If you drive through Marshfield or Pembroke, you might think that Ed Mazzuchelli is the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Massachusetts.
He’s not — that’s Kevin O’Connor, a lawyer who lives in Dover. But Mazzuchelli’s lawn signs appear frequently alongside those of Republicans like state representative candidate Tatyana Semyrog and state senator Patrick O’Connor of Weymouth.
Mazzuchelli, who is running a write-in candidacy as an independent, considers himself fiscally conservative and socially moderate — but he opposes legal abortion.
The 45-year-old is a Kingston resident and father of two who owns Train4Life, a gym in Marshfield. He announced his run in late August, saying he feels as though there should be more small business owners represented in the federal government.
“I’ve always been interested in politics,” Mazzuchelli told New Boston Post at a campaign event at Alumni Sports Cafe in Pembroke on Sunday. “I think with what happened with COVID and the response at the federal level where there’s a lack of a bipartisan coalition and it’s almost like nobody gets along anymore, what ends up happening is small businesses like mine suffer while people at the federal level still get paid while we’re all going out of business. That was the catalyst for me. I’ve seen the divisiveness for so long. As a business owner, everything is about relationships. You have to hear both sides of everyone’s stories. You have to find that sort of middle of the road and find solutions for everybody.”
Mazzuchelli said while he does not oppose government stimulus amid the coronavirus pandemic, he thinks trillion-dollar deficits or more in a non-pandemic year aren’t sustainable.
“It’s not that it wasn’t necessary, but some of us are just finding out how we’re going to have to pay that back,” he said. “It’s like if you went to get an auto loan and they didn’t tell you what the interest is and realize you can’t afford it. I just think we have to be more responsible.”
The United States government is in more than $27 trillion of debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the U.S. debt-to-Gross Domestic Product ratio will reach 121 percent by 2030 and 220 percent by 2050 if no changes are made. That would exhaust Social Security by 2031 and permanently reduce wages and economic growth by 0.6 to 0.8 percent, as the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget points out.
Mazzuchelli told New Boston Post that he would like to make current programs run more efficiently to deal with the debt problem.
“Anytime you increase the size of government, you increase spending,” he said. “I’m about shrinking government to its essentials. We have this wonderful document that great people in the 1700s wrote, and we want people to take in that whole thing.
“We don’t have to necessarily cut this or cut that, but we bring in $3.5 trillion a year in revenue,” he added. “That’s a lot of money. We have to do a better job managing that.”
If not, Mazzuchelli said the United States will have a harder time borrowing money — in this case, selling treasury bonds — and the dollar will be weaker as a result.
One solution he supports: simplifying the tax code. Mazzuchelli said he doesn’t support the kinds of loopholes that help corporations and the wealthy avoid paying income taxes — although he does not blame them for taking advantage of existing law.
“I think everyone should pay their share,” he said. “There’s a lot of loopholes. We’re hearing a lot of it now because, unfortunately, Donald Trump is front and center on everything but while people are blaming him, he’s been president for three-and-a-half years. He’s never been a senator or congressman, so he doesn’t write those laws. I’m an S corporation and we can take advantage of some of those same loopholes.”
“That’s necessary, but that just expands revenue,” he added. “We are gonna need smart people to make tough decisions on what needs to be trimmed at the federal level.”
On social issues, Mazzuchelli said he supports legal immigration and is pro-life. A campaign flier at the event also noted that he supports law enforcement and opposes defunding the police.
On immigration, Mazzuchelli said he supports a pathway to citizenship for those who are already here, but not open borders.
“Immigration is part of our nature here,” he said. “It’s part of our backbone. I just think it has to be done the right way. I don’t even get where the argument is to just let people come over. I don’t understand it. I don’t think anybody wants people to not come here. They just want them to come the right way.”
While Mazzuchelli is pro-life, it’s not his top campaign issue.
“I’m a father of two,” he said. “Earlier in my life, I was less involved with that situation. The beauty of it is that the constitution at no point says anything about it. I don’t know why people get hung up on that. It’s a state-by-state thing. Roe v. Wade basically said that the federal government says it can’t tell you what to do with your body. No state can say that you can’t, but what they can do is limit terms. I don’t see it as something that’s on the ballot. I just see it as a social buzzword where people love to come after you one way or another.”
As for the incumbent, U.S. Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat who sponsored the Green New Deal, Mazzuchelli sees him as an ineffective lawmaker and political opportunist.
He noted that Markey has only been the primary sponsor of 27 bills that have passed and that he has been in Congress since 1976 — which he said amounts to slightly more than one every two years.
“I know that if you wrote an article once every two months, that might not work out too well for you,” he said. “You might not make a lot of money.”
He also said the timing of Markey’s Green New Deal was convenient: 2019 when he was up for re-election the following year and was worried about having a primary challenger. (That happened: Markey beat U.S. Representative Joseph P. Kennedy III in a slugfest Democratic primary in September.)
The Markey campaign did not respond to New Boston Post’s request to comment for this story on either Sunday or Monday.
Mazzuchelli also said that he has been impressed with the feedback he has received from his campaign locally and has tried branching out to other parts of the state to gain name recognition as well.
“The local level has been great,” he said. “This is our first time doing anything like that. Running a grassroots campaign is difficult. We don’t have the infrastructure machine like the Republican side or the Democratic side. We’ve been getting out to places like Leominster and Fitchburg. It’s been eye-opening and rewarding that my kids get to see me do this. This isn’t my last run, either. We hope this is the first of two or three runs.”
More information on Mazzuchelli’s campaign is available on his web site www.mazz4mass.com.
A Mazzuchelli For U.S. Senate lawn sign in Pembroke, Massachusetts
