Can Massachusetts GOP Ride on Brown's Coattails?

Written by Byron Tau on Tuesday January 19, 2010

Exclusive: FF spoke to Scott Brown and Massachusetts GOP state chair Jennifer Nassour about rebuilding the Massachusetts Republican party.

“Après moi, le deluge?” is a fair question for Scott Brown to ask.

The real question at the heart of this most bizarre special election is whether Senator-elect Scott Brown is just an outlier who captured the popular zeitgeist of a restless, dissatisfied Massachusetts electorate, or something more – a harbinger of a competitive, yet moderate Republican Party in a state where liberal Democrats overwhelmingly dominate the machinery of government.

Former governor Mitt Romney came into Massachusetts in 2002 promising to revitalize the state Republican Party and reverse the GOP’s declining fortunes. No longer would Republicans simply concede that they had no chance of winning anything but the governorship – rather, the state party would rebuild its voter rolls and actively recruit competitive candidates to run for office at the local level.

But when Romney left office in 2006, the state party may have been in more dire shape than ever before. Despite his relatively smooth, competent tenure, voters perceived him as too focused on divisive social issues like gay marriage and too busy laying the groundwork out of state for his campaign for president. His Lt. Governor Kerry Healey lost the race to replace him to a liberal Democrat, and the GOP lost three more seats in a state legislature where their caucus barely controlled 10 percent of the seats in both chambers. Half of the state’s ten incumbent Democratic members of Congress ran completely unopposed. And though the party fielded a candidate against the late Ted Kennedy, he was a lightweight with little hope of defeating the veteran lawmaker.

But in the last three years, the political winds in Massachusetts may have shifted – in part because the party has moved towards the center and away from the ideological battles tearing apart the national party.

Brown himself epitomizes some of these compromises. In a conversation with him last November – before his meteoric rise to frontrunner status – Brown stuck to bread and butter economic issues and all-around pragmatic conservatism.

“As a party, we need to have a larger tent. And we need to have some diversity of ideas,” he told me. In response to a question I asked about the debate then raging over whether the GOP should adopt an ideological purity test, Brown was dismissive. “I’m a fiscal conservative. I’ve never voted for a tax increase. Another Republican may not feel that way. I think it’s shortsighted to have a purity test.”

The current state party chair in Massachusetts, Jennifer Nassour, emphasized roughly the same points. She made waves in national Republican circles when she told a LGBT newspaper that, “there shouldn’t be a monolithic party position” on social issues – rather individual candidates should be free to embrace a pro-choice or a pro-gay marriage position if their conscience dictates.

"To me social issues are personal issues. Those are personal views, and we are not legislating here - at least I am not legislating anyone’s personal views," she added.

In an interview with me last fall, Nassour said “The fiscal issues are really the winning issues,” emphasizing job creation, lower taxes, good governance, anti-corruption and all around sound, moderate fiscal policy.

The truth is that the myth of Massachusetts as a liberal oasis has always been somewhat overstated. Voters were initially hostile to gay marriage when the state’s Supreme Judicial Court suddenly declared it legal in 2004. Roughly half the state’s voters are registered independents. The “Taxachusetts” label is a relic of the 1970s and 80s – the state has a flat income tax mandated by the constitution, and ranks 28th amongst the states in terms of overall tax burden. Massachusetts voters can sometimes flex a stubborn libertarian streak too – in 1986, the state’s mandatory seatbelt law was overridden by voters, and in 2008, the state essentially decriminalized simple possession of marijuana.

In short, it will take a more flexible brand of Republicanism to win in a state like Massachusetts. It will take abandoning some conservative dogmas and challenging some GOP orthodoxies. But if a moderate Republican like Scott Brown can win a race to succeed Ted Kennedy, there’s no reason why the state GOP can’t be competitive in Massachusetts.

“I try to lead by example. I think that people are looking at this race, and they’re wondering how I’ll do,” Brown told me in November.

Given his incredible five-point, come from behind victory, Massachusetts Republicans may have no other choice but to follow the path blazed by Brown.

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