Friday, November 9, 2012
Instilling Civic Duty at an Early Age in the 2012 Election.
My grandmother, Clara Baker (known as Clara Baker Cohen after she got married), grew up in Somerville. She attended junior high and high school with Harry Ellis Dickson and convinced him to follow her to the New England Conservatory. Years later, she toured the country with a violin trio, while Dickson joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra and conducted the Boston Pops. Dickson also became father-in-law to Governor Michael Dukakis, who as we all know, was the Democratic presidential candidate in 1988. I thought of my grandmother last week as the election was approaching, because I recalled my role in getting her to vote in an election that took place a few years before she died. She was feeling tired that day and disinclined to schlep out …
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Marilyn Pettito Devaney won with 75 percent of the vote in the district that covers more than 30 communities.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Voters made decisions on car repairs, assisted suicide and medical marijuana in the statewide election.
Question 1: Right to Repair Voters approved the “Right to Repair” ballot question, which would give consumers more choices when fixing a car in today's election. According to numbers on boston.com, 85 percent of voters approved the question, with 51 percent of the state reporting at 10:15 p.m. The initiative requires automakers to make computer software codes for repairs more accessible to independent repair shops and car owners by 2015. But in July, state legislators devised a compromise that would give carmakers until 2018 to comply with the new law, according to a Boston Globe report. By approving Question 1, voters trumped that compromise and enacted the “Right to Repair” act as written on the ballot. “Voters sent a clear message to …
Marilyn Pettito Devaney won with 75 percent of the vote in the district that covers more than 30 communities.
[Results updated at 9:35 a.m. on Nov. 7] Voters returned Watertown’s Marilyn Pettito Devaney to an eighth term on the Governor’s Council, Tuesday, supporting her by a wide margin in the race against Newton’s Thomas Sheff. With 95 percent of the 270 precincts counted, Pettito Devaney received nearly 74percent of the votes, according to results collected by Patch and Boston.com. Pettito Devaney, a former Watertown Town Councilor, received 230,222 votes, and Sheff, who had run for mayor in Newton in 2005, received 80,891 votes. Pettito Devaney defeated two challengers in the Democratic primary in September before facing Sheff, who ran as an un-enrolled candidate. The Third District of the Governor’s Council includes 32 communities, from …
Democrat Elizabeth Warren beat incumbent candidate Scott Brown in the Massachusetts U.S. Senate race.
Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren has beaten incumbent Republican candidate Scott Brown for a seat on the U.S. Senate, according to the Associated Press. Warren is won by a margin of eight percentage points, 54 percent to 46 percent, making her the first female senator elected in Massachusetts. An estatic Warren addressed a crowd of hundreds of excited supporters at the Copley Fairmont Plaza hotel in Boston on Tuesday night. "We did what everyone thought was impossible," she said. "We taught a scrappy, first-time candidate how to win." "You took on the powerful Wall Street banks and let them know that you want a Senator out there fighting for the middle class all of the time," she said. "And despite the odds, you elected the first …
Retiring Barney Frank will be succeeded by scion of Kennedy political dynasty.
Joe Kennedy III will be a new U.S. Congressman from Massachusetts. At around 9:30 p.m., the Associated Press called the race for 32-year old Kennedy, who lives in Brookline, as he was beating by a 2-1 margin Norfolk Republican Sean Bielat in the race to represent the redrawn Fourth Congressional District. Rep. Barney Frank, a media celebrity Tuesday night at Kennedy's celebration party at the Newton Marriott Hotel, is retiring after serving the Fourth District since 1981. Yes, the Kennedys are a famous political family, but Joe III especially follows family tradition with this particular win: his father, Joe Kennedy II, served as Congressman from Massachusetts (in the 8th Congressional District) from 1987-1999. And his great-uncle, who …
Monday, November 5, 2012
According to the latest poll by UMass Lowell, Brown had a one point lead heading into election day, but the lead was within the poll's margin of error.
Just a day before election day, a new poll released shows that Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown are virtually tied in the US Senate race among likely voters in Massachusetts. Brown is ahead of Warren by 1 percentage point, 49-48, the poll showed. The one-point advantage is within the poll's 4.1 margin of error. The latest poll was conducted by UMass Lowell's Center for Public Opinion and the Boston Herald. Nearly one thousand Massachusetts voters were surveyed between Wednesday, Oct. 31 and Saturday, Nov. 3. The poll found that Brown is viewed favorably by 54 percent of the 956 voters surveyed, with 39 percent holding a negative opinion of him, according to the Herald. Warren was viewed favorably by 50 percent of voters, with 42 percent …
Saturday, November 3, 2012
Vote in our poll by sharing your thoughts in the comments field below.
A Washington Post/ABC poll released this week showed that 80 percent of voters feel President Obama has done a good job dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Even New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie – a staunch supporter of Mitt Romney – praised Obama's response to the storm, which devastated parts of New Jersey and New York and caused serious damage in many other states, including Massachusetts. Obama also received the endorsement of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Thursday, with Bloomberg citing Obama's handling of Hurricane Sandy as one of the main reasons he decided to support the president. Meanwhile, Romney's previous pledge to abolish FEMA hasn't helped him in the wake of the storm. What do you think? Will Hurricane …
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Who do you think has the momentum coming into these final days of the election campaign?
Democrat Elizabeth Warren is up by five points over incumbent Republican Sen. Scott Brown in the latest WBUR/MassINC poll of the U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts. That's a near-total reversal of the last WBUR poll, which on Oct. 9 (right after the first presidential debate) had Brown up by four points. In fact, Warren has been trending upward in most recent polling. The New York Times' FiveThirtyEight blog has Warren up by four in an average of recent polls. The blog, which uses advanced statistical modeling akin to baseball sabermetrics (think Moneyball) gives Warren an 89 percent chance of winning the election. But Brown's got some significant energy on his side as well. He's been barnstorming the state with political luminaries like …
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Barack Obama and Mitt Romney squared off last night in the final presidential debate. Here's how Massachusetts Republicans and Democrats reacted.
Massachusetts Republicans and Democrats both expressed confidence in their candidates after the final presidential debate, with Republicans citing Gov. Mitt Romney projecting an image of a "capable Commander-in-Chief" and Democrats citing President Barack Obama's line about the military having "fewer horses and bayonets" as standout moments: that's the major finding of the Red and Blue Commonwealth flash polls sent out to local politicos immediately after the debate ended on Monday night. Obama and Romney faced off Monday night at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla., with CBS's Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer moderating a debate that focused on foreign policy, but regularly delved back into domestic policy differences between the …
mara
6:43 pm on Friday, November 9, 2012
I'm glad I'm not the only one who misses the ka-THUNK of the old NY voting machines. more ›