GREG TORRES, MASSINC PRESIDENT: I’d like to welcome everybody tonight for a very interesting and provocative program. I’d like to thank, acknowledge and welcome a few people. We have several board members – Ann-Ellen Hornidge from Mintz Levin, Tom Trimarco from O’Neill and Associates and Geri Denterlein from Denterlein Worldwide and Judith Kurland, chief of staff to Mayor Menino and from the Fourth Estate, Julie Mehegan from the Boston Herald and Dante Ramos of the Boston Globe and Rick Holmes of the Metrowest Daily and formerly of the Fourth Estate, a good friend to all of us Walter Robinson from the Northeastern School of Journalism, formerly of the Globe. We’d also like to thank so many people who sponsor our work of civic journalism, long-form very high quality civic journalism. We have been at it for about 13 years. We could not do it without our supporters. Our work is made available to the public for free and we distribute to a list of about 5,000 opinion leaders. We hold events like this for free. We do it all through the support of people you see on the back page of Commonwealth magazine. My wife, Betsy Puttullo, is the founder of Beacon Health Strategies, a major sponsor. Ned Murphy from the Mentor Network, Jim Roosevelt from Tufts Health Plan and Philip and Sandy Gordon, longtime supporters of MassINC and Commonwealth magazine. I reserve special thanks to the Boston Foundation and the Knight Foundation. A year ago we started conversations about supporting a buildout of Commonwealth magazine and the Boston Foundation supported it and introduced us to the Knight Foundation, which is based in Miami and was just starting a big initiative, a $24 million program to engage foundations to find creative uses of media and technology to help keep communities informed and their citizens engaged. As a partnership with the Boston Foundation, we were one of 21 organizations that received multi-year grant awards so we are able to build out the depth of our reporting and work on the format through which it is delivered. We are going to do a lot of work on our web site and initiate a web-based magazine essentially as a result of the support of these two foundations.
BRUCE MOHL, COMMONWEALTH MAGAZINE EDITOR: I have two announcements. You can schmooze after the event. The bar will be open. Hang around and talk to the panelists. I want to give you information about how we came to be here tonight. We are always looking for issues that affect how public policy is made. Robert David Sullivan for our fall issue did some research and put together a piece analyzing legislative races and found Massachusetts had the lowest percentage of contested legislative races in the country. I was amazed by this. I knew we were bad but didn’t know we were the worst in the country. A lot of other people wrote about it, the Globe, the Patriot Ledger, other news outlets. I was still fixated on this low percentage. We sent Alison Lobron to Minnesota, which had 100 percent of legislative races contested. We wanted to learn what they were doing that we are not doing. It led to her cover story in the most recent issue. We can talk about challenges people face here in Massachusetts. It’s a little backdrop. It starts with a little thing and grows and shows we are an outlier out there.
LOBRON: We have a great panel to consider why so few people run for office in Massachusetts and what to do about it. We have about 57 minutes. I don’t want to waste any time. The statistic Bruce talked about had to do with the Legislature at 17 percent contested. We have a legislator here and a councilor from Boston and someone thinking about getting into a different kind of office. Mr. Cunningham is a professor of political science at UMass Boston who studies and teaches about Massachusetts politics. What is it Mr. Cunningham about Massachusetts that has gotten us to this dismal state of political competition?
CUNNINGHAM: First thanks for inviting me. We never have been really except for a brief period a competitive state. It helps to think about the history of our non-competitiveness. I decided to start at 1639. Deputy Governor John Winthrop was brought up on charges of abusing his governing powers and he was acquitted and gave a little speech on liberty and said, those who govern should not be beholden to dissenters or to public opinion. We have done a fairly good job of following Winthrop’s ideas ever since. We have not had much party competition. We went from the dominance of the Federalists to the Whigs in the Civil War. The Republicans took over and managed to dominate politics until probably about 1928. Democrats were gaining and in ’28 you had the first Irish Catholic to run for president, Al Smith. He became the first Democrat to take Massachusetts. He brought so many people into voting and so forth and it becomes competitive for about two to three decades. The Democrats win the House in ’48 and the Senate in ’58 and have held the Legislature ever since. For most of that time they have held the House and Senate overwhelmingly. The real competition has been on the gubernatorial side. Since 1928, when Gov. Patrick finishes his term, the Republicans and the Democrats will have evenly split the governor’s office for those decades. In the 70s something important happened. Gov. Dukakis became the dominant Democratic figure and also brought in a lot of managerial progressive-minded people who were interested in efficiency in government. When people didn’t think they were getting that in 1990s they turned to Gov. Weld who promised to deliver on it. You had an opportunity for Republicans to take those kinds of voters and they did with Govs. Weld, Cellucci and Romney. On the legislative side, there were two important years. In 1990, 16 Republicans get elected to the Senate and they pick up seats in the House but within the next few elections they’d given that up. In 2004 there is a very substantial effort by Gov. Romney to run a lot of candidates, over 100, on the Romney Reform team and every one of those challengers, non-incumbents lost and very few ran in 2006 when Gov. Romney had his mind on different things and abandoned the effort. And now I think the Republicans are probably really in the worse shape than they ever have been in the Legislature. I think of Gov. Romney’s relationship to the Massachusetts Republican Party as analogous to Bernie Madoff’s relationship to his investors. It went good for a while but now you are near bankruptcy.
LOBRON: So we have folks here in different stages of the political process. Some have just finished a race, some in the last month got into a race and we have one thinking about maybe getting into another race. Mr. Baker, you are thinking about running for governor. When are you going to decide and what is going to go into that decision?
BAKER: Do you really think I’m going to answer that question?
LOBRON: I have to ask.
BAKER: The funny thing about it is the big question you have to answer when you consider something like this is, do you think you can make a difference? Is it going to matter? Because at the end of the day it’s a tremendous amount of work. It puts a tremendous amount of stress on your family if you have one. It’s no day at the beach from start to finish. And I think the 64 thousand dollar question for anybody who is thinking about it is, do you believe at the end of the day that it’s going to make a difference? I actually think one of the reasons we have trouble – and it’s not just Republicans running against Democrats, it’s Democrats running against Democrats too – I think one of the reasons we have trouble finding candidates is a lot of people ask that question and they’re not sure they know the answer. I think in some ways the most interesting thing to me about that article about Minnesota was when you read that article there is a perpetual sense of capacity to deliver change and to make a difference if you’re running. I was astonished by the level of almost naïve optimism that played all the way through that article when they talked to people from Minnesota. And I don’t think anyone would ever describe the Massachusetts political culture as naively optimistic. I think that’s a big part of the issue. I mean, if you’re going to make the investment, you better sure that you can make a difference if you win. That’s a tough question to answer in this state.
LOBRON: Another difference, at least in the people that I spoke to, was there was less of a sense of, am I going to win? There was more of a sense of, you run because that is what a democracy is. It’s having multiple candidates.
BAKER: I really think that’s a secondary level question. I really do. The first question is do you think it would matter at the end of the day.
YOON: I ran in 2005 for city council because initially I thought that by running I could make a difference, simply by running. The fact is if I had known more about Boston city politics before I made this decision I probably wouldn’t have run. But I was naïve enough, and optimistic enough to actually believe that since there had been no Asian Americans since 1630-what to run for office in the city of Boston, that somehow by being the first that some difference could be made. As it turned out I did win the only open seat on the city council, so just on that point there’s some difference that can be made and I got the sense that some of folks that you talked to in Minnesota may have felt that as well.
LOBRON: What about your recent decision to run for mayor? There are three people in the race now. It’s not clear whether the current mayor will run again. If he does, it’s been 60 years since Boston voters have turned out an incumbent. So you’ve got a seat on the council. Why give that up against those odds?
YOON: Now I know more about politics. I had to do a little bit more homework. It does matter whether one thinks that you can actually win. There are tremendous sacrifices. In Boston, it’s very much the same as Massachusetts and the Legislature. The current mayor has not been challenged since he took office. The last competitive election was 1983. I hope we get into this a little bit later. I do have to spend a tremendous amount of time on the phone raising money. We are not going to just say, ‘Woe is us.’ But there are structural issues around that that I think we do absolutely need to start talking about. If I become mayor, I don’t want a challenger to have to go through what I am going through now in order to challenge me. That’s the honest truth. That process is so vitally important. We’ve seen in the last city election a dismal 14 percent of registered voters coming out to vote. Last year in an election for president that didn’t even matter since all our electoral votes were going Barack Obama, 65 or so percent came out to vote. We need to talk about this and to remove some of the barriers to this current state.
LOBRON: Sen. Chang-Diaz, you have had two decisions, taking on an incumbent in 2006 and then doing it again in 2008.
CHANG-DIAZ: Before I get into my personal story, I want to return to this question going on here of can I make a difference or is it, people should have choices at the ballot box and this is the way democracy should be? Which one of those is the right question? The answer is those should be the same question and in fact they are the same question. It does make a difference for people to just run. I would venture that there is a higher voter participation rate in Minnesota where we see these constant challenges to incumbents. Just that in an of itself draws more people to the polls. In that simple way it makes a difference in the health of the democracy and the attention level that people are paying to policies and their sense of investment in the system. Then the question is, is it worth it enough, can you make enough of a difference to outweigh the personal cost of running? That is where the personal stories come in. I want to give the caveat that I don’t always choose to be out there and talk about my decision-making process and all of the terrible things that happen to you as a candidate and the costs and the price you have to pay. We all run for office because we care about much bigger problems and helping people that have much bigger problems and it feels a little off to play your sad song about how hard it is to run. But if you are asking the question of how can we get more people to run we need to talk about the very down and dirty details. I’ll just put my agenda right out there. The costs are very much about financial costs, both for one individually and for the economics involved with fundraising. For an individual most races and elections you have to leave your job, either on a leave of absence or you just quit your job. You leave your income and health insurance. For most people in society that is not a possibility. That on its own wipes out a whole swath of our society from being able to run. Imagine for women and people of color, working families, it is even more disproportionate. I was just barely on the cusp of being able to do this. I am probably the cheapest person in this room. I live very frugally. I was able to live off of savings while I ran but it was a real challenge. I almost wasn’t able to do it. And I almost wasn’t able to do it twice. I remember Michael Jonas and I had an email exchange in between my two elections. I hope it’s okay if I share this. He had written about how city council candidates needed to be willing to run twice to get over the barrier and be willing to lose once, build name recognition and run twice. I emailed him to say here’s another angle to think about. For many low-income candidates, particularly women and people of color, it wipes out their whole savings to run once. Many people will say, oh you are a great candidate and we’d love to see you come back again. And you are going, I can’t do this again. It’s something we have to think about, the personal finances. If you have children, just leaving the health insurance, that on its own takes it off the table. I think about single moms running. Gloribell Mota ran for the special election seat in East Boston a couple of years ago. I don’t know how she did that. On the federal level there is a rule that allows candidates to draw a salary from their federal campaign funds, which is problematic because it’s hard enough to do the fundraising right, just for the campaign let alone to pay your living expenses. In Massachusetts we’re not even allowed to do that. So I think that’s one thing that we could look at. And then there’s the fundraising piece. If you are running as a challenger it’s very hard to fundraise. Particularly looking at the underrepresented populations in our government, women and people of color and working class, as a challenger you are raising not from the big political mucky mucks and organizations and PACs, you are raising from your personal network and if you do not come from a high net worth personal network the changes are you don’t have many friends who can write you five hundred dollar checks and max out to you so that presents a whole other challenge.
LOBRON: In Minnesota they do have a spending cap and a carry forward cap, which they acknowledge has never been challenged and where essentially if you are an incumbent you can’t keep your money between election cycles so you have to either donate it to a cause or, what does get weird is they can give money to their state parties, which are more powerful than ours. Mr. Cunningham, can you talk about ways other states have worked with the money question?
CUNNINGHAM: I am not as familiar with many other states but you hit on the right point of a cultural question, this openness to advantaging challengers doesn’t exist here. It does exist in other places like Minnesota and Iowa for heaven’s sake allows a computer to redraw its redistricts. Other states are open to more. Our culture isn’t that way and to expect our culture to change I think is just mistaken. I agree that money is utterly critical. Every study of challenges to incumbents shows the importance of money but when you look back on clean elections in this state the majority party turned that aside rather handily and so I don’t think you can expect that kind of help. The kind of problems the Sen. Chang-Diaz describes are going to persist in this state for a while.
LOBRON: You did raise some money. Can you talk about what kind of fundraising strategies worked for you?
CHANG-DIAZ: Discipline. You have to do it every day. You have to do those fundraising calls every day and you have to get over the sense of this idea that your are asking money for yourself and understand that you are asking for money for a set of values and a set of ideas that is larger than yourself and that’s why you’re running. That is an enormous challenge, I know sociologically and culturally particularly, that’s a challenge for women. I come at this not just as a candidate but having worked at the Barbara Lee Family Foundation that seeks to train women and men running for office and seeing this play out in trainings, how hard it is in particular for women to ask for money. You’ve got to get on the phone. Pound those phone lines. Ask, ask, ask. Sometimes people say yes. I ended up raising a fair amount of money at the doors, which was a little bit unexpected. Those are the two things I’d spend my whole day doing, doing fundraising calls and knocking on doors. Every now and then a wonderful blessed soul would write me a check at the door. As a challenger you don’t have access to a lot of the big raisers who will put together a fundraising event for you and the money appears sort of out of nowhere.
LOBRON: One question for you and Councilor Yoon, one of the things happening here and elsewhere with challengers is drawing heavily out of state or out of their district to get funding for their campaigns. It’s an interesting phenomenon in the sense of why would these people care and want to give. I wonder if you can speak to your experience raising money outside. Is is something you feel you have to do because you can’t raise in your own district or is it simply the network you’ve got?
YOON: Some hay has been made out of the money that I have raised out of state. I take a moment to clarify. I have raised 1,900 or so donations from the city of Boston itself, about 1,700 to 1,800 from Massachusetts outside of the city and about 900 from out of state. There is this perception in the minds of some that I am raising the vast majority of money from out of state. It is a larger amount than I am sure any other challenger to a Boston mayor has ever done. Naturally there is some strong significance in the Asian American community nationwide about my race because there has never been an Asian-American mayor of a major American city outside of Hawaii. As Sen. Chang-Diaz said the enormous amount of time you have to spend on the phone is itself prohibitive for you to mount a viable challenge. A million dollars – the incumbent mayor has a million and a half – if people gave you every phone call you made resulted in five hundred dollars you would have to make 3,000 of them to get that. The number of messages you have to leave and the people who get uncomfortable and hang up on you. Particularly this year, it’s such a bad economy. The federal government has recognized that a low limit protects incumbents. They said if you want to level the playing field, McCain-Feingold raised the limits to $2,000, that’s a quarter of the phone calls that I’d have to make. I don’t have kind of the institutional fundraisers out there. What challenger does, what challenger has a bevy of vendors and contractors that do business with the city of Boston? What councilor has that, or anyone outside City Hall? We need to talk about how to limit those contributions as well. I have a hearing order in the City Council I filed last week. Other cities have recognized that if you have any business before the city you are limited to $250. The equivalent in the city of Boston which would make sense would be a limit of $100. The federal government has also recognized that if you work on Capitol Hill you cannot contribute to your employer, to your boss. In the city of Boston, you have a strong mayor system. The mayor has access to 20,000 employees who can give up to five hundred dollars each, and their friends and families as well. That’s incumbent protection. It’s simply put. That’s a culture that we need to challenge. But that’s what laws are for. I proposed legislation to start the discussion. That’s largely why I am running for office. The standards we need to apply to make Boston more democratic are the same standards I would subscribe to obviously if I were elected mayor.
LOBRON: Give us some sense of what it takes to make change here, Mr. Cunningham.
CUNNINGHAM: I wouldn’t look for a great deal of structural change, the kind that I think the candidates have spoken of. I don’t think that’s forthcoming. I have studied a little bit the 2004 legislative elections and I found the variables I tested, I found two that were particularly important. Money, no surprise there. The more money a challenger can raise the better he or she can do. The second one, the governor was not on the ballot, the thing that moved most votes for Republican challengers was Gov. Romney’s vote percentage in that district in 2002. It leads me to conclude that for an effective partisan challenge in this state, the Republican Party will need a candidate at the top who is a compelling figure, who is a good vote-getter, him or herself, and I think somebody who I think, where Gov. Romney failed, will continue to work at it and recruit good candidates and stand up for them over a period of time. There is going to need to be somebody at the top who is going to have some coattail effect for those in the lesser offices. I have no idea who that person could be, but if any of the other panelists do.
LOBRON: Thinking about the person nearest me, how about the farm team? We keep hearing the Republican Party needs somebody to take it on. There’s always a challenger when it’s the governor’s office. The issue has always been in the legislative races and actually getting somebody on the ballot. Is that something you’d want to take on? How would you take it on?
BAKER: If you think about the 1990 election, which was the election when Weld, Cellucci and Malone all won and there were 16 [Republican] senators and I think 46 Republicans in the House. You basically had a pretty vibrant Republican Party at that point. Ray Shamie had been the chair for a few years. He put a lot of money in. He raised a lot of money. I think one of the more interesting dynamics to play out after that was in the subsequent two elections, with Bill as governor and popular as governor, Republicans lost seats in both of those elections. And people forget that Weld and Cellucci got 76 percent of the vote in 1994. It was the biggest blowout in gubernatorial political history in Massachusetts in a year when we lost two more seats in the Senate and I think five or six in the House. So I don’t really know if I think this thing flows downhill. I think it actually flows in the other direction, which is up from the bottom. I thought for a long time that one of the things the Democrats do better than Republicans is they treat this as a career. People run and they run more than once. They run as many times as it takes. The most interesting thing to me about the 2004 election, the presidential election, there were a bunch of Republicans running, many for the first time against, for all intents and purposes, incumbent Democrats and a presidential candidate from Massachusetts at the top of the ticket, raised a fair amount of money and came awfully close to winning and got more votes than the person who won the race had gotten two years before that in the previous election. And none of those folks ran in 2006. Persistence, to get back to your word about fundraising, persistence matters in this space. I think as a party we have had trouble figuring out how to make that that part of the creed. You’ve got to run more than once.
CUNNINGHAM: The Republican Party in 1990 was well prepared for a year that was a throw the bums out year. You had a year where the economy was terrible, where corruption was an issue, where the Democrats were divided. If this sounds anything like what we are facing in the next year or so, it might ring a bell. In 1994, as Mr. Baker says, Republicans did terrifically at the top of the ticket but seemed more focused on the top than the bottom of the ballot. I did a questionnaire in 2004. Huge problems happened. A lot of people learned a lot from running and did not run again. I think probably 40 to 50 of those Republican candidates responded I do want to run again in 2006 and eight of them did. There was no follow-up at all.
LOBRON: Is that a lack of support or the job being appealing enough?
BAKER: I spent eight years in state government on the executive side and spent a lot of time with people who are reps and senators. If you are built a certain way it’s a really interesting job. I would say this about the local stuff too – it’s a wonderful study in human behavior if you can think about it that way. It’s very interesting to end up in these conversations where everyone agrees the Red Sox are the best team in town but you get into conversations about land use and property taxes and all these other things where two people who are perfectly good friends on everything up until that moment suddenly become bitter enemies. I found that stuff to be kind of fun and kind of interesting, but it’s wearing. It’s all day long every day, which I don’t think is really appreciated by a lot of folks outside the system.
YOON: I wonder to what extent in states like Minnesota we have forums like this or programs like the Commonwealth Seminar. There are some people who were in that seminar with me or in initiatives for diversity and civic leadership. Programs like this and programs to encourage civic engagement and participation are really important in developing that farm team, as you say. But as I talk to a lot of recent graduates of these programs, there are still very big hurdles, a mental and emotional hurdle about breaking in and actually running. I think a lot of people are enthralled with the idea of running and have that optimism, naïve maybe, about making that difference. But it is still incredibly daunting. What was striking about the article is you can be a dentist or you can be a mechanic or a lawyer but you are doing this out of a sense of duty to serve for six months as opposed to all year round.
LOBRON: You give me a good segue into my next question, the issue particularly with the state legislature, the part-time nature. Senator, you are two months in but that is what a lot of states do. What do you think of a change like that? Would it make it easier who want to get involved?
CHANG-DIAZ: I don’t. I want to caveat this with I’d love to see numbers behind this, which I don’t know. But I really suspect that making it technically a part-time job, I am sure there are many states where the Legislature is technically part-time but it is in fact still a full-year job. It’s the legislating part of the job that goes on while the Legislature’s in session but there’s drafting and researching and district work going on the rest of the year. That really makes it a job that’s prohibitive again for people who have to work for a living. It’s difficult to find seasonal work for the other half of the year. So I think that again would take out a large swath of people from the pool of potential candidates.
BAKER: I actually see that one exactly the opposite. We do business in New Hampshire and Maine as well as in Massachusetts. New Hampshire has a part-time Legislature. I spend a fair amount of time up there on all kinds of issues. The interesting thing to me is a huge piece of the New Hampshire Legislature is part of another community. They have an affinity of the fact that they are a legislator but they are also a contractor, a real estate agent, an insurance broker. I think their capacity to see what goes on in government from the outside in, as well as from the inside out, is better because they have feet in both of those places, than people in Massachusetts who spend 12 months a year on the inside and have trouble seeing the world from the outside in.
YOON: What I see in the Boston City Council, and I think this is true of a state rep or senator, when you are facing your constituents you feel the pressure all the time to deliver for them, to make good things happen for their community center or the park or getting the stop sign. That is a tremendous amount of work. A lot of city councilors recognize that the way they’ll keep getting reelected is through delivering constituent services. Of course city councilors don’t have the staffs to actually deliver the services. It’s the mayor who delivers the services. What we have is this interesting dynamic where a councilor’s worst fear is that they will not get their calls returned by the mayor so therefore how can they continue to find favor in the eyes of their constituents? This is something that has perpetuated a political dynamic in our city where the idea of simply representing your district or your constituents in matters that move policy is really not what it takes to get reelected. Our irony is, whereas in the State House it’s 160 seats in the House and 40 in the Senate, the city councilor pay of $87,500 is really to be a service delivery kind of conduit whereas our legislative function is very, very weak because we have such a strong mayor. One of the things I plan to talk about as I campaign for mayor is to simply put the question out there and say do you think this works for our city? Does it make sense? Should city councilors educate citizens in terms of how they can actually get the stop sign on their street without having to go through city council? Or maybe should the city council should move policy and budget priorities in a way such that where stop signs are actually needed they get put up without having to know someone who knows someone who can get to the councilor or the councilor’s chief of staff so you can get a meeting and a phone call. Instead of doing things that way – that is why this is a full-time job.
AUDIENCE STATEMENT: Thank you for this important topic. Why does the State House Legislature and in fact a governor consider that a career position for lifetime when they can retire for a quarter million dollars in retirement? I think we should go down the road of term limits and limit the kind of retirement plan and then we might have a change in who’s being elected, not this inbred kind of system that we presently have.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: I am Ellen Sturgis from Stow. I am a selectman and I ran for the legislature last year in an open seat that was a retiring legislator. What I found was most frustrating – I won’t even start with the money thing – it’s really more about the mentality that is the career professional. I was running against the handpicked successor to the previous and so the Democratic Party really swooped in and said, well you are not really a Democrat and it was getting to the point where was saying, could I take the wrath of my family and run as a Republican? I was so annoyed by this idea. It wasn’t about the best candidate. It was about the party. Could you just talk to that?
BAKER: Coming back to the article. One of the major points you get out of that article is the culture in that state about the positivity of lots of people running and competition. The mere fact that rollover is probably not legal and yet no one challenges it is just an incredible statement about the culture that people live in out there relative to what you would see in other places. That’s a fundamental problem that we have. The professor sort of nailed that one when he said if you expect big structural reforms here, don’t hold your breath.
CHANG-DIAZ: I don’t want to be Pollyanna about this. I don’t think we are about to pass clean elections this year in the legislation. I want to say in a real cautionary way don’t let people tell you that what you think is naïve because people called Sam naïve, people called me naïve and look where we are now. Cultural change in our political system is possible and I think it’s possible in a surprisingly short time horizon. Look if enough people say out loud gosh I’d really like to have campaign finance reform in this state I think we’ll find that a lot of other people have probably been thinking that quietly to their selves and we might get there in a few years.
BAKER: Sonia, can I ask you a question? What do you think the likelihood is that there’s going to be pension reform passed this year?
CHANG-DIAZ: I think it’s likely. I do. I am a cosponsor.
BAKER: How about the governor’s ethics reform bill? Do you think that’s going to get passed?
CHANG-DIAZ: I do.
BAKER: Well those would be two really big steps in the right direction.
CHANG-DIAZ: I could not agree with you more Charlie and I will be working to make that happen.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: I am Dan Dunn. I am from Arlington and ran for state rep in ’04. I ran against Jim Marzilli. It didn’t matter what my name was or my party. I was running against a Democrat. The gubernatorial election excepted, most of the time the general election has been completely determined. The primary is where there is a lot of turnover. The real problem to solve here is, how do we bust out of the one-party system? Do we have to break that and how do you do it?
YOON: Correct me if I am wrong but in the last state election there were 45 or so contested seats and I think 30 of those, the vast majority, were Democrats challenging Democrats. I don’t think it’s fair to characterize the Democrats don’t encourage challenges because that’s mainly what happened. Among Republicans, and this may just have to do with small numbers, but there were no challengers in the Republican primaries in the last state election. The Democratic Party, and I am a Democrat although in Boston they are nonpartisan races, but the Democratic Party is really pushing small d democracy as much as it is the capital D Democrats through initiatives that really do try to bring new people in. I am one of them. Gov. Patrick signaled for me, hey this is a party for you too – someone who hasn’t been a lifelong kind of like coming out of cultured career of politics. I do believe that and that’s something that as a member of the party you should continue to push that we believe competition is good and challenges to our own ideals and sense of entitlement, where it may exist, should be challenged.
BAKER: Sam pointed out the city election is nonpartisan. The local election when I ran was non-partisan too and my campaign was basically run by Democrats because all my neighbors are Democrats. One of the things that’s sort of interesting about this is the party registration data, what is it 12 percent Republicans, 52 percent are independents, and 35 percent plus or minus are Democrats. When you look at that data it basically says if you are a Republican, all other things being equal – a lot of people just vote affinity, there’s no question that a lot of Democrats vote for Democrats and Republicans vote for Republicans – if you are a Republican you have to get every Republican to vote for you, you have to get a third of the Democrats to vote for you and you’ve got to get more than 50 percent of the independents to win. That’s a pretty big lift and it’s probably not going to happen the first time you run, coming back to this earlier point. In some ways you are going to have to run more than once to convince a third of the Democrats who would normally vote for the Democrat to vote for you and to get 52 percent or more of the independents to vote for you. I think the notion that you’ve got to be willing to run more than once is a really important point. It’s even more true if you are a Republican.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: My name is Brandy Brooks. I am a resident of Somerville and I run the Community Design Resource Center of Boston. We talk about a reason people don’t want to run twice as the barriers to run once are so high that no one would want to do it again. One of you is an incumbent. One is an incumbent trying to not be. Another wants to be an incumbent in a different kind of way. What are you doing to make sure you have challengers at the primary and the general election level?
YOON: I submitted legislation last week around campaign finance reform. One very simple step towards that is to push for full transparency of those who do business with the city. When you look at cities across the country, so many of them recognize that in city politics that relationship between a vendor or contractor doing business, needing approvals, having contracts, is a relationship that can become a pay to play sort of system very easily. I have legislation that says we apply the strictest standard the state allows to contracts between five and $25,000. Secondly to explore the notion that if the mayor writes your paycheck every week, that kind of power, asymmetric power dynamic is such that you cannot be expected, not be allowed to contribute to your boss. That form of incumbent protection is something that weighs heavily on me. These are reforms I am pushing for and reforms that I want to live by if I am elected mayor. I think that’s healthy. We need to absolutely talk about term limits. If the president of the United States can be held to eight years . . .
BAKER: Minnesota has term limits.
YOON: There you go. New York City had term limits. A friend who is a New York City councilor said the incumbency, a lot of the old school, the old boy network that he experiences from the outside in, totally wiped away when they enacted term limits there.
CHANG-DIAZ: I will say that I think politically in terms of the political landscape that passing publicly owned elections, publicly financed elections this year is not viable. I am not leading the charge on that legislation this year. It is something that’s on my agenda for the future. I will absolutely support it and I will continue to talk about it even though it might not be in the pipeline this session. This year I am supporting other electoral reforms like election-day registration because I think there are other things that we can do to build the political power from the ground up to support challengers, to support more candidates of color, to support more women. That is one thing I am doing this year. Also on a personal level I am trying to do all that I can to get out there and go to Commonwealth Seminar and things like this and encourage more people to run. I would say that clean elections bar none would be the biggest game changer in encouraging more challengers and that will encourage challengers to me and I will still support it.
