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Did anyone see this coming? Be honest: Did you?
A tsunami. Bluenami. One-hundred-year flood. The names keep coming. Democrats won Senate seats in states that seemed off-limits just a few months ago: Kansas, South Carolina, and Iowa, among others. In Texas, they didn’t just win the race for a US Senate seat but also for governor and attorney general. Democrats also flipped the governorship in at least five states, giving them control of the top state office in a majority of states, the first time that has been true in 16 years.
Bottom line: The Democrats will enter 2027 with at least 240 seats in the House and 54 seats or more in the Senate. Those are rock-solid majorities.
Even in Massachusetts, where Democrats were already in full control of state and most local government, the party became more dominant. Every statewide candidate, from Governor Maura Healey to Senator Ed Markey to Treasurer Deborah Goldberg, won with 60 percent or more of the vote. Democrats even gained seats in the state House — where they already held a supermajority. For now, the state Republican Party looks like a red speck on a blue wall.
What does this all tell us about the mood of the country?
On this week’s “Say More” podcast, I talked with James Pindell, a Globe political reporter and veteran of many national elections, and two Globe Opinion columnists, Joan Vennochi and Abdallah Fayyad, about these and other questions. Here are six takeaways.
Trump really was on the ballot.
It seems clear this election was a resounding repudiation of the president, his politics, and perhaps his personality — one even greater than the Democrats’ rout of the Republicans in the 1974 midterm elections following President Richard Nixon’s resignation during the Watergate scandal.
To Pindell, this suggests that Trump’s domination of the American political conversation is coming to an end. “Donald Trump has defined our political era for the last 11 years, and this is the moment it’s over,” he said.
“Now we’re in a situation where the Democratic-led Congress can block him, and he can block them. They can decide to work together, but the aggressiveness and boldness that we are used to in the Trump era, that is all gone.”
The election did not resolve the struggle between the Democrats’ left and center.
In South Carolina, a relatively conservative Democrat named Annie Andrews won the Senate race, while in Maine and Michigan Bernie Sanders-endorsed progressives, Troy Jackson and Abdul El-Sayed respectively, won their Senate contests.
On the one hand, that would seem to show that Democrats of all stripes could win because Trump is so unpopular. On the other, it suggests that the ideological fight for control of the party will last well into the 2028 presidential campaign.
“I’m very excited for the next presidential race, which started today,” Pindell told me. “It is going to be the greatest presidential election of my life. One reason is because the Democrats get to figure this out.”
He added that Republicans are facing a similar reckoning in preparation for the post-Trump era: “Republicans are going to have to figure out their future without Trump. If you would ask everyone eight months ago, they would say, ‘Oh, it’s Vance and it’s fine, and then maybe he’ll lose and they’ll figure it out then.’ No, we’re doing all of this now.”
The New England Republican is nearly extinct.
With Senator Susan Collins’s loss to Jackson in Maine, New England will have zero seats in the 2027 US Senate and possibly only one seat in the House — though Republican Paul LePage was clinging to a thread in his race for the ME-2 congressional district. Even a former Republican senator, John Sununu, lost his bid to regain his seat in New Hampshire, falling to the Democrat, Representative Chris Pappas. (The region will have two Republican governors: Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire and Phil Scott in Vermont.)
What will it take for Republicans to regain a foothold in Massachusetts and its neighboring states?
“For a long time, the argument has been ‘stop doing everything that Trump wants and cater to your electorate if you want to win,’ ” Fayyad said. “You could argue that Susan Collins did that. You could argue that John Sununu in New Hampshire did that. And yet they both lost.”
“Clearly if they nominate a Trump-like candidate, they’re not going to win in New England,” he continued. “But now the question is, if they nominate more moderate Republicans, can they even win then?”
Troy Jackson had a secret sauce.
Vennochi argued that even if Jackson paled in personality compared to Graham Platner, the Democratic front-runner who fell from grace during the primaries, he had an authenticity that helped him win the day.
“He did come across as just sort of a decent, plain guy,” she said. “He has the real working-class roots that for Graham Platner seemed more of an imagined scenario.”
Collins, she added, might have been hurt by two factors: She had been around for too long (30 years) and was stuck in an untenable middle ground that seemed uniquely unappealing to voters in this polarized moment.
“In the middle, you’re not loved by anybody,” Vennochi said. “So she was just sort of abandoned.”
Will Democrats try to impeach Trump a third time?
Pindell said he is hearing “no chatter” among Democrats about impeaching Trump, which they did twice during his first term, failing to win convictions in the Senate both times. “I’m not sure what exactly it accomplishes other than it feels good for some people in the base to have some accountability retribution,” he told me.
But oversight investigations into corruption and abuse of power by Trump administration officials might well be warranted. We might also expect to see probes into Trump’s senior advisers, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“You’re smarter to go after people who still believe they have a political career,” Pindell said.
Healey didn’t just coast.
Though Healey won with 62 percent of the vote, she ran “a real campaign,” perhaps because her Republican opponent, Mike Minogue, put nearly $20 million of his own money into defeating her.
“It was not a rose garden strategy or anything like that,” Vennochi said. “She treated Mike Minogue like a real candidate who could threaten her, and I give her credit for that.”
Fayyad noted that running up her margin of victory mattered “because if in Massachusetts she wins by about 10 points or less, that’s a loss.”
What should she do with her electoral mandate in a second term? Fayyad argued that she needs to double down on her first-term push to build more housing.
“You need to be able to make this a more affordable state to live in,” he said. “The consequences of not doing so is going to be catastrophic for Massachusetts’ [gross domestic product] and just overall economic growth.”
- Jim Dao
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 5 episode of “Say More.”
Jim Dao: Welcome to “Say More” from Boston Globe Opinion. I’m Jim Dao, Opinion editor. I’ve never been great at election predictions, but man, I really got Tuesday’s midterms wrong. I thought, “Sure, there will be a blue wave of some sort, and Democrats will regain control of the House. But the Senate, no way.”
Man, was I wrong.
Here’s what did happen. Democrats not only took commanding control of the House, but they also won the Senate, and by a lot And they didn’t just win in swing states like Michigan and Maine, they won in Texas
Texas [has not been] a safe space for Democrats for the last couple decades. They might still win seats in Mississippi and Alaska, states that are as red as can be.
To help us understand it, I’ll be talking with the Globe’s political correspondent, James Pindell. Then stick around for the second half where I’ll talk to our columnists about some of the local and regional races.
Dao: Late night. How are you holding up?
James Pindell: I’m doing okay. I love this stuff, so what more can I say? But, my strategy is typically to go to bed as soon as I can because I have to wake up really early in the morning to do the early column.
I am still on fumes, but I’m loving life.
Dao: This was a midterm rejection of a sitting president on a historic level. What were your main takeaways from it?
Pindell: There are several, but I guess the biggest takeaway was the fact that Donald Trump has defined our political era for the last 11 years, and this is the moment it’s over.
He’s still the president for two years, but he understands that he doesn’t want to have to veto one thing after the other. Now we’re in a situation where the Democratic-led Congress can block him, and he can block them.
They can decide to work together, but the aggressiveness and boldness that we are used to in the Trump era, that is all gone. That is probably the single biggest takeaway.
Dao: I wanted to flip the script a little bit and ask you that even though Trump clearly was the big issue on ballots from senator to dog catcher, practically, how much do you think Democrats deserve credit for running good races and having good candidates or not at all?
What’s your thought on that?
Pindell: They deserve credit in one particular way. When it came to big statewide races, they recruited some really great candidates in places where they didn’t think they had a shot.
They recruited candidates, as you mentioned, in Kansas, Iowa, and Texas. I mean, you can go down the line in a number of these races.
They had a shot of winning Montana and in Alaska. You can go down the line and they recruited candidates that gave them a shot if there was a wave. And there was a wave, and they won.
Beyond that, the Democratic Party is a party of opposition. It’s not a party of ideas right now. It is a party that is still fractured from the same fights they’ve had since Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.
We’re still having the same debates. We had the same primary season with that sort of lens. This time we had a different flavor of DSA, but it was still Bernie versus Hillary, and we don’t know what they’re for. We just know what Democrats are against.
And I remind you, this is an historic night. Taking absolutely nothing away from Democrats, they are still more unpopular than Republicans, if you look at every single poll. That’s not an insignificant thing.
Dao: You had candidates who won on the left, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan Troy Jackson in Maine. Then you had more centrist, pragmatic candidates like James Talarico in Texas, or Annie Andrews in South Carolina. Huge upsets there.
Can you look across the country and say one side came out ahead of the other, or are they in full deadlock?
Pindell: I can’t, and that was supposed to be a clarified heading into 2028, and you’re asking the right question. Liberals were making such a big deal about Abdul El-Sayed. They said if he can win in one of the biggest swing states in the country, it’s proof that the whole idea that we had to have Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, was false.
You could actually be a progressive and win. The thing that’s so frustrating for me about that — and I don’t have a side on this, just on the facts — is that he won, and Jocelyn Benson won governor of the same state, ran into very much of a Hillary Clinton mold, and she did better.
What are we exactly proving here? There’s no answer. It proves that both could win. Obviously, it’s such a big wave year that it papers over a lot of these debates.
Look, I’m very excited for the next presidential race, which started today. People are going to hate me, but it did. It is going to be the greatest presidential election of my life. And I am deeply excited about it.
But one reason is because the Democrats get to figure this out. And they’re going to have to rally around a nominee. And because of the sheer wipeout for Republicans, JD Vance is obviously not the clear front-runner nominee anymore.
Republicans are going to have to figure out their future without Trump. If you would ask everyone eight months ago, they would say, “Oh, it’s Vance and it’s fine, and then maybe he’ll lose and they’ll figure it out then.”
No, we’re doing all of this now.
Dao: We would be remiss if we didn’t cite some of the historic races and results that came out of yesterday.
We have the first Black female governor of any state in Georgia, the first Black Republican governor of Florida, the first openly gay senator, Chris Pappas in New Hampshire. There’s several other examples of that. What of all those cases really stuck out to you?
Pindell: There’s a lot to mention.
In Iowa, you have the first permanently disabled member of the US Senate. We had some war heroes, but this is a guy who has spent his whole life in a wheelchair, Josh Turek. We had the first Muslim American senator, Abdul El-Sayed.
There’s so many to mention. But you’re right, I think we had three Black governors in all the history of the United States. We elected three last night, and that’s going to be five overall serving at the same time. It’s historic.
The Native American governor in New Mexico is the first ever in history. That’s what happens with the wave elections. You put candidates up, they may be the best candidate, they may not be, but a lot of people get swept up in it.
If there’s one key delicious thing, there’s two other details that were especially delicious nationwide.
One was that the chairman of the Committee to elect House Republicans lost his own race in North Carolina last night to a perennial candidate from West Virginia who just moved to North Carolina.
And my other one, I have a long history of covering New Hampshire, so I’m going to bring up a random race, but it’s so awesome.
There’s a longtime Republican state senator, chairman of the State Finance Committee in New Hampshire, who may eke it out, but was losing all night last night.
The race is too close to call at this taping. You know who he has not defeated? A person who dropped out of the race a month ago.
Dao: And what happened with Paul LePage in Maine?
Pindell: It’s unclear. He is currently losing, but it has not been called.
Dao: That’s another amazing one. It’s very tempting to talk about 2028, but I’m going to resist that for a minute and talk a minute about the incoming Congress.
The Democrats are going to come in full force, left and right, ready to do things, maybe big things in the 2027 Congress.
What do you think will be the first order of business for this Congress?
Pindell: I think there’s going to be several tracks on it, and the fact that they have the Senate and the House, it’s a huge deal.
The first thing is going to be the debt ceiling. They’re going to have to try to figure that out in terms of leverage, trying to take up any kind of budget matter. Second, there will be investigations. I’m not the person who’s going to say, “Here at the last moment is when Donald Trump pivots,” because you’ve been waiting for the pivot from Donald Trump forever.
But, my goodness, he really could. If he actually wants to do things and he’s concerned about his legacy — which heads up, he’s very concerned about his legacy — a comprehensive immigration reform is the one thing he could actually do. He doesn’t even have to get many Republicans along with him, just a few, to override the cloture vote in the Senate.
To do something about the debt could be something important to set the stage for 2028, or it’s just going to be a sad lame duck end. There is a possibility to do something big. It’s sitting there, and Democrats have the votes.
Dao: This is a great argument, and it’s one I’ve tried to make to our opinion section columnists, and nobody buys it. My wife punches me in the arm whenever I say it.
I’ve often said, “Maybe Trump will actually try to get something done with Congress if he loses and he’s a lame duck and he wants to do something about his legacy.” Then I think about it and I’m like, “No, probably not.”
What are you really thinking right now?
Pindell: I don’t know what he wants. I’m not in his head. He obviously looks tired, let’s be honest. But if he wants to do things, with the back channel in September between Jared Kushner and Hakeem Jeffries that occurred in New York, I know it got a lot of people upset on both sides, but it is very interesting.
You know who has a big agenda to get the president to do something? Jared Kushner. The more busy Congress is, the less they’re looking at him. Again, there are huge opportunities here for him to do something now that he doesn’t have to worry about his base, and his base failed him in this election.
Dao: Yeah. You know, it’s interesting, uh, back in the day when I was in,
Pindell: uh- Granted, they would say he failed them, but I, uh, right.
Dao: I was just going to talk about Jared Kushner, I’ve had one interaction with him in my journalistic career, and it was because he wanted to talk about immigration reform. It’s an interesting one to watch for sure.
I wanted to ask you about impeachment. Is there going to be a drive among Democrats to impeach Donald Trump for the third time?
Pindell: There has been no appetite to impeach Donald Trump a third time, even among high-level Democrats. There’s been no chatter that I’ve heard.
Dao: Even among left-wing Democrats?
Pindell: Well, left-wing Democrats want Trump in jail. They want all of it, and I understand that. But Democrats are like, “He’s beyond a lame duck.” The previous two impeachments didn’t work out in their favor. We’re moving on.
If Trump is just going to sit there and veto things and there’s nothing else going on, I think they could.
Remember, all of this, unlike the previous times, is occurring in an environment where — I know we don’t wanna talk about 2028, but 2027 is the year of nonstop primaries and I believe this is going to be the greatest presidential election of my life.
I am beyond excited for it, but you’re going to have the largest field in American history running for president, running around seven early primary states. It’s going to be a post-boomer, post-Trump environment where people are actually looking for solutions, and it’ll be about ideas.
And what happens in Washington, just like it did in the last two years of Barack Obama, just like in the last two years of George W. Bush, just like the last two years of Reagan, we are moving on.
And so an impeachment vote, I’m not sure what exactly it accomplishes other than it feels good for some people in the base to have some accountability retribution.
You’re smarter to go after people who still believe they have a political career. Pete Hegseth, RFK, if he wants to run again, any of the other cabinet members who want to run again, or some accountability on that end. Elon Musk, for example, who’s future-forward looking versus someone who’s so old and walking off the stage.
Dao: Last question. I wanted to ask you about the Supreme Court.
You raised the possibility that Sam Alito or Clarence Thomas might retire before the end of the year to give the Republican Congress a chance to approve a new, younger conservative to the court. What do you think are the chances of that?
Pindell: I don’t know. The logic is all pointing to it. I mean, I think if you ask Republicans, they think it’s likely that either, a Democratic president will be elected in ’28. Again, I brought it up, sorry.
Or second, it’s going to be harder for them to flip the Senate in a guaranteed way that they’re going to have another chance like this in quite some time. And these guys are getting older.
I think all the logic points to that if they ever want to retire, and at some point you’re going to have to unless you want to just die in office, this is the moment to do it if you really care about the court.
That’s why if you’re a conservative and that’s why I think we have to be looking at those two retirements. And remember, Amy Coney Barrett went through at lightning speed, and that’s what’s going to have to happen here.
Next we have a short chat with Globe columnists, Abdallah Fayyad and Joan Vennochi, about the nine ballot questions in Massachusetts and the midterm outcome for regional politics.
Dao: Tuesday was just an unbelievable night for Democrats nationally, and I think we’re all riveted by places like South Carolina, Kansas, and Texas.
But we had a couple of significant Senate races in our region, New Hampshire and Maine, which were won by Democrats in both states. Abdallah, you’ve covered both those races. You want to tell us a little bit about what happened?
Abdallah Fayyad: Maine is one of the biggest headlines from yesterday, and not just regionally.
Susan Collins served in the Senate for five terms. She was seen as this unbeatable candidate. Last cycle in 2020, she was down in every single poll going into election day, and she still managed to win. After that, it just seemed she was a mainstay, like there was no way to beat her.
I think her loss was a pretty massive hit for the Republican Party and Republicans in New England. It kind of puts them in the spot where they really have to start asking themselves how are they going to win these statewide offices ever again.
It’s not that they didn’t have any wins yesterday, like in the Vermont governor’s race, for example. They won, but now New England has no Republican senators and I think that’s a pretty big deal.
Dao: It’s possible that in 2027 there will be zero Republicans in Congress, either house, from New England. Although it’s still possible that Paul LePage, a Republican, could win in Maine. We don’t know that yet.
Given that it feels like the end of New England Republicans, a proud tradition, what is the way forward for Republicans in this region? Can they win? How do they win?
Fayyad: I don’t think there’s a clear answer. I think the reason it’s especially interesting is because New England has historically charted this different path from the general direction of the GOP over the last couple of decades where they have nominated these more moderate figures.
For a long time, the argument has been “Stop doing everything that Trump wants and cater to your electorate if you want to win.”
You could argue that Susan Collins did that. You could argue that John Sununu in New Hampshire did that. And yet they both lost.
In New Hampshire it wasn’t even close.
Clearly if they nominate a Trump-like candidate, they’re not going to win in New England. But now the question is, if they nominate more moderate Republicans, can they even win then?
Essentially, how much more liberal does a New England Republican have to be in order to win? If they’re serious about winning statewide races, they’re going to start to have to think about how to be really independent from the National Party, and maybe much more liberal on social issues that can be really polarizing in this region.
Dao: Unless the National Party changes and gets beyond Trump.
Fayyad: Which is a big “If.”
Dao: That is what the next couple years are all about.
Joan Vennochi: In the case of Susan Collins, isn’t it also that it just felt like her time was up?
That she’d been there for so long, and that when you’re playing the middle like she did. You could compare it to an Ed Markey scenario.
He’s been in Washington for a really long time, but he just carved out this niche on the left so that he was sort of beloved by that constituency.
In the middle, you’re not loved by anybody. So she was just sort of abandoned.
Dao: Joan, you wrote a fair bit about Troy Jackson, who defeated Collins in Maine.
Reading commentary today, one of the common threads was that the Democrats did pick some really charismatic, interesting, and vibrant young candidates ... except for Troy Jackson.
Vennochi: Yeah, he was not one of them.
Dao: What does his victory, which at the end of the day was reasonably comfortable, say to you?
Vennochi: He did come across as just sort of a decent, plain guy. He has the real working class roots that for Graham Platner, the original Democrat who ran, it seemed more of an imagined scenario. And there was also an ad that I read about, I didn’t see it myself, where somebody made some remarks about him, just sort of denigrating him as just a lumberman or something.
That kind of backfired, because you could see that his roots were true.
Dao: I’m looking forward to seeing his interaction with Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, who is a real firebrand and Jackson being a guy who you’re not sure if he’s awake all the time.
Fayyad: But, I also think it’s important to note as well that Jackson essentially ran on the same platform as Graham Platner. He ran a very lefty campaign on a lot of issues. And yet he still managed to beat Susan Collins.
I think part of it is not just that Susan Collins was around for too long. Some people can overcome that, but her message was just unconvincing. And I think she failed at her job as senator.
When I talked to voters in July, for example, some of them told me that they started to feel differently about Susan Collins when she voted for Brett Kavanaugh to confirm him to the Supreme Court.
Dao: Yeah, as Joan has written.
Fayyad: That obviously wasn’t enough to turn the tide in 2020 when she ran and she was reelected. But it started to change even more afterwards and in the second Trump term because her pitch to voters has always been, “I’m the moderating force. I will protect Maine from Trump, and I will deliver to Maine.”
And in July, ICE shot and killed a man in Maine.
And people went crazy. They protested outside her office. That’s her job, to essentially prevent Trump’s worst impulses from impacting the people of Maine.
If that’s her selling point over the last two years, she really failed, and that’s ultimately why she lost more than anything else.
Her kind of politics worked in the past up until this point because Trump has become so much more extreme, and what she says she’s good at, she actually wasn’t.
Vennochi: Her closing argument basically was, “I bring home the bacon.” I don’t think people wanted to be bought off. They wanted something more than that.
Fayyad: And Jackson had this great line in the debate when she was talking about how she mitigated the impacts of the tariffs and how she mitigated the prevention of the tariffs on road salt, which is important, admittedly. Jackson’s response was, “We can’t eat road salt.”
I thought that was a really good line, but it also shows that even with that kind of “moderating force,” it’s just not enough.
Dao: That’s the perfect Maine issue, road salt. Let’s move to Massachusetts for a second. It was a blue wave nationally, but Massachusetts is this even bluer wave.
All the statewide candidates won by big margins. Governor Maura Healey won a second term, even though the Republican Mike Minogue spent nearly $20 million of his own money attacking her relentlessly.
Joan, what do you think that says about Massachusetts politics right now?
Vennochi: Well, first I’d like to talk about what it says about Maura Healey because she ran a real campaign. It was not a rose garden strategy or anything like that.
She treated Mike Minogue like a real candidate who could threaten her, and I kind of give her credit for that. It’s easy to just say, “No way can a Republican win,” and [especially] with Trump.
She ran a very vigorous campaign, and she made it about Trump, and she took some flak for that. In the end, she was basically right because that’s what the midterms were about: Trump.
So what does her election say about Massachusetts? That we’re a really blue state [where] Trump is not held in high regard.
I wrote this in a column, [that] Tip O’Neill said all politics are local. This time around all politics are national. That’s really what framed things here in Massachusetts.
Fayyad: To your point, and I could be wrong, but I feel like Healey tried harder this time than she did four years ago. I think her campaign was a little bit more energized than it was four years ago.
Four years ago she kind of did the rose garden strategy. She really didn’t see that she would lose. She wasn’t talking about policy all that much. I know that she disagrees. But after the primary, she just didn’t put anything really out there and didn’t really stick her neck out.
Vennochi: Minogue did point to some real weaknesses on our part. On economics, the fact that people are leaving the state, the housing issue.
Plus decisions that were made on her watch, the courthouse that we’ve written about, the $2 billion courthouse in Springfield that’s raised some questions about the process.
Scandals with the state police, things that a governor should be held accountable for. I think that it felt like she knew that and she was determined not to make that the focus of the campaign. And she succeeded in that.
Fayyad: You would know more about this, but I think the margins really mattered to her because if in Massachusetts she wins by about 10 points or less, that’s a loss.
That’s the end for her really. Maybe not in Massachusetts, but if she has hopes for higher office and ever wants to run for president, she wants to win by 20 [or] 30 points.
Maybe she was just running up the margins as much as she can so that she can always leave that door open if she wants it.
Vennochi: I think you’re right about that. I did listen to some of her speech last night, and I think it was interesting that she went out of her way to say to those people who voted for her opponent, “I’m your governor, too.”
I think it does speak to a broader ambition.
Dao: So nine ballot questions.
The fact that there were nine to begin with, which tied a record, says something about how frustrated Massachusetts voters are. That the legislature often gets stalemated in doing things that people think should be done.
So they covered things from legalizing pot to repealing a gun law, to changing party primary rules, and increasing the number of tax rebates people can get.
It’s like every major subject under the sun. Anything about those ballot questions that stuck out for you guys?
Vennochi: Ugh. Well, it took a long time to vote. I went there in person and filled in the little circles, and there was a little bit of a line. The theme is basically that people were frustrated with the legislature for not doing things but in the end, [but] I don’t know.
There’s no real dramatic message that I read from the results. People decided to keep legalized pot.
Dao: Not a surprise to you.
Vennochi: Not a surprise. I think we’ve talked about it before. There’s room for more regulation and doing a better job in how it’s marketed and sold and kept away from underage young people.
But I think people didn’t see any positives in going back to a time.
Fayyad: That ballot question, I think, was one of the most interesting for me because I obviously knew it would fail. It was clear from any polling that it would fail by a wide margin.
It failed by, I think, around 50 percentage points. It’s a message also that goes beyond Massachusetts that legalized marijuana is just here to stay. This debate is over whether there should be prohibition on marijuana. Now the question is just how do you regulate smartly?
I think any hope among skeptics to go back to the old days in these states that have already legalized it, I think this is a message to them like, “Focus your efforts elsewhere. Focus your efforts on regulation.” I think that could have a ripple effect in that sense.
Obviously not really consequential here in Massachusetts, but I think it speaks to the broader electorate.
Vennochi: I mean, I was a vote against legalizing pot. And this time I voted to keep it.
Dao: Interesting, because it’s there and why pull it back?
Vennochi: Right. And I feel that it’s kind of a personal responsibility to use it or not, and it’s hard to separate it from alcohol.
Dao: One of the most hotly debated ballot questions is one that I think was very arcane to people. It was the ending of the party primary system and replacing it with an all parties primary where you could be a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, whatever. You would run in the same primary. Then the top two finishers would run in the general.
It was presented as a way to undermine the power of the machines, the political parties, and special interest groups even. It would open the door to more candidates. [It] failed pretty badly. It seemed to me an example of where actually, the traditional institutional parties kind of won on that one.
Do you guys have any thoughts on that?
Vennochi: I think what killed it, and I have no evidence to back this up other than my own thinking was the Globe report that the people that wanted it represented private equity. The big money was behind it.
That was the framing for it. So if big money wants it, it’s bad.
Fayyad: I just didn’t like that ballot measure. I wrote about this way earlier this year. There are a lot of reasons for that kind of primary system, but what it promises is just a mirage. It doesn’t actually deliver on making the process more democratic.
Obviously, there are problems with the current system, but having an all-party primary could result in candidates that are entirely unrepresentative of the electorate. So I do think the current system is definitely broken. Particularly for the GOP, it’s not nominating the candidates that clearly voters are looking for.
But I think that alternative is not really the answer.
Dao: I’ll just point out that there were an incredible number of uncontested legislative races this year, and the one number that stuck out to me was there were nine open seats that were uncontested.
In other words, those are the seats where Republicans had a shot to win because there was no incumbent, and they still couldn’t get a candidate.
Which is I think probably more a statement about the state of the Republican Party than anything else, but it does show how uncompetitive Massachusetts elections are.
Fayyad: I think that was something else I was thinking about. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about how Republicans need to reform in New England if they want a future, but Democrats also have a problem in New England.
Massachusetts is a perfect example of that. It is a supermajority Democratic state. They completely control politics here and, as we just talked about, there were nine ballot questions because the legislature is just not delivering for people.
Obviously, this isn’t a short-term problem for Democrats when it comes to them winning statewide offices and maintaining control of the legislature. At some point, this is an unsustainable way of governing.
Even though it seems on the surface that Massachusetts is this super-liberal, super-lefty state, when you look at the legislature, the legislature is much more moderate.
Overall, the Democrats in the legislature, most of them are much more moderate than Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey are in the Senate. The legislature needs to start delivering, otherwise this is going to be an example of what happens when Democrats are in power. Nothing.
That’s not the message that Democrats want to send. It’ll be bad for them in Massachusetts. It will also be bad for them on the national level because then Republicans can always point to Massachusetts and say, “Hey, you have full control of your legislature. You’ve had the governor’s office for a long time, and still your housing prices are still going up.”
All these problems, all this red tape, they need to figure that out, and that’s the long-term problem for Democrats.
Vennochi: The New England delegation from the Massachusetts delegation also seems a little calcified.
It’s been around. I’m sure people will be checking Markey’s pulse for a while, and if Elizabeth Warren will run for re-election, there’ll be some jockeying and repositioning.
Dao: You raised that possibility in a column, that Democrats are so content and solid in their positions. They can already start looking to 2028, and even beyond that. Maybe there’ll be lots of maneuvering going on.
We’re thinking about whether Elizabeth Warren will step down or not run again? Will Markey make it to the end of his term? And if there’s a Democratic president in 2028, will there be cabinet positions for people?
Healey’s often mentioned as somebody in that position. How much of that maneuvering do you think is already starting?
Vennochi: I think the talk about it has definitely started. You hear it all the time. It is Warren’s seat, Ayanna Pressley’s seat. Will Jake Auchincloss get in? What about Mayor Wu?
It is a foregone conclusion that these are seats for Democrats, and who’s going to be the one to benefit from it?
Dao: Tell me what you think should be the priorities for Healey in the legislature in 2027.
Vennochi: She talked a little bit in that speech that I heard last night about how she’s going to focus on affordability and housing
And keep her return to the local issues and the things that a governor can do something about. But I guess we have to see exactly what that means.
Fayyad: I think the biggest focus for Democrats in Massachusetts is affordability and housing prices. It just comes down to the cost of living and housing prices.
You need to be able to make this a more affordable state to live in. The consequences of not doing so are going to be catastrophic for Massachusetts’ GDP and just overall economic growth in the future.
If they are able to do anything, and I think now with winning re-election, Maura Healey should double down on rezoning, on taking advantage of the MBTA Communities Act, and galvanizing these towns to not just rezone, but permit. She needs to get buildings and construction started, and I think they have to deliver on that.
Victoria White of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
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James Dao is the editor of the editorial page. He can be reached at jim.dao@globe.com. Abdallah Fayyad can be reached at abdallah.fayyad@globe.com. Follow him @abdallah_fayyad. Joan Vennochi is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at joan.vennochi@globe.com. Follow her @joan_vennochi.