Top union officials are vowing a strong Election Day turnout to defeat a casino-repeal ballot measure — a push that could prove the wild card for the gubernatorial race.
“Obviously Question 3 (the repeal initiative) is a big question for organized labor and also for the economy of Massachusetts,” Teamsters Local 25 President Sean O’Brien said yesterday at a raucous Charlestown rally of hundreds of union members for Democratic candidate Martha Coakley. “We must maintain the legislation to build casinos in Massachusetts.”
The effort to get out the union vote for Coakley has been in full swing for months, said O’Brien, who leads the largest Teamsters union in New England, with 11,000 members.
“We’re out there, we’re knocking on doors, we’re doing phone banking every night, we’re doing robocalls, we’re using social media, we are doing a grass-roots campaign to make sure that our candidates get elected,” he said.
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The casino ballot question will be an incentive for union members to head to the polls, Coakley said after her speech.
“That is one question I think will drive some turnout,” Coakley said. “I expect that will have an impact.”
At a campaign event in the North End an hour later, Republican candidate Charlie Baker said he would welcome high union turnout.
“I’ve talked to a lot of union members over the course of this race who feel they’ve been nickeled-and-dimed to death by the commonwealth of Massachusetts ... and the attorney general has made it quite clear that she has no problem with continuing to raise taxes,” he said.
Both candidates may be right to welcome — and fear — union turnout on the issue, said David Paleologos, director of Suffolk University’s Political Research Center.
The latest polling shows the repeal losing by 15 points. But among registered Democrats — despite strong opposition by the party’s traditional allies in organized labor — the repeal is passing, Paleologos said.
“The second place it gets tricky is among women voters. Because the literature suggests that women are more susceptible to higher divorce rates, higher domestic violence, higher spousal gambling addiction, etc. etc. ... women oppose Question 3 in our poll,” he said. “Women should be Coakley’s wheelhouse, so it’s not all fully correlated ... You don’t have full alignment of these groups.”
Yesterday, the attorney general urged the hundreds of Teamsters to get their friends and family members to the polls on Election Day.
“I need your help,” Coakley told the crowd. “If you will give us that time and you have our back, I will have yours.”
In her unsuccessful 2010 Senate race against Scott Brown, union support was infamously marginal for Coakley.
“What happened in 2010, that’s history,” O’Brien said. “We’re moving forward and she’s going to be the next governor.”