The Mass. governor’s race is heating up: What Healey’s campaign launch reveals about her strategy
It's on — officially.
Gov. Maura Healey kicked the 2026 race for governor into high gear on Tuesday with a new launch video and a seasonally appropriate campaign website complete with merch.
It was another big day in a big week for Healey, who will deliver her third State of the Commonwealth address to a joint session of the Legislature on Thursday night.
There, she'll stake out her priorities for the coming year, and, by extension, her reelection campaign.
And while the Democratic governor undoubtedly knows that three Republicans are vying for her job, her 2-minute launch video made it clear that she's hunting much bigger game.
Namely, President Donald Trump and his attacks on programs and causes near and dear to the deep blue Bay State. She also focused on questions of affordability, which have become the driving issue of the 2026 midterms.
"In Massachusetts, we work hard, we look after each other, but these are tough times," Healey intoned in the ad over the obligatory sweeping and emotional soundtrack. "Donald Trump is making everything worse."
The ad includes a laundry list of Healey's accomplishments over her first term, including free community college, her efforts to tackle health care costs and to protect abortion care and an admittedly uphill fight to tame the state's wildly expensive housing market.
"But there's more for us to do. A lot more. And that's why I'm running for reelection," she continued.
In some ways, Tuesday's announcement, also the first anniversary of Trump taking office for the second time, was old news. Healey made it clear nearly a year ago that she wanted another four years in the Corner Office.
But that was then.
Since that soft launch with an interview on WGBH-FM, voters have been treated to a year of Trumpian excesses, including broadsides against Harvard University and attempts to withhold billions of dollars in federal funding the state annually receives from Washington.
There have been more court fights than you can shake a gavel at.
And, perhaps most viscerally, there have been the images of federal immigration agents roaming the streets, often to horrifying effect.
Healey's announcement video, cannily, includes references to all of the above, including the widely circulated footage of a Minneapolis woman being dragged from her car by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
Trump is "raising costs, taking away your health care and tearing families apart," Healey continues. "We see the damage he's doing to our state and our country, but we'll never back down. In Massachusetts, we stand together on what matters most."
More subtly, Healey's mentions of her efforts to fight the housing crisis and reinvigorate the MBTA also pull double-duty as attacks on two of her three Republican opponents — both Baker administration alums — even if she does not mention them by name.
GOP hopeful Mike Kennealy was Baker's housing and economic development czar, while aspirant Brian Shortsleeve oversaw the MBTA.
"Out of the box, in one video, she defined the race, defined her record, defined her opponents and defined Donald Trump," veteran Democratic analyst Mary Anne Marsh, of Boston, told MassLive.
"That's not a bad start. So she has established the terms of engagement and the debate that will be this race because she's the only one who has the standing to do it right now," Marsh said.
Which is not to say that Shortsleeve and Kennealy, joined by medical device executive Michael Minogue, are exactly asleep at the switch.
They've been out making the rounds of Republican town committees and scooping up endorsements at a feverish pace. They've also been blasting out press releases and social media attacks.
In other words, they're doing all the things that challengers are supposed to do as they try to build grassroots support for their candidacies.
That happened again on Tuesday, with both Kennealy and Shortsleeve releasing statements critical of Healey's campaign announcement.
Shortsleeve argued that "Massachusetts families are being squeezed harder every day while Beacon Hill refuses to take responsibility," as he pointed to what he said were the lost jobs and rising costs on Healey's watch.
Kennealy sounded a similar warning, reeling off a litany of statistics that put the state near the top of the list for outmigration and at the bottom of the list for affordability.
"Our families pay the third-highest energy bills in the entire country – these are direct results of policies enacted and pushed by Maura Healey," he said. "These aren't abstract statistics – they're the real-world consequences of a Governor who has mismanaged the basics and refuses to take responsibility for the decline happening on her watch."
Those criticisms came on top of attacks on issues ranging from the activities of the state Parole Board and the arrest of a senior Healey aide on drug charges .
What is less clear is whether this Jackson Pollock-like approach of throwing ink at paper and hoping a pattern will emerge can stick in a state where it's tremendously difficult to unseat an incumbent politician.
Healey, who faces vulnerabilities of her own on affordability, her role in high energy prices , and her management of the state shelter system, held a double-digit lead over all three of her Republican challengers in a UMass Amherst/WCVB-TV poll released last November.
And more than half of the 183 self-identified Republican respondents in the poll said they did not know enough about the three Republican candidates to make up their minds.
Bradford Wyatt, a Republican National Committeeman from Boylston, who said he's staying out of the gubernatorial primary derby, believes there are lines of attack open to the GOP hopefuls on the economy.
And with a Democratic supermajority in charge at the State House, the GOP candidates also should stress the "need for balance on Beacon Hill for good government decisions and operations."
But "it's too bad the primary calendar is so late," he said, referring to the Sept. 1 intraparty election. He also noted that there's a four- to five-week window after the primary before voters start receiving mail-in ballots for the general election in November.
That makes it hard to deliver a campaign message to the voters, and "the late primary really benefits incumbents," Wyatt said.
Read more analysis from John L. Micek
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