BAY WINDOWS: ’Chang for Change,’ the sequel
by Matt Maguire | Thursday Feb 21, 2008
Sonia Chang-Diaz, who narrowly lost a hard-fought bid to unseat incumbent Sen. Dianne Wilkerson back in 2006, is gunning for a rematch this fall. The one-time aide to openly gay former state senator Cheryl Jacques who also lent her political skills to MassEquality during the State House battle to preserve marriage equality, confirmed for us a recent report on the progressive blog BlueMassGroup.com that she’s making another bid for the 2nd Suffolk District seat Wilkerson has held for eight terms.
Chang-Diaz’s 2006 candidacy split the LGBT community’s support for Wilkerson, whose impeccable record of leadership on LGBT issues was overshadowed by personal professional missteps like her failure to gather enough valid signatures to get her name on the September primary ballot, which forced her to wage an expensive sticker campaign, and fresh allegations of campaign finance improprieties (Wilkerson had settled similar allegations with a hefty financial penalty in 1998). MassEquality was on the receiving end of an angry backlash from supporters who were frustrated with the organization’s whole-hearted support of Wilkerson in keeping with its philosophy of supporting all pro-equality incumbents who were up for re-election. Many LGBT voters were apparently unwilling to overlook Wilkerson’s transgressions, given that Chang-Diaz also expressed strong support for the LGBT agenda: on primary day, Chang-Diaz, who also waged a sticker campaign owing to her late entry into the race, bested Wilkerson in district neighborhoods like the South End and Jamaica Plain, which both include large LGBT communities. In the end, Wilkerson, a charismatic politician who was once considered a rising star in Democratic politics, squeaked out a victory over Chang-Diaz by just 692 votes. But soon after she won the general election against Republican challenger Samiyah Diaz, Wilkerson was back in the news after she failed to file her slate of legislation on time.
Despite the heat they took for supporting Wilkerson the last time around, MassEquality Political Director Matt McTighe pledged that the organization would "stick with Dianne" - her 2006 sticker campaign slogan - in 2008. Reiterating the organization’s policy of supporting legislators who support equality come hell or high water, McTighe added, "in Dianne’s case that’s 100 times more the case because she’s just been such an incredible leader. Really we have her to thank for the victory," said McTighe, noting that though Wilkerson by no means acted alone, she played a key role in getting a 2006 constitutional convention postponed before lawmakers could vote on an anti-gay marriage amendment and early in 2007 lobbied newly-elected Senate President Therese Murray on the issue. "She was just somebody that every step of the way was there for us." He added that Wilkerson has already begun advocating for MassEquality’s expanded LGBT agenda on Beacon Hill.
Chang-Diaz, whose 2006 campaign theme was "Chang for Change," said her decision to run again stems in part from her strong showing the last time out as well as the encouragement that she’s received over the past year from supporters and activists to mount another campaign. She acknowledged that she still faces an uphill climb in unseating an incumbent, no easy feat in Bay State politics. "That’s definitely a reality for a challenger," she said. "You do bump against that status quo preservation. But looking at the experience in 2006 and the year since then, just hearing from voters over and over again how much appetite for change there is in the district, and at the end of the day it is the voters that get to make that decision in the election."
Is Chang-Diaz going to make a bigger play for the gays this time around? "We’re going to do it the old fashioned way," she answered. "We’re going to get out there and talk to people one-on-one, do more of what we did in 2006, which is really just take it straight to the voters. Certainly I’ll be out there working for every vote in the LGBT community, but I’ll be working for every vote in every community.
"But I was extremely, extremely proud and honored to have the support that I did at the end of the day from the LGBT strongholds in the district," Chang-Diaz added. "I’m also proud that my record of working for LGBT issues and equal rights really was something that people looked at."
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