BOSTON — After nearly three hours of his campaign refusing to admit defeat, and indicating a potential challenge to Tuesday’s election results, Geoff Diehl finally conceded the race to Maura Healey.
“Right now, with the gap that we have, it is impossible to close it,” Diehl said shortly before 11 p.m., about three hours after the Associated Press called the race for Healey, and unofficial results showed her leading by a 27-point margin, with 37% of the votes counted.
Diehl, a Republican and former state representative, said he spoke with Healey and congratulated her on her win.
“The people of the commonwealth have spoken,” Diehl said after supporters shouted at him not to concede. “I respect their choice. And I ask everyone who supported me and Leah (Cole Allen) to give her the same opportunity that I would have asked for if the shoe were on the other foot.”
However, three hours earlier, things appeared to be heading toward a less conciliatory outcome.
Almost as quickly as the gubernatorial race was called for Healey, Rick Green, the emcee for Diehl’s election night party, went on stage to question the results.
“As we sit here, there are lines across the commonwealth, of voters still waiting to cast their vote in towns and small cities for Geoff Diehl and Leah Cole Allen,” Green said shortly after 8 p.m.
“What you see on your TVs is nothing more than a projection of the mainstream media and what they believe will happen.”
The race was called minutes after polls closed, with percentages listed at zero for both the Democrat attorney general and Diehl.
“We have reason to believe that this may go down as a worse call than Arizona in 2020,” Green said, telling attendees in the Wharf Room of the Boston Harbor Hotel to stay put. “We believe this is faulty information and we will have more time.”
An hour later, Diehl campaign manager Amanda Orlando doubled down on that assessment, saying that with less than 5% of the vote counted — and Healey leading by 15 points — it was “irresponsible” and “extremely premature” for the Associated Press to call the race.
“In the last 45 minutes, we’ve seen red dots pop up on the electoral map as real results are coming in,” Orlando said. “I’ll also remind folks that back in 2016, the Associated Press called the presidential election for Hillary Clinton and I think we all know how that one turned out.”
The message matched the optimistic tone that was struck by Orlando and MassGOP Chairman Jim Lyons less than an hour before results started to come in, despite polls in recent weeks that showed Diehl was trailing Healey by double digits.
“I think tonight’s about us winning,” Lyons told reporters. “We’ve seen the polls. We understand the polls. You guys have all seen the polls, but we think Geoff’s run a great campaign and we think that we’re gonna win.”
Lyons said Republicans felt low voter turnout — with fewer Democrats and more Independent voters expected — was going to give Diehl and other party candidates a good chance to win on Tuesday night.
While Lyons dismissed the notion that not having the endorsement of popular outgoing Republican Gov. Charlie Baker hurt Diehl’s chances, Orlando said the campaign was happy to have the support of former President Donald Trump.
“We certainly don’t regret it,” Orlando said. “First of all, he supported Donald Trump back in 2016, as did a million people in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that year, right. So we’re in good company as far as where the voters are.”
However, Eric Fehrnstrom, a former top aide to former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s 2012 Republican presidential campaign, said an endorsement from Trump did not do Diehl any favors.
“Donald Trump is still the center of the political universe for Republicans,” Fehrnstrom told the Herald. “As long as that remains the case, Republican candidates in liberal Massachusetts are cursed to wandering in the wilderness.”
Fehrnstrom said successful Republican candidates for Massachusetts governor have, in the past, run on some combination of balancing the budget, tax cuts and creating more jobs.
However, the problem with that approach this year, he said, is that there’s low unemployment, a balanced budget, and “a record amount of money is being returned to taxpayers in the form of refunds.”
“Yes, prices are high, and gas and groceries cost more, but no one blames Maura Healey for inflation,” Fehrnstrom said. “Because Geoff Diehl didn’t have a strong economic case to make, voters are left to think about the social issues they care about, where Republicans do not score very well.”
He pointed to Diehl’s primary opponent, Chris Doughty, as a candidate the Republican party used to rally around, “a successful and pragmatic businessman who said he would work across the aisle to get things done.”
“The problem is those people cannot make it out of a Republican primary unless they swear loyalty to Trump, and that makes them unelectable in blue states like Massachusetts,” Fehrnstrom said.
