Mike Minogue’s political prospects are looking bleak. This week, a UMass Amherst / WCVB poll showed Democratic Gov. Maura Healey leading Minogue, her Republican challenger, by 25 points, while a Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll put Healey’s lead at 23 points.
With Election Day two weeks away and early voting already underway in earnest, you might expect Minogue and his supporters to be going scorched earth on Healey, attacking her on everything from outmigration driven by high housing costs to her oddly glib comment about an alleged rape at the State Police Barracks on Martha’s Vineyard.
Instead, though, the super PAC backing Minogue, the Massachusetts First Independent Expenditure Political Action Committee, Inc., is running a video ad and sending out mailers attacking Andrea James, the independent candidate for governor who is running to Healey’s left.
The ad, which is running on YouTube and premium streaming platforms, starts with an image of Healey. “Governor Healey is a do-nothing liberal,” the narrator says. “Her opponent Andrea James is a do-everything socialist. James is the Massachusetts [Zohran] Mamdani.”
A photoshopped image of James and the progressive New York mayor smiling together near Boston Harbor then cuts to James herself outlining her priorities in a campaign video: “Housing for all, health care for all, child care for all.”
According to images shared with GBH News, one side of the mailer also describes James as the “Massachusetts Mamdani” and urges voters to choose “common-sense Republican Mike Minogue” instead. The other side warns that while “Maura Healey is a liberal … Andrea James is a super liberal” who would, among other things, end all state cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and stop the construction of new state prisons.
According to federal law, super PACs are not allowed to coordinate with the campaigns they support.
Massachusetts First’s decision to focus on James seems odd, given that she received just 6% support in the UMass Amherst / WCVB poll and a miniscule 2% in the Suffolk University / Boston Globe poll. But Rob Neuner, the chairman of Massachusetts First and CEO of the Connecticut-based canned oxygen maker Boost Oxygen, tells GBH News that the ad campaign is a matter of principle.
“The big thing was … we thought, as [an independent] candidate, she should’ve been in the debates,” Neuner said of James. (James was not included in either of the two gubernatorial debates, which aired on WBZ-TV and WCVB-TV.)
“We looked into Andrea James a little bit more and figured she is someone that is showing the direction Massachusetts is going, and people should be aware of that,” Neuner added.
An attempt to lower Healey’s support?
There’s another possible explanation — namely, that Massachusetts First is running ads decrying James as too left leaning in an attempt to convince some of Healey’s more progressive supporters to vote for James instead.
This rationale was suggested in the analysis of an internal poll commissioned by Massachusetts First and released in September, which asserted that the “Independent, Progressive Candidate” in the race — i.e., James — ”Hurts Healey.”
“Healey drops under the 50% mark on the ballot when voters are told independent progressive candidate Andrea James is on the general election ballot,” conservative pollster John McLaughlin wrote at the time. “While the little-known James currently pulls votes equally from both Healey and Minogue, it is a near certainty that she will draw more from Healey in November as voters become more familiar with her far-left politics.”
Shortly after that poll was released, Minogue called on gubernatorial debate organizers to include James.
Given the magnitude of Healey’s current lead, closing the gap in a meaningful way by luring her supporters into voting for James seems like a long shot. For the record, Neuner insists that’s not what’s happening.
“Our polling showed otherwise, actually,” he said of the suggestion that Massachusetts First could prop up James to weaken Healey. “When James was part of the cohort that was polled, Mike actually got less [support].”
This is also true. The same poll showed that, among voters who had seen, read or heard about both Minogue and Healey, Minogue led Healey 52% to 45%. When James was added to the mix, however, Minogue’s lead vanished and Healey led by 45% to Minogue’s 44%, with James pulling in 5%.
There’s not necessarily a contradiction here, though. James may be capable of pulling from either Minogue or Healey, depending on how much voters know about who James is and what she stands for. A case could be made that this new ad campaign serves two complementary purposes: it makes it more likely that James will pull votes from Healey, and less likely that she’ll pull them from Minogue.
But John Cluverius, a political scientist at UMass Lowell, contends that, at this stage of the race, it’s hard to imagine many voters vacillating between Minogue and James.
“There are probably more progressive voters who are frustrated with Healey than there are swaying, undecided voters ... who are conservative who would back Minogue otherwise,” Cluverius said.
The video ad and mailer, Cluverius said, “seem designed to elevate James as a spoiler to shave votes from Healey.”
Jesse Rhodes, a political scientist at UMass Amherst, has a different take. He suggests that portraying James — who is the only Black candidate in the race — as a dangerous radical could be a cynical get-out-the-vote strategy.
“A concern that I have, certainly, is that it could be a kind of dog-whistle politics, in which the [ads are] intended to elicit racialized anxiety by highlighting James’ positions … and trying to make voters who might be undecided or thinking about staying home anxious and mobilized on that basis,” Rhodes said.
For her part, James says she welcomes the publicity.
“Imagine the immense privilege it takes to think housing, healthcare, and childcare for all is a bad thing,” James told GBH News by text. “These attack ads are making my case for me. ... If making sure people can afford to live here makes me too liberal, I’ll be that.”
