Robert David Sullivan 2

Will Jill join the anti-tax brigade?

The announcement that Jill Stein will run for governor on the Green Party ticket is generally seen as another headache for Deval Patrick, who can't afford to lose any votes to his left in this fall's election. Stein, who got 3 percent of the vote and respectful press coverage when she ran for governor in 2002, is probably the strongest possible candidate for her shrub-like political party, and she's likely to get votes from people who aren't happy with Patrick's performance but who would never vote Republican.

Still, likely Republican nominee Charlie Baker would be wise to keep an eye on Stein. Her geographic base is in the more affluent parts of MetroWest Boston, which is precisely where Baker needs to peel some votes away from Patrick (much in the way that Mitt Romney made gains in this region). As long as she stays under 5 percent, her vote probably comes out of Patrick's hide; anything more, and things could get dicey for the GOP.

There's also the fact that Stein may end up as a strange bedfellow with Baker, his fellow Republican candidate Christy Mihos, and independent Tim Cahill on the issue of the state's sales tax. All three of those candidates want to repeal last year's sales tax hike from 5.0 to 6.25 percent (Mihos wants to push it down to 3 percent), and Stein said last summer that she was also against the sales tax hike -- on the grounds that it was regressive and that a graduated income tax was the better way to go.

It's not clear whether Stein will make a sales tax rollback a priority of her campaign (as the GOP nominee and Cahill surely will), but it would be interesting to see Patrick stand alone in defending last year's tax hike (and, indirectly, the Legislature that passed it). Would he look like the voice of fiscal sanity, or would he stand out for being more politically tone-deaf than the lefty Greens?

Do the people on Buzzards Bay swear like sailors?

People in one Iowa city seem to think so. The Bettendorf City Council has changed "Falmouth Court" to "Lilly Court" because too many people have trouble pronouncing the former. From the Quad-City Times:

At least one real estate agent and a builder on the former Falmouth Court in Bettendorf claim the name has hampered their ability to sell houses there. So on Tuesday, the Bettendorf City Council voted unanimously and without discussion to change the name of the cul-de-sac to a more innocuous Lilly Court. The council will have to vote twice more on the ordinance for it to become official.

“There’s one buyer on the court that believes it’s pronounced ‘foul mouth,’ and they don’t want to live on Foul Mouth Court,” Bettendorf City Attorney Greg Jager said.

This is bad news for Midwestern developers hoping to lure New Englanders with such names as Leominster Square and Billerica Estates. And while Bay Staters have warm feelings toward the municipality nicknamed "P-town," it might not be such a good moniker for a cul-de-sac in Dubuque.

 

Mass. beats Florida, 24 other states in population growth this year

The Census Bureau released its annual Christmas present to demographers this morning: state-by-state population estimates as of six months ago.

The US as a whole went up by 2.6 million people from 2008 to 2009, or 0.9 percent. Massachusetts ranked 25th (26th if you count Washington, DC) in population gain, rising by just about 50,000 people or 0.8 percent. That's the biggest increase in the Northeast outside of Delaware.

The only three states to lose population were Maine, Michigan, and Rhode Island. Our other neighbors lagged far below the Bay State in growth: Connecticut ranked 40st, New Hampshire 45th, New York 42rd, and Vermont 47th.

The fastest-growing state was Wyoming, followed by Utah and Texas. The state of Florida, a growth powerhouse before the home-mortgage meltdown, ranked 31st, with a below-average growth rate of 0.6 percent.

The population gain in Massachusetts is attributable to a "natural increase" (births minus deaths) of 22,487 people. More notable is that we gained a net of 24,518 from international migration and a net of 3,614 from domestic migration. The latter may not sound like much, but it's a change from the many years in which more Americans moved out of Massachusetts than moved in. From 2000 to 2009, the Bay State has lost a net of 277,000 people to other states, so the most recent data represent only a slight step out of the population hole.

As Massachusetts goes, so goes health care reform?

The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn leans on the Bay State's health care reform law to make the case for national reform:

Has reform solved the access problem in Massachusetts? No. Has it made the problem a lot less severe? Yes.

The measure of success for Scott Brown

I think the Globe's Joan Venocchi is correct that Scott Brown's chances of winning the special US Senate seat in January are poor:

Brown, a Republican state senator, can’t beat Martha Coakley, a Democratic attorney general, in the race for the seat of the late Edward M. Kennedy. The Bay State’s political DNA -- Democrat to the core -- will overcome any of Coakley’s personal weaknesses.

From a national perspective, however, this is kind of a no-win election for the Democrats. If Coakley wins overwhelmingly, no one will care, since the result will merely confirm that Massachusetts is solidly Democratic.

But if Brown gets 45 percent or more, expect the national media to cite the election as evidence that even Massachusetts thinks the Obama adminstration has gone too far to the left and overreached on health care reform.

.

Political independents slightly more common than unicorns

The Monkey Cage shares some data indicating that the number of independents in the US is vastly overstated by the usual-suspect pundits:

Most independents are closet partisans. This has been well-known in political science since at least 1992, with the publication of The Myth of the Independent Voter (here). When asked a follow-up question, the vast majority of independents state that they lean toward a political party. They are the “independent leaners.”

I think the current health care reform debate underscores that the "rise" of independents is really a rise in the number of liberals and conservatives who don't simply don't like the political process -- with its compromises, vote-trading in Congress, etc. -- and thus refuse to identify with the party that's closer to their views. This is bad for both parties, but worse for the Democrats, since they're more likely to try to pass substantive (if not perfect) legislation. The idea that both parties are corrupt and not to be trusted helps the Republicans, since they're more likely to try blocking legislation.

Each registered voter costs Oregon $4.51 in paperwork

That's according to a new report from the Pew Center for the States, which treats Oregon as a case study to see how much state governments spend on maintaining their voter rolls. The authors say that the $9.7 million Oregon spent in 2008 could have been reduced by using less paper and more binary code:

Innovative, cost-saving steps toward modernization have already been implemented by some states. For example, Delaware reduced its labor costs by $200,000 annually with its eSignature practice that requires every visitor to the Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to register to vote, update their record or decline to do so and then electronically syncs the data with the state election office. In Phoenix, Arizona, an online registration costs an average of 3 cents to process versus at least 83 cents for a paper registration form.

More good strategy from Coakley?

Dan Kennedy wonders whether Democratic US Senate nominee Martha Coakley is insisting that Libertarian nominee Joe Kennedy be included in debates to ensure that people are aware he isn't that Joe Kennedy. More evidence that her shrewd sense of strategy may make her the Bay State's first woman senator?

Martha Coakley and the myth that women can't get elected in Massachusetts

I’ve never really bought the idea that Massachusetts is particularly hostile toward women as political candidates. (See this weekend's story in the Boston Globe, as well as a different take on the topic by my CommonWealth colleague Alison Lobron.) We rank 17th in the percentage of state legislators who are women, and we’ve had plenty of women mayors across the state. As for the idea that the “old boys’ network” has blocked the progress of female politicos, it doesn’t explain how Therese Murray got to be president of the state Senate, or how Patricia McGovern was one of the most powerful members of the Senate back in the 1980s.

Indeed, a chief reason why we haven’t elected a woman governor is that Bay State voters have a strong bias against “next in line” candidates, or insiders who work their way up the ladder, for that position. Michael Dukakis, Bill Weld, Mitt Romney, and Deval Patrick all leapfrogged over establishment candidates to capture the Corner Office. But all of the major women candidates for governor over the past 20 years have been precisely the kind of pseudo-incumbent that turns off voters looking for change.

Evelyn Murphy, Jane Swift, and Kerry Healey were all lieutenant governors whose (male) mentors weren’t terribly popular, and they seemed to offer more of the same. Patricia McGovern, who didn’t get past the Democratic primary in 1998, was an effective and respected leader in the state Senate, but legislative leaders almost never advance to higher office here. (Ask George Keverian and Tom Birmingham.)

Mass. had steepest drop in imprisonment rate in 2008

According to new data from the Department of Justice, the number of people "under correctional supervision" in the US hit 7.3 million at the end of 2008, an increase of 0.5 percent over the previous year -- but that was the slowest increase since 2000. The number of people actually in prison was a bit more than 1.6 million -- or one out of every 198 Americans.

The full report has state-level data. Outside of Maine and Minnesota, the Bay State had the lowest imprisonment rate in the US: For every 100,000 residents, 218 were serving prison sentences of more than one year. The highest rate was in Louisiana, where 853 out of every 100,000 people were doing serious time, followed by Mississippi and Oklahoma.

Just one year earlier, the imprisonment rate in Massachusetts was 249 (and seven states were lower than we were). Our one-year drop of 31 percent in the imprisonment rate was tied with Texas for the highest in the nation, just ahead of Texas.