Download August 1, 2025

“The numbers of Republicans of the Republicans of Massachusetts are disappearing both in the state's structure of power and the state's enrolled party squad. When the National Republican Party has stimulated the right democrats, the local democrats have created hay by ignoring the candidates of the Massachusetts-Gop candidates against the Republican brand.”

This seems pretty good to describe the challenging landscape of kicking Brian Shortsleeve and Mike Kenneal, the two Republicans who compete for the right to kick Governor Maura Healey next autumn. In fact, it comes from one Commonwealth Article written 11 years ago – the “Flashback Friday” in the archives this week.

In “Threading the Nadel”, which was published in the spring edition of 2014 of the 2014 magazine, Paul McMorrow increased the approach that was followed by another Republican governor's hoper, and this a second bite at the apple after he had won a drubbing in his first run for the corner office.

When McMorrow caught lively, this was not the Charlie Baker from 2010-and the angry guy, who apparently seemed to remove the increase in the tea party genome, which had carried a little-known GOP state legislator to the US Senate seat, which was once held by Ted Kennedy at the beginning of the year.

The Charlie Baker 2014 was friendly, gentle and frankly boring, if this is a way to describe a focus on basic bread and butter problems that are important for humans, but do not ignite ideological passions. “Baker carries out a campaign that is used with crossover topics that have no republican or democratic solution. He tries to win over independent and democrats for his cause by hovers over his party,” wrote McMorrow.

Baker told him that Republicans win in Massachusetts by “doing the case on things that take care of people: jobs, the economy, schools, the gap. These are not democratic or republican problems. They are a platform on which a large state is built up, and a great life.

Of course we know how the story ended. Baker achieved a close victory over General Prosecutor Martha Coakley this year before winning a second term in a landslide four years later.

The remarkable thing about the size of the GOP challenge in 2014, with a national republican brand that had become poisonous in deep blue Massachusetts, is that this was all before arriving at Donald Trump's crime scene.

During the GOP nomination, Shortsleeve and Kennealy in Healey offer many Republican Republicans with Red-Meat about problems such as immigration and public security. However, the story indicates that the Baker game book could be a pretty good general election model for those who appear as a republican candidate – complete with all the deficit and bad jokes that have brought Baker to democratic venues like a Charlestown St. Patrick in McMorrow in McMorrow.

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