"Newcomer Gabriel Gomez to face off against veteran Edward Markey" by Michael Levenson and Frank Phillips | Globe Staff, May 01, 2013
Gabriel E. Gomez, a businessman making his first run for higher office, won the Republican senatorial primary Tuesday, scoring an upset victory that has the potential to draw major national interest as he prepares to face Edward J. Markey, a veteran congressman who rolled to a win in the Democratic contest.
Related: Sunday Globe Specials: Globe Asks Why Bother Voting?
Gomez, a 47-year-old private equity investor from Cohasset, used his fundraising advantage to soundly defeat Michael J. Sullivan, a former state and federal prosecutor considered the front-runner for the GOP nomination. Daniel B. Winslow, a state representative and former district court judge, ran a distant third.
Markey, 66, the choice of the Democratic establishment who has been in the House for 36 years, built on his strong support in the party’s base of progressive activists, rolling up wide margins in liberal communities to defeat US Representative Stephen F. Lynch, who courted conservative Democrats and independents....
Gomez’s come-from-behind victory creates a major shift in what had been a sleepy campaign to replace John F. Kerry, even though the race is one of several over the next two years that may determine control of the US Senate.
With his unexpected victory, Gomez, the son of Colombian immigrants and a former Navy SEAL, now promises to draw strong interest from national Republicans who are looking to rebrand the party as more inclusive of Latinos after a disastrous showing with minorities in last year’s presidential election.
“Gomez’s upset victory suddenly changes the dynamics of the general election significantly,’’ said Lou DiNatale, a veteran Democratic strategist, noting that Democrats had hoped to face Sullivan, whose conservative positions would enable the party to paint him as out of step with the broader electorate. The state party had targeted Sullivan with attacks early in the primary campaign.
Gomez, a social moderate and fiscal conservative, will present a fresh public face for the Republican Party, in sharp contrast to Markey, who is steeped in national battles over gun control, climate change, and abortion rights.
Senior Republicans said Gomez’s victory will ignite a keen interest from the Washington media and put heavy pressure on GOP fund-raisers to pour money into his campaign.
“Gabriel showed today that he has what it takes to do one of the most important things, and that’s to inspire people,” said National Republican Committeeman Ron Kaufman.
But some analysts said his lack of experience as a candidate could be a major vulnerability in a heated campaign.
His only prior run for elective office was an unsuccessful bid for Cohasset selectman.
In January, he wrote to Governor Deval Patrick, asking to be appointed interim senator and pledging to support President Obama’s policies on gun control and immigration. Those positions may have played well in a general election but he renounced those stances to appeal to conservatives in the Republican primary.
“On paper, he may be very attractive,’’ said Tad Devine, a Washington-based Democratic consultant. “But he may be in a role he can’t handle. Like a lot of new candidates, they suddenly burst on to the stage and then quickly fall off the stage.’’
Republican insiders sensed Sullivan’s early lead in the race was eroding over the last week. Gomez, with his personal fortune and ties to the financial world, was able to raise $1.2 million, making him the only Republican with a significant television ad campaign, an advantage that may have proved crucial in helping him to victory.
Several GOP analysts said Sullivan also lost some of the enthusiasm of the social conservatives and Tea Party activists that made up his base of support by ignoring them during the campaign.
Tuesday’s voting ended a truncated three-month campaign to fill the seat that Kerry left in January.
The race was overshadowed by snowstorms and more dire news, including the Boston Marathon bombings just two weeks before the primary.
From the beginning, Markey was the heavy favorite. He was backed by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which controls much of the party’s national fund-raising, and endorsed by senior members of the party in Washington and Massachusetts, including Kerry, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy, and Attorney General Martha Coakley.
Drawing on the fund-raising connections he built over 36 years in Congress, Markey raised $4.8 million in the first three months of the year, compared with Lynch’s $1.5 million.
He exploited Lynch’s opposition to Obama’s health care law to blunt his rival’s appeal to core Democratic voters.
He also succeeded in picking up enough support from unions to prevent the AFL-CIO, the state’s umbrella labor group, from uniting around Lynch, a former labor leader and ironworker who was counting on a groundswell of support by labor activists.
Lynch embraced his underdog status and lambasted Markey’s establishment support in an attempt to rally blue-collar voters, conservative Democrats, and independents. Calling Markey “an insulated person” more connected to Washington than to the struggles of average families in Massachusetts, he spoke frequently, of the 18 years he spent as an ironworker and of his childhood in the Old Colony housing project in South Boston.
What was cut:
But beyond the focus of his biography, he struggled to find policy issues that he could use to attack Markey. During several early debates, he was often on the defensive, not only over his opposition to the health care law but also for his history of opposition to abortion rights and gay rights. After the Marathon bombings, he seized the offensive and tried to paint Markey as soft on terrorism. But with the public attention largely focused on the bombings and the investigation, that message never broke through with the broader electorate.
The Republican race took shape late, after Scott Brown surprised many in the political world by announcing that he would not run.
What was added:
The party’s two nominees, appearing at their victory parties, immediately hit the themes that are expected to dominate the sprint to the June 25 general election.
Gomez, speaking to a small crowd at the Red Lion Inn in Cohasset, mocked Markey as a creature from the era of 8-track tapes who was first elected to Congress in 1976, when Gomez was still playing Little League.
“If you are looking for an independent voice, a new kind of Republican, take a look at our campaign,” he declared.
Markey, joined by Senator Elizabeth Warren and other senior Democrats, struck back at the Omni Parker House. He called on Gomez to abide by the pledge that Scott Brown signed in his race against Warren to keep special interests out of the campaign. Markey and Lynch signed a similar pledge in their primary fight.
“The people of Massachusetts want this to be a special place,” he said. “I don’t think they want Gabriel Gomez or anyone else bringing in this special interest, undisclosed, unlimited money from around the rest of our country and polluting the politics of Massachusetts.”
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"Democrats fear reliving 2010 race that elected Brown" by Jim O’Sullivan | Globe Staff, May 01, 2013
Republican Senate nominee Gabriel E. Gomez’s runaway victory in Tuesday’s primary delivers an unwelcome jolt to Massachusetts Democrats, with the dynamics of the upcoming general election race offering an unnerving comparison to the 2010 Senate election that still haunts many of them.
Indeed, on paper, the 47-year-old Gomez can lay claim to many of the traits that helped propel Scott Brown into the US Senate: youthful-looking, camera-friendly, a military background, and barely a blip on the Democrats’ radar just months before winning the primary. Unlike Brown, he has no political experience, but his resume is arguably more muscular, with a stint in private equity and service as a US Navy SEAL.
That is stacked against the Democratic nominee, US Representative Edward J. Markey, who is 66 years old, has served in Congress since 1977, and can boast virtually no employment experience outside elected office.
The specter of a replay of 2010, when the prohibitive favorite, Martha Coakley, ran what analysts called an aloof campaign and coughed up the late Edward M. Kennedy’s US Senate seat to the long-shot Brown, is too obvious for Democrats to ignore.
Related: Selecting a Senator: What Happened to the Coakley Campaign?
Who Bought Brown's Election?
The usual crew.
Gomez has at times seemed green on the stump and tripped through a few missteps early in the campaign. But privately, Democrats say they would have vastly preferred facing Michael J. Sullivan, a former US attorney, who had led in public polling, or state Representative Daniel B. Winslow, who had trailed both his rivals.
Markey, of course, starts the general election with some significant advantages over Gomez. There are more than three times as many registered Democrats as Republicans in Massachusetts, according to state figures current through last October. But the majority of Bay State voters, nearly 53 percent, are unenrolled.
Gomez gives Republicans two things the national party needs. He is a high-profile Latino candidate as the party is trying to make up for its deficit among Latino voters, a gap vividly on display in President Obama’s victory last November. And he has a shot at prying from Democrats a Senate seat they have held since Democratic challenger Paul Tsongas beat incumbent Republican Edward Brooke in 1978.
“He’s a Republican, Hispanic, who comes across as moderate,” said James Innocenzi, a Virginia-based Republican strategist. “And right now the party is going after every Hispanic they can, realizing what happened in the presidential. He could emerge as a sort of marquee Hispanic candidate.”
Innocenzi added: “If it’s competitive, money will show up out of nowhere. If the general election is competitive, Republicans see a chance to steal a seat, and you could see a lot of money coming into Boston.”
Republicans wasted no time positioning Gomez as a natural heir to Brown’s upset legacy.
“You’re hitting all sevens in the slot machine once again,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican public affairs specialist in Washington, D.C. “This time you have a Hispanic Republican who has the potential for staying power in Massachusetts. Brown won, and lost his election. [Gomez] would have the potential to stick around for longer.”
Republicans running in Massachusetts face the perennial problem of being married in voters’ minds to the more conservative members of their national party. During the campaign leading up to his 2010 US Senate election, Brown, then a state senator, ducked that problem, his campaign famously asking the National Republican Senatorial Committee to keep a low profile in the state. At the same time, Brown harnessed grass-roots excitement that allowed him to flood his campaign coffers with contributions from across the country.
Last year, Brown had a harder time eluding the national GOP brand in his duel with Senator Elizabeth Warren. Warren waited until relatively late in the race to try to nationalize the race, her campaign eager to emphasize her own life story. But, in their first debate, she leveled Brown with the charge that empowering a Senate Republican majority could place Senator James Inhofe, who has derided climate change as a “hoax,” in charge of the Committee on Environment and Public Works.
Gomez’s efforts during the primary to appeal to core Republican voters offer Markey a clear opening. In a January letter to Governor Deval Patrick requesting consideration for an interim appointment to Kerry’s seat, Gomez indicated he would support President Obama on gun control. But after that letter became public in March, Gomez said he would have backed a failed Senate bill expanding firearm sale background checks but would not support banning assault weapons.
In the same letter, Gomez, the son of Colombian immigrants, said he would back Obama on immigration reform, a stance used against him by his primary opponents but one that could ultimately lend him credibility as a bridge-builder and could prove useful in the general election campaign.
The letter as a whole, which both Sullivan and Winslow used as a cudgel against Gomez, could blunt Democratic efforts to portray him as hard right in the general election.
Along with gun control and immigration, the state’s next US senator will probably face votes on the budget showdown between Obama and Republicans, foreign policy questions like how to respond to strife in Syria, and national security, which surged to the fore in the campaign’s closing weeks after the Boston Marathon bombings.
The Markey campaign started in on Gomez Tuesday night, saying that the GOP primary did not sufficiently vet him as a candidate and that his nuanced position on abortion would turn off Bay State independents....
Just bringing that issue up turns me off.
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"Markey, Gomez each have room to grow in Mass. Senate race" May 01, 2013
The Senate contest between US Representative Ed Markey and businessman Gabriel Gomez, who won their parties’ nominations last night, has one obvious fault line: experience. Markey has so much — almost 37 years in Congress — that some voters seemed, fairly or not, to be yearning for a fresher option. Gomez certainly looks fresh; his only political experience was an unsuccessful, little-publicized run for Cohasset selectman a decade ago.
What propelled Gomez to victory in the Republican primary Tuesday, along with a major spending advantage, was his resume. A former Navy SEAL turned private equity millionaire, Gomez is a son-of-immigrants success story who can credibly claim to speak for a new breed of Massachusetts voter. He deserves a chance to make that case.
Markey can’t make that claim, and would be foolish to try. Rather, he must persuade Massachusetts voters, new and old, that his record of legislative accomplishments will translate to the Senate and pay off in tangible ways for Bay State voters. The next senator will fill a year and a half of John Kerry’s remaining term — a period of time that would have marked Kerry’s 30th year in the chamber. When combined with the 47 years of seniority lost upon the death of Senator Edward Kennedy in 2009, Massachusetts is suddenly without more than three-quarters of a century of experience in the US Senate.
How valuable is such experience? Markey shouldn’t assume that voters will gravitate toward him simply because he has nearly four decades in Washington behind him. He needs to chart a legislative game plan to turn his clout into action. Along the way, he needs to shake off the rust that was evident in his debate performances against his surprisingly strong primary challenger, Stephen Lynch; Markey’s competence was evident, but his spirit seemed to be lacking.
For most voters, Gomez is a blank slate. In the primary, he campaigned as a centrist, eager to work with President Obama. But he never claimed any particular cause as his own, and he sometimes seemed to be making up his mind on issues as he went along. A kind of affable dilettantism served Scott Brown well in his special election against a long-serving Democrat; it also helped doom his reelection campaign last November. Gomez isn’t likely to push the Brown comparison too far. But he should keep in mind that Brown, at a similar stage in his career, had 12 years as a state representative and state senator under his belt.
As a politician, the 47-year-old Gomez has to grow up fast. And Ed Markey has to realize that, even at age 66, politicians have to show themselves to be capable of growth.
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"Mass. Republicans bet on a fresh face with Gabriel Gomez" by Scot Lehigh | Globe Columnist, May 01, 2013
Talk about your contrary impulses! Yesterday Massachusetts Republicans bet on the excitement of biography over the value of experience, putting a fresh new face in a serious place. Gabriel Gomez, whose only previous electoral outing was an unsuccessful race for Cohasset selectman, is now the GOP’s US Senate nominee.
The Democrats did just the opposite. Ed Markey is about as many decades removed as one can be from fresh-faced-ness and still be thought vital enough to serve a term or two in the US Senate. The long-time congressman ran as a reliable liberal stalwart who would fight the good progressive fights and push ahead on the issues that energize the Democratic base.
Gomez’s strong victory is particularly impressive because it came over two solid candidates. Former US attorney Michael Sullivan was better known, and with a decent geographical base. State Representative Dan Winslow was much better versed on the issues.
Neither advantage mattered when matched against Gomez’s appealing story: A Latino mega-achiever who, after military service as a Navy pilot and SEAL, went on to private-sector success.
On the Democratic side, a biographical message didn’t pay similar dividends for Stephen Lynch. His campaign was based on the notion that a guy who had pulled himself up by his ironworker’s bootstraps was best able to represent the average person in the Senate. Unfortunately for Lynch, average Democratic primary voters found themselves unconvinced of that proposition.
And so the general election phase of this Senate special starts. Markey begins as a plodding but experienced front-runner, an accomplished legislator, but one who fairly personifies the notion of Washington insider.
Gomez starts as the charismatic political newcomer, a candidate who will attract considerable curiosity and interest — but who will also have to survive the pitfalls that so often claim a novice who ventures out on the political high-wire.
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"Winslow finds that media endorsements aren’t a game changer" by Jeff Jacoby | Globe Columnist, May 01, 2013
If newspaper endorsements decided elections, Dan Winslow would have romped to victory in yesterday’s Republican US Senate primary. Instead he came in last. Gabriel Gomez cruised to an easy win, and will be the party’s nominee in the June 25 special election to succeed John Kerry.
Six Massachusetts dailies had made endorsements in the GOP primary, and all six — The Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Lowell Sun, Fitchburg Sentinel, Eagle Tribune, and Springfield Republican — had come out for Winslow. That was a “political grand slam,” crowed Winslow’s campaign. It was a “game changer.”
Apparently voters were working from a different playbook.
Political candidates avidly pursue media endorsements and proudly trumpet those they land. But Winslow’s fate is a reminder that endorsements generally matter a lot less to voters than they do to the politicians who crave them. How many voters need their newspaper editorial board to tell them what their opinion should be, especially in the Internet age, when citizens can access political news, analysis, and advocacy from an almost limitless array of sources?
Winslow is intelligent, inventive, and interesting; it’s easy to understand his appeal to those who write political endorsements. But opinions expressed on the editorial pages alienate readers, too. According to Larry Powell, an expert in political communications at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, newspaper endorsements often hurt the intended beneficiaries, reducing their support in the polls by as much as 3 percent.
Traditions die hard in journalism, but political endorsements are one tradition that ought to be laid to rest. When a newspaper takes sides in an election, it can’t help but provoke some readers into questioning its credibility. That wouldn’t be a price worth paying even if endorsements could guarantee victory. As yesterday’s results once again make clear, they can’t.
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"Fatigued voters turn out in low numbers" by Peter Schworm | Globe Staff, May 01, 2013
Across the state, vote turnout for the US Senate primary was consistently low, a display of disinterest that caught even veteran election officials by surprise.
“It’s the lowest I can remember,” said Gladys Oyola, election commissioner in Springfield. “If we break the double-digit mark, I’d be stunned.”
Statewide figures were not available for the special election, but many towns and cities reported turnout well below 15 percent, and in some cases far lower.
If it's already well below how much lower can it get?
In Boston, 17.3 percent of voters cast ballots, according to the city’s website. By contrast, nearly 19 percent of Boston voters turned out for another special election primary in 2009, when Scott Brown and Martha Coakley scored victories in a US Senate contest.
Voters and election officials offered a range of reasons so many voters stayed home. The unusual timing of the spring election caught many people off guard, particularly after a campaign that struggled to capture public attention. After the Boston Marathon bombings, the election fell further off the public radar.
“It sucked all the news out,” said Joe Kaplan of the Election Commission in Lowell....
But most said that with the state holding its third Senate election within four years, plus a presidential race, voters were just worn out.
“There’s been one election after another,” said Maria Tomasia, who heads up the Elections Board in New Bedford. “I think it’s a little too much.”
Just 7 percent of registered voters in that coastal city would cast ballots, she estimated. “It’s basically just the diehards.”
At elementary schools in Winchester, poll workers said that turnout reminded them of a recent town election, when many of the candidates ran unopposed.
In a democracy?
William F. Galvin, the Massachusetts secretary of state, estimated Tuesday afternoon that statewide turnout would wind up somewhere between 10 and 15 percent....
Galvin said several factors relegated the race to the back burner: a harsh winter, the announcement that Mayor Thomas M. Menino of Boston would not run, and most of all, the deadly bombings....
What does a harsh winter have to do with yesterday? Please!
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Also see: Boston mayoral candidates seek nomination signatures
