Philip’s Massachusetts Election Predictions

I’ve talked to a few friends, talked to a few folks holding signs outside the polls, and voted. For a bit of fun, I will make some predictions about the outcome of the Massachusetts election. I have not tainted myself by looking at any pre-election polls. I’ll update this posting with inline results when the election is concluded.

Proposition 1: Deval Patrick added sales tax on top of existing alcohol excise taxes back in 2009. Prop 1 tries to roll this back. Due to Massachusetts’s Puritan background, I predict that the extra “sin tax” will stay with us and this proposition will fail by 45-55. It doesn’t make any practical difference except that it burdens alcohol retailers with additional forms and bureaucracy. If the state wants more money from alcohol sales it can simply adjust the excise tax at any time. [Result: Passed 52-48.]

Proposition 2: Tries to roll back a poorly understood law regarding affordable housing. A friend who is an architect says that he is familiar with a lot of projects built under this law and they’ve all been “horrible” blights on the landscape. Nonetheless, he is reluctant to vote “yes” to repeal because affordable housing is such an important goal to him. Based on people being afraid of change, I predict that this initiative fails by 42-58 with a lot of people not even bothering to vote on it. [Result: Failed 42-58.]

Proposition 3: This would roll back the sales tax to 3 percent from the existing 6.25 percent rate, established by Deval Patrick in 2009. Sales taxes fall hardest on poor people and inevitably a reduction in sales tax would result in higher income and property taxes, which means that the rich will suffer if this proposition is passed. A friend said “It would be terrible if this law passed because they would cut programs for the poor.” I.e., people whose main problem is that they don’t have enough money can only be helped if we take some of their money away, give 90 percent of it to $150,000/year unionized public employees, and then return 10 percent of it to the poor in the form of free visits to doctors earning $250,000/year.” Rich people will vote against this because of self-interest and, to some extent, because they can feel as though they are helping the unfortunate by maintaining high taxes on the unfortunate. Because they are primarily poor, not stupid, poor people will vote in favor of the rollback, but many of them will have to work two jobs today and/or will have their cars break down. Therefore more rich people will get to the polls and the proposition will fail by 45-55. [Result: Failed 43-57.]

Governor: I asked friends what Deval Patrick had accomplished in his four years as governor. None of them could think of anything yet all will vote for his reelection. I asked a unionized public employee standing in front of the polling place with a “Deval Patrick” sign what he had accomplished. She replied “I’m a teacher and he’s supported us.” Given Patrick’s complete lack of accomplishment in the minds of voters, I predict that he will win with the smallest number of votes possible for a Democrat in Massachusetts, perhaps with as little as 47 percent of the vote (there are a couple of independent candidates, so Patrick can win with a plurality). [Result: Patrick reelected with 48.7 percent of the votes.]

Most of the remainder of the people on the ballot were incumbent Democrats running without opposition and/or candidates for offices that I did not realize existed. [Result: nytimes shows that every incumbent who ran for reelection in Massachusetts won. Two or three open positions were won by Democrats.]

[I would welcome other folks’ predictions in the comment section below. I’ll buy lunch or dinner (might have to be at a dog-friendly venue) for whoever comes closest to being right!]

Post-election analysis: If voters nationwide are supposedly unhappy with the things that the government has been doing, how could people in Massachusetts willingly assent to a continuation of one-party rule here? My theory is that the collapse of the U.S. hasn’t been that unkind to Massachusetts. We have universities that attract foreign students and federal government spending; California can go bankrupt and the Rust Belt can sink into the Great Lakes and Harvard and MIT will still be doing fine. We have a large money management industry that collects fees in good times and bad and the financial services sector has largely been shielded from any economic harm. We have huge biotech and health care industries that benefit from government spending in these areas. The troubles that plague the rest of the U.S.? We didn’t have much of a housing/building boom, so we don’t have to try to dig ourselves out of that hole. We lost our manufacturing jobs to the Carolinas 100 years ago, so we aren’t affected by the exodus to China. We have a disproportionate number of citizens with college and advanced degrees, who have generally prospered over the last few decades. So if we’re doing okay here (except for the 8.3 percent of us who are officially unemployed and perhaps the additional 5-10 percent who would be counted under other unemployment measures), why vote for change?