Election 2026: The Race for the Corner Office

ELECTION 2026 · EDITION 6

The Race for the Corner Office

Gov. Maura Healey will head into Election Day with a high-spending opponent, an affordability crisis still raging, and few of her campaign season wish-list items fulfilled by fellow Democrats in the Legislature. Odds are it won’t really matter.

Poll after poll shows voters by a sizable margin are leaning toward keeping Healey in the corner office for another four years. A CommonWealth Beacon/MassINC Polling Group survey conducted in mid-September found Healey up by a margin of 22 percentage points over Republican challenger Mike Minogue. Another poll from UMass Amherst and WCVB put the governor’s lead in early October at 25 percentage points. Then, a third poll from Suffolk University and The Boston Globe in mid-October followed up with Healey ahead on Minogue by 23 percentage points.

It’s always a steep climb for a Republican in Massachusetts to try unseating an incumbent Democrat, especially one who holds statewide office. But it didn’t always seem like the blowout that home-stretch polling is now suggesting.

Healey’s numbers hadn’t always been the strongest. A MassINC Polling Group survey conducted in March found that only 39 percent of voters viewed Healey favorably, compared to 45 percent who viewed her unfavorably. In June, a Suffolk/Globe poll found most voters could not name a signature accomplishment for the governor during her first term. And just this month, the same survey that had Healey up 23 points also found a plurality of voters, 42 percent, saying Massachusetts has gotten worse in the last four years.

Based on a survey of 800 Massachusetts registered voters collected from March 12 – 17, 2026, via live telephone interviews and text message invitations to an online survey.

Meanwhile, Healey’s Democratic counterparts in the Legislature are not exactly stumbling over themselves to ship her big wins before Election Day.

The gas-tax suspension she floated just days after Minogue thrust the idea into the spotlight? Dead on arrival in the House. The sweeping energy affordability legislation she filed way back in May 2025, before the war in Iran sent prices spiking? Stuck in House-Senate negotiations since July. How about tackling the eye-wateringly high cost of housing? The Legislature may make some moves after the votes are counted, but so far hasn’tdone all that much since a 2024 borrowing bill, and they’ve been sitting on Healey’s push for more permitting reforms for months.

Even if Minogue entered the race as an unknown entity who had never held elected office, he has the one asset even veteran candidates would envy: a seemingly unlimited war chest.

When Johnson & Johnson purchased Abiomed, the medical device company Minogue ran, he personally earned more than $240 million, according to SEC filings unearthed by the Globe. Minogue has been happy to tap into his wealth so far, contributing more than $17 million to his own campaign and significantly outspending Healey.

Yet here we are. Healey’s strategy of nationalizing the election — of using Minogue’s past donations to Donald Trump and other GOP causes to make her reelection a referendum on the president — has, arguably, paid dividends.

It’s easy to see why: nearly three-quarters of voters in the most recent Suffolk/Globe poll have an unfavorable view of Trump. A third deem him the figure most responsible for the state of the Massachusetts economy, roughly the same share that picked Healey for that title.

You can see evidence of partisan ideology outweighing any other concerns in most other races, too. US Sen. Ed Markey, Attorney General Andrea Campbell, and Treasurer Deborah Goldberg — all statewide Democrats running for reelection — are up 20 or more points over their Republican challengers in recent polls. Secretary of State Bill Galvin has an even bigger lead than that.

So there might indeed be some heat in this election season. It’s just aimed down at Washington, DC, instead of the candidates actually on the ballot here.

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