True or False, Allegations Against Alex Morse Should be Ignored by Primary Voters

You don’t have to be Nostradamus to know that Alex Morse never had a realistic chance of beating Richie Neal. On the other hand, you don’t need to be Perry Mason to know that UMass College Democrats’ allegations of misconduct against Alex Morse, irrespective of the merits, are an attempt to ensure that Morse’s margin of defeat is large enough to head off any embarrassment for Congressman Neal. The real tragedy of these accusations against Alex Morse is not only that they are probably bullshit, but also that they obscure what had been shaping up to be an honest contest between two clear and contrasting theories of politics that reflect the primary cleavage in today’s Democratic Party.

If you toss this late inning effort by Neal supporters to trash Morse’s character, you see a campaign in which both candidates are pretty much what they appear to be. A powerful professional politician with deep ties to political and economic power brokers who believes that protecting the interests of his district’s major stakeholders is the best way to protect and advance the interests of his district is facing a young, idealistic, progressive politician who believes that progress on social and economic justice requires a more diverse, competitive, and confrontational politics. If both candidates allowed this to be the dominant narrative, Neal would still win the contest because the district’s voters remain quite satisfied with his approach to the job, but the margin of victory would be smaller because most voters are also sympathetic to Morse’s fundamental critique of American politics.

It’s very important to note here that Neal’s 2018 opponent, Tahirah Amatul-Wadud also gave Democrats a choice between these two theories of politics, but she presented a much less potent threat to Neal because she was a woman of color with zero elective political experience. Both the prevailing demographics and political culture assumptions of likely voters in the 2018 primary made Amatul-Wadud’s challenge futile from the start. Put more bluntly, Amatul-Wadud’s effort to advance a progressive theory of politics in the 1^st Congressional District had to overcome racism and sexism, along with a more popular theory of politics, making her campaign an impossible dream.  In 2020, however, progressives found a white man with elective political experience AND both descriptive and substantive progressive bonefides in Holyoke’s young gay Mayor. Morse’s candidacy provided a far better chance of making the race a contest between the two dominant theories of politics on the left because neither gender nor race, the two most powerful culture war weapons in American politics, could be employed to distract. Make no mistake about it, these allegations against Morse are toxic to the race because he is gay, not because he may have behaved inappropriately. The charges, regardless of the merits, have poisoned the contest by diverting it.

Before these accusations against Morse, actual policy debates were getting some airtime and attention. The back and forth over surprise medical billing, for example, contained plenty of BS and questionable spin from all sides, but it was nonetheless a real policy debate that reflected the contrasting theories of politics in this race. Whatever else is true of the progressive groups that came to Massachusetts to spend (dark?) money attacking Neal on this and other issues, they were helping to make this contest more visible, competitive, and substantive because they forced Richie Neal to engage his critics substantively. It forced Neal to take Morse, and more importantly, Morse’s theory of politics, seriously for the first time in his career.

I would have loved to see how close this race would have ended up if it could have avoided the culture war sleaze of the allegations against Morse. I would have loved to have seen a race in which Richie Neal’s theory of politics was honestly pitted against Alex Morse’s theory of politics. I don’t doubt that Richie Neal would have won such a race, I’m convinced most Western Mass voters honestly agree with Neal’s approach, an approach he has never disguised, but I’m also confident that Morse’s challenge would have been a more useful barometer of public opinion in the district, as well as a more valuable contribution to a very real and very substantive debate about American politics.

My advice to Democratic primary voters is to forget about the character attacks and to vote their own theory of politics in this contest. If you are convinced that the toppling of politicians who choose the incremental path to progress is the best route to social and economic justice, then stand up and say so by voting for Alex Morse. If you believe that the incremental path to progress remains the most productive path and/or that the institutional power of the Chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee is crucial to the interests of the people of the 1^st Congressional district, then vote for Richie Neal. These are honest and ultimately useful reasons for supporting one or the other candidate in this race.

The rest is just noise in my opinion, and an honest accounting among Massachusetts Democrats about where the center of ideological gravity ought to be in the party would be very helpful and useful to the party. By disrupting this race with last minute character assassination, the College Democrats of Massachusetts have done their party no favors.