Colin A. Young
State House News Service
Pocketbook stress and affordability concerns are marbled throughout practically every topic of debate in the 2026 election cycle in Massachusetts – housing costs, energy expenses, tax burdens, the cost of doing business, outmigration.
The cost-of-living pressures bearing down on Massachusetts residents have become painfully obvious in recent years: there aren't enough homes here, so housing costs are exorbitant; if you can afford a house or apartment here, you pay close to the highest energy prices in the country; having higher wages on average means Bay Staters face some of the highest tax liabilities in the country; and the costs to start and operate a business here are notoriously burdensome. That's all on top of the high prices consumers pay across the country for services and goods, like groceries and gasoline.
"It's really just about everything right now, right?" Gov. Maura Healey said the first week of September.
When the UMass Poll asked voters last month to identify the state's most important problem, housing, cost and affordability were the three most frequently used words. A "whopping 39%" of respondents said the cost of living was the one issue they most wanted to see the governor and the Legislature take action on in the coming year, Tatishe Nteta, provost professor of political science at UMass Amherst and director of the poll, said. Housing was second at 14%.
While Democrats are assured of retaining their hold on the Legislature after this year's elections, the governor's office is up for grabs and candidates in the coming weeks have a chance to showcase their plans to address affordability woes.
The Democrat Healey and Republican nominee Mike Minogue have both centered affordability in their 2026 campaigns to lead the state as governor for the next four years. But the ability of a governor to unilaterally affect the costs that are most burdening Bay Staters is limited – so many of their promises either outrun the powers of the office or undersell the hurdles to their becoming reality.
Voters will also have the opportunity to take direct action of their own in Nov. 3 elections that could be a meaningful pivot point, though the one tax policy lever voters could pull directly is itself being fought over.
Promises and Power
Both candidates know Bay Staters are frustrated by how expensive everything here has become – Minogue says state government is to blame for costs that have soared beyond budgets; Healey says government is the solution that can bring prices back to Earth. No matter the cause, the affordability problem is something the governor is going to have to deal with.
Healey responded to anger over high energy bills last winter by ordering utility bill rebates, and Nteta named suspension of the state gas tax as another example of a way Beacon Hill could provide relief on its own - Minogue supports the idea and Healey announced Tuesday that she will propose a two-month suspension of the gas tax later this fall. But Nteta said voters generally point to President Donald Trump and national forces when asked what is most to blame for rising costs.
"That doesn't mean they don't want to see the governor and Legislature, given their shared partisanship, do something about this issue other than handwaving" and blaming national factors, he said. "I think that most people in the state would welcome movement on this issue but they also recognize that, for a lot of reasons, the governor's and Legislature's hands are tied in terms of rising costs."
That's part of the explanation, Nteta said, for what seems like a disconnect: Voters say affordability is the issue most in need of urgent attention from state government and yet the governor of the last nearly four years was leading her challenger by 20 points in the same UMass poll.
"There is not an active and influential opposing narrative about the governor in this state, and that's a reflection of the decreasing power and the decreasing influence of the Republican Party here," he said. "It will be interesting to see whether or not Mike Minogue can make these issues more salient and point to the governor and the state Legislature and their policies as contributing to the affordability problems in this state."
For Healey, the challenge is that voters expect more than she's done in her four years in office and her agenda runs through a Legislature that shares her party affiliation but not always her urgency. For Minogue, the challenge would be operating with Democratic supermajorities in the Legislature that could block or complicate his agenda.
Healey has not detailed a plan to address affordability in her second term. When the topic comes up on the campaign trail, she generally discusses actions she (or she and the Legislature) have already taken, like capping copays and deductibles, ordering unnecessary charges removed from utility bills and signing a tax cut law in 2023.
"Every single day, I am working on ways to lower costs for people in this state, our residents, our businesses. That has been and will continue to be job one," Healey said at a Sept. 10 campaign stop.
Minogue has been more clear about what he would try to do as governor, though many of his proposals have already been met with opposition from Democratic legislative leaders who could block many of them. The Republican says the path to relief for residents is to cut taxes, find hundreds of millions of dollars being wasted through an audit of the state budget and suspend collection of the state gas tax.
He said this spring that he has "a skill set that none of these politicians have, and I will help solve the problems. I will start by cutting taxes and spending by eliminating waste and fraud with audits and prioritization."
Nteta said it's difficult to tell whether voters' intense focus on affordability is about a specific set of policies or more of an expression of general frustration. He identified housing as "an area where people are a little bit more expectant of actual policies" and one that is a state and local problem.
He said there is "a lot more pressure on the governor and Legislature to do something and a lot more populist efforts – whether it be rent control or the ballot question about building houses on smaller lots, but a recognition of the ways in which zoning laws at the state and local level are precluding the ability of the people most interested in solving this problem [from] acting upon it."
Voters who have consistently expressed frustration at finding affordable housing and housing in desirable areas of Massachusetts, among others, could be a source of support for the Minogue campaign.
"The lack of movement on a lot of these issues ... in other circumstances would likely lead to a lot more voter anger towards incumbents and it's up to the Republican Party, given it's the only other viable party within our state, to try to capture that discontent. And I just don't know if they've done an effective job of doing it," Nteta said.
The Other Lever
With Question 5, voters have the opportunity to move in the direction of relief from high costs. A "yes" vote would impose stricter limits on annual state revenue collections and could make statutorily required refunds to taxpayers a more frequent occurrence. Supporters say taxpayers deserve some of the benefit when state government collects excess revenue, but opponents argue that limiting what the state can take in will lead to budget cuts and higher local taxes.
Republican candidate for treasurer Elizabeth Dionne plans to vote for Question 5, and she said a ballot question that would have lowered the state's income tax rate from 5% to 4% "would have won overwhelmingly" on this year's ballot had it not been derailed by a court challenge.
"We are barreling toward a fiscal cliff that we're going to fall off of. If we want to stop hemorrhaging our young adults, if we want to stop hemorrhaging our older seniors who can't live here, we've got to address affordability," Dionne told WCVB's "On The Record" program Sept. 13. "Taxes are a major issue there."
Dionne waved off concerns that rebates might harm public programs that make healthcare affordable for some people. By addressing pharmacy benefit managers and market competition, she said, "we can easily find a couple billions dollars of savings" out of $34 billion in state healthcare spending.
Question 5 would amend Chapter 62F, the voter-approved tax cap law that mandated nearly $3 billion in rebates for taxpayers in 2022. Some lawmakers are eager to change the same law – though not to make rebates more common.
More than half of the Senate this summer supported an amendment to the economic development bill that would have repealed Chapter 62F outright. But before it got to the floor, sponsor Sen. Jason Lewis redrafted it to instead change 62F while keeping it on the books.
The Lewis language, which critics say would make taxpayer rebates less likely than the ballot question approach would, is part of the ongoing House-Senate negotiations around the economic development bill. When the Senate adopted the amendment in July, Lewis said that the rebates voters got under Chapter 62F in 1987 and 2022 would have still been triggered under his amendment language, though he did not say how much taxpayers would have received.
"We recognize that there is also a proposal that is likely to go before the voters later this year that would also make additional changes to Chapter 62F. This amendment ... has no bearing on that," Lewis argued in July. "Voters will still have their say if they choose to approve that initiative."
Whoever wins the gubernatorial election in six weeks will take leadership of a state where the economy appears to be humming but where residents are under constant financial stress. On the other side of the constant campaign talk of affordability, the next governor and Legislature will also be faced with what it means for a state to be affordable and for whom.
"A critical question facing Massachusetts is whether broad-based prosperity can be restored to regions and populations left behind by knowledge-economy growth, or whether the state will accept an increasingly divided economy where success is mostly confined to a prosperous core," the editors of MassBenchmarks wrote in their latest snapshot of the Bay State economy this month.
[Michael P. Norton contributed reporting.]
