Gov. Maura Healey was not on the poll on Election Day however she nonetheless misplaced on a number of fronts.
The 2 candidates she campaigned arduous for — Joyce Craig in New Hampshire and Kamala Harris for the White Home — misplaced their elections and one of many poll questions she opposed, nixing the MCAS commencement requirement, marched on to victory regardless of her efforts.
The primary-term Democratic governor mentioned she doesn’t remorse her work past the Bay State’s borders even after spending many days on the highway within the Granite State lobbying for Craig and taking to the airwaves numerous instances to defend Harris.
At a press convention simply exterior her State Home workplace, Healey mentioned “no” when requested if she thought she ought to have spent extra time campaigning inside Massachusetts for native points.
“We knew New Hampshire was going to be close. The reason I was in New Hampshire is because my mom and dad still live there. I grew up there. I played sports there, went to school there, worked there,” she mentioned. “I care a lot about that state. We have a very close relationship, I mean, literally, as border states.”
Healey’s out-of-state advocacy drew the ire of Republicans in Massachusetts, together with from MassGOP Chair Amy Carnevale, who mentioned the governor had little to indicate after a “campaign season marked by political blunders and missed opportunities for real change.”
Carnevale knocked Healey over the MCAS poll query, which discovered the Democratic governor and native Republicans in the identical camp opposing the measure.
“In the critical final days of the election cycle, she was conspicuously absent from the conversation, leaving students and parents without a strong advocate,” Carnevale mentioned in a press release.
However Healey did strike wins in her opposition to a poll query that will have raised the subminimum wage for tipped employees and in some native legislative races the place she endorsed Democratic candidates.
Jerold Duquette, a Central Connecticut State College political science professor who writes for the MassPoliticsProfs weblog, mentioned Healey’s losses on Election Day aren’t more likely to have any vital impression on her governorship or political clout.
He mentioned it could have been “absurd” for her to not have stumped for Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee.
“Neither of these are the kind of things that you think, ‘oh my God, this is a signal that she’s weaker than we thought. I don’t really think that that makes a lot of sense,’” he advised the Herald. “I don’t think a lot of Massachusetts voters are going to sort of look askance at something that happened in New Hampshire in terms of the governor’s profile.”
Healey spent Friday in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state that finally voted for former President Donald Trump, campaigning for Harris, together with at two separate get-out-the-vote rallies for LGBTQ voters in Allentown and Philadelphia.
The governor then traveled to New Hampshire Monday to pitch voters on each Harris and Craig, together with at occasions in Exeter, Manchester, and Nashua.
Healey additionally spent Election Day in New Hampshire at occasions for Craig and Harris in Hampton Falls, North Hampton, Hampton, and Durham, in accordance with a marketing campaign spokesperson.
She was initially scheduled to look on the Massachusetts Democratic Social gathering election evening occasion in Boston however didn’t present up.
Wendy Wakeman, a Republican strategist in New Hampshire, mentioned Healey was the “big loser” of election evening.
“She put all kinds of chips into the candidate who lost to Kelly Ayotte. She put a whole bunch of other chips into going around the country and working for Kamala Harris and she didn’t win anything,” Wakeman mentioned.
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