Elizabeth Warren Is Massachusetts’s Last Chance for a Presidential Nominee
While the Patriots Super Bowl victory continues to add to the incredible run of sports success for Boston, a streak of another sort may or may not continue in Massachusetts politics.
If Sen. Elizabeth Warren follows through on her many, many declarations that she will not run for president, it will be the first time since 2000 that Massachusetts does not put forth a presidential nominee.
In 2012, former Gov. Mitt Romney lost as the Republican nominee in his bid to unseat President Obama, and in 2008 Romney couldn’t make it out of the primaries. Four years earlier, former Sen. John Kerry wind-surfed his way to a loss as the Democratic nominee.
Indeed, a losing presidential bid from a Massachusetts politician is fairly par for the course ever since John F. Kennedy’s victory in 1960. Gov. Michael Dukakis and his helmeted tank ride were no match for George H.W. Bush in the 1988 general election. Between Dukakis, Kerry, and Romney, Bay State nominees have gone 0-for-3 in presidential elections over the past 30 years.
Overall, despite its modest population, Massachusetts has put forth four major-party presidential nominees since 1960, the most of any state in that time. Texas and California, the two most populous states, come in just behind with three and two presidential nominees, respectively.
That number of candidates balloons if you include a couple other Massachusetts’s politicos who weren’t able to make it out of the primaries. Sen. Ted Kennedy finished second to Jimmy Carter in the 1980 race to become the Democratic presidential nominee. And while Sen. Paul Tsongas was “not trying to play Santa Claus,’’ he also was not able to keep up with Bill Clinton during the 1992 primaries.
Add in that pool of politicians who spent formative years in the state and you can see Massachusetts’s political dominance. Long before he was president, George H.W. Bush was born and grew up in Milton. He and his sons, President George W. Bush and likely presidential candidate Jeb Bush, both spent their formative high school years at Phillips Academy in Andover.
Then there’s “Barack Obama, formerly of Somerville,’’ who graduated from Harvard Law School. And though Robert F. Kennedy was a senator from New York when he ran for president in 1968, the Kennedys are Massachusetts mainstays.
All is not lost for Bay State political homers, though. Perhaps Boston could lay some claim to Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon and potential Republican candidate, who lived in a Boston tenement for two years as a child. He and Jeb Bush could duke it out in a quasi Mass.-on-Mass. primary campaign.
If either of them do make it out of the primary, they’ll have one benefit in the general election over previous Mass. politicians: their college degree.
“Harvard doesn’t play well in the Heartland,’’ National Journal wrote in 2012. “Harvard doesn’t even play that well around Harvard.’’
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