Alex Morse, the 30 year old Mayor of Holyoke, will challenge Congressman Richie Neal in a Democratic primary next year. Observers are asking the same question about this race as they did about the 2018 challenges to Congressman Neal and Congressman Capuano. Is it about progressive insurgency or generational change in the Bay State’s establishment-friendly politics? If it’s the former, Neal’s reelection is as certain in 2020 as it was in 2018. If it’s the latter, the Congressman may need to break a sweat, but not to over exert himself. For the race to be a win for the district, however, it needs to be a bit of both.
Morse is clearly hoping to replicate the tight rope walk of Ayanna Pressley, whose upset take down of Mike Capuano in 2018 was made possible by her ability to be both a credible transactional politician, willing and able to leverage political power to advance the interests of her district, and a credible progressive insurgent able to provide substantive and descriptive representation for a demographically diverse Boston-based district. While the Mayor of Holyoke may be taken seriously enough by the political establishment and has plenty of credibility with energized progressives in Western Mass, the demographics of the 1st Congressional District are not nearly as favorable for progressive insurgents as they were for Pressley in the 7th Congressional District.
The 7th Congressional District is geographically dominated by the city of Boston, where Ayanna Pressley was a popular and highly visible City Councilor. Only 34% of its residents are white and one in three were not born in the United States. The 1st Congressional District is the state’s most rural. Its population is more than 70% white. Though I don’t have numbers, I’m comfortable assuming that Richie Neal’s district is closer to the statewide estimate of the immigrant population, which is one in six residents. Alex Morse is the Mayor of Holyoke, an economically depressed, medium-sized city in the District’s most populous county. His activities as Holyoke Mayor are undoubtedly less well known to the district’s voters-at-large than were Ayanna Pressley’s activities as a Boston City Councilor. Western Mass progressives getting behind Morse are almost certainly doing the same thing in the 1st Congressional District that many are doing nationally, which is over-estimating the electoral strength of progressive voters within the Democratic Party electorate.
All this leaves Morse with a long shot campaign that will probably out-perform Neal’s 2018 challenger’s, but that can’t replicate Ayanna Pressley’s feat without some unforeseeable lucky breaks. If Morse is the student of politics he appears to be, he will find himself torn between the hopes of his progressive supporters and his long term political career goals. The former will quickly consume the latter and Morse will likely decide that the two are not necessarily incompatible, which is to say that Morse’s campaign will ultimately rely on replicating Tahirah Amatul-Wadud’s 2018 effort with the hope that his profile and experience in elective office will make the difference.
Framing Congressman Neal as a creature of an essentially corrupt system that needs to be overthrown sooner rather than later will secure Morse the loyalty of progressive activists going forward, but not the support of the majority of Democratic voters. Average Democratic voters in the district have responded positively to Neal’s approach to his job for three decades. They do not resent Neal for his career-oriented approach. They want him to be politically powerful and understand that politics is a tough and competitive enterprise. Neal is a long-serving transactional politician in part because the voters of his district are by and large transactional voters, for whom moralistic appeals by ideologically motivated challengers (from the right and left) have fallen largely on deaf ears.
Congressman Neal not so subtlety signaled that he will be playing offense against his young challenger recently when he told reporters that “the 2020 Democratic primary will be as much about his challenger, Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse, as it will be about himself.” So, while Morse is campaigning uphill to change the perspective of the district’s voters Neal will be campaigning downhill, reinforcing his supporters’ shared assumptions about what makes an effective congressman.
While I too believe that legislators should be encouraged to cultivate institutional power to be leveraged for the advancement of their districts’ interests, Neal’s early signal that he will give as good as he gets in this campaign was a bit disappointing to me. Even though I understand that Capuano (and even Hillary Clinton) showed the danger of using kid gloves on long shot progressive insurgents in hopes of winning over their supporters, I hoped the Congressman would understand the factors that make him far less vulnerable than Capuano or Clinton were. I hoped (and still hope) that Neal will trust the data a bit more and be willing to acknowledge the utility of passionate progressive policy advocacy, even as he reinforces voters’ comfort with his “old school” approach to the job. A campaign that facilitates an honest debate about the best balance between institutional power politics and aggressive policy advocacy would be healthy, timely, and also no threat at all to Neal’s re-election effort. Of course, successful political pros always operate as if their re-election opponents are a real threat because urgency is a far better motivator than education and is a proven catalyst for increasing voter, volunteer, and donor engagement, all of which are necessary for continued success in politics before, during, and after elections.