Driscoll won Lieutenant Governor primary by having largest geographic reach

Lesser and Gouveia were not able to expand local support bases

The Massachusetts State Primary election on September 7 featured several hotly contested races for statewide consitutional offices, including a three-way race for the Democratic nomination for Lieutenant Governor. The candidates on the ballot were Kim Driscoll, mayor of Salem, Tami Gouveia of Acton, State Representative for the 14th Middlesex District, and Eric Lessor of Longmeadow, State Senator for the 1st Hampden and Hampshire District. Another Western Massachusetts State Senator, Adam Hinds (D-Pittsfield), was in the early running, but failed to get the requisite 15% support at the Democratic convention in Worcester in early June.

Mayor Driscoll earned the endorsement of the state party at the convention, and held a name recognition and preference lead over Lesser and Gouveia throughout much of the primary. Driscoll was also able to secure some Western Massachusetts support after Adam Hinds left the race, securing nominations from the mayors of Pittsfield and Easthampton.

Senator Lesser came into the race with high hopes and a great deal of national Democratic support, having served in the Obama administration as Special Assistant to Senior Advisor David Axelrod. While Lesser called on his famous White House colleagues for help with fundraising and volunteer recruiting, he wasn’t able to make major inroads in the non-western parts of the Commonwealth.

Representative Gouveia was a favorite of progressive activists but had even more trouble with name recognition and geographic reach beyond the Route 2 corridor of Concord, Acton, Littleton, and Harvard.

Measuring Geographic Reach

While the winning candidate map gives us an intuitive sense of each candidate’s geographic reach, I found it useful to quantify the reach by finding the distances between each candidate’s home community and all of the cities and towns where that candidate won the plurality of the vote. Taking the community with the maximum distance gives an idea of each candidate’s geographic reach. I am ignoring several outlier towns for Driscoll and Lesser that aren’t contiguously attached to the other supported areas.

While Driscoll’s maximum reach community was Nantucket, you can also see her range by her wins in Warwick, MA (74 miles) in Franklin County and Southbridge, MA (66 miles) near the western edge of Worcester County with only Sturbridge as a buffer between Lesser’s home county of Hampden.

Kim Driscoll Vote Share

The Driscoll vote share map shows incredible strength on the North Shore in Essex County, as you would expect. While the percentages are not quite as large as Lesser’s in his home district towns, the larger community sizes lead to much higher total margins. The only weak areas for Driscoll in Middlesex County are the Route 2 corridor towns of Gouveia’s home district@mdash;while Driscoll maintains a second place standing in those towns.

Driscoll took 50% of Boston with Lesser and Gouveia splitting the remaining 50% and remained strong in Worcester County, the South Shore, and on the Cape and the Islands.

Eric Lesser Vote Share

Senator Lesser’s voter stregth was limited almost exlusively to the Western Massachusetts counties of Hampden, Hampshire, and Franklin, and Berkshire County to a smaller extent. Lesser’s frontier extends into a few towns at the edge of Worcester County, but not beyond.

Tami Gouveia Vote Share

Two-term State Representative Gouveia was able to get the endorsements of progressive organizations like the Massachusetts Teachers Assocation and Progressive Mass, but was not able to parlay that into wider name recognition around the Commonwealth.