Bernie Sanders endorsement gets you $289
And other lessons from the 19th Suffolk special election
Starting today, we’re migrating some Priorities For Progress & Policy For Progress email updates to Substack. In 2018, we undertook research to understand why the online policy & politics conversation in Massachusetts was diverging significantly from the facts on the ground. As we continue sharing more analysis, this format will help us learn - feedback welcome!
Yesterday’s special election for Speaker DeLeo’s seat had the outsized narrative implications of an off-cycle race. It is usually hard to find much news on state legislative races, but NBC aired “Progressive Dems Take Aim at DeLeo’s seat” while the Globe noted it would “test appetite for progressive politics.”
“Styles make fights”, and the structure of this Democratic primary field lent itself to the nationalized progressive insurgent narrative - heightened by endorsements by presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Julian Castro for Juan Jaramillo, a union rep, former legislative staffer, and the lone candidate from Revere in a district where most voters (and three candidates) hail from Winthrop.
But, as seen in most national, statewide, and local districts outside of the most-Democratic areas, progressive groups dominated on Twitter but not at the ballot box. To be fixed, the problem must first be recognized - and placed in the proper context of policy implications, not just electoral winners & losers.
Democratic primary voters last night nominated not just a Trump voter, but a rant-on-Facebook-about-Trump guy. Maybe this is a good time to review what we know about the Massachusetts electorate.
Progressive groups won the internet, lost the election (again)
Online, this race wasn’t close.
Jaramillo dominated the #mapoli world - supportive tweets from activists and power Twitter users, and endorsements from progressive politicians outside the district. One shocking data point - in a district outside of Boston, Jaramillo was endorsed on Twitter by at least 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Boston City Councilors (and at least 1 Boston City Council candidate) but only had 6 financial supporters (of any amount) out of the 18,000 Winthrop residents who could vote for him.
Our August 2020 poll showed what anyone on Twitter feels: it is not representative of voters. The 13% of Democratic primary voters who identify as “Very Progressive” are 3.5x as likely to use Twitter daily as all other voters - even plain old “Progressive” Democratic primary voters.
While there is only one election day, the Twitter Distortion Field has an election every day - and the “Very Progressive” segment rarely loses.
Left Decile framework continues to apply
As we outlined in a Scot Lehigh column in The Boston Globe after the 2018 election, progressive challenges have only been successful in the “Left Decile” - the 10% most-Democratic districts in the state.
In the 16 state representative districts in the “Left Decile”, 4 of 16 “ incumbents lost primary challenges from the left in 2016 and 2018. In the congressional delegation, the lone Left Decile district (Capuano/Pressley) also fit this theory. But only one had lost in the other 100+ Democratic districts, and we predicted that trend would hold.
In the 2020 cycle, there were five significant progressive challenges to unindicted incumbents - 3 to state reps, 2 to members of congress. All five lost by 17% or more - and while the leading national progressive group blamed the losses on high turnout, it was the district selection that was the problem.
Candidates backed by progressive groups have won open seats, and the Winthrop/Revere seat could have been one of them given the fractured field. But the dynamic is clear.
Bernie gets you 12 donors and $289 (and a narrative)
As CommonWealth Magazine’s Michael Jonas noted in today’s Daily Download, “Bernie Backing means little in middle-of-the-road Winthrop.”
But how little? We actually can quantify how much out-of-state support the Bernie endorsement earned Jaramillo. While the endorsement Facebook post from Sanders on February 19th got 15,000 likes, according to the Office of Campaign and Political Finance database just 12 out-of state-donations totaling $289 came in total (we have no way of knowing if all were related to Sanders). It did provide another data point of strength as he closed in on undecided voters in Revere and built up volunteers, but likely not what many media & onlookers were expecting.
While the media narrative likely helped a case for momentum, campaign finance records show thousands of dollars from PACs, politicos, and lobbyists, but just that trickle in national progressive support.
Polling still works! And institutional groups don’t *really* have to care
The Trump-voting ‘Reagan Democrat’ winning a primary in Massachusetts drew some national attention on Twitter, but that’s not surprising if you saw that our polling showed him in the lead last week as the only candidate with support in both towns, and checked out public campaign finance data showing he was the only candidate with significant financial supporters in both towns (Turco had 6x as many donors in Revere as Jaramillo had in Winthrop). The results broke down how you’d expect - the lone Revere candidate swept the many undecideds, the scandal-plagued candidate collapsed, and the frontrunner stayed the frontrunner.
Our public polling breakdown last week showed that Winthrop native and former DeLeo aide Alicia Delvento had a path to beat Turco, and if we were in a state where Democrats or social progressives had a more narrow advantage in the legislature you likely would have seen significant institutional coalescing behind her - both because she had a better chance to win, and because she was more likely to diminish Turco’s support.
In the end, there was a smaller gap between Delvento and Jaramillo (4 points) than between Turco and Jaramillo (6+ points).
While there will likely not be a significant policy change in the near future as a direct result of this election, the narrative is important. At the national level, political scientists have noted that the Online Left is “stronger now in its insular bubble” and may not learn important lessons from elections.
To make real progress in our state, we first have to grapple with those lessons.