Thursday’s election for Massachusetts Democratic Party chair might seem, from the outside, like an esoteric bit of political theater. But it’s actually a window into a bigger debate over the national party’s future in the wake of the 2020 election — and a referendum on an ugly local controversy that’s still roiling the party.
The incumbent chair of the Mass. Dems, Gus Bickford, wants to keep his job. As he tells it, the party has thrived under his leadership since his election in 2016.
“This election cycle, and the election cycle two years ago … we’ve had a tremendous amount of success,” Bickford, a longtime Democratic operative who’s worked for Elizabeth Warren, Niki Tsongas and Martha Coakley, told GBH News.
“We’ve flipped nine [state legislative] seats from red to blue,” Bickford said. "We’ve won all the special elections this year. We have continued to keep a completely Democratic congressional delegation, kept our U.S. senators in office.”
Bickford’s two challengers — former gubernatorial candidate Bob Massie and Mike Lake, who ran for lieutenant governor in 2014 — have a very different take.
As Massie seeks the chair’s job, he’s circulating a 30-plus-page document that describes his vision for the party and critiques Bickford’s leadership. In it, Massie notes that the number of registered Democrats in Massachusetts continues to decline; right now, Massie observes, Democrats comprise the same share of the electorate in Arizona as here.
Massie’s manifesto also laments that legislation embodying the values articulated in the state party’s platform continues to languish on Beacon Hill, including police reform and a bill to extend the state’s COVID-era eviction moratorium.
The problem, Massie contends, is that the state party focuses too much on getting Democrats elected — and not enough on pushing them to do the right thing once they are in office.
“At one level, the Massachusetts Democratic Party is dominant,” Massie said in an interview with GBH News. “We control 80 percent of the positions in the State House, in the House itself, and then 90 percent in the Senate. Our entire congressional delegation is Democratic, and two-thirds of our constitutional offices are Democratic.”
And yet, Massie added, “Whether it is economic disparities, or racial injustice, or the breakdown of our educational or healthcare or housing systems under the pressure of COVID or climate change under the impact of COVID or climate change — these are areas that the Democratic Party has in its platform that are not being fully implemented, or even advocated for in effectively in the state. And I’d like to fix that.”
The shift Massie envisions would effectively push the Massachusetts Democratic Party further to the left, as some national Democrats attribute the party’s weaker-than-expected showing in the 2020 elections to an embrace of overly progressive positions and messaging.
Other Democrats question this diagnosis, however, and contend that a commitment to ambitious goals like Medicare For All is the party’s best path forward, both in principle and politically.
Lake, Bickford’s other challenger, also notes the decline in Democratic registration in Massachusetts — and argues the party is failing to effectively court the very people whose values naturally align with it.
Nationally, Lake said, the past four years have seen “historic levels of activism … from an inauguration that had less attendees than protesters to the Black Lives Matter movement, which is now the largest protest movement in American history.
“These folks who are protesting share our values," he continued. "And yet, in the same four-year period of time, Massachusetts has seen 50,000 fewer registered Democrats.”
Lake also says Democrats need to do a better job making their case to communities they’ve tended to take for granted, including white working-class men and communities of color. And he cites the controversy that erupted in this year’s First District Democratic Congressional Primary as more evidence of the need for change.
In that race, challenger Alex Morse, the mayor of Holyoke, was accused of inappropriate behavior with college students — and the state party was accused of inappropriately responding to those allegations in a way that boosted incumbent Richard Neal.
A recent independent report on the episode, conducted by former State Sen. Cheryl Jacques, found that complaints about Morse's conduct had circulated for two to three years, and that some allegations about the party’s conduct were unfounded.
But the report also concluded that Bickford violated a state party bylaw by encouraging the College Democrats of Massachusetts, who had raised concerns about Morse’s behavior, to speak with a reporter prior to the primary election — thereby participating in a contested primary instead of remaining neutral.
“We need leadership that can be trusted, that restores the integrity of the party,” Lake said. “And we can’t do that when the party is under investigation, or in the midst of a scandal and a cover up.”
Bickford, for his part, says the report shows the party urgently needs an official protocol to address such complaints in the future and insists that he acted with no ill intent.
“I couldn’t be more sorry for the pain that that has caused, in the LGBTQIA+ community and to Democrats across the state,” Bickford said. “And I think because I know what has happened, I can help rebuild that trust.”
Another point of contention in tonight’s election: whether the Democrats have done enough to push back against Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican who was easily re-elected in 2018 and is more popular among Democrats than among members of his own party.
Bickford says he’s built up the party’s fundraising base over the past four years, and that whoever the Democratic gubernatorial nominee is in 2022 will have more financial and organizational assets at their disposal than former nominee Jay Gonzalez did in 2018.
Massie believes Democrats need to highlight Baker’s preference for incremental management rather than big, structural change — and that the appetite for that critique will be greater in 2022 than it was in 2018, thanks to Joe Biden’s presidential victory and other shifts in the political landscape.
“As one major political said to me not that long ago … Gov. Baker has a great deal of political capital, and he refuses to spend any of it on anything of lasting significance,” Massie said.
Lake, for his part, believes Democrats just aren’t doing enough to contrast their vision with Baker’s.
“We have a very different vision of what Massachusetts can and should be, but we’re not talking about that. ... So we’re not giving people an option, a choice — we’re not helping them to see the alternative," he said. “When we start standing up, that’s when we can expect people to be standing with us.”
The Massachusetts Democratic State Committee will elect its chair Thursday evening.
