GOP falls short in state
The Republican Party lost a net of three seats in the Legislature yesterday, as Governor Mitt Romney's $3 million attempt to cut into Democratic control of the House and Senate went nowhere .
With the biggest field of GOP hopefuls running in more than a decade, the Republicans appeared to lose at least one of their seven seats in the Senate and two of their 22 seats in the House.
It was a stunning defeat for Romney, who personally recruited many of the GOP candidates as he positions himself for a potential White House run.
Romney, addressing a crowd of about 150 supporters at
''Obviously, the John Kerry tidal wave in Massachusetts was a lot deeper than we had hoped," Romney said in a brief speech. ''It was tough for our candidates to swim through it. They couldn't get all the way to the surface in time. That tidal wave was a bigger one than we expected, and so we haven't picked up the seats that we had hoped. But we're not going to have that name at the top of the ticket in two years, and we're going to keep on fighting."
In perhaps the biggest surprise of the night, Democrat James E. Timilty of Walpole defeated Republican hopeful David W. McCarter in the race to fill the seat being vacated by Republican Senator Jo Ann Sprague. Incumbent Democratic senators Therese Murray of Plymouth and Susan Fargo of Waltham won, as did Democrat Karen Spilka, who will step up from the House to the Senate to replace outgoing Senator David Magnani of Framingham.
On the House side, Democrat Cleon H. Turner of Dennis defeated Republican Richard W. Neitz in the race to replace outgoing Representative Thomas George, a Republican.
Also, Democrat Denis Guyer of Dalton will now take over the seat being vacated by Representative Shaun Kelly, a moderate Republican. With three-quarters of the precincts reporting last night, Guyer was leading, 70 percent to 30 percent.
Democrats boasted that the election results offered proof positive that voters utterly rejected a Republican campaign that featured what they said were negative mailings, negative radio advertisements, and promises to lower taxes with the state's economy still in flux.
''He made it a referendum on him and his administration," said state Democratic Party chairman Philip Johnston. ''That's why he spent millions of dollars, ran ads with his message. He put his personal reputation on the line, and he lost."
The outcome leaves Democrats with an even more commanding lead in the House and Senate than they started with as Election Day began. The Democrats will be easily able to override Romney's vetoes as he heads into the final two years of his term as governor and can block his initiatives as he weighs whether to run for reelection in 2006 or run for president in 2008.
Furthermore, the nasty tone of the Republicans' campaign could make it harder for Romney to work closely with legislative Democrats.
''I want to see him get out of his campaign mode and get into a working relationship with the Legislature to address the issues facing the Commonwealth," Salvatore DiMasi, a North End Democrat who is the new speaker of the Massachusetts House, said last night. ''He has to change his attitude and start governing."
Romney's candidates campaigned on a pledge to support his efforts to overhaul state government by cutting waste and redundancies, especially his plan to merge the Turnpike Authority with the Highway Department.
In addition, the GOP candidates also touted a plan to cut the state income tax rate to 5 percent and to block the children of illegal immigrants from qualifying for in-state tuition at public colleges. Many also opposed gay marriage, but refrained from making it a central issue.
Democrats, by comparison, largely campaigned on promises to restore local aid funding to the levels it stood at before a fiscal crisis caused widespread cuts to school, police, and fire departments. They also criticized Romney for traveling out of state to campaign for President Bush.
Several of the Republican candidates were individually wealthy and pumped tens of thousands of dollars into their campaigns. Two of them, senate candidates Gail Lese of Yarmouth and Timothy E. Duncan of Falmouth, bought homes in order to qualify as residents in the districts where they ran.
Duncan was soundly defeated by Murray, the Senate Ways and Means chairwoman.
At 9:30 p.m., Murray pumped her fists in the air as Shania Twain's ''Man, I Feel Like a Woman" blared at her victory party in Plymouth.
''When the governor decided I was his number one target . . . we had to rise to the challenge," Murray told the crowd at the Radisson Hotel.
Duncan, who moved to the district from Cambridge, spent about $200,000 of his own money on the campaign.
''We did the best we could," Duncan conceded.
In her victory speech last night, Murray called the amount of money spent on the campaign, more than $500,000 between the two of them, ''obscene."
''I had to raise money that I never had to raise before, and I hope we never have to do it again," she said.
Republican Party officials tried to put the loss in a positive light, saying their campaign was still a victory of sorts because Romney succeeded in doing what other GOP governors had failed to do: build up the party.
''This is what two-party government is all about," O'Brien said. ''You have dozens of candidates who never had opposition, every two years was a coronation. Now, we've got real two-party government whether or not we win big."
Only a few weeks after Romney took office in January 2003, he vowed to rebuild the state Republican Party and mount the most well-funded and focused challenge to the Democrats' legislative hegemony in years.
On May 25 of this year, Romney staged a press event at the Park Plaza hotel in which he unveiled 131 Republican legislative candidates. It was the largest slate of GOP hopefuls in at least a decade, and many had been recruited by the governor.
Since then, Romney has stumped for more than 40 candidates, making nearly 70 trips out to the districts to lend his prestige to largely unknown GOP contenders. The Republican Party spent about $3 million on the campaign, trained the candidates in how to get voters out to the polls, and offered each a database that highlights the independent and swing voters in their districts.
Of the new Romney recruits still running strong campaigns, four have spent more than $100,000, and a few -- Lese of Yarmouth, John C. Thibault of Chelmsford, and Duncan -- have expended $200,000. All three pumped more than $100,000 of their own money into their campaign accounts.
On Monday, Romney spent the day shaking hands and posing for photos with eight strong Senate candidates in the western Boston suburbs and on Cape Cod, but downplayed virtually any hopes of the Republicans picking up more than a few seats in the Legislature.
The Senate race between Republican Robi Blute of Shrewsbury and Democrat Edward Augustus of Worcester was in some ways a rematch of the 1996 congressional race in which Augustus's longtime boss, US Representative James McGovern, ousted Blute's husband, Peter.
The results were much the same this time, too. Augustus, McGovern's former chief of staff, easily bested Blute.
Augustus said he blames Romney for ''one size fits all" ads against several Democrats. One accused Augustus, he said, of supporting a pension boost for former University of Massachusetts president William Bulger, even though Augustus wasn't in the Legislature and couldn't vote on it.
Republicans have countered that the mailings accused the Legislature, and not specific candidates, of backing the pension boost.
Augustus will replace Guy Glodis, a conservative Democrat, who is giving up his seat to run for Worcester County sheriff.
In the Cape and Island Senate race, Lese has outspent two-term incumbent Robert A. O'Leary of Barnstable by roughly $178,000, but O'Leary won by a comfortable margin yesterday.
Lese, a pediatrican, was a registered Democrat living in Nahant until last year, when Romney announced plans to launch aggressive campaigns against Democratic incumbents.
Jenn Abelson and Lisa Kocian of the Globe staff and Globe correspondent Matt Viser contributed to this report. 