The first and only debate between Democrat and incumbent Sen. Ed Markey and his Republican challenger, Kevin O'Connor, is Monday night at 7 p.m. It's being hosted by GBH and moderated by our own Jim Braude and Margery Eagan. GBH News Political Reporter Adam Reilly spoke with All Things Considered host Arun Rath before the debate. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Arun Rath: So first, tell us a bit about Kevin O'Connor. I think he's not a familiar name to most people.
Adam Reilly: I think you're right. He is making his first run for elected office. Kevin O'Connor lives in Dover. He is an attorney, a graduate of Trinity College and Boston College Law School. And also, this is an interesting wrinkle: He is a former Democrat, who left the Democratic Party in 2010 and became a Republican in 2017. He claims that the Democrats have gone, as he likes to put it, 'from being the party of JFK to the party of AOC,' — New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And he's been working really hard to link Ed Markey to her, which is something that Ed Markey has done himself over the course of his Senate campaign for very different reasons.
Rath: Right. And he's not exactly running from AOC, either.
Reilly: No, not at all. And it worked pretty well for him in the Democratic primary. It worked very well for him. O'Connor, I think, is betting that there are going to be moderate voters, maybe conservative Democrats, who are turned off by that. So, we'll see if he's right.
Rath: Adam, is anybody giving Kevin O'Connor a chance? Could this race end up being close?
Reilly: Let me answer that in a couple different ways. First off, all the different entities that watch these races — Roll Call, Congressional Quarterly, Cook Political Report, places like that — they all say that Markey is going to win, that this is a safe Democratic race.
O'Connor recently released an internal poll that put him 10 points behind Markey, which, from the O'Connor campaign's vantage point, was good news. But there's reason to take that poll with a grain of salt. First off, internal polls always need to be viewed skeptically. You've got to wonder why they're putting them out, if this is the best of several polls they've conducted, for example. But that poll also gave President Trump higher favorability ratings than we're used to him getting in Massachusetts, which is an indicator that maybe that poll skewed a bit to the right.
Rath: There's been a back and forth today — I think a lot of people might have missed it because of everything going on with the president — but back and forth over COVID testing with O'Connor and Markey. Could you fill us in on what happened?
Reilly: Yeah. Markey announced yesterday that he had just tested negative for COVID, and his campaign manager John Walsh said that Markey had taken his COVID test over the weekend in advance of being in the studio tonight. O'Connor came back, put out a statement saying, 'This is ridiculous. Ed Markey is trying to weasel out of the debate.' I'm paraphrasing here, but this is the spirit of it. 'He's trying to get out of the one debate that he's agreed to hold. There was never an agreement made that people need to be tested for COVID. We're going to be doing this safely. This is a pretext.'
Now, GBH has announced that they are going to put the two candidates in different studios. That announcement was just made recently.
I have a theory here: That statement from John Walsh, Markey's campaign manager, was not the same as saying, 'We demand that Kevin O'Connor get tested,' but it could be read that way. And I think the Markey campaign wanted to have the discussion going in — when it comes to people who are paying attention to this, even the moderators, Jim and Margery — I think they wanted people thinking about the different ways these two candidates approach COVID, and the different ways that Republicans and Democrats approach COVID. Because as we've seen from the president recently, there are very, very different thoughts about what the right way is to be smart around this disease. If you look at Kevin O'Connor's social media accounts, there are some indications that he is not a religious mask-wearer, for example, and I wouldn't be surprised if Ed Markey wants to bring that up tonight and this back and forth was, at least in part, a way to get that issue to the front of people's minds.
Rath: A little bit of gamesmanship with a message there.
Reilly: That's my theory.
Rath: Now, of course, Republican Scott Brown very famously won the Senate seat in Massachusetts back 10 years ago now, when almost no one thought he had a chance. Does this race compare with that one in any ways?
Reilly: Certainly, Kevin O'Connor would love it if it did. And I think there are times when he's on the stump and you can hear him making a Scott Brown-esque [pitch], talking about himself as the common sense candidate, for example.
There are some big differences. Scott Brown, in that race, even though Martha Coakley, who he beat, was a well-known politician, she wasn't a sitting senator. Brown wasn't running against an incumbent. In addition, it's worth reminding people: that was a special election in the middle of the winter. This is very different. This is a presidential election year in which there's also a Senate contest, among other things, which means that we can expect a massive Democratic turnout here in Massachusetts, which is likely to boost Ed Markey. Remember, Scott Brown lost that seat to Elizabeth Warren a couple of years later, in 2012 — another presidential election year, when Barack Obama won reelection.
All that being said, I think Democrats are going to fear the ghost of Scott Brown. You know, as long as people are around who can remember watching that race and remember how completely stunned they were when the Democrat lost.
