TIM CAHILL has been cast in the role as spoiler, the man who will bring down Charlie Baker’s otherwise sure march to the corner office. If true, so what? If you don’t want candidates in elections, move to Burma. But in all likelihood, it’s not true anyway. Voters are smarter than most pundits think. Come Election Day, they’ll figure this stuff out.
Cahill, the state treasurer, got his job with the cute “Tim for Treasurer’’ line uttered by his then 10-year-old daughter. The same daughter today less alliteratively urges “Tim for Governor’’ on behalf of the one-time Democrat. With his run, Cahill is tearing up a script that had Baker going one-on-one against incumbent Deval Patrick. Baker had seemed the GOP’s dream candidate. With a resume to be envied — degrees from Harvard and the Kellogg School of Management, financial wunderkind for two governors, and architect of the resurrection of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care — he was a Bill Weld for the 21st century. Early polls pointed toward a solid Baker victory.
But with Cahill in the mix, things looked different. From the moment he entered the race, polls started showing him with a meaningful chunk of support — somewhere in the mid-teens — with Baker now trailing the governor. Patrick supporters were ecstatic and Republicans despondent. Both sides were drawing the same conclusion: Cahill was taking votes away from Baker. Cahill didn’t get into the race to be a spoiler, of course. Sensing the same voter anger that gave rise to the Tea Party movement, and knowing that he would have no chance of successfully taking on Patrick in a Democratic primary, he figured the time opportune to cast himself as independent of both parties. For any number of reasons, however, his candidacy has not caught fire. The message he has offered has been unclear, a brutal ad campaign financed by the Republican Governors Association has tarnished his image, and the voter anger Cahill once detected may not be as strong as he thought.
With it seemingly the case today that his campaign doesn’t have a chance of winning in November, the calls for him to pull out have increased. Cahill says adamantly that he’s staying. Good for him (and Jill Stein as well). On a principled level, allowing anyone to run is the fundamental stuff of democracy. And more practically, the chances that Cahill ultimately will be a spoiler are actually quite small.
For one, the ready assumption that, absent Cahill, Baker would be ahead ignores the changing dynamics of the election itself. Baker may well have a good resume, but his campaign itself has been flat-footed, with the challenger stumbling over obvious questions about the Big Dig. Meanwhile, Patrick is getting beyond the gaffes that marked the beginning of his term (the luxury car, the redecorated office, the pompous autobiography). He seems to have become more comfortable and interested in his job; he managed well a difficult budget for next year; and is presiding over a state whose economy is outperforming that of the nation’s. That last point, of course, may have nothing to do with Patrick’s policies, but if we blame the guy in office for the bad, so too he should get credit for the good.
Moreover, it’s by no means clear that Cahill actually does disproportionately take votes away from Baker. A recent poll for State House News Service by Gerry Chervinsky, for instance, found about half of Cahill’s votes coming from conservative Democrats who otherwise would support Patrick. That seems reasonable. Cahill once was a Democrat and his candidacy is as likely to split the Democratic Party as it is to draw voters away from the GOP.
And finally, there are voters themselves. They really aren’t dunderheads, you know. Third-party (or independent) candidates usually don’t do well on Election Day — getting far less than they had been polling — because voters choose from likely winners. Here’s what I suspect will happen: Some voters may well favor Tim Cahill in the run-up to the election, but at the voting booth the calculus will become pragmatic; if Cahill looks too weak to win, then they’ll vote for their second-preferred candidate. Whether the winner in November ultimately is Baker or Patrick, don’t blame Tim.
Originally published September 20, 2010, in The Boston Globe, op-ed page.