The Last Two Open Seats

In advance of the impending special election for Marty Meehan's Congressional seat in the 5th district and prompted by Susan M's prediction that only four candidates will survive until election day, I thought I'd take a closer look at the two most recent elections to open Congressional seats in Massachusetts. The most recent, as the press keeps reminding us, was in 2001 -- on 9/11, actually -- with a special election to replace the late Congressman Joe Moakley. Then state Senator Stephen Lynch (D-South Boston) was the winner of that election with a total of 39% of the vote. That year was a battle of sitting state Senators, with Lynch besting a field that consisted of then-Senator Cheryl Ann Jaques and current Senators Brian Joyce (D-Milton) and Mark Pacheco (D-Taunton) and a few other minor candidates for a total of seven candidates on the primary ballot. Here are the final results of that primary:

Candidate	Votes	Percent	Hometown
Stephen Lynch	44,905	39.44%	Boston
Cheryl Ann Jacques	32,933	28.93%	Needham
Brian Joyce	16,818	14.77%	Milton
Mark Pacheco	15,009	13.18%	Taunton
William Sinnott	3,110	2.73%	Boston
John Taylor	767	0.67%	Boston
William Ferguson	253	0.22%	Milton
All Others	54	0.05%

The community that was the largest part of this district was, obviously, Boston, and Lynch won the election mainly because he won Boston convincingly, with 55% of the Boston vote. His closest competitor in the Hub was Jacques, who only mustered 30% of Boston. Of course, there were other factors to Lynch's win, but in this case, the crowded field was an advantage for the candidate from the largest community.

The 1998 election to fill Joe Kennedy's seat in the then 8th district was slightly different as it was a regularly scheduled election, and not a special election. As such, no sitting member of the legislature was willing to risk their seat to run. Even so, the 2001 special primary garnered more votes than the 1998 primary, which I did not expect. This election featured two former Reps, two Boston City Councilors, a former state Senator, a sitting and a former mayor, and three other candidates for a total of ten. Here are the results of that election:

Candidate	Votes	Percent	Hometown
Michael Capuano	19,446	22.88%	Somerville
Ray Flynn	14,839	17.46%	Boston
George Bachrach	12,157	14.30%	Watertown
John O'Connor	11,092	13.05%	Cambridge
Marjorie Clapprood	10,446	12.29%	Watertown
Chris Gabrieli	5,740	6.75%	Boston
Charles Yancey	4,437	5.22%	Boston
Susan Tracy	2,858	3.36%	Boston
Thomas Keane	2,150	2.53%	Boston
Alex Rodriguez	1,802	2.12%	Boston
All Others	21	0.02%

Note that Current Congressman Mike Capuano won this election with less than 23% of the vote. That low bar should be encouraging to aspiring candidates in this year's election. In any case, in the 1998 election, the largest communities were split -- former Mayor Ray Flynn won Boston with only 24% of the Boston vote and former state Senator George Bachrach won Cambridge with only 23% of that city's vote. Contrast that with Capuano, who destroyed the competition in Somerville, winning it with 55% of the vote there.

What I had been wondering was whether it was a foregone conclusion that one of the candidates from Lowell, the fifth district's largest community would win the election. From the results of the past two open seat elections, that does not necessarily have to be the case. In 2001, the vote from the largest community in the district did not split, and the candidate from that community won the election. In 1998, the opposite happened, and the votes from the two largest communities split among several candidates, and the candidate who dominated one of the smaller communities won. My feeling is that this year's race to replace Marty Meehan will be more similar to the 1998 election than the 2001 special election. This year there promises to be two candidates from Lowell who have the potential to split that city's vote, former Mayor and current city councilor Eileen Donoghue and the widow of former Senator Paul Tsongas, Niki Tsongas.

This suggests to me a slight advantage to Representative Barry Finegold (D-Andover), who represents part of Lawrence, the second largest community in the district. If (and this is a big if) Finegold can win Lawrence convincingly and the Lowell vote is split between two or more candidates, he might be able to clear the low threshold needed to win such a crowded race. Given that Finegold only represents four precincts in Lawrence, however, it seems unlikely that he'd be able to win that city by the margins necessary.

Lynch and Capuano Talk About Hearings

Massachusetts Congressmen Mike Capuano and Stephen Lynch were both on Greater Boston with Emily Rooney tonight talking about the Iraq war. In case WGBH doesn't archive the conversation on the web, or you can't catch the rebroadcast, here's a portion of the interview that I think underscores the need to take back the House in 2006 if we ever hope to get to the bottom of how the administration got the pre-war intelligence so wrong. I've bolded the portions I think are important.

Congressman Stephen Lynch: Now we're finding out that maybe the president, or maybe someone in the administration actually did cook the evidence, and if Cheney has a problem with people doubting whether that was the case, they should have hearings. We've had five requests, the Government Reform Committee, to have a full investigation and open hearings on whether the intelligence was cooked, whether it was falsified and delivered to Congress. They've refused to allow us to have those hearings on five separate occasions. This is the same Republican leadership that spent 140 hours in hearings and testimony and interrogatories and taking evidence on whether President Clinton violated his Christmas Card privileges.

Emily Rooney: Do you think this might be the end result, though, of [the Fitzgerald investigation?] Might that go to the next level?

SL: We think so.

Congressman Michael Capuano: I hope he's right. I think not. Not until the House changes, because to have House hearings it has to come from leadership. If it's going to be hearings from the outside, that's a different story.

SL: Well, you can also go into executive session, where the press is not included. But members of Congress who are charged with this oversight can have those answers directly from the individuals involved. They're blocking us at every turn.

MC: That has to be approved by the majority, by the leadership. And the leadership right now is run by the Republicans. I don't know, but I don't think they're ever going to let the President be investigated on this issue as long as they run the House.

ER: Why is this so partisan? Why can't everybody look at this the same way and say if we had bad data -- no one's saying, well some people are, that it's intentional, that this evidence was gathered intentionally to drag us into a war. No one really believes that we wanted to go over there and do this.

MC: Don't say no one. <laughs>

ER: Well, that's conspiratorial to think that you would just want to do that without good evidence, so why not do an investigation?

MC: I happen to believe that there are two ways to lie. There is a lie of commission, where you overtly lie. There is another lie of omission, by not telling you the full truth. I happen to believe -- now again, I would love to get more evidence, but as I stand here today without having the full evidence, I suspect that we had a lie of omission. So I think it's pretty serious stuff. I would love to have hearings on this. And for the sake of America, I wouldn't mind being proven wrong. But we're not going to get those hearings. I don't think we're going to get those hearings either in executive session or in public. I hope I'm wrong. I hope that next week we go back or two weeks from now and all of a sudden the Republican leadership says "You know what, we're going have those hearings and we're going to open this up and we're going to do this right." If that happens, then I'll let the chips fall where they may.

SL: I think there's a benefit in just making clear to the American people that we have not had these hearings. We haven't asked these questions, so that if they want to continue to obstruct that -- and I think the American people are owed an answer on this -- if we just keep pushing on this... I think it's a disgrace that it hasn't happened already, but I think that just because they're going to say no it doesn't stand that we shouldn't ask those hard questions.

On that note, last week, I saw Al Franken speak in Cambridge, and he suggested that the Democrats' 2006 motto should be "Subpoena Power". I think there's something to that, particularly in terms of getting out the Democratic base, and convincing Independents that it's the Republicans who are obstructing investigations, preferring to protect the President and their buddies rather than trying to find out the facts about our intelligence failures. Even Rumsfeld has admitted that the pre-war intelligence was wrong, and if Democrats can convince the public that it's worthwhile to try to figure out why, they may get a chance at taking back the House or the Senate next year.

Why do Marty Meehan and John Tierney Hate the Internet?

I've been meaning to post about H.R. 4194, the Orwellian-named "Internet Anti-Corruption and Free Speech Protection Act of 2005" sponsored by Chris Shays (R-Ct) and Marty Meehan (D-Lowell), for a while now, but Lynne did such a good job last week that I've put it off. Check out her post, which in turn points to this post at DailyKos.com.

While the Shays-Meehan bill would protect individuals who have blogs from having to report to the FEC under campaign finance law, it would not protect group blogs, such as DailyKos.com, MyDD.com, or any other group blog that spent or took in more than $1000 in a calendar year. The $1000 includes server space and bandwidth costs, which can easily exceed that much over the course of a year for a popular website. What does that mean for the blogosphere? It means that while Bill O'Reilly can stump for any candidate he wants on his TV or radio shows, any group blog or other web endeavor (a wiki, podcast, or mailing list, for example) that spends or takes in more than $83 a month could not do so without violating election law unless they register as a political committee.

Proponents of the proposed measures fear that a company, for example, could start up a blog attacking or supporting a candidate, and avoid campaign finance regulations altogether. They worry that without regulation, groups could spend unlimited amounts on Internet ads. If it's ads you're worried about, though, I think there's a limit to how much you can spend on Internet advertising before you run into diminishing returns. Plus, ads on the Internet generally require people to choose to click on them to see the detailed content. That's not true of TV ads that are pushed out onto viewers. That said, there's a difference between web ads and weblogs -- something that people unfamiliar with the medium may not understand. An advertisement has a measurable value -- the amount one charges to put it on the web. What is the value of a blog post? How would you classify it as an in-kind contribution?

Meehan's colleague, Congressman John Tierney (D-Salem), is a cosponsor on H.R. 4194. Of all of the Massachusetts Congressmen, only Mike Capuano (D-Somerville) cast a vote in favor of H.R. 1606 -- the bill which would have codified the FEC rules the Internet operated under during the 2004 campaign cycle. That bill failed, largely due to the efforts of Shays, Meehan and campaign finance groups that have good intentions, but don't necessarily understand the consequences of regulating speech on the Internet. I would hope that the rest of our Congressmen would either reject their new efforts or amend them so that at least Internet commentators get the same protections as commentators in the traditional media.

Somebody Else

Last month I speculated that if "somebody else" was still winning the polls for the Democratic gubernatorial primary, we would see another candidate jump in. Well, according to the Boston Globe, Congressman Mike Capuano may be that somebody else. This comes despite his claim in January that he wasn't interested. The Congressman has not been impressed with any of the candidates that have surfaced so far.

"Deval Patrick, I think, is still new," Capuano said. "I don't know whether he can do this or not; too early to tell. Billy Galvin -- is he running? I don't know."

Of Reilly, Capuano said, "I think it's important you have an opinion. That's why Democrats lose across the board. That was one of the problems with John Kerry when he ran. I think that's one of the attractions of George Bush. He appears to stand for certain things, and he does stand for certain things. I give him credit for that."

Capuano would instantly become the most formidable challenger to Attorney General Tom Reilly, the current frontrunner. He had $420k in the bank as of March, and spent nearly a million dollars last campaign cycle to scare away any challengers. The danger for him, of course, is that he and Patrick may split the progressive vote allowing Reilly or Galvin to win with a small plurality. Still, Capuano can credibly take the mantle of progressive Beacon Hill outsider with political experience, combining the most appealing traits of all three other candidates. If he enters the race, I expect him to get a lot of support rather quickly at the expense of Patrick and Reilly.

If Capuano does run for governor, expect a knock-down drag-out fight for his Congressional seat. Perhaps Jarrett Barrios will give up his quixotic quest for the Middlesex County DA.

Blue Mass Group has more.