream for the GOP now. There’s no wishing that away.
lol
Baker never campaigned. He ran as a white male authority figure on the "People like me have been running things forever, trust me" platform. And it worked!
Just because you just woke up, doesn't mean everyone else has been napping.
can someone please
make sure Martha Coakley is hidden somewhere out of sight so she doesn't seize her moment, run, and give us Governor William "Billy" Tauro
She's probably too busy
protecting the interests of
big tobaccobig vape.Coakley is a DOA candidate
No one is going to support her at this point.
Pressley might stand a good chance if she wanted the job.
Pressley is too extreme to
Pressley is too extreme to win a statewide election. Maybe Seth Moulton?
It's okay to not favor Pressley
But I would like for people who deem her "extreme" to not participate in voting.
Pressley's doing fine where she is.
As are other Massachusetts House members.
Except...
Except for Richie Rich Neal. We can do better.
I, for one, am bummed
Charlie was the kind of Governor we can always use. Smart, focused on the details, not overly political. I think he did a hell of a job (not perfect, but then who is) and whoever comes in next will have some big shoes to fill.
.
delete
I'd rather roll the dice
for someone more liberal, on the whole.
Meh
Charlie Baker missed so many opportunities to implement bold decisions during the pandemic and codify himself as a leader. He showed flashes of this at the beginning of the shutdown. Later, though, he often tried to wait things out and typically made good decisions weeks or months later than they should have been and only when the state’s back was against the wall. It seemed like he was “playing its down the middle” as to appear moderate in order to keep the-election hopes alive. And while the vaccination program eventually gained a strong foothold, let’s not ignore what a disaster the implementation and roll out was after having +6 months to prepare.
The result was we did not get the best leadership from our executive branch and Baker made no headway in gaining party support for re-election. Baker’s leadership was often tepid and aimed at not alienating “conservatives”, and yet the state GOP hates him meaning we could have had the good and timely leadership all along, but Baker always waited until the last minute.
It’s wonderful that Baker wasn’t DeSantis or Abbott. But even before the pandemic I am hard-pressed to think of anything distinguishing about Baker? It was under his watch that the veterans homes were such a disaster that made them so vulnerable to early Covid, so let’s make sure that gets lumped in with the Baker pandemic accolades. His signature campaign promise was that he was going to fix the T, yet it seems status quo. What did he actually do?
I’m not a Baker hater, but the guy is overrated. He did work his ass off during the pandemic. But I think because he isn’t a mainstream MAGA Republican he gets overly praised and not enough critical attention from the center.
He got his 8 years. He worked mostly in earnest, he didn’t burn the place down, and he did not live up to his potential during Covid. He is cookie cutter and completely replaceable.
Charlie Baker
Is precisely the kind of politician I have in mind when I say that people who live here are better than their government.
Not "playing" down the middle
I think he actually IS a moderate, which is fine. He played the political game of trying not to slam people in his own party, even Trump. But you still knew that Charlie disagreed with Trump on most things.
He knew what the right decisions were…
…but he was paralyzed into inaction at so many important steps during the pandemic response because he wanted to appear as if he wasn’t always “siding with the Democrats”. Like NY has had a digital vaccine passports since March, and Baker is finally getting around to it. Basically he waters down or delays enacting good policy and people mistake that for moderation.
Baker knows when to fold.
He won't get any support from the Trumpies, and, after the early Covid mess, I don't think he'd get many crossover voters this time.
Which opportunities were missed?
The state is in the top 5 in the US regarding vaccination rates, which is about as much as you could hope for. In the end, I think that is doing pretty good despite the earlier fumbles that caught most of the nation with its pants down (and in most red states with the pants worn upside down on their heads)
"Implement bold decisions" often means driving everyone off a cliff. Slow and steady is bold in it's own way. You have to be careful what you wish for when it comes to politics. Predictability and incremental steadiness is about as good a feature as I can ask for.
Bold decisions
He made the bold decision to hand vaccinations over from municipal departments of public health, which were ready and prepared, to the private sector, which was decidedly not, and for several months last year we were lagging the rest of the country in vaccinations by hundreds of thousands.
People probably got covid and died who didn't need to.
But he made a bold decision to fuck up the vaccination schedule.
(Other bold decisions include things like installing a crony to run the veterans home.)
And the good decisions he did make…
…he made weeks/months after prevailing experts told him that “we should do this right now”. The holiday and winter surges here did not need to be as catastrophic as they were. Baker was always lagging and his inaction is misinterpreted as moderation.
And it was super cool of him to introduce that restaurant relief package—that we were fully capable of providing all along—after so many restaurants went under.
Baker was routinely (at best)...
... a day late and a dollar short.
for several months last year
Last year? Vaccines were barely authorized a year ago. And through April 2021 people were still snapping up vaccine appointments 50 miles from home. The bottleneck was manufacturing vaccines, not distributing them.
If anyone deserves blame for causing unnecessary deaths, it's the FDA. They should've authorized vaccines for the highest-risk people aged 80+ six months earlier than they did. For that set of people, the known risks of COVID were huge compared to the guestimated risk of untested vaccines.
A couple of other MassGOP notes
They failed to get sufficient signatures to get their three ballot initiatives (gas tax, voting, abortion) on the ballot.
The state committee was scheduled to meet last night, that is until enough moderates stayed home so a quorum couldn't be reached. Chairman Lyons cancelled the meeting, then called an executive committee session, which is apparently illegal due to insufficient notice time.
This is all happening while Lyons and State Sen. Ryan Fattman are being investigated by a grand jury in regard to shenanigans regarding funding for Fattman and his wife.
Hard to see if a moderate will run in the primary; then again, hard to see if any moderates will financially support Diehl.
You'd maybe think the MA GOP might
be slightly less bigoted, stupid and awful than the national party, but I guess not. It's not hard to imagine Diehl losing by 70 points even if the Dems nominated a bag of dirty baseballs.
Unless they nominate Coakley again
because if so the bag of dirty baseballs had better be running third party so that I could vote for it.
An easy decision for Gov Baker
after McKinsey and Co. offered WFH.
So ...
Maura vs Joe 3 in the primary?
Time to dust off the barn
Time to dust off the barn coat and get an oil change for the pickup truck.
Couple of names
Spilka and Hogan.
Multiple reports out since Baker's announcement
that Marty wants to come home and run for gov.
Multiple?
I see one firm story from WCVB and a Boston dot com story that cites the 'CVB story.
Aaaaahahahahaha
Hilarious.
Stay in DC, Maaaahty, you've risen as far as you're going to.
I'm watching Sonia Chang-Diaz
I love Maura Healy too, but Chang-Diaz's focus on education funding has won her a bunch of loyalty from me. Please don't give Gov Baker credit for that, I feel like he was dragged to the signing at English High after his commercial for a flood of charter schools didn't work (I never forgave him for that).
Healy
Same, which is why I want her to stay as AG.