Huge night in Massachusetts. Watch live here.
From 7:30-9:30 EST tonight I’ll be on TYT live, breaking down results from the Ed Markey-Joe Kennedy race, Morse-Neal, and others. Polls close at 8 pm. I was on Rising this morning previewing the races.
The congressional fight over repealing the Affordable Care Act was heating up all through 2017, and Lydon, Massachusetts resident Sara Seinberg was following it intensely. For her partner, who had a chronic health condition, it was an existential question, and Seinberg didn’t want to simply preserve Obamacare, she wanted to see a health care system that didn’t issue a death sentence if she lost her job.
She reached out to her local state representative and senator, and heard back quickly about their position on health care policy. But she got nothing from her congressional representative, Richard Neal, who was beginning his 16th term representing central and western Mass.
She called, she wrote, and she hunted endlessly for events where he might be appearing. She finally found him, she told me, at a local school, and asked him where he stood on Medicare for all. His answer was so cool, distant, and detached from her reality, she said, that she vowed right then and there she would do everything in her power to unseat him. That cycle, a local progressive, Tahirah Amatul-Wadud, challenged Neal, but raised barely any money, finishing with 29 percent of the vote to Neal’s 71.
Still, the election results suggested a base of opposition to Neal existed, and Seinberg pressed forward, organizing her local community into a group called the CD1 Progressive Coalition. In January 2019, she launched a Facebook group. “Within 20 minutes, I got a message from Alex Morse,” she said. The two met up on January 29 -- Morse’s 30th birthday -- and it was clear to Seinberg he was thinking about running. She did all she could to encourage him.
That encouragement included, in February, reaching out cold to the group Justice Democrats to tell them about the exciting mayor of Holyoke, who had a real shot at unseating Neal. JD’s executive director, Alexandra Rojas, met with Morse later that month, as the group contemplated what it would mean to take on the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Knocking off Joe Crowley, who was in line to be speaker of the House, had been no small feat. And their more recent conquests -- Eliot Engel and Lacy Clay -- were respectively the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee and a senior member of the Financial Services Committee. But none of it compared to Neal, and Morse’s district did not include the number of urban voters that had enabled them to knock off Crowley, Engel and Clay. In western Massachusetts, they’d have to win among the types of white working class voters that had previously stymied their growth. And Neal was a canny politician, taking nothing for granted, and would have endless money.
But the upsides were obvious: For one, if a Justice Democrat could win in western Massachusetts, it would mean that no incumbent was safe. And the implications for people’s lives would be immediate. Neal’s jurisdiction gave him a hand in nearly every piece of legislation moving through the House, and it was always a helping hand for corporate interests. A more progressive chairman of the panel -- perhaps Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas, the number two in line -- would mean that every major piece of legislation moving through Congress in 2021, potentially headed for the desk of Joe Biden, would be more progressive.
And so they went for it. In July, Morse announced his candidacy, and Justice Democrats endorsed him in August. A year later, a Morse internal poll had Neal hovering at 45 percent, well into the danger zone for an incumbent, especially one like Neal who was getting battered for corruption and failing to stand up to Trump.
And then, on August 7, all hell broke loose. The College Democrats of UMass Amherst sent Morse a letter, which was quickly leaked and published by the college paper, disinviting him from future events, saying that he had made students uncomfortable by making advances on them, along with other vague allegations.
On August 12, we published the first of four exposés, that reported, in order: One of the students who orchestrated the scheme was motivated by a desire to launch his political career through Neal; that the students had sought to entrap him and, having failed, went ahead anyway with vague allegations; that the state party had offered legal advice and media training in preparation for the letter being leaked, and, finally; that the state party, once the scheme was exposed, publicly ordered an investigation into the students’ conduct while at the same time privately urging the students to delete messages that showed collusion with the state party.
The New York Times called the reporting “a cascade of head-spinning revelations,” but in the district, voters who relied on the local news were still treated with he-said/he-said coverage that made room for Morse’s denial but gave little oxygen to the reality that it had been an orchestrated smear. The saga turned a race that had been a referendum on Neal and his style of politics into a conversation about Morse and his sex life, fueled by TV ads and robocalls run by Neal’s allied super PAC, which hammered away at Morse for acknowledging consensual sexual relations with students as a single, gay man in the region. Even after the super PAC apologized for the ad and said it was aired by mistake, it continued airing it (!), one of the more brazenly cynical exploitations of bigotry in recent Democratic primary campaign memory.
In the wake of The Intercept’s reporting, groups who had pulled back from Morse re-doubled their support, including the Sunrise Movement, Working Families Party, Indivisible and others.
The Neal-Morse race, however, isn’t the headliner in Massachusetts; that would be the challenge to Ed Markey that was launched by Joe Kennedy III. (Our profile of that race is here.)
In the race for Kennedy’s old seat, a would-be Squad member and a more standard progressive are threatening to split the vote and let a right wing Democrat claim the seat. Background on that is here.
And Rep. Stephen Lynch, in the 8th Congressional district, is facing a spirited primary challenge from his left.
Here’s the link for the live coverage of these races tonight.
And if you bought Chuck Rocha’s campaign memoir, Tio Bernie, please do us a solid and give it a review.