‘Pocketbook concerns’ continue to dominate the issue landscape
More than four in 10 Massachusetts voters think the Bay State is headed in the wrong direction, an increase over the same measure of sentiment from two years ago, according to new poll results commissioned by the Retailers Association of Massachusetts.
The Polity Research Consulting survey, set to be released Monday, found 43% of registered voters think Massachusetts is on the wrong track, compared to 39% who think the state is on the right track and 18% who said they do not know.
Polity asked the same question in prior iterations of the survey, conducted in April 2024 and April 2023. In both instances, a higher share of voters felt Massachusetts was on the right track than the wrong track (48% to 39% in 2024, 59% to 29% in 2023).
Bay State voter sentiment is even more negative about the national outlook: two-thirds of respondents said they think the country is moving in the wrong direction; 27% said they think it’s going in the right direction.
However, pollsters noted the “souring of the public mood has not translated into negative perceptions for most state elected officials.” Fifty-eight percent of respondents had a favorable rating of Gov. Maura Healey, up from 54% a year ago, and both of the Bay State’s U.S. senators had majority support.
“As we have seen in the past two statewide surveys, ‘pocketbook concerns’ continue to dominate the issue landscape — especially the cost of living (83% extreme importance) and the affordability of health care (72% extreme importance),” Polity CEO Ernest Paicopolos wrote in an executive summary alongside the results. “The cost of housing (69% extreme importance), energy prices (68% extreme importance) and the state of the overall economy (68% extreme importance) also score highly on the issues list.”
Voters were close to evenly split on state government spending, with 33% saying Beacon Hill spends the right amount and 31% saying it spends too much.
Legislative Democrats, with the support of both former Republican Gov. Charlie Baker and Healey, have significantly increased the size of the annual state budget in recent years to fund new programs and services.
The web-based survey involved 600 registered voters and ran between April 23 and April 29. It has a margin of error of 4 percentage points.
