Vote Coakley on Tuesday

The race for governor of Massachusetts has come down to the wire. Attorney General Martha Coakley and businessman and former state cabinet official Charlie Baker are locked in a dead heat. With Election Day this Tuesday, however, the time has come to make a choice—a choice between two visions, and two very different sets of experiences, for Massachusetts.

Contrary to what Republicans and the Baker campaign might have you believe, Coakley and Baker have clear differences in ideology and priorities. In Martha Coakley, the people have a fighter, an advocate for ordinary Massachusetts families. In Charlie Baker, they have a bureaucrat, a man with a mixed record of public administration. As leader of the AG attorney general’s office, Coakley took Wall Street to task for subprime mortgages and won a string of multi-million dollar settlements for homeowners; Coakley led attorneys general across the nation by filing the first state suit against the Defense of Marriage Act—no longer law thanks to her efforts; and Coakley forced major changes in health care costs through investigations of health care companies gaming the system.

In contrast, Charlie Baker’s track record as an administrator—his chief calling card—leaves much to be desired. While serving under Republican governors William Weld and Paul Cellucci, Baker was chief officer in financing the Big Dig. His plan, and the dramatic cost overruns of the project, left the state transportation system underfunded by $1 billion a year. Throughout the project, he and the Republican administration refused to consider raising taxes, choosing to borrow and neglect other transportation priorities instead.

If Baker is put in charge of financing the state, any budget shortcomings will be met by cutting state programs rather than by raising taxes, as his management of the Big Dig project indicates, and as his actions as Undersecretary of Health and Human Services in the early 1990s suggest. Faced with a budget shortfall or an economic crisis, one can only assume that Baker would cut government programs integral to helping the most vulnerable members of society. By doing so, he would renege on promises made before his tenure, ignoring social responsibility under the guise of fiscal responsibility.

Many Baker supporters argue we need a Republican governor to check our blue-state tendencies. We had an example of this logic at play during the 2000s in California. California elected a moderate Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who served from 2003 to 2011, to solve their massive budget problem. But what were the results?

The Republican government, at least consistent in its anti-tax stance, decided to gouge funding for social services for years. By the end of Schwarzenegger’s term in 2011, $955 million had been cut from the criminal justice system, $510 million from the state’s welfare program (CalWORKS), $121 million from child welfare and foster care, $1.4 billion from Medicaid, $846 million dollars directly out of worker compensation, $2 billion from the CalState and UC systems, and $5.8 billion from K-12 education. In the end, it took a Democratic governor in Jerry Brown working with the Democratic legislature to clean up the mess.

The people of Massachusetts deserve better than Charlie Baker and Republican governance. We need Martha Coakley. Coakley will invest in our citizens. It’s Coakley who has campaigned on ensuring early childhood education for all children, setting them up for success later in life; it’s Coakley who has advocated for significant and much-needed infrastructure improvements across the state to not only create jobs, but also better connect workers and businesses; and it’s Coakley who seeks to economically empower communities across the state (not just Boston) by creating state-local-industry partnerships for revitalization and innovation.

Martha Coakley represents our Massachusetts values of fairness and opportunity. She deserves your vote this Tuesday.

Ross C. Svenson ’15 is a government concentrator in Winthrop House. Andy Secondine ’18 lives in Matthews Hall. They are members of the Harvard College Democrats.