At a time when the state party is led by the most popular governor in America, Massachusetts Republicans have failed to mount a robust challenge to the Democratic stranglehold on Beacon Hill.
After a year of prodigious fund-raising, the state GOP has fielded only 14 Republican challengers to Democratic incumbents in the House and only eight candidates to take on sitting Democratic state senators seeking reelection.
Those numbers — gleaned from reports of nomination paper filings at city and town halls — could shrink in the final stages of the process for candidates to get on the fall ballot.
This is a dramatic decrease from the 2014 campaign, when 40 House Democratic incumbents had to fight off Republican opponents, and 12 Democratic senators faced GOP candidates. There are now 34 Republicans in the 160-member House, and five in the 40-member Senate.
In all, the GOP will field candidates for about 40 percent of the seats in the Legislature — including open seats and seats currently held by Republican incumbents.
The small GOP slate that Governor Charlie Baker and his party have fielded comes at time when the governor is shunning the Republican Party on the national level. He confirmed this week that he will not support the presumed Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump — the first time in memory that a Bay State governor from either party has refused to back his party’s nominee.
It also unfolds as Baker and his political team, which controls the state party apparatus, are raising record amounts of campaign cash, funds that appear to be aimed mostly at building a political infrastructure for Baker’s presumed reelection race in 2018, not to build a legislative foothold at the State House.
State Republican leaders sought to downplay the significance of the relatively small number of candidates who have emerged this year for legislative seats, saying the GOP always faces strong headwinds in presidential election years because of heavy Democratic turnout in Massachusetts. In 2004, for instance, when then-US senator John Kerry was the Democratic presidential nominee, Governor Mitt Romney recruited 130 legislative candidates, all of whom lost.
They privately see three or four open Senate seats as potential GOP gains and as many as 12 in the House.
Brian Wynne, the party’s executive director, rejected the notion that the relatively small number of potential candidates was a failure, saying the party was “thrilled about the great slate of Republican candidates.’’
“Thanks to Governor Baker’s leadership, the MassGOP is in a tremendous position to unseat entrenched Democrat legislators and elect new Republicans to open seats this November,’’ he said.
But other observers said the combination of the expected Democratic voting surge in a presidential year and the Republican governor’s need to both govern effectively at the State House and get reelected two years later explains the slim GOP slate.
“It’s not a good time to be running on the Republican ticket in Massachusetts,’’ said Peter N. Ubertaccio, associate professor of political science at Stonehill College.
He said Baker, like GOP governors in the past, is inherently more concerned about his own political future than taking on a monumental task of building the party’s legislative presence at the State House.
“And if you want a successful legislative agenda, you have no choice but to be very much engaged with the Democrats,’’ Ubertaccio said. “It’s hard at the same to recruit serious challengers against them.’’
Baker’s light recruitment also is in sharp contrast to his campaign this winter when he aggressively fielded 54 candidates for the 80-member elected Republican State Committee.
Those elections, which took place during the March 1 presidential primary and included his raising over $300,000 for the campaign, were critical to his gaining firm control of the party from the hard-right conservatives.
Frank Phillips can be reached at phillips@globe.com.
