Sweating in the late-July heat, a small group of supporters of legislative candidate Evan MacKay gathered in Cambridge’s shady Franklin Street park, fanning themselves with election flyers listing MacKay’s progressive credentials.
They listened as MacKay explained that the campaign is attempting something exceedingly rare in Massachusetts: a challenge against a longtime Democratic incumbent, in this case state Representative Marjorie Decker. MacKay’s pledge: to fight for a transparent, accountable government in a state renowned as one of the least transparent in the nation. Too few voters are aware of the barriers to public records and meeting access that are routine on Beacon Hill, MacKay said.
“A lot of people don’t have consciousness of the state Legislature,” MacKay, a graduate student in sociology at Harvard, told the group before setting out to knock on doors in the neighborhood. “You will be their educator.”
As the Sept. 3 primary approaches, MacKay is just one of 13 Democrats this cycle attempting the exceptionally difficult feat of unseating an incumbent Massachusetts House lawmaker.
Incumbent House lawmakers are seeking reelection in 121 of the 142 districts where Democrats are nominated on the primary ballot; 108 of them face no challenger. The picture is similar though the numbers are much smaller on the Republican side. Of the 22 GOP House incumbents on the primary ballot, only two have challengers.
MacKay’s challenge is highlighting a prime source of the dysfunction and complacency many observers see on Beacon Hill: the singular lack of competition for political office in Massachusetts.
“With no chance of losing, with almost no chance of getting a primary challenger, with so many seats uncontested, you end up with one political party that’s sort of ossified in success and another political party that’s ossified in failure,” said John Cluverius, an associate professor of political science at University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Between 2002 and 2022, 79 percent of Democratic House primary races were uncontested, a Globe analysis of state election data shows. In the same period, just 25 Democratic House candidates have beaten an incumbent in their primary.
This year, just one House Democrat — state Representative Thomas Stanley of Waltham — will face both a primary challenger and, if he survives, a GOP opponent in November. (The November ballot also will feature an independent candidate who is competing for that seat.)
As an undergraduate at Harvard, MacKay watched bills important to progressives, such as those aimed at protecting immigrants and updating sex education in schools, stall without a clear reason why.
Campaigning door to door, MacKay, who uses they/them pronouns, emphasizes three main changes they want to see on Beacon Hill. First, the votes lawmakers make in committees, which play a big role in which legislation advances, should be public information; they often aren’t now. And votes on the floor are too often taken by voice, or otherwise not recorded. Also, legislative outcomes are commonly “predetermined by House and Senate leadership,” making it difficult to hold individual lawmakers accountable for their policy positions, MacKay said.
MacKay points to Decker’s lack of support for a 2022 referendum to make legislative committee votes public. The nonbinding ballot question asked voters whether House representatives should make the votes public, as the House only publishes the names of members that voted against bills in committee, along with an anonymous total of affirmative and withheld votes. Under the Senate’s rules, on the other hand, Senate committee votes are required to be recorded and published online on the Legislature’s website.
Decker said that while lawmakers “can do more” to make committee votes more available and easier to search, she herself is transparent.
“I support transparency,” Decker said. “My committee votes have always been available as a chair, and I work really hard to be transparent, accountable, and effective in my district.”
MacKay also focuses on the exemption state legislators enjoy from public records and open meetings laws, and on the fact that bills are often pushed to a vote little notice, giving the public and even their own colleagues scant time to review them.
And yet, voters, if they know about these things, seem to act as if they couldn’t be bothered.
Like most incumbents, Decker has faced little substantive competition before MacKay. After withdrawing in 2010 from a special election for an open Senate seat, Decker won her House race in 2012. Decker overcame two other Democrats in that primary; both ran against her in subsequent primaries, but neither gathered more than 300 votes.
She has never had an opponent in the general election, and her last primary challenge was six years ago, in 2018. She also has twice as much cash on hand as MacKay, a metric that often — but not always — correlates to electoral success.
Decker told the Globe in a recent interview that, despite her long incumbency, she does not take her role for granted. Addressing MacKay’s claims that she is out of touch with her district, she said she puts out a frequent newsletter to constituents and holds office hours on Zoom and in person. She said that, despite MacKay’s criticism, she believes her constituents reelect her because they believe in her work.
“I am in our district 24/7,” she said. “I understand the challenges my constituents face because I face them too.”
In a trifold mailer sent to voters the week before early voting began, Decker explained that she voluntarily makes her committee votes public, supports voting reforms, and is “held accountable” by voters. In the mailer, she listed a number of priorities she was able to pass during legislative sessions, including bills increasing cash assistance to poor families, the elderly, and residents with disabilities; banning forever chemicals in firefighter gear; and getting money in the budget for nonprofits in her district.
“Nobody who knows me ever wonders where I stand on an issue,” the Cambridge Democrat told the Globe. “This job is not about one legislative cycle. I work very, very hard in this job.”
Among the volunteers drawn to the MacKay canvassing event in the park were longtime Cambridge residents Carolyn Fuller and her husband, Bill McAvinney. The two are passionate about pedestrian and cyclist safety, and fear their concerns are not being taken seriously by Decker.
Fuller, 76, said she has supported Decker since the representative ran for Cambridge City Council, but the recent inaction in the Legislature had them looking for alternatives.
“When a rep loses touch with her constituents or his constituents, it’s time,” she said. “I saw Marjorie in the last year . . . she was yelling at me about how inconvenient the bike lanes were for her and her family. And I just got really tired of it, especially after we’ve had to see bicyclists die on our streets.”
Decker said the sentiment is “not accurate and intentionally misleading” and that the topic of bike safety has “become polarizing.” Decker said she supports bike lanes, especially given the fact that her teenage son primarily uses bikes to get around the city. But officials need to “think about the unintentional consequence of implementing bike lanes.”
At each home they visited, MacKay explained their platform to voters, passing along notecards with a link to a video titled “What’s wrong with our state government?” At one apartment they visited during the campaign, MacKay informed Barbara Carlson, 63, that Massachusetts is one of the only states in the country where the Legislature, governor’s office, and the judicial branch are all shielded from public records laws.
Carlson rolled her eyes in frustration. “What don’t they want people to know?”
The end of the legislative session was telling, MacKay said. A number of bills were left on the table as formal lawmaking ended earlier this year, including sweeping climate legislation and a bill to provide more oversight of the hospital industry.
Massachusetts had the lowest ratio of bills passed to bills introduced — making it, by that measure, the least effective state legislature in the country, according to a 2021 study by Washington, D.C., information company FiscalNote.
MacKay said the end of formal lawmaking this year, which culminated in a marathon, 23-hour session, “pierced the consciousness of people within my district,” boosting awareness of the very problems MacKay is stressing on the campaign trail.
Decker herself once made an issue of legislative inaction and incumbency. In 2002, she took on four-term incumbent Democrat Paul Demakis, at the time a reliable progressive voice in the House, but lost with 35 percent of the vote.
“Incumbency is not about entitlement,” Decker, then-29, told the Globe in 2002. “People are very frustrated with the Legislature and so the status quo is disconcerting.”
Now it is Decker who is a member of the status quo, her challenger says.
In Massachusetts, state lawmakers benefit from forms of incumbency protection. Unlike a number of other states, lawmakers here don’t face term limits. And many lawmakers — nearly a quarter — were initially elected to the Legislature during a special election, contests that tend to favor insiders who can quickly assemble a campaign, and typically draw fewer voters than regularly scheduled elections.
The current political calendar setup, which puts primary day right after Labor Day, also makes it hard for voters to cast ballots. Many voters are out of town, and students at the state’s nearly 100 colleges and universities don’t have time to register at new addresses by the Aug. 24 deadline.
A 2022 effort to put Massachusetts on the map with 22 other states that have same-day voter registration fell flat in the Legislature.
While lawmakers have the ability to change the primary date, they choose not to.
Such a culture has pitfalls, Cluverius said.
A stagnant political culture creates “less room or motivation for innovation,” he said. So too does the consolidation of power in the Legislature by the top leaders in both chambers.
There have been some notable exceptions to the dismal record of House challengers. In 2018, Jeffrey Sánchez saw his 15-year run as a state representative come to end after Nika Elugardo defeated him in a Democratic primary for a district that includes Mission Hill and Jamaica Plain. Elugardo challenged Sánchez one year after he was named chairperson of the House Ways and Means Committee, a powerful leadership post, and during her campaign accused him of only doing the bidding of the House speaker, rather than leading on his own, as well as being not progressive enough for the district.
“He has one of the highest-ranking seats in the House, but he doesn’t do anything without the permission of the speaker, it seems,” Elugardo said at the time.
Still, such primary wins are rare.
The dynamic frustrates candidates such as MacKay and Jaymin Patel, who is challenging Natick Democratic state Representative David Linsky for his seat this September. When Patel ran against Linsky in 2020 for the first time, it was Linsky’s first primary challenger since 1999, the year he was elected to the House by winning a special election.
Patel, 31, believes the only way to fix Beacon Hill is by “offering people choices.”
“It’s the only way to get these guys to hold themselves accountable,” said Patel.
Samantha J. Gross can be reached at samantha.gross@globe.com. Follow her @samanthajgross. Laura Crimaldi can be reached at laura.crimaldi@globe.com. Follow her @lauracrimaldi.