I hope this email finds you well and you are enjoying your last week of August. I wanted to update Worcester Herald followers on some of the latest progress with Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance has been launching a yearlong voter education campaign to highlight the voting record of lawmakers across the Commonwealth . We erected a large billboard in central Mass in January that is visible on Rte 290. In April, we began to distribute more than 500,000 newspaper inserts focused on our legislative scorecard in approximately 70 newspapers. It showed how all 200 lawmakers voted on 3 specific issues.
Paul Craney
More recently, we began to mail legislative districts educational mailers on how their local lawmaker voted on 4 issues (implementation of Obamacare, the gas tax tied to inflation, local aid and allowing the legislature to vote on allowing priority to our veterans over illegal immigrants for public housing). We recently printed a second mailer that will be sent to the same districts. That mailer should be hitting mail boxes as soon as this Saturday and into next week. For each round of mail, we send out approximately 300,000 at a time. Click Here to view our reports filed with OCPF.
Unfortunately for many of these lawmakers, they share a voting record over the last two years in which they were given some flexibility, but were required by their leadership to vote for the passage of many of these ill convinced ideas. Having an inconsistent voting record will be something many of them will have to reconcile with their constituents.
As a result of our first mailer, many of the incumbent lawmakers have been struggling to respond. As we all know, the best response is honesty and defending your voting record but unfortunately, that is not the case for the vast majority. Instead, time after time, they are criticizing our mailer as an “attack” piece. One lawmaker went as far as calling Mass Fiscal Alliance a “Washington, D.C.” organization and another over this past weekend was so unsettled by his voting record being shared that he stopped by his opponent’s home, unannounced, to confront him on the votes being shared.
Mass Fiscal Alliance should be flattered, a spoof website was to counter our mailers. The website of course mentions the “Koch brothers” and is a humorous but pitiful attempt to attack the messenger. I doubt many will read it and fewer will take it serious.
I hope you enjoy your Labor Day weekend and enjoyed reading about our progress.
–Paul
Paul D. Craney
Executive Director
Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance
* Take a moment to review your legislators voting record
