So far, State Police scandal is not a roadblock for Charlie Baker

Governor Charlie Baker and State Police Colonel Kerry Gilpin. Steven Senne/Associated Press

As scandals go, the latest questions swirling around the Massachusetts State Police over fraudulent overtime pay are hardly the stuff that takes down a governor, especially one who is already the nation’s most popular.

That said, political analysts say Republican Governor Charlie Baker handled the most serious controversy yet of his administration almost perfectly: first expressing shock and then announcing concrete plans of action — all without picking a fight.

There have been smaller scandals and tough questions before for Baker during his three years in office. Headlines blared last month that a Baker Cabinet member gave six-figure state jobs to his Wellesley country club buddies. There are also the systemic issues at the Department of Children and Families and, of course, the MBTA.

Unlike those issues, the State Police scandal had the potential to snowball if Baker hadn’t acted as he did. Attorney General Maura Healey, a Democrat, jumped on the governor to act. Baker’s three virtually unknown Democratic challengers begin to think they had an issue to jumpstart their campaigns. (Though, notably, the Democratic Governors Association never issued a press release on the issue.)

Just weeks after a series of Globe stories about trooper pay, Baker held a press conference with State Police Colonel Kerry Gilpin. She announced the agency would eliminate the most troublesome Troop E unit and install GPS monitoring to ensure that troopers who claim to be working overtime actually are doing so. Baker said he agreed with all of it.

“The way he even announced it was particularly smart,” said Erin O’Brien, who chairs the political science department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “He didn’t come into this suggesting he was taking on the police, but that he was actually backing up what the police said they wanted to do. He looked like the executive taking strong action as a Mr. Fix-it.”

However, it should be noted, it’s unclear if or when these strong-sounding actions will be implemented. A Globe story Wednesday noted that GPS monitoring might take longer than first thought to implement. Even then, it is an item that must be negotiated with the State Police union, along with requiring body cameras, another Gilpin initiative.

Baker’s argument that he would be a nonideological manager was key to his successful run for office in 2014. Anything that cracks his veneer of competency could be a particularly powerful weapon for his political opponents.

Yet Jennifer Duffy, who has tracked gubernatorial politics for years at the Cook Political Report, says even if voters began to believe that Baker were somehow a bad manager, he still has a lot of political buffer. A WBUR poll last month showed Baker with a 66 percent approval rating among Massachusetts voters. Only 14 percent did not approve of his job performance. He has also raised a record amount of money for reelection.

Generally speaking, Duffy said, the moment when governors fall steeply from grace is when a scandal is directly related to the governor personally — either over ethics or a sex scandal — or when a governor bungles the response to a natural disaster.

“Even had Baker not responded so quickly and strongly, the worst this particular matter would be is just annoying, but not debilitating,” Duffy said.

Still, there is the question about how much credit Baker really deserves. The decision to punish a bad State Police unit that might have been cheating taxpayers is sort of a no-brainer.

“I am not sure how much credit he will get for these reforms or how he handled it, but the key here also is that it is hard to see how he gets blamed for the problems that happened under his watch,” O’Brien said. “He finds a way to navigate with the fewest land mines.”