By the time the dust had settled on Massachusetts’ primary election on Tuesday, voters got some notable surprises in what had been expected to be a pretty low-key day.
In what could become an extraordinary upset, graduate student Evan MacKay declared victory in their race against long-serving state Rep. Marjorie Decker in the Cambridge-based 25th Middlesex District.
The Boston Globe reported that MacKay led by just 40 votes early Wednesday, raising the possibility of a recount.
Decker did not concede the race. But she did deliver an emotional speech reflecting on her time in the Legislature, the newspaper reported.
If the result holds, it would represent a remarkable rebuke in a political culture that favors incumbents, most of whom still appear set to cruise to re-election in November.
Also, in a race that no one really saw coming, public defender Allison Cartwright declared victory over Boston City Councilor Erin Murphy in the race for clerk of the Supreme Judicial Court for Suffolk County, according to Politico.
It was a campaign, as Commonwealth Beacon’s Michael Jonas reported, for a job that no one had heard of, and probably couldn’t explain, even if they had.
A competitive campaign for Governor’s Council also injected some drama, with incumbent Councilor Marilyn Petitto Devaney apparently losing to challenger Mara Dolan in a rematch of their 2022 Democratic primary contest.
Unofficial tallies showed Dolan taking 52.2% of the vote to DeVaney’s 47.8%, the Associated Press reported. The wire service called the race for Dolan at 1:36 a.m. on Wednesday.
It all happened on a night in which Secretary of State William L. Galvin had forecast around 15% turnout.
A primary held the day after the Labor Day holiday, even if not by design, seemed destined to hold down in-person turnout.
Still, Galvin’s office had sent out 992,813 mail-in ballots, as of early Tuesday morning. Of those, 468,520 had been returned, his office said in a statement.
But even for those surprises, there were still some constants.
Consider:
All nine Democratic members of the state’s U.S. House delegation, facing no competition, effectively had the night off, even if their names were on the ballot.
Meanwhile two incumbents, U.S. Reps. Stephen Lynch, D-8th District, and Bill Keating, D-9th District, appear poised to face Republican opponents this fall.
In the race for U.S. Senate, John Deaton, a Swansea lawyer with ties to, and some pretty hefty backing from, the crypto-currency industry, handily won a three-way GOP primary.
He’ll now have to run what is widely expected to be an uphill race against incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., this fall.
In the Legislature, at least one closely watched race that was initially thought to have the potential for competition turned out to be much ado about not much.
In the Somerville-based 27th Middlesex District, unofficial tallies showed incumbent Democratic state Rep. Erika Uyterhoeven defeating challenger Kathleen Hornby, a former legislative staffer, with 68.9% of the vote.
Early on, conversations with poll workers and voters across the state pointed to a sleepy day. By late afternoon, things had started to pick up.
Around 4:30 p.m., at Newman Elementary School in Needham, Precinct D Warden Theodora Eaton said that turnout started picking up after a rather slow morning.
Eaton said that ballots were still being collected from the Town Hall, as voters placed some of them at the red ballot box on Highland Avenue.
In Boston, 35 people had cast ballots at the polls in City Hall by 3 p.m., and 12 had voted at the City Hall Pavilion on Congress Street by 3:25 p.m.
“We had a rush for a while at mid-day,” said Janet Maloof, an election official who has volunteered for the past 15 years.
Meanwhile, the voters who did show up in person knew the assignment.
Among them was lawyer Christina Fitzgerald, of Roslindale, who turned up to vote for Cartwright for Supreme Judicial Court clerk.
“I was excited to vote for her,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s an important year to be voting, a lot of political issues get decided by the courts.”
Because of this, she added, “Good people make sure the courts are being run efficiently.”
Earlier in the day, at Richard J. Murphy School in Dorchester, Vincent Baker, a lifelong resident of the city’s largest neighborhood, was volunteering for Murphy.
“Erin was my children’s teacher here at the school. She’s a very organized person, a sane person,” Baker told MassLive. “I align with her politics, and she did a great job with the council [and she’s] the hardest working person.”
Tuesday also was a reminder that these contests serve, in their way, as a dress rehearsal for the November general election when one giant race, the fight for the White House, will be atop the ballot.
Things are likely to be anything but sleepy. And the capacity for surprise probably still will be equally bottomless.
MassLive’s Adam Bass and Anne Brennan contributed additional reporting.
