Kennedy, Markey primary goes down to the wire

The brutal Senate primary battle between U.S. Sen. Edward Markey and U.S. Rep. Joseph Kennedy III came down to the wire Tuesday, with the rivals pounding the pavement and pressing the flesh through sunset as uncertainty over the vote count in the state’s first major election of the coronavirus pandemic loomed large.

Kennedy, down in the polls ahead of primary day and carrying the weight of not just his political future but also the family dynasty on his shoulders, kept adding stops to an already-packed schedule as he tried to pull out the win against the incumbent senator.

“Running around,” Kennedy said as he scampered through Dorchester Tuesday afternoon, fist-bumping voters and posing for photos. “Response feels great, turnout’s high and we’re excited.”

Markey, riding a wave of polling and money momentum down the homestretch, has been utterly jovial on the campaign trail in recent days, laughing with supporters, snapping socially distanced “thumbs-up” photos and cracking jokes with the media even as his campaign has been contending the race is a dead heat.

“It’s Game 7, so we’re going to take it right to the wire,” Markey said Monday night ahead of his final get-out-the-vote rally at Millennium Park in West Roxbury, adding that he’s “taking nothing for granted, working hard to win every single vote in the state of Massachusetts.”

Yet with analysts saying a significant portion of Markey’s vote was already in through early voting before Sept. 1, the senator largely stayed off the trail on Tuesday, save for stops in Jamaican Plain and Springfield, followed by a socially distanced election night party in front of the library in Malden Center.

Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins, speaking at that event, said she supported Markey’s politics and policies, and she didn’t mince words when talking about the challenger.

“This is a colossal waste of our time as Democrats, we’re going to come down to the mat to have a democrat beat a democrat and then, you know, bodies strewn across Massachusetts,” Rollins told reporters. “I’ve said this to him — I think it’s selfish, and it’s with respect to him wanting to look at what he wants in the future.”

She said she suspects Kennedy was trying to avoid a run against U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, who’s seen as a likely strong competitor for the next open senate seat. Rollins praised Markey’s ability to communicate with generations of progressive politicians.

“He speaks in my language as a 49 year old — he speaks in AOC’s language as a barely 30 year old,” Rollins said, referring to lefty star U.S. Rep Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. “And he speaks in my daughter’s language as a 16 year old.”

The outcome of the hotly contested primary has been roiled in uncertainty since the state rolled out a massively expanded vote-by-mail effort and allowed a week of early in-person voting for the first time in the state primaries due to the coronavirus pandemic.

As mail-in ballots continued to pile up as voters hit the polls, concerns about municipalities’ ability to handle them mounted along with it, particularly as irregularities cropped up in some precincts. Secretary of State William Galvin predicted a statewide turnout in the Democratic primary of more than 1.2 million, driven in significant part by the marquee Senate race and several other contentious congressional races.

Kennedy declined to say Tuesday afternoon whether he’d consider a legal challenge to the election. But, he said, “I talked to some folks who said they dropped off their ballot by Friday or Saturday, and I’m not sure that’s going to be received by Tuesday … We’ve been out there, today even, educating folks.”

Kennedy was fighting an uphill battle Tuesday, tasked with turning out not just his core voting bloc of working class people and communities of color, but also independent voters who strategists and pollsters said were leaning his way, in order to make up the difference with Markey’s more educated, more affluent and more white base they said voted earlier and by mail.

The challenger told his supporters Monday night that Tuesday’s turnout would test his bet “that if we go out into every nook and cranny across our cities, in our towns and our communities, and we ask people for their vote, if we explain what is at stake, then they’re going to come out.”

Kennedy’s backers have been optimistic, even as they acknowledged Kennedy, once the double-digit favorite in the race with the famous last name and personal charm to boot, had ended up as the underdog in the primary’s waning days.

“lt’s hard to judge,” Frank Baker said Tuesday outside a polling location in Dorchester. “I hope the polls are wrong. Everyone this guy touches is voting for him. But I’m anxious.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2ETEc7m