NAACP’s Tanisha Sullivan takes on incumbent Bill Galvin to become state’s top election official

It's not just the race for governor that's attracting attention on Beacon Hill this election year. There's also a burgeoning race for secretary of the commonwealth, the state's top election official. GBH News State House reporter Mike Deehan joined host Henry Santoro on Morning Edition today to discuss the race. This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity and length.

Santoro: Secretary of state not only oversees elections, but it's also the state's top securities regulator and also oversees public records, lobbyists and the federal census. We have three people in this race, including the longtime incumbent, your friend and mine, Bill Galvin. And with the amount of attention elections got in 2020, do you expect more names to be added to this list?

Deehan: You might see some more names coming. I think now that Galvin himself, the incumbent, has declared and there is a Democratic challenger, you could see some more folks getting in, maybe additional people on the Republican side. And it really is because election security, election access, democracy, however you want to put it, is really a huge, huge issue in the zeitgeist in national politics. And the secretary of state's race is how it plays out here locally.

So that's drawing a lot of attention and a lot of interest, not only about what the job is now and what it does, but what it could do in the future or in what some activists think it should be doing differently.

Santoro: Bill Galvin announced his reelection plans this week. If he [wins], it'll make it his eighth term. I mean, it's the stuff of like Guinness Book Records, right?

Deehan: He's not quite the longest serving. But you're right, it's his eighth term, he was first elected in 1994. He's already got 28 years in office, so this would push him to 32 years in office.

Galvin is definitely an old school figure up here on Beacon Hill. He's very well known. He's very recognizable. He's pushing right now and saying that “I have this record of success.” He's coming off of quite a few record turnout elections for both president and off years. So, if election turnout and access to the ballot is something to be measured, Galvin's got a pretty good case for saying that he's improved every single time.

Santoro: Few have been there longer than you, and he's one of them. Let's talk about who else is in the running here. Tanisha Sullivan announced her run last week.

Deehan: She's the president of the Boston branch of the NAACP. And so she's really running from an activist perspective. She's running to push the message that Massachusetts should be even more open to voting, especially for communities of color and marginalized communities who haven't had the access to the ballot traditionally or contemporarily as much as other communities have.

And she really wants to make Massachusetts a real example for the rest of the country to show off, you know, blue Massachusetts being perhaps the most open, the most accessible in the face of other states that are going in the other direction, cracking down on voting and things like that. She is bringing that enthusiasm. And from a national perspective, I wouldn't be surprised if you saw her have a very high national profile as secretary of state, if she were to get elected.

On the Republican side is another African American woman, Rayla Campbell, who was the write-in candidate against Ayanna Pressley in 2020. Campbell has been affiliated with Donald Trump's campaigns in the past. She's tweeted about vaccinations and skepticism. She's compared vaccine mandates to authoritarian regimes and things like that. But if you look at her website and her campaign platform so far, it's very much towards the middle of what the secretary of state does. She does have plans for the securities and corporate officer role that the secretary plays in that she's going to go after vote security, the kind of more conservative angle when it comes to how elections are run here. So we don't really know what kind of campaign [she’ll run], whether it's going to be like a full Trump campaign or something a little more targeted to what this election is.

Santoro: Well, it's certainly going to be an interesting race to watch. And of course, our esteemed governor gives his final state of the state address tonight.

Deehan: He does. It will be his last one. I think it's going to take you by surprise, "oh yeah, he's not running again." It's going to be at the Hynes Convention Center, not in the House chamber like it usually is. He actually gave it from his office, via Zoom last year. So this is a little bit back to normal.

I asked Baker what we could expect. And he said that it'll be a lot about how well he works with the Legislature. I think it's going to be an awful lot of victory lap type speechifying, if you can sit through that — what he's accomplished, what he's done as far as things that are new, that he might want to get done in these last few months of his term in office. He definitely said that mental health was something that's on his list. That's something that the Senate president agrees with him in a lot of ways.