Win-it-all Deval: 2006 gubernatorial results

Get town-by-town election results, along with a comparison to the 2002 election, here in an Excel spreadsheet or here in a PDF file. (In 49 states, you can get at least county-level election statistics for recent state elections on the web, but not here.) Scroll past the maps for an analysis of the race.

 

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Originally posted on November 14, 2006.

Maybe the best thing the state Republican Party can say about last week’s election is that the Democrats still haven’t proven that they can win a competitive race for governor of Massachusetts. Unfortunately for the GOP, this time the race wasn’t competitive, so they were out of luck. As noted in our quadrennial analysis of voting patterns in Massachusetts (see “Shifting Ground,” CW, Spring ’06), “Democrats in this state seem to win big or not win at all,” and Deval Patrick found a way to do the former.

Patrick was helped by his overwhelming margins over Kerry Healey in the state’s largest cities, but his support in Boston’s suburbs and exurbs, particularly those to the west, turned what might have been a narrow win into a rout. He carried all 10 of the state’s political regions, as defined by CommonWealth magazine, including the seven predominantly suburban areas won by Republican Mitt Romney in the last gubernatorial race:

 

 

Patrick smashed the ring of Boston suburbs that had sent Republicans to the governor’s office from 1990 through 2002. In so doing, he finally connecting the Democratic strongholds at both ends of the state — that is, Boston in the east and the Berkshires and Pioneer Valley in the west. While Bill Weld, Paul Cellucci, and Romney each won with noticeably different coalitions, all of them enjoyed strong support in the five regions that form a nearly complete circle, or a “Big C,” around Boston and its outskirts (with Massachusetts Bay accounting for the gap). To the north is Stables & Subdivisions, centering on Cape Ann and Essex County, and Post-Industria, which takes in the Merrimack Valley and eastern Middlesex County. To the south is Ponkapoag, which includes most of Norfolk County, and Cranberry Country, taking in most of the South Shore and Cape Cod. And to the west is Offramps, which follows Route 495 to form the middle part of the Big C.

Compared with Shannon O’Brien, the last Democratic nominee for governor, Patrick did significantly better in all five of these regions, but his biggest gain was in Offramps, which was Romney’s strongest region in 2002. The Democratic vote there went from 35 percent to 49 percent, with the GOP ticket falling from 60 percent to 43 percent and independent Christy Mihos taking 7 percent. Healey managed to create two bands of red on the political map, winning clusters of towns on both the north and south shores, but Patrick’s strength in the west turned the Big C into something akin to two flippers on a pinball machine — and rather ineffectual ones at that.

Beyond Offramps, Patrick got a more comfortable 54 percent in MidMass — home of the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, Worcester mayor Tim Murray — and then it was smooth sailing in the western third of the state, which has been growing increasingly hostile toward the GOP since the early 1990s. Patrick’s reclamation of the territory between Boston and Pittsfield — or, if you prefer, between Cambridge and Northampton — was a feat of political engineering that puts the Zakim Bridge to shame.

Patrick’s share of the vote in each of the 10 regions represented the best showing by a Democrat since Michael Dukakis was reelected governor in 1986. The Democrats’ biggest gain since the last election (a jump of 15 points) actually came in Shopper’s World, which includes the suburbs just to the west of Boston and is the most affluent and well-educated of the state’s regions — and also the one that produced the biggest swing toward Mitt Romney in 2002. Patrick improved the Democratic percentage in Shopper’s World by almost 15 points, going from 44 to 58 percent of the vote. In the town of Sherborn, he went from 31 percent to 52 percent, and in Wellesley, he went from 37 percent to 56 percent.

Offramps, as noted above, also moved toward Patrick by more than 10 points, fueled by big shifts in towns like Westborough (from 33 percent to 51 percent Democratic), Shrewsbury (from 35 percent to 53 percent), and Acton (from 41 percent to 60 percent). And in MidMass, where O’Brien won only two out of 54 communities in the last election (the town of Ware and the city of Worcester), Patrick won 46 localities, including the cities of Fitchburg and Leominster.

Indeed, Patrick ran behind O’Brien’s showing in only three of the state’s 361 cities and towns. One of them — O’Brien’s hometown of Whitman — was in the Ponkapoag region, where the Democrats made a relatively modest improvement, from 44 percent to 51 percent. (The others were the small western towns of Montgomery and Tolland.) Ponkapoag seems to be a natural base for any candidate thinking of running against Patrick in four years, but it’s hardly a gimme for the GOP. Indeed, it was by the best region for Mihos, who got just under 10 percent of the total vote there and did even better in the Ponkapoag city of Brockton (15 percent). This is not surprising, given the history of the region: It gave independent presidential candidate Ross Perot a quarter of the vote in the 1992 presidential race, and the percentage of voters here that are registered as Republicans has long been below the statewide average (which is now at a pitiful 13 percent).

Another potential weak spot for Patrick is Post-Industria. Compared with the gubernatorial race of 1990, which began 16 years of GOP rule, this is where the Democrats made the smallest gain this year: Patrick got 50.2 percent, hardly above John Silber’s 48.9 percent. In Dracut, Patrick got 42 percent to Silber’s 48 percent; in both Methuen and Woburn, he got 46 percent to Silber’s 49 percent. It’s certainly no coincidence that the anti-tax vote in this region is consistently stronger than in the state overall; a 2002 ballot proposal to eliminate the income tax entirely lost statewide but won in Dracut and Methuen, as well as such Post-Industria towns as Billerica, Saugus, and Tewksbury. Voters here may judge Patrick the most harshly if their tax burden seems to get heavier over the next four years.

Earlier this fall, we speculated that the large number of votes for Patrick in the September Democratic primary — more than for any other candidate in a gubernatorial primary since Silber won the Democratic nomination in 1990 — would give him a strong base to build from in November. That seems to have been the case. The 452,000 votes won by Patrick in September turned out to equal 20.4 percent of all votes cast in the general election, higher than for any primary candidate since, again, Silber in 1990. In 37 cities and towns, his primary vote equaled more than a third of the general election tally, and in 10 of those communities, he still managed to more than double his vote in November, racking up percentages above 70 percent. These included Cambridge, Amherst, and Northampton in Left Fields; Brookline in Bigger Boston; and Newton in Shopper’s World. In squeezing even more votes out of communities that were already among the most liberal and most Democratic in the state, Patrick followed the lead of Romney, who ran up GOP percentages in such bedrock communities as Boxford and Duxbury in 2002.

But perhaps more impressive is the fact that Patrick carried 20 of the 29 communities he lost in the primary, suggesting that he successfully blocked Healey from picking up enough supporters of Chris Gabrieli and Tom Reilly to make her candidacy viable. In three regions (Brink Cities, MidMass, and Post-Industria), Patrick’s primary vote amounted to less than 20 percent of the votes cast in the general election, but he still got more than 50 percent in November. If you assume that people who voted for Patrick in the Democratic primary voted for him again last week, he and Healey were virtually tied among all other voters, at 44 percent each — a figure that makes it impossible for a Republican to win.

In most of the state’s “gateway cities,” where Republicans made sizable gains in gubernatorial elections during the 1990s, Healey made little ground between September and November. For example, in Brink Cities, she got only 29 percent of the New Bedford vote and 30 percent of the Fall River vote not already claimed by Patrick in the September primary. Similarly, Healey got 35 percent in Post-Industria’s Lynn and 37 percent in MidMass’s Gardner.

Healey apparently captured a majority of the “unclaimed” vote in 133 of the state’s 351 cities and towns, but most were sparsely populated exurbs such as Topsfield, in Stables & Subdivisions, and Dunstable, in Offramps. Among the larger communities in this category were Cranberry Country’s Barnstable and Plymouth, and Post-Industria’s Billerica and Methuen, but Healey didn’t win a majority in any of them (thanks, in part, to Mihos).

Healey did not win enough votes in the more socially conservative regions.

Can the Republicans reassemble a winning coalition in 2010? Healey’s emphasis on issues such as crime and immigration did not help her win enough votes in the more socially conservative regions of Brink Cities, MidMass, and Post-Industria, where she ran well behind the strong showings by Cellucci in 1998. The alternative is to win back the Romney voters in Offramps and Shopper’s World, who tend to be moderate-to-liberal on social issues but are more inclined to support Republicans on fiscal matters. The question is whether Patrick can manage to please both his urban and his suburban supporters; if not, the Big C may once again choke the Democrats off from the corner office.