Worcester, MA is Going GOP Red (Woot Woot!)

Worcester County is Going Red in Blue MA

I had to rub my eyes when I read the following headline in the Boston Globe:

Slowly but surely, Worcester County has gone Republican

Could this be happening? Is it really possible that one part of Massachusetts is turning into a Republican stronghold, in spite of the fact that the Bay State has not gone Republican since Reagan's landslide reelection in 1984, and they lost their last two Republican Congressman twelve years later?

Apparently, Republicans are again traction in Central Massachusetts, despite decades of Democratic dominance (and corruption).

The Boston Globe reports:

When Representative Richard Neal arrived at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and saw the huge crowd that had turned out that summer day in 2009, he was thrilled. Wow, he thought, more than 200 people had shown up to hear his views on health care.

Those feelings lasted for about 15 seconds into his talk when an elderly woman stood up and began railing at him, egged on by hisses, boos, and raspberries from the crowd when he tried to answer her. It was the beginning of a nearly two-hour session full of rants about death panels, the “government takeover” of Medicare, and sometimes far-fetched fears about the Affordable Care Act, which was signed into law the following year.


Obamacare really has soured the Democratic Party brand, even in deep blue Massachusetts. "Mr. Governor" Deval Patrick almost lost his reelection bid in 2010 in the Tea Party wave. A second surge of conservative outrage ensured that Charlie Baker would get the corner office in 2014. Republican state senator Scott Brown took advantage of voter discontent with Obamacare and became the Bay State's first US Senator in nearly forty years. It was a euphoric time for national Republicans and the Tea Party movement. They had made a major dent in a deeply liberal-progressive enclave.

Neal, a Springfield Democrat, felt he was seeing the first explosive evidence of what was brewing at the precinct and ward levels of the towns he represented in Worcester County.

The once Democrat-dominated county — a collection of rural and suburban communities, three small cities, and the city of Worcester — is now a Republican enclave. It is the state’s epicenter for Tea Party activity. Some of the most conservative groups in the state GOP, many of them renegade competitors to the party establishment in Boston, are based in the county.


Incredible. The Tea Party movement is alive and well in the state where its namesake was born over two hundred years ago.

“It’s the most underreported political story in the state,’’ Neal said in a recent interview. His district, for many years until it was redrawn for the 2012 election, spread east from his home city, taking in the southern Worcester County communities along the Connecticut border and reaching into the Blackstone Valley.


First of all  — of course this Republican resurgence is underreported. The media are biased toward the Left, liberals, and Democrats in general. They don't want to talk about Republicans winning seats and regain traction in one of the bluest states in the Union.


Still, strange indeed that redistricting has put Democrats at a disadvantage in Worcester. The gerrymandering of the Democratic Party (and gerrymandering is named after a Massachusetts governor, by the way) has now seen some of its strength put aside.

The political shift gives Republicans fertile ground in a wide geographical swath in the middle of a very blue state. And it is giving them confidence that Worcester County, with its large — and growing — percentage of the state’s voting population, can be ground zero for its resurgence in Massachusetts.

How have Massachusetts  Republicans worked their way back into power and preeminence in this region?

Two Republicans have recently won election to top county posts that Democrats held for decades. Lew Evangelidis was elected sheriff in 2010, and political novice Stephanie Fattman pulled off a major upset last year when she beat an incumbent Democrat in the race for register of probate.

The Republicans in Massachusetts have learned what Republicans in California are now learning. All politics is indeed local, and starts with conservatives fighting for smaller seats in cities and on school boards. Conservative values have to grow from the ground up to be effective. For too long, conservatives and Republicans wanted to strike out for the big offices and the

A Republican has represented the county on the Governor’s Council at the State House for the past four years. And Fattman’s husband, former state representative Ryan Fattman of Webster, last year crushed a respected longtime Democratic senator, Richard T. Moore.

Ryan Fattman

Ryan Fattman is a powerhouse, a machine of a politician, but one for the force of good. Republican US Senate Edward Brooke often told his charges: "Seek power. There is nothing wrong with power, if you are seeking to do good."

With his choice of local state Representative Karyn Polito as his running mate, Governor Charlie Baker got an extra boost out of the county in last fall’s gubernatorial campaign. Baker won the county with 56 percent of the vote, to Democrat Martha Coakley’s 38 percent. In the 1990 governor’s race, by comparison, Republican William Weld carried the county by one-third of a percentage point over Democrat John Silber and barely eked out a statewide victory.


Baker was smart. He probably knew about the Republican strength he could tap into in that region, and tapping Polito to join him was smart politics to assure his victory in 2014.

And now, for the first time in years, the GOP is making a play in heavily Democratic Worcester city politics, with many of its elected officials and activists rallying behind City Councilor Michael T. Gaffney, a Tea Party-leaning councilor who is challenging Mayor Joseph Petty’s run for a third term this year.


Notice that the mayor is an Independent. The Republican name is not quite strong enough yet to play big, but it is getting there.

Drawn to his antigovernment, antitax rhetoric, Republican officeholders and activists have endorsed Gaffney, a registered independent, setting up a confrontation next November that could demonstrate the party’s reasons for optimism.


Now why would Massachusetts residents start hating government and taxes? Because there is too much of both in their lives. Democrats have done untold damage to the state and their brand has boosted the 1% and created more parasites taking and preventing more from making the most of their lives. Nobody really wants to be a welfare queen. There is too much to life to settle for being dependent on someone else.

“The Republicans and the Tea Party want to make this race a test,’’ said Paul Giorgio, a Worcester political activist and consultant to Petty’s campaign. He predicted Petty would win easily. As for the Republicans’ success countywide, he said: “They’re certainly feeling their oats.”


Paul Giorgio has a dubious, shady past, That alone should indicate why Democrats are doing so poorly.

Kirsten Hughes, the state Republican Party chairwoman, said party leaders see a huge potential for Worcester County to provide a revival for the party that has been outgunned by Democrats for decades.

“Since 2010, there has been an explosion,’’ she said. “It has been increasingly red, but it is now getting deep red.”


Incredible, and inspiring.

Hughes said that because Worcester County has a much larger percentage of voters than the few other GOP enclaves in Massachusetts, mostly in the Cape Cod area, the new crop of legislators and elected county officials finally gives the Republicans a bench of future state political figures, the lack of which has been a major hurdle for the party.

The more Republicans that get elected, the more that can get elected at a higher level. Simple at that.

“That is where the farm team is the strongest,’’ Hughes said. “We think it can be our launching pad for candidates for statewide office.”


Now why are more Bay State residents voting Republican, even if the party affiliations and registration have not changed for the better? One elected official commented about his diminishing support:


 The constituency that sent him to Beacon Hill for so many years — blue-collar workers who believed in FDR’s Democratic Party values and looked upon government as a force for good in their lives — had died off.


While some political activists have commented that demographic changes would doom the Republican Party, the fact is that a large number of the "Old White Vote" which tended Democratic is dying away, and in Massachusetts, this shift is benefiting Republicans.

Another source of the Republicans’ growing strength, according to analysts, is disaffected Democrats who have settled in suburban towns and rural communities and away from rapidly diversifying cities where they grew up. They feel they have lost control of their lives and blame President Obama and liberal politicians.


Really?

Lou DiNatale, a Democratic political analyst and longtime Worcester County activist, said those voters feel alienated from the Democratic Party and its socially liberal, pro-immigration, antigun agenda and are angry over their stagnant wages and what they see as burdensome taxes.


Despite what the media and academia portray, voters do not like open borders, gun control, and they want to make a buck and keep it. That's the American way, and the Democratic Party has declared all-out war on working Americans.

“They have fears of immigrants when there aren’t any in their communities, fears of benefit losses to immigrants, and a hostility to institutions across the board — governments, corporations, the media.

DiNatale and others say those former Democrats feel alienated from their party, believing it has become dominated by elite liberals more concerned with social issues than the issues they care about.

The Boston Globe cannot help but let slip its arrogant, self-justifying liberalism. Americans are not racist, and they do not resent legal immigration. They resent illegal aliens taking advantage of the weak borders and easy government welfare. The anger toward "institutions across the board" all has to do with the poisonous interference of the state into many facets of our lives. Enough is enough.


As Democratic politicians pander to illegal aliens and Big Government elites, a wide swath of voters whom Richard Nixon called "The Silent Majority" are getting angry and riled up enough to do something about the bad policies and wicked governance in their local, state, and federal representatives.

Final Reflection


The Democratic Party in New England has gone too far. President Obama pushed their dangerous policies and doubled down on them, then imposed the hurt nationally. Eventually, the battered wife will find herself in the corner and kill her abused. An enemy pushed into the corner will fight to death. The rapid affront of unparalled secular progressivism has born its bitter fruit, and life-long Democrats from differing coalitions have had enough.

Republicans in blue states and counties have taken over precisely as a check on these monstrous overreaches. In Massachusetts, conservatives are working hard to focus on issues which local shareholders care about, and then win on.