We are two days past Election Day, and the results from Massachusetts’ statewide races and ballot measures are all in. Plus, reactions to Donald Trump’s resounding victory in the presidential contest continue to pour in.
Politico’s Kelly Garrity joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to unpack the last few days. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Arun Rath: Let’s start with a national lens in the local reaction to Donald Trump’s win. Gov. Maura Healey and Attorney General Andrea Campbell have both weighed in now. What is the message they are conveying to voters?
Kelly Garrity: Both the governor and the attorney general yesterday held press conferences responding to the election results. [For] both of them, the top line message was: anyone who has concerns about a future Trump administration, Massachusetts electeds are here to assuage those concerns. If you’re concerned about various rights that you’re worried a Trump administration might be coming for, we are trying to protect those.
Attorney General Andrea Campbell — she definitely kind of took a more serious tone. She didn’t necessarily directly lay out any plans to do so, but she hinted that she was ready and that her office was prepared to sue Donald Trump’s administration if it came down to that.
In Trump’s previous administration, when Maura Healey was actually attorney general, she sued Trump somewhere around 100 times. And it sounds like the current attorney general is ready to do that as well.
The governor’s message was, “I’m a governor for all people.” Obviously, there are plenty of folks in Massachusetts who did vote for Donald Trump, so she acknowledged that some people were very happy with the results, but then went back into any concerns.
Rath: That’s fascinating how — thinking about the contrast between Attorney General Maura Healey under President Trump, and now Gov. Maura Healey under President Trump.
Zooming into the local elections, ballot question results are in. Are there any results that surprised you? Or any results that won or lost by larger margins than expected?
Garrity: Yeah. I think a lot of the results that came in were pretty expected.
The fact that Question 2 won by ... around 20 points is pretty interesting, just considering how that campaign started. It sounded like business groups were really ready to campaign against this question that would end the MCAS as a graduation requirement. At the beginning, they were really … there was a lot of concern that getting rid of the requirement would really reduce standards in Massachusetts.
The “yes” campaign on that question didn’t do fundraising, but a lot of in-kind donations from the Massachusetts Teachers Association, and ended up totaling something like $15 million, compared to — I think it ended up being something like $5 million on the “no” side, so they really got outspent on this and ended up paying the price.
Question 1 passed kind of in line with what polling showed it was gonna do — around 70% support.
It’ll be interesting to see on questions 1 and 2 — legislative leaders have suggested that they would be open to potentially changing those questions if they did pass. Now that they have passed, it will be interesting to see how that plays out if they do decide to kind of weigh in and tweak those or toss those out.
It’s more likely Question 1 — the auditing question — that that would end up going to court. That definitely still has kind of a long way before we actually potentially see a legislative audit. They could decide that they don’t like the result there, but it seems a little less likely that they would do that, considering how much support it would have. And it would require the governor to also sign off on overturning the will of 70% of the voters who said they wanted to see a legislative audit.
But it is likely that that ends up moving through the court, so I think we’re not quite done with Question 1 yet.
Rath: And for Question 2, does anything really change for educators now? Do they just go about their jobs, or does that have anything to go through?
Garrity: Yeah. So, the state put out guidance yesterday. This question doesn’t get rid of the tests — students will still be taking the test — it just means that students don’t have to pass the test in order to graduate. So I think it’s still a little unclear exactly what that’s going to look like, but yeah, we’ll see. We’ll see if the Legislature does try to weigh in and create some kind of new standard that is statewide.
The House speaker, the Senate president and the governor all oppose getting rid of the MCAS as a graduation requirement. It didn’t seem like it was because of any huge love for the MCAS test itself, but all of them kind of said they’re concerned about not having a statewide requirement.
Rath: With Beacon Hill, we know there’s no significant change, but there is measurable change. Obviously, Democrats still control both chambers and every statewide office, but there were some Republic gains, and some Massachusetts Republicans — like Amy Carnevale, chair of the state GOP — say they’re feeling encouraged.
Garrity: Yeah, definitely. Republicans … ended up netting one seat. ... It doesn’t do anything to change the power dynamic on Beacon Hill. But I think that for a lot of folks who are watching this and for a lot of Republicans, honestly, it’s really difficult for a rookie in Massachusetts typically to win any race during a presidential election year. And typically, it’s been even harder when Donald Trump has been on the ballot.
That was not the case this year. I think it’s interesting to see how that played out in some of the open races, and then, in a couple of the races where there were Republican challengers, it’s pretty unique. The Republican Party has been losing seats on Beacon Hill for a while now.
It feels like the shift towards the Republican Party — it wasn’t just reflected in the numbers at the top of the ticket. It also seemed like it was reflected down the ballot in Massachusetts in some of these legislative races.
