Why you should vote for Evan MacKay over Marjorie Decker

In previous posts I focused solely on Rep. Decker: her many contributions from lobbyists, and her repeated lies and what they tell us about her approach to public service. In this post I’m going to build on that, and more, to compare Rep. Decker to her challenger, Evan MacKay.

Non-policy issues

While policies are important, you may not like either candidate’s policies, or perhaps the policies you care about are ones where the candidates don’t differ that much. So it’s worth doing some other comparisons as well.

Comparison #1: Lobbyist contributions

Since I went over Rep. Decker’s lobbyist contributions, I thought I’d compare them to Evan MacKay’s. Here are the numbers for 2025:

Name	Number of lobbyists contributing
Marjorie Decker	130
Evan MacKay	1

The one lobbyist who contributed to MacKay is Daniel Lewis Zackin. Per the lobbyist database, he is “primarily lobbying members of the Massachusetts State House and Massachusetts State Senate for bill H.872/S.481, An Act Establishing a Climate Change Superfund and Promoting Polluter Responsibility, which would levy a one-time fee on top polluters that would fund a climate adaptation superfund.”

And here are the numbers for the first half of 2026:

Name	Number of lobbyists contributing
Marjorie Decker	~50
Evan MacKay	0

Lobbyists love Decker! MacKay, not so much.

Comparison #2: Listening to the public

I have to assume that lobbyists love Rep. Decker because she listens to them. The people she doesn’t listen to are the public, at least those of us who disagree with her.

This was my personal experience the one time I went with a group to lobby her as my representative. She was not interested in what we had to say. Instead, she spent most of the time lecturing us about how the ideal legislation is that which passes muster with Democrats in districts competitive with Republicans.

It’s not just me, though. Here’s Clyve Lawrence, writing in the Cambridge Day about his experience advocating for Memorial Drive:

Decker was unhelpful from the beginning. I first met her in 2022, when then-councillor E. Denise Simmons and the city held six community meetings for residents from all sides to discuss their views on Riverbend Park. I expected an elected official to care about hearing multiple perspectives. But Decker arrived only halfway through, listened briefly and promptly declared she was not taking a position.

… I noticed she did not attend the other five meetings, where much of the constructive dialogue and compromise between neighbors took place. Her absence spoke volumes about her level of engagement and commitment to finding a solution.

… When we finally got to call, I learned again that she preferred discussing anything but solutions to park access. Each time I respectfully redirected to the issue, she would dwell momentarily, question whether I understood the situation and shift topics. I listened patiently as any constituent would while she pointed out several instances where she had been unfairly maligned by certain groups, which wasn’t the purpose of the call.

My state representative spoke at me, not with me.

As for MacKay: early on in their campaign, the last time they ran, they told me about meeting with some residents who they disagreed with on many issues. MacKay told them something like “I may disagree with you, but I will always respectfully listen to what you have to say.”

As someone who, personality-wise, is probably closer to Decker than MacKay, I’d still much rather have the latter representing me, even when we don’t agree. MacKay will at least listen.

Comparison #3: Legislative experience and seniority

As the incumbent, Rep. Decker has more experience and seniority in the legislature than MacKay. Unfortunately, this experience and seniority isn’t very helpful because of the way the legislature (doesn’t) work.

Let’s look at some numbers: how many bills were passed in three legislatures, in three states, all with about the same population.

Year	Bills passed: MA	Bills passed: IN	Bills passed: WA
2022	65	191	298
2023	7	257	478
Average	36	224	388

The data sources are: MA, IN, WA; annoyingly they only had partial 2024 numbers for MA.

During this period, Indiana passed 6× as many bills as Massachusetts. Washington passed 11× as many bills! And it’s not that Indiana and Washington are abnormally productive legislatures; Tennessee, with around the same population as Massachusetts, passed 2633 bills a year during this period!

There are 160 lawmakers in the state House; at 36 bills a year, and assuming each bill is spearheaded by one Representative, the average legislator will create a successful bill every 53 months on average. In Indiana a lower body lawmaker will create a successful bill every 5 months; in Washington it’s every 3 months.

In short, the Massachusetts legislature does a shit job at passing laws, their whole purpose of being. So what we need are representatives who will push to make the legislature more transparent and effective, so that they will actually do their job and pass laws.

Which brings us to my next comparison—

Comparison #4: Transparency and responsive legislature

This verges on policy, but really it’s more of a meta-policy: if the public doesn’t know what the legislature is doing, it’s much easier for the legislature to ignore the public. So transparency is a prerequisite to having a responsive, small-d democratic legislature that gets whatever it is the public wants done. Lacking transparency, it’s easy for the legislature to do the minimum possible, coasting by with no controversies, hoping the public doesn’t pay attention and doesn’t bother to vote.

As I discussed in a previous post, Rep. Decker opposed a 2021 proposal to make committee votes public, on the basis that it’s easier to pass legislation if you don’t share details with the public. Since as you’ve seen the MA legislature is quite bad at passing laws, this isn’t a very good argument!

Meanwhile, MacKay is endorsed by Act on Mass, an organization that has been fighting for transparency and against legislative corruption. This is not a surprise: MacKay has made transparency a key part of their campaigns.

And it’s worth noting that the legislature has noticed. When MacKay first ran against Rep. Decker in 2024, the whole political establishment of the state lined up behind her. Rep. Decker winning by just 40 votes was a huge blow, and the legislature leadership realized they needed to do something to demonstrate they care about transparency. As a result, in 2025 they finally made committee votes public.

This is the impact on transparency MacKay had when they lost. And of course this is the result of many years of political organizing by many people; this isn’t MacKay’s personal individual achievement. But their almost-win was evidence to the legislature’s leadership that the public cares about transparency.

Comparison #5: Other relevant experience

Before joining the legislature, Rep. Decker was a City Councilor.

After joining the legislature, Rep Decker got a second job working as director of community affairs and doing business development for a law firm that does class action lawsuits. Per the Crimson, she “represented the firm at meetings with institutional investors and public pension officials across the country.”

MacKay helped organize the Harvard Grad Students Union, HGSU-UAW Local 5118, and was part of their initial bargaining committee. They were also part of a group of union organizers who fought to make the UAW itself more democratic and transparent. They’ve also done quite a bit of political organizing and volunteering outside the union.

Policy differences

Policy is a little tricky to discuss when comparing both:

• There are many issues where both candidates agree; I assume both will support abortion rights, both say they support rent control, and so on.
• As I wrote elsewhere, Rep. Decker has repeatedly lied to constituents, and feels it’s useful and necessary to hide information from the public in order to pass legislation. As a result, it’s difficult to know which part of Rep. Decker’s claimed policy positions are true.
• You can just go read MacKay’s and Rep. Decker’s issues pages, you don’t need me for that.

So in the next major section, I’m going to take a step back and take a different approach to policy, by reviewing the different coalitions they represent, and the corresponding differences in their approaches to politics. But before that, one exemplary policy difference.

Taxing the rich

After voters passed the Fair Share amendment, a progressive income tax that means people who make more than a million a year pay slightly more in taxes, rich people in Massachusetts lost their shit. Apparently having ever-so-slightly less income was a mortal threat.

In response, the first thing Gov. Healey did after she was first elected was push the legislature to implement massive tax cuts for the rich, and the legislature was happy to oblige. Here’s a letter from Rep. Connolly, who represents parts of Cambridge and Somerville, explaining why he was opposed. The other local Representative who voted against these tax cuts was Rep. Uyterhoeven, currently running to represent parts of Cambridge in the State Senate.

MacKay has made clear they would have voted against tax cuts for the rich. In contrast, Rep. Decker voted in favor of tax cuts for the rich.

Who supports each candidate?

A different approach to policy is to look at the groups backing each candidate.

A candidate is a person with individual opinions and beliefs, but they can also be seen as organizers of an ad-hoc coalition of supporting groups. And these supporters can tell you how and why the candidate will make policy decisions.

Rep. Decker’s supporters

The political establishment

Rep. Decker is the representative of the establishment; here’s what one of her fundraisers looked like in 2024:

Gov. Maura Healey and Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll were there. So were several top figures in the state Legislature. Mingling with assorted local activists and union officials, the Democratic heavyweights descended on the venue’s rooftop patio to show their support for Cambridge state Rep. Marjorie Decker, who was launching her reelection campaign for a seventh two-year term.

At one point in the evening, Decker raised her phone, taking a selfie photo with the sea of supporters smiling behind her, making sure the governor and lieutenant governor had prominent spots at the front of the frame, along with Aaron Michlewitz, chairman of the powerful budget-writing House Ways and Means Committee, and Sal DiDomenico, an assistant majority leader in the 40-member Senate.

Unions

If you look at the Rep. Decker’s endorsements page, you will mostly see lots and lots of unions, and a few other organizations like Planned Parenthood. Since MacKay has literally helped organize a new union, if they win they will likely be just as supportive of unions.

So why are these unions supporting Rep. Decker? In circumstances like this with two candidates who will both support many of the same positions, endorsing organizations are likely to support the candidate with a longer history of support, one of the many advantages of being an incumbent.

Lobbyists

Another set of Rep. Decker supporters, as I wrote about elsewhere, are many many lobbyists. Their support is presumably based on the expectation that she will vote the way they want. The things they want may or may not conflict with what unions want, it depends very much what they’re lobbying for.

Anti-tax rich people, including at least one billionaire

Finally, there are a set of Rep. Decker supporters who are clearly in opposition to the unions on many policy issues. Notably the many donors, including billionaire John Fish and executives in his company, who are pushing for tax cuts for the rich, and who hated the Fair Share amendment.

The Fair Share amendment was sponsored by Raise Up, which includes many unions in its coalition. Why are these two very different groups, unions and the anti-tax rich, supporting Rep. Decker?

There’s no way to know for certain, but I can suggest some possibilities:

• In a deeply centralized and undemocratic legislature, political actors’ main way of achieving policy goals is to get the support of key insiders.
• Or, perhaps the support is due to different reasons. Perhaps John Fish and other billionaire-aligned donors to Rep. Decker aren’t so much supporting Rep. Decker as they are opposing MacKay. Having a socialist elected to replace an insider in the legislature leadership can’t be good for their interests.

Evan MacKay’s supporters

MacKay’s endorsers include some unions, including the Massachusetts Teachers Union, who as late as December 2025 sent out a mailer in support of Rep. Decker.

More interesting are the other endorsing organizations, which include Democrat Socialists of America (Boston and national), Progressive Massachusetts, Act on Mass, Massachusetts Peace Action, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Sunrise Movement (an environmental group founded by young people), IfNotNow Boston (a Jewish peace group), Palestinian House of New England, and Cambridge Bicycle Safety.

These are all very different organizations, focusing on a wide range of issues, but there is a common thread: all these organizations are pushing for change to the political status quo.

From status quo—

At the broadest level, Rep. Decker’s supporting coalition is that of the beneficiaries of the status quo. This includes the policy status quo (on things like transportation, or tax policies that benefit the rich), but also the legislature’s status quo:

• Incumbents who can expect to run unopposed and get re-elected for decades with no competition.
• A legislature where power is centralized in a small number of people.
• Decision making that happens behind closed doors.
• Politics which is all about getting access to that powerful handful of people.
• Trying to change things as little as possible, because change is always a risk to beneficiaries of the status quo. And when change bypasses the legislature in ways that hurt those beneficiaries, trying to undo it.

For the last point, I’ve already given the example of cutting taxes for the rich as a response to the Fair Share ballot initiative (“millionaire’s tax”).

Another example: after Trump was first elected, the first bill to protect immigrants in MA was filed in 2017. It didn’t pass for years, despite being filed repeatedly in every legislative session. The legislature only passed such a law this summer, 9 years later… and even after this law passed, they are still allowing MA to hand over prisoners to ICE.

This is the system Rep. Decker represents and upholds.

—to change

In contrast, Evan MacKay is running on the novel idea you can actually change things for the better. They did this at Harvard, where they helped organize grad students into a new union. I first met them doing this on a much smaller individual scale, when they helped canvas voters for the Cambridge City Council a few years ago. They even managed to change things for the better in the legislature when they barely lost their last run, which put the fear of the public into the legislature leadership and resulted in more transparency.

And so the question you need to ask yourself in this election is whether the status quo is good for everyone.

We have unaffordable housing, tens of thousands of people losing healthcare due to Federal cuts, 40% of households are food insecure, crumbling public transportation (in a dangerously literal sense**, people being kidnapped off the streets… and a legislature that will sit on a critical problem 9 years before they even partially address it.

It’s time to change Massachusetts, one legislator at a time. It’s time to vote out Rep. Decker and vote in Evan MacKay.

A bit more

Song of the day (in two languages): Do You Wanna Have a Party (English version) / Ala Canggung (Malay version), by Too Phat.

• A contempt for constituents: why Rep. Decker lies
  A detailed example of how Rep. Decker has lied to the public, and some thoughts about why she did it.
• Independent voter? Moving? You can (and should) still vote in the Sep 1 primary
  If you’re a registered voter, you can and should vote in the upcoming primary.
• 130 lobbyists, their family, and friends: Rep Decker’s campaign finances
  Digging into Rep Decker’s campaign finances to get a sense of where the money comes from.
• The MA Senate tells renters to go fuck themselves, or, why primaries matter
  The primaries are… September 1st. They really don’t want you to vote; I suggest you do that and more.