by Chris Lisinski, CommonWealth Beacon
September 16, 2026
PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS in particular are key players on the state’s political landscape, so it’s no surprise to see a burst of activity by organized labor heading into the November election. And this year, along with backing labor-friendly candidates, unions are deploying significant energy and resources on the thicket of ballot questions.
Unions have been some of the loudest critics of a proposal to place a tighter limit on state tax collections, wary that any changes to Beacon Hill’s spending approach could spell cuts for their membership. Another question is itself a labor matter, seeking to allow staff at the state’s public defender agency to unionize. Yet a couple of unions have taken an even broader approach to the issues facing voters in November.
The Massachusetts Teachers Association this summer gave $500,000 to Yes for a Safe Massachusetts, the campaign urging voters to keep a 2024 gun reform law on the books in the face of an attempted repeal. That makes the state’s largest teacher union by far the effort’s biggest financial backer, far outpacing contributions from groups like the Everytown For Gun Safety Action Fund and the Alliance For Gun Responsibility.
MTA delegates supported the spending at their annual meeting in May. The union “has consistently taken stances to support the safety of educators and students through gun controls,” it wrote in a summary of the votes.
It’s not the only educator group to back the tighter gun law. On Tuesday, the Boston Teachers Union endorsed keeping the gun measure on the books.
“Along with other frontline workers, educators and students are impacted by gun violence every day, whether that is navigating the trauma of violence in the community, participating in active shooter drills, or experiencing the fear created by school shootings elsewhere in the country,” Ruth Zakarin, chair of the Yes on 9 campaign, said in a statement.
On the other side of the issue, the biggest single donor to the campaign pushing the repeal question remains firearms manufacturer Smith & Wesson. The former Massachusetts company – Smith & Wesson decamped from its longtime Springfield headquarters for Tennessee in 2023 – contributed $50,000 two years ago, when the effort launched. (A reminder that Question 9 is a bit quirky: Unlike all other questions, proponents here want “no” votes, which will erase the law Gov. Maura Healey signed. A “yes” vote will keep the law on the books.)
Fresh off its victory two years ago on a question eliminating the use of MCAS exams as a high school graduation requirement, MTA has spread out its money this cycle.
At the same time that it steers member dues toward fighting a tax cap reform measure unpopular on Beacon Hill, the union has also dropped cash backing another proposal causing agita among top Democrats: It donated $30,000 toward the campaign to subject the governor’s office and Legislature to the public records law. The National Association of Government Employees, or NAGE, also backed Question 1 with a $25,000 contribution.
No, Question 1 has not actually generated the most spending so far
If you took a passing glance at the official state campaign finance tracker for ballot questions, you might reasonably come away with the impression that supporters of wrenching open access to gubernatorial and legislative records have already spent more than $5 million, the most among any of the nine measures on the ballot.
That would be, to some, a shocking revelation. As much as top House and Senate Democrats have griped about the proposal, there’s no formal opposition campaign, which always puts a damper on how much cash supporters are willing to burn. Plus, two years ago, Auditor Diana DiZoglio and her supporters spent less than half a million dollars on a ballot question voters overwhelmingly approved that allowsher to probe the Legislature, so a tenfold jump for that proposal’s spiritual successor wouldn’t make much sense.
As it turns out, the eye-catching total is simply the result of a record-keeping quirk.
The Coalition for Healthy Democracy campaign committee, which drafted the records proposal (Question 1) before handing it off to DiZoglio last year, supports both that question and a separate measure seeking to replace the state’s partisan primary elections with a single, all-party primary (Question 3). It’s already spent more than $4.7 million altogether, and OCPF’s public-facing dashboard counts that amount twice: once under Question 1, and a second time under Question 3.
There is a small disclaimer at the top of the page, but the effect is that two separate questions look like they’ve each received the entirety of a pot of money that was in fact split between them.
It’s especially odd given that, if a committee supports or opposes more than one proposal, OCPF allows it to delineate which dollars have been spent for which question when filing reports. Those answers are not made public, though an OCPF spokesperson said the agency’s IT department is working on it.
Jesse Littlewood, the campaign manager for the Coalition for Healthy Democracy, told CommonWealth Beacon that a “majority” of the group’s spending in 2025 and 2026 went toward supporting the all-party primary question.
“We’re still active and spending a portion of our resources on [Question 1],” he said, but with DiZoglio and her allies leading the charge there, “our focus is on Question 3.”
Curious about rent control finances? Wait ‘til next year
Real estate industry groups and landlords did not like the prospect of rent control coming back from the dead in the form of a strict statewide cap, so much so that they vowed to spend up to $30 million to defeat the measure at the ballot box.
As for how close they actually got to that promise before the Supreme Judicial Court rendered the issue moot by tossing the question from the ballot in June, you’ll have to wait a few months longer to find out.
Neither the campaign finance committee organized to oppose the ballot question nor the one that backed it has filed any report with state campaign finance regulators since January 2026, and they won’t be required to do so until January 2027.
OCPF has a series of deadlines in the weeks before and after the election that force more insight into initiative petition finances, but those only apply to measures that are actually on the ballot. Campaigns working on questions that were once in the running but will no longer go before voters — including rent control as well as a proposed legislative stipend reform — only need to file year-end reports, which will cover the entirety of 2026.
Spending for and against ballot questions is heavily backloaded to the days and weeks just before Election Day, so don’t expect any bombshells when we finally learn what was spent on the issue before the SJC booted the question from the ballot. But it seems a safe bet to assume that real estate power players and rent control activists each splashed some cash in the first six months of the year.
This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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