Forty-three-year-old Maura Healey, a small-town girl from Boston's North Shore who won a scholarship to Harvard and went on — improbably — to play professional basketball in Europe, clinched the Democratic nomination Tuesday night for Massachusetts Attorney General.
It was a virtual women’s sweep, but with 62 percent of the vote, Healey’s victory was the biggest, trumping the status quo — which was consonant with her campaign’s message all along.
“The attorney general is the people’s lawyer,” Healey said in her victory speech. “And the people’s lawyer fights for all of us, from the homeowner facing foreclosure, to the student bullied in school, to the worker cheated out of her wages. The attorney general is there to fight for us.”
Like U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Healey was unabashedly populist.
“Do we want an attorney general who will end gun violence in our neighborhoods?" she asked the crowd. "Do we want an attorney general who will stand up to predatory corporate practices? Do we want an AG who will fight for a woman’s access to healthcare? Then we all need to work together.”
And she was personal.
“You all believed in this campaign and we built it together, from the first drive to Longmeadow, to the Democratic convention in Worcester, to all the polling places across the state tonight, you were there and you did it,” she said. “Because you knew that this was a fight that mattered to everyone.”
At the victory party, political veterans said they had to remind themselves that this was Healey’s first campaign, though she nodded to her more seasoned colleagues for showing her how it's done.
“To those elected leaders who took a chance and came on board on an unlikely campaign, I say thank you — thank you for showing me the way, showing me how this gets done and for sticking your necks out,” Healey said.
For many months, Healey, who is gay and served in the attorney general’s office, was viewed by many political pros as an outlier, a long shot — Certainly not in the same league her opponent, Warren Tolman, a former state senator who had run statewide before. Tolman won endorsements from Gov. Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh.
In the end, those endorsements could not staunch Healey’s very steady rise. And on Tuesday night, it sounded as if Tolman would return to his private law practice.
“When I talked to the governor an hour or so ago, and he told me, ‘You know Warren, often what happen in these situations is another door opens up and you have another opportunity to make an impact doing something else,'" Tolman said in a concession speech. “And well, it won’t be elected office for me, but I’m blessed to have a wonderful family and friends who went to the wall for me.”
And as the door to the attorney general’s office closes for Tolman, it may be wide open for Healey, who faces Republican nominee Jeff Miller in November.
