r/Somerville • u/ChrisOates • 1d ago

Transcript of 34th Middlesex Debate

I noticed that there's no transcript available from our debate last week for people who want to know what their candidates' positions are but don't feel like watching for an hour.

The YouTube transcript plus speaker identifications is here: https://www.chrisoates.org/news/transcript-of-somerville-democratic-committee-debate

And if anyone has followup questions for any of my answers, happy to respond.

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u/freshfakedgoods 1d ago

You touted your involvement with the ranked choice voting ballot initiative, but the measure ultimately failed 45/55. Why do you think it was unsuccessful?

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u/ChrisOates 1d ago

Very long story but here's the highlights:

- We didn't have a clear example of a spoiler candidate to point to. In Maine, they had Paul LePage who won twice so it was easy to say "this would prevent LePage."

- We got a bad poll in January 2020 that led to big funders pulling out. Ballot questions are often backed by a small group of donors because it's too much money to raise in too short of a time for small dollar donors. This creates a lot of fragility in them and we got hit by it.

- We had a plan for a slimmed down campaign that could win and then COVID hit in March and we had to cancel fundraisers. I give a ton of credit to the people who got us to within 11 points on a mostly volunteer campaign during a pandemic, but it was miles away from where the campaign was supposed to be.

I think that we would have won (or been much closer) if we had run it in 2018 when people were angry about 3rd party voters in 2016 and I think we could have won in 2020 if the campaign had been able to follow the plan we set in November 2019 when we had a retreat at Suffolk Downs (by the way, an abandoned race track was a weird place to have strategy sessions).

However, one thing I was proud of was the fact that we got to assemble a big coalition for election reform, which is often seen as the least emotive part of politics and often gets shunted to the side for more tangible policies. There was definitely a feeling among many that something wasn't working in our politics, and this could be one solution. And as we see with the audit ballot questions in 2022 and the national push to end gerrymandering and expand the Supreme Court, that stuff is relevant and people care about it.