Out of curiousity, I looked up the voter registration statistics for the fifth district from the Secretary of State's office and from the Wayland town clerk (to make sure to include only the three precincts of Wayland that are actually in the fifth district). I keep hearing about how MA-05 is more conservative than the rest of Massachusetts, and I wanted to see if this translated into more registered Republicans than other areas of the state. Here are the party breakdowns:
| Party | MA-05 | State |
| Democratic | 33.30% | 36.91% |
| Republican | 13.51% | 12.50% |
| Unenrolled | 52.41% | 49.79% |
From this, it looks like the fifth district is a little more independent than Massachusetts as a whole, but there are still more than twice as many Democrats as Republicans. While it is majority unenrolled, I wonder how much of a factor that will play in a special election. As I've noted previously, voters not enrolled in a party are the least likely to make it out to the polls. This, I imagine will be especially true in this race, given that it is a special election. That will make the job of any Republican candidate very difficult, because they must get the independent voters to turn out, and turn out to vote for the GOP.
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