The Massachusetts gubernatorial election is occurring on November 8, 2022, but the real date that will decide Massachusetts’s next governor is the sixth of September, the day of the primary. That race, however, seems to have already been won.

Charlie Baker, the moderate Republican governor of Massachusetts, a deep blue state, assumed office in January of 2015. Even though he is a Republican in Massachusetts, he has the highest gubernatorial approval rating in the country: 74%, according to a Morning Consult poll from April 28th, 2022. Massachusetts has no gubernatorial term limit, so he could’ve decided to run for re-election. However, neither Charlie Baker nor his Lieutenant Governor, Karyn Polito, are running again. Biden carried Massachusetts with over 65% of the vote in 2020, so without a popular Republican incumbent, the door is wide open for Democrats.

The Democratic Primary is thus the de facto election. There are two prominent candidates. The first of these is Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, who was elected first in 2014, then again in 2018. Upon her election, she became the first openly gay state attorney general in the country. The other major candidate is Massachusetts State Senator Sonia Chang-Díaz, who was the first Hispanic woman elected to the state Senate. Maura Healey has a commanding lead in this race though, with a UMass Lowell poll of likely Democratic primary voters showing her leading Diaz 62% to 17%, with 20% undecided or backing a different candidate. The poll also showed that Healey is seen as the stronger candidate on many issues, like Covid (where she leads 26 points), the economy (+31), and health care (+29). She is also viewed as a stronger leader (+41), the best representative of Massachusetts values (+29), and as more likely to win the general election (+55). Diaz leads in only one category, race relations (+12). Overall, it seems Healey will be the Democratic nominee.

On the Republican side, the leading candidate is former Massachusetts State Representative Geoff Diehl. Diehl, in stark contrast to Charlie Baker, is more aligned with former President Trump: he served as the co-chair of Trump’s 2016 campaign in Massachusetts, and is also endorsed by Trump. This makes it unlikely that he will win, as Trump lost to Biden 32 percent to 65 percent in 2020. Even after taking into account the current Republican-leaning political environment and the fact that Healey is more progressive than Biden, polls and Massachusetts politics show that it is still quite likely that Maura Healey will be our next Governor.