Reply #13: True dat! Plus the Mass Dems are unorganized.

[TayTay]

The little-known secret about Mass Dems is that they are unorganized. The local races depend on the heavily Democratic local organizations to get the vote out. The statewide party cannot seem to get beyond the in-fighting between the moderate and liberal wings of the party.

Trying to organize Mass Dems is a daunting task. The libs don't trust organization because it might be an oppressive fascist plot hatched against them by the conservatives. The moderate don't trust the libs because they are flighty and talk about issues that the rank-and-file don't really care about. The gubernatorial races engender hard feelings that linger, sort of like the last Pres primaries did. The libs want a knight errant to come in and champion the lib cause. There are no 100% pure candidates and there never will be. There are only humans. So every time one of those humans does something that isn't 100% pure, the left gets a huge hissy fit and screams about those folks abandoning them. (The left can be so unrealistic about actual politics which is about compromise. Compromise is not the pact with Satan that so many lefties make it out to be. Sometimes compromise is the only way to get what you want.)

Anyway, the libs get gubernatorial candidates that it doesn't really like and can't seem to get behind. It buys the Rethug talking points about said candidate being a tool of 'the Beacon Hill insiders.' The Dems shoot their own by either not really showing up to do GOTV or by sitting home and basking in their own moral purity and not bothering to do the actual work of getting a Dem elected. (This is excused by saying that the libs were 'true to their principles.' You can be true to your principles and lose. I don't see the upside of that, but I am only 1/2 Mass lib. The other half believes in real politic.)

Best line at the MA Dem convention, "How do other states where Democrats have to be organized in order to get elected do it?" Democrats in Massachusetts control 87% of the seats in the state legislature, 100% of the congressional delegation and haven't had the Gov's seat for 16 years. And the MA Dem party has deep, deep problems that this seeming success has only made worse.