Vote for Evan MacKay for state representative in the 25th Middlesex District, group says

Voters in Cambridge’s 25th Middlesex District have the opportunity to elect a true progressive champion in the Sept. 3 primary. Our Revolution Cambridge and Our Revolution Massachusetts urge you to vote for Evan MacKay (they/them), a union leader, community organizer and a Harvard teaching fellow.

• Evan has a strong labor organizing background. In the largest union victory in the state since 2008, they helped win a union election for the Harvard Graduate Student Union/UAW representing 5,000-plus student workers. They served on the union’s bargaining committee and as union president, helping the union negotiate midcontract raises. Evan also worked in the UAW reform caucus, which succeeded in democratizing and emboldening the UAW. They serve as an elected representative to the Greater Boston Labor Council.
• For the past 10 years Evan has been active in Cambridge, joining many struggles for social, racial, environmental and economic justice, including for reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights and a cease-fire in Palestine. They helped lead the municipal resolution against private jet expansion at Hanscom. They are also a Cambridge LGBTQ+ Commissioner.
• Evan has an intersectional understanding of many big issues we face in Massachusetts, including criminal justice reform and the foster-care-to-prison pipeline (they grew up in a family that fostered more than 100 children).
• Evan is committed to all the issues you would expect in a transformative and progressive agenda for Massachusetts, including housing as a human right, more spending on public transportation, Medicare for All, a Green New Deal with good union jobs, increased funding for education, debt-free higher education, ending MCAS as a graduation requirement, criminal justice reform, welcoming communities legislation, reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ rights.

While Evan’s opponent, incumbent Marjorie Decker, supports some of this agenda, she also supports an existing state legislative system that makes it extraordinarily difficult for much of this agenda to be achieved. Massachusetts has the least transparent, least democratic legislature in the country. The Massachusetts Legislature, and especially the Massachusetts House, where she serves, is so controlled from the top that it is very difficult to advance legislation that is not favored by top leadership, with the result that Medicare for All, for example – which is widely supported by Massachusetts voters and voters in Decker’s district – has not been brought to the floor for a vote, let alone adopted. Most votes within committees are secret, meaning elected representatives are not accountable to voters. Decker supports and defends this system that shuts us out, although two years ago 94 percent of her district voted to instruct her to support holding public committee votes. This current legislative system resulted in only 0.22 percent of all introduced bills passing last year. Evan is committed to working to make the state Legislature more democratic, transparent, functional and accountable.

Another major difference between Evan and Decker is that she supported the billion dollars in tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy engineered by speaker of the House Mariano in 2023. These tax cuts increased the wealth gap and allowed the leadership to argue that the state doesn’t have funds for important public services. The cuts also directly undermined the objective of the voter-adopted Fair Share Amendment, limiting its effectiveness in providing for public education and transportation. Evan is calling for a repeal of these tax cuts.

Additionally, Decker voted to support a rollback of the state’s right to shelter for homeless families. Evan supports the right to shelter and opposes the rollback.

Because there is so little transparency in the House, the best way to see what a representative supports is to see what legislation she did or did not co-sponsor. Over the years, progressive community organizations and members have pressured representatives to cosponsor legislation to help it pass. Here are some of the bills Evan supports but Decker did not co-sponsor:

• Local option for a real estate transfer fee (H2747) that would enable communities to get desperately needed affordable housing funds.
• Payment in lieu of taxes reform legislation (H2963) to set higher minimums for what universities such as Harvard and MIT are required to pay instead of real estate taxes.
• Five-year moratorium on new prison and jail construction to allow the development of more effective community-based approaches to public safety (H1795).
• Safe Communities Act (H2288) limiting local and state police collaboration with federal immigration agents.
• Legislation allowing State House legislative staff to unionize (H3069). (Evan’s support for this legislation, among other things, led to their endorsement by IBEW Local 2222, the union organizing these employees.)
• The Thrive Act (H495), a legislative pathway for ending the MCAS graduation requirement.

The 25th Middlesex District is one of the most progressive in the state. It should have a truly progressive representative who will take bold action to enact a transformative equity-based agenda for Massachusetts as well as the changes in House governance needed to accomplish it. Evan MacKay has a transformative agenda. Evan’s experience winning victories for Harvard workers and making the UAW more democratic exemplifies the bold action we need to make the Legislature more democratic, transparent and effective. We urge all residents of 25th Middlesex to vote for Evan MacKay on Sept. 3.

Information is here.

Rena Leib, Nancy Wechsler, Kathy Watkins, Carolyn Magid, Henry Wortis, Matthew Schreiner, Andrew King and Kavish Gandhi for Our Revolution Cambridge

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