Trump Made Gains In Massachusetts On Path To Victory

By Colin A. Young

The nation’s 45th president will also be its 47th, and the Democratic supermajority on Beacon Hill is once again coming to grips with the number of ways they think a Donald Trump presidency could affect Massachusetts.

Trump, the twice-impeached former president convicted by a Manhattan jury on 34 felony charges this spring, was declared the projected winner of the presidential contest by the Associated Press early Wednesday morning. He is expected to beat Vice President Kamala Harris in both the Electoral College and the popular vote.

He is only the second president, after Grover Cleveland in 1892, to win a second, non-consecutive term in the White House. Trump’s comeback is part of a remarkable late-life political career launched in earnest in 2015 by the former real estate mogul and entertainer. On Wednesday morning, as he thanked supporters, he called his reshaping of the Republican Party and rejection of previous norms the “greatest political movement of all time.”

“And now it’s going to reach a new level of importance, because we’re going to help our country heal, help our country heal. We have a country that needs help, and it needs help very badly. We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything about our country. We made history for a reason tonight, and the reason is going to be just that. We overcame obstacles that nobody thought possible and it is now clear that we’ve achieved the most incredible political thing. Look what happened. Is this crazy?” Trump said when he spoke to supporters in Florida around 2 a.m. Wednesday.

The president-elect added, “And to every citizen, I will fight for you, for your family and your future. Every single day I will be fighting for you, and with every breath in my body. I will not rest until we have delivered the strong, safe and prosperous America that our children deserve and that you deserve. This will truly be the golden age of America.”

The Mass. Republican Party said Trump’s election “signals a mandate for change” at “a time when Americans are largely united in their belief that the country is on the wrong track.”

Trump is poised to return to the White House on Monday, Jan. 20, 2025, with a party that supports him much more than it did in 2017 in control of the U.S. Senate and likely to retain control of the U.S. House. Republicans have also installed a majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court and will hold the governor’s office in 27 of the 50 states. Trump could also claim a mandate from the public, being projected to win the popular vote for the first time in his three presidential runs.

“Donald Trump is our President-elect, and I want to remind constituents that it is essential to recognize the will of the people and support a peaceful transition of power as these are central and non-negotiable tenets to being a democracy,” Attorney General Andrea Campbell, a Democrat, said late Wednesday morning.

AG Preparing For Trump Round 2

For Massachusetts, the return of Trump means uncertainty over federal funding, immigration policies, reproductive rights and the future of an offshore wind industry the state is banking on to meet its decarbonization commitments.

Immigration in particular could be a question mark. Massachusetts relies heavily on immigration to plug gaps in the workforce here and the state’s higher education and health care sectors attract talent from all across the globe. But the state has also been under a state of emergency for more than a year as an influx of migrants pushed a safety net shelter program beyond its limits and is projected to cost the state about $1 billion a year at a time of lackluster tax revenue collections.

During his four years in office, Trump antagonized the offshore wind industry and his administration forced a multi-year delay for the Vineyard Wind 1 project, which was to be the first major offshore wind farm in the country. Industry players said late last year that they were “laser focused” on getting projects as far down the permitting road as possible before 2025, to make them more difficult for a potential second Trump administration to stymie.

The Senate’s top clean energy official, Sen. Michael Barrett, acknowledged in early August that a second Trump presidency could potentially alter the timeline for things like grid modernization, which is sorely needed before the large amounts of wind-generated electricity that the state is planning on come online.

“If, perchance, Mr. Trump is reelected president, we’re not going to have an offshore wind industry generating electrons in need of a robust grid in quite the timeframe we anticipated,” he said.

After acknowledging Trump’s victory, Campbell said she is “also clear-eyed that President-elect Trump has told us exactly what he intends to do as President, and that we need to believe him and to be ready for the challenges ahead.” The AG’s office said it has already identified potential “threats” posed by the incoming Trump administration as well as legal strategies to address those threats.

Campbell’s office said its priorities lie around the rule of law; political violence, hate and discrimination; reproductive rights; LGBTQ+ rights; rights of immigrants; racial justice; environmental justice matters; health care; education and student loan programs; gun violence prevention; and federal benefit programs.

“Across the country, attorneys general will be on the front lines to protect our fundamental rights and freedoms, and Massachusetts will continue to be a beacon of light and hope,” Campbell said. “My office is prepared for the threats our residents may face, ready to act and we will not shy away or back down from the critical work ahead.”

Trump Tide Rising Across Mass.

With about 96 percent of ballots counted as of 1:15 p.m. Wednesday, the Associated Press reported that about 2.04 million Bay Staters (61.4 percent) had voted for Harris while almost 1.21 million people (36.4 percent) filled in the bubble next to Trump’s name. The AP results showed Trump having won or leading the counting in about 80 of the state’s 351 municipalities as of early Wednesday afternoon.

Though final results could take a few days before being finalized, Harris appears on track to fall short of the 2.38 million votes Joe Biden got in Massachusetts in 2020 while Trump surpassed his 2020 total tally of nearly 1.17 million Massachusetts votes.

Much of Trump’s support here came from Southeastern Mass., Hampden County and the semicircle of towns to the south and west of Worcester. The town that leaned most heavily in Trump’s favor was Acushnet, where about 72 percent of the more than 8,000 voters there supported the Republican.

Between his 2020 defeat and this year’s national victory, Trump appears to have improved his standing with voters in practically every Massachusetts city and town.

In Boston alone, the Republican went from 15.38 percent support in the 2020 contest to 20.4 percent support in 2024, according to the AP. His vote share also increased this year in the four next most populated municipalities: Worcester (from 29.4 percent in 2020 to 34.8 percent this year), Springfield (from 24.93 percent four years ago to 32.2 percent in 2024), Cambridge (from 6.39 percent in 2020 to 8.6 percent in 2024), and Lowell (from 31.67 percent in 2020 to 37.2 percent in 2024).

Trump also appears to have flipped nearly two dozen Massachusetts towns he lost in 2020, including a cluster around Worcester (Sutton, Uxbridge, Webster, Millbury, Northbridge, West Brookfield, Rutland, Barre and Hardwick), a pair of towns in northern Worcester County (Athol and Orange), a grouping of South Shore towns (Hanover, Pembroke, Rockland, Whitman, Bridgewater and Raynham), and a few on the South Coast (Fall River, Westport and Somerset). North of Boston, Trump flipped Saugus, Lynnfield and Salisbury into his column from four years ago.

Harris performed best in Suffolk and Middlesex counties, racking up 76.9 percent of the votes cast in Boston, 87.6 percent from Cambridge, and 84.4 percent in Somerville. Cape Cod also went for the Democrat, with support ranging from as much as 91.4 percent in Provincetown to a more narrow 51.9 percent support in Bourne. The college towns of Hampshire County and rural towns of Franklin County also voted overwhelmingly for the vice president, with Harris taking 87.9 percent of the vote in Amherst and 85.2 percent in Northampton.

“In Massachusetts, we’ve felt the failures of the Biden-Harris Administration profoundly,” MassGOP Chairwoman Amy Carnevale said. “Our Commonwealth faces an unprecedented migrant crisis that will cost the Commonwealth billions, and inflation has combined with our state’s poor fiscal policies to push more residents out than we attract.”

Optimism Shifted Tuesday Night

Carnevale’s statement said the state party, which has struck a more moderate tone under Carnevale than under former chair and diehard Trump supporter Jim Lyons, “looks forward to supporting President Trump’s renewed focus on America First policies, confident that better days lie ahead for both Massachusetts and the nation.”

When polls closed here and the AP called Massachusetts for Harris right at 8 p.m., Bay State Democrats seemed optimistic about their party’s chances.

“It’s going to be a very good night for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz,” MassDems Chairman Steve Kerrigan said over raucous applause at the party’s election night bash in Boston’s South End.

But as the SoWa Power Station began emptying out before 11 p.m. and with the national results starting to alarm some Democrats, Kerrigan announced that the party would soon be wrapping up and had changed his tone slightly.

“Eight years ago, decisions were made way into the early morning and four years ago, we knew almost into the next week,” the chairman said. “So I don’t think any of us showed up here expecting to get a final result in the presidential election. Things are going well, in my estimation, in the Blue Wall battleground states, and we’ll see how it goes in the rest of the country.”

Overnight, it became clear that the so-called Blue Wall of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin that helped clinch Biden’s 2020 win would be mostly repainted red in 2024. The AP called Pennsylvania for Trump at 2:24 a.m. and called the presidential contest for him at the same time, 5:34 a.m., that it declared him the victor in Wisconsin. The AP called Michigan for Trump just before 1 p.m. Wednesday, projecting him to have won 49.7 percent support there and about 80,000 more votes than Harris.