Around New England

Anyone for Deval Patrick? So Far, Crickets …

December 11, 2019

Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick announced his 2020 presidential bid nearly a month ago and still lacks any significant support.

Patrick, who served as Massachusetts’s governor from 2007 to 2015, entered the race for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination on November 14, according to WBUR. It occurred one day before the state of New Hampshire’s deadline for candidates to file to appear on the ballot and nearly five months after the party’s first primary debate.

Since then, support for Patrick has been minimal, and recent polling data confirms that has not changed.

On Wednesday morning, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight tweeted out his web site’s polling data averages for presidential candidates in New Hampshire. He reported that Patrick is polling at 0.1 percent in the state.

WBUR also released a New Hampshire poll on Wednesday, December 11 in which Patrick received less than 1 percent of the vote. 

In WBUR’s poll, Patrick trailed three candidates who have never held elected office:  Andrew Yang (5 percent), Tom Steyer (3 percent), and Marianne Williamson (1 percent).

When Patrick entered the race, he lacked name recognition. A November 2019 Morning Consult poll revealed that 46 percent of New Hampshire voters had “never heard of” him. 

Patrick’s lack of support manifested in real life on November 20 when he had to cancel an event at Morehead College in Atlanta, Georgia because only two people showed up for it, as the Daily Caller reported. Patrick scheduled his event on the same night as a nationally televised Democratic Primary debate.

One criticism the Washington Post had for Patrick when he announced his candidacy is a lack of substantive policy proposals on his web site. Instead, his web site features a “Visions” tab which the newspaper called “still-vague.”

Although Patrick is a longshot to win the Democratic nomination, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren previously stated that if she were elected president, she would like to have him in her cabinet, as Fox News reported.