Alex Morse's #MeToo Scandal Was Missing the "Me" and the "Too." Now He Might Win Big For Progressives.
“We knew that the story was being shopped around for months,” Alex Morse, the 31-year-old mayor of Holyoke, Massachusetts told me about the scandal that nearly tanked his political career. “And reputable journalists refused to move forward because there was no evidence. So we thought it had fizzled out.”
In one of the country’s most consequential Democratic primary races, which will be held on Sept. 1, Morse is challenging an incumbent 40 years his senior, MA-01 Rep. Richard Neal, chairman of the powerful Ways and Means committee. The campaign seemed like a near standard blueprint for fresh-faced, left-wing candidates, checking the boxes on policies like Medicare for All and heralding small-dollar donations. Then all hell broke loose.
On August 7, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst’s college paper published an article on a letter from the College Democrats, vaguely accusing Morse, who was a guest lecturer there, of “abuse of his power for sexual relationships” and banning him from events. After local media picked up the allegations, the university announced it was launching an investigation, and some progressive groups retracted their endorsements.
“When I get an email from the College Democrats telling me that I made students feel uncomfortable, I'm human,” said Morse, who had to walk a fine line between defending himself and not playing into tropes that undermined sexual assault victims. “If I have unintentionally made someone feel uncomfortable, then I own that and I have to respect that.” Morse issued a statement acknowledging consensual adult relationships (with individuals who were not his students) and apologizing if he’d ever made anyone uncomfortable. A Boston Globe columnist called his campaign “pretty much shot.”
But in a bizarre plot twist, a series of Intercept articles unveiled something of a honeypot scheme, with shades of a B-movie Tracy Flick, including chat logs of a few students discussing trying to find Morse’s dating profiles in order to entice him into a compromising exchange. One student expressed hope that he would get an internship from Neal for his effort to “sink [Morse’s] campaign.” And the leadership of the Massachusetts Democratic Party also reportedly had some involvement in the allegations, directing the students to a lawyer. In the weeks since, zero accusers have come forward, rendering this a would-be MeToo allegation with neither a Me, nor a Too.
It was an unexpected hiccup for the rising progressive star. A working-class native son of Holyoke (pop. 40,300), Morse shockingly won the mayorship at just 22, launching his campaign during his senior year at Brown and knocking off a 67-year-old Democratic incumbent. It made the red-headed wunderkind Holyoke’s youngest and first openly gay mayor, and the first in a city which is now 52 percent Hispanic to be fluent in Spanish—a skill he deploys to delight elementary school classes. He quickly staked out bold positions to jolt the once-humming paper mill city back to life, closing coal-fired plants and opening up solar farms, renovating long-shuttered mills for marijuana cultivation, and embarking on ambitious renovations for public housing previously consigned to demolition. He’s been re-elected three times since. And he presents the first serious challenge in memory to Neal, a close Pelosi ally who has been in Congress for 16 terms and crushed his last primary challenger in 2018.
Rarely, if ever, does national political attention turn to Massachusetts’s First. The boot-shaped district, the most rural in the state, abuts Vermont, New York, and Connecticut to the west, encompasses large tracts of farmland, the struggling post-industrial cities of Holyoke and Springfield, and well-regarded cultural institutions—and is overshadowed and over-resourced compared to Boston to the east.
The race could be a bellwether for the direction of the party. In contrast to other Democratic incumbents felled by insurgent primaries, such as Joe Crowley and Eliot Engel, Neal actually lives in his district and took the race seriously from the outset. He is also pro-choice and is not in a majority-minority district—MA-01 is 83 percent white—with a challenger from an underrepresented minority. That’s precisely why both progressive and establishment insiders are watching the race so closely: If Neal can lose, the thinking goes, no one is safe.
There’s also potential for a larger ripple effect. Austin-area Rep. Lloyd Doggett—a member of the Progressive Congressional Caucus who is viewed as less friendly to Pharma and criticized Neal’s slow-moving approach on requesting Trump’s tax returns as “dilatory”—is second in seniority on Ways and Means, which potentially puts him in line for the chairmanship. If Dogget took up the gavel, it could potentially rechart the direction of Ways and Means—the chief tax-writing committee that has outsize influence on public policy—and send greater reverberations through Democratic leadership.
And that’s why the chats of a few undergrads bear such weight. Instead of sinking Morse, the outlandish controversy reinvigorated his campaign, bringing the national spotlight and with it more attention from local voters. “It was very clear that he was being railroaded,” says Lis Smith, formerly Pete Buttigieg’s star advisor, who came on to informally advise the campaign after the allegations broke. “I felt very strongly that if the smear effort against him were successful that it would have implications for LGBTQ and young candidates in elections going forward.”
I’m familiar with the region: I grew up in South Hadley, and attended Springfield’s Cathedral high school with some of Neal’s children. To get a sense of the race, I spoke with more than 20 locals, and what I found is a once moderate Democratic district in flux, potentially on the brink of a substantial shift.
Many of the voters I spoke to were livid about unsavory political tactics and the homophobic insinuations of the allegations. (“Bullshit,” seethed a classmate from high school.) The Morse campaign has raked in $550,000 from 17,000 donations since the story broke, and 1,500 new fired-up volunteers reached out. A rosy internal poll in mid-August found Morse gaining on Neal, trailing just 5 percent behind the 32-year incumbent. Sixty-five members of the Massachusetts Democratic party signed a letter calling for an independent investigation of leadership’s involvement with the scandal. New endorsements for Morse started gaining steam, as local elected officials who were previously neutral came off the sidelines, San Juan mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz signaled her support to the region’s sizeable Puerto Rican population, and the PAC of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom Morse credits with inspiring him to run, came in with a week to go.
On a rainy day last October, I sat in an idling car with Morse and his senior political advisor Max Clermont, a former Obama field director and a classmate from Brown, across Tapestry Health, a nondescript building operating a needle exchange on an industrial strip in Holyoke.
“For the last 20 years, my brother has been in and out of prison and rehab treatment facilities,” Morse told me about his oldest brother Doug’s struggles with opioid addiction. “I've brought him to detox, visited him in jail, picked him up and brought him to treatment facilities without judgement. When he relapsed last summer, we couldn't find a detox bed here in Holyoke and Springfield, so we had to get him to Pittsfield. There are so many cracks in the system.”
In one of his first acts as mayor, Morse established a needle exchange program, for which his own City Council tried to sue him. It backfired. That court case ended up changing state law, putting needle exchange programs under the purview of health commissions as a matter of public health rather than a political one under city councils, resulting in the five existing programs expanding to 29 around the state. But there are limits even to the grit and determination of a young visionary mayor. In February, Doug passed away from a heroin overdose. That fresh trauma followed another family devastation just two years after the death of Morse’s mother, who struggled with mental illness for years, and with whom Morse was exceptionally close, speaking with her on the phone every morning before starting his day.
Morse’s political outlook was nurtured by his tight-knit, working-class family and grassroots city programs. “Poverty was at the heart of it,” he says of his parents’ struggle into the middle-class. “Dad would tell stories of being on public assistance and food stamps and knowing what it’s like needing help at certain parts in your life.” Driving around Holyoke, Morse took me by the public housing complex where his parents met (“everyone was struggling but everyone supported each other”), and pointed out the annex building where he started working in the youth commission in eighth grade, adjoined to City Hall, where his office is now (there’s a photo of him at a Harvard Young Mayors program alongside Pete Buttigieg).
Morse points to a slate of progressive policies that differentiate him from Neal: He supports the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and criminal justice reform, and refuses corporate PAC money. But he sees a philosophical difference too, reminiscent of his first run in Holyoke when there was still a nostalgia for its once flush Paper City days. “I think he has this nostalgia for the way politics used to be,” says Morse, who has support from voters who say they feel marginalized from the Massachusetts political structure. The community organizers he worked with in his early days signed on as first-time political volunteers for his mayoral upset victory—one he’s hoping to now repeat at ten times the scale.
There is a biographical echo between Morse and Neal, despite the four decades that separate them. They’re two mayors of small post-industrial cities, plagued by the decline of manufacturing and transformed by demographic shifts, who faced life trauma (both Neal’s parents passed away by the time he was 17) but found community in their cities. Before running unopposed to take over his mentor Ed Boland’s seat in Congress in 1988, Neal was first mayor of the region’s largest city, Springfield (pop. 153,000), where many voters now have known him for decades. As Ryan McCollum, a political consultant of RMC Strategies, who also attended high school with some of Neal’s children, puts it: “Richie’s well liked by everybody. He does constituent services very well. And he has a very well-liked family.”
Neal—who told the Boston Globe when he was first elected to the House that “the rule” at the “legislative body is: Freshman should be seen and not heard,” and that “here, the idea is to make new allies, to do your homework, be prepared on an issue”—put his head down and slowly worked his way up to a committee chair over the span of 30 years. When I ask him over the phone about what has changed since then, he attributed the outspokenness of newer members to “the advent of social media” and the contraction of mainstream media, where “there's more emphasis on conflict” over context. That may still be true for the Democratic side, but it’s hard not to watch four outlandish nights of the RNC and think things have changed there too.
“Richie Neal is one of the most effective members of Congress,” says former congressman Barney Frank, who argues that the newer left wing, with whom he agrees on goals but not process, underestimates the opposition. “Some of the things that may diminish him in the current age, where people are looking for more rhetoric, serve him well as a legislator. Democrats don't have an automatic majority. Richie is one of those people that understands that there is opposition out there that we can overcome if we do it sensibly.” Local elected supporters, like Easthampton mayor Nicole LaChappelle, praise Neal’s ability to consistently deliver on “bread and butter” issues.
But the once solidly moderate Democratic district has been trending more progressive, according to locals, and young families priced out of Northampton and Amherst have been relocating there. When Neal first started in Congress, both Holyoke and Springfield were majority white, but now Hispanic populations are the largest group in both—and the Massachusetts Irish-Italian Catholic base is on the wane.
Still, some things haven’t changed: Western Massachusetts has double the unemployment rate of the state. When I asked Neal what he might do, as the chairman of the committee overseeing taxation, if a Democratic administration was elected to address income inequality, he told me he would address the tax cuts of 2017, which lowered the corporate and top individual rates, returning to an “individual rate is 39.6 again, as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama subscribed to.” He also promised “a full examination of the tax code” to weed out “incentives built into the system for wealthy interests,” like international companies that make their profits in one jurisdiction and report them in another. But a return to Clinton-era tax rates, instead of more drastic fixes, is very much what some of the younger generation of Bernie Sanders-leaning supporters sees as a problem with the Democratic party.
Neal has deep, long-standing ties in Springfield’s Black and Hispanic communities. But not everyone is happy with his outreach there. “Communities of color—we represent over 50 percent of the population here, and we're routinely left out,” Justin Hurst, the 42-year-old City Council president, told me, echoing a sentiment I heard from some community activists. “Resources are going downtown, but they're not being filtered back to the communities. I'm the City Council president, and I hear from Elizabeth Warren, but I don't hear from the congressman.” Hurst is among a newer generation of Black and Hispanic politicians breaking up Springfield’s once-dominant Irish-Catholic machine, signaling a newer level of engagement, particularly with the advent of more widespread Black Lives Matters-inspired activism. Hurst’s father, Frederick, 77, a former administrative judge and publisher of local paper African-American Point of View, ran for the city council and lost.
“I think Richie is a fine man,” says the elder Hurst, who endorsed Morse in his paper. “But he always had a powerful group of people around him, represented the powers that be, and never had a very difficult time rising up. He’s never fought as hard for this.”
Neal is still the heavy favorite. The latest poll from Jewish Insider has him up 49-40 percent. He has spent $4 million on the race, with another $2.75 million on hand. His base of support is in older, more reliable voters—many of whom are comfortable with the status quo, think taking corporate PAC money is part of the game, and see his position as Ways and Means chairman as vital in directing funds to the district. One undecided voter, who thinks there should be term limits, nonetheless told me he was leaning Neal after the debates because “he seemed more informed.” And Neal remains assured. “I've done everything you can and you're supposed to do,” he told me when I asked if anything in the race would lead him to change how he represents the district. “And I feel very confident about what's going to happen.”
Still, Neal’s campaign isn’t taking any chances, certainly not with polls showing the incumbent under 50 percent. Special interest groups, including the American Working Families Super PAC, are dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars to attack Morse into Massachusetts’s once-forgotten district. The Neal campaign sent a cease and desist letter to a local television station for running an ad that says he has taken more money from corporations—making the distinction that it is corporate PAC money—than any other member of Congress. Despite activist pleas, the congressman hasn’t held a townhall in three years. And when I asked Neal, who in the last debate urged viewers to “listen to the students,” if he would condemn tactics that resulted in homophobic rhetoric in the district, one of his campaign advisors stepped in to refer me to the campaign’s statement on the matter. Other Neal surrogates were more frank. “To see Alex's momentum to go through the roof is concerning,” Easthampton mayor Nicole LaChapelle said to me. “It's now come down to not issues, not to the record. It has come down to identity politics.”
Like other incumbents, Neal is challenged by greater national trends. He’s taken heat for moving slowly on both impeachment and requesting Trump’s tax returns, and even the pandemic might play a role. “Droughts, floods, and even shark attacks [have been shown to] hurt the incumbents,” says Adam Hilton, a professor of politics at Mt. Holyoke College. Morse's support for the Green New Deal could generate some momentum, in part because its main sponsor, Sen. Ed Markey, is also on the same Massachusetts primary ballot. Markey is up by 7 percent in the latest Data for Progress poll, and if more new, young, climate-oriented voters are activated, that could move the dial towards Morse, who put Holyoke on the leading edge of decarbonization. Neal is the only member of the Massachusetts caucus who has not endorsed the measure. “Conceptually, I’m a believer,” Neal told me over the phone when I asked him why he hasn’t endorsed it despite almost 200 environmental activists protesting him last December. “I think the Green Act, the Green New Deal, but certainly attacking climate change is going to be one of my huge priorities if it's a Biden presidency. But let's write some legislation, as I have done, to get it done.”
That Neal, who voted against the Iraq War and helped write the Affordable Care Act, is on his backheels defending his record against left-wing attacks isn’t entirely surprising. “The Democratic Party has been trending in a more progressive direction for a while, and we’re seeing significant generational overturning in the party,” says Hilton. “I don’t think progressives are taking over the party but they certainly set the terms of the debate.”
That was certainly true of the two televised debates between Morse and Neal, during which Neal attacked him, not for being too radical, but on Morse’s progressive bona fides. The district may not tip over to the progressive wing just yet, but the informal rules of Congress and the party have undeniably changed. Even if Morse doesn’t win this election, he could run again like Missouri’s Cori Bush and Illinois’s Marie Newman, who both just prevailed. As strategists like Lis Smith put it to me, there’s a “seismic shift” underway nevertheless, and Morse is the “future of the Democratic party.”
Mari Uyehara was previously the culture editor at GQ. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and The Boston Globe, among others.
Originally Appeared on GQ
