Longest Warrant

A New England town meeting runs off a warrant, the list of articles the selectmen post weeks ahead, and every voter in town gets a say on each one. Massachusetts voters will see something close to a statewide warrant on November 3: nine ballot questions, tying the record set in 1994. Beacon Hill’s Interval Training described a legislature that can be stopped by a single objecting member for five months a year and does its late-session work in closed conference committees. Several of this year’s questions are what voters put on the warrant when they gave up waiting for that legislature to act.

The rest of the region votes the same day. Two Senate seats in Maine and New Hampshire are close enough to bear on control of the chamber. Maine and Rhode Island elect new governors, and Vermont’s Republican governor faces the closest race of his career. What November Reassembles sorted the Great Lakes by who draws the lines and who taxes what. New England’s questions are close kin: who sees the records, who decides how small a house lot can be, who runs a small town’s school, and how much the state may collect before it has to give money back.

Massachusetts: nine questions

The top of the ballot isn’t close. Gov. Maura Healey leads Republican Mike Minogue 57 to 32 in the UMass Amherst/WCVB poll released October 19. Sen. Ed Markey beat Rep. Seth Moulton by almost thirty points in the September 1 primary and faces Republican John Deaton. The supermajorities in the General Court aren’t at risk. Whatever changes in Massachusetts this year will come from the questions.

Question 1 would extend the public records law to the Legislature and the governor’s office, the only state government in the country that exempts all three branches. Auditor Diana DiZoglio is behind it, following her 2024 question authorizing an audit of the Legislature, which passed with more than seventy percent and which legislative leaders have since refused to honor, calling it unconstitutional. The UMass poll has Question 1 at 84 percent yes. The legislature that negotiates its biggest bills in conference after the formal session closes would have to keep those negotiations on the record.

Question 3 is the one both parties oppose. It would replace party primaries for state, county, and congressional offices with a single all-party primary in which the top two finishers advance, whatever their party, starting in 2028. Its sponsor is Harvard’s Danielle Allen, through the Coalition for Healthy Democracy, with former Govs. Deval Patrick and Charlie Baker, a former state Republican chair, and the NAACP’s New England conference behind it. Against it stand the Massachusetts Democratic Party, the Massachusetts Republican Party, the AFL-CIO, and most of the progressive groups that usually campaign against the Democratic leadership. Ordering the Separations described Connecticut’s Toleration ticket of 1818, Baptists, Episcopalians, and Jeffersonians who agreed on nothing except that the Standing Order should stop collecting taxes. Question 3 has assembled the mirror image, a coalition of party officers and activists who disagree about nearly everything else and agree that a primary ought to belong to a party. Support has fallen to 49 to 39 since August.

Question 7 would bar towns from requiring more than 5,000 square feet and 50 feet of frontage to build a single-family home on a lot with public water and sewer. It comes from the Pioneer Institute’s Andrew Mikula and Abundant Housing Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Municipal Association leads the opposition. It is a narrower cousin of the MBTA Communities fight the August dispatch covered: the state again telling towns what their zoning maps may say, this time about lot size instead of multifamily districts. Tufts’ Center for State Policy Analysis estimates 350 to 1,200 new homes a year. Pro-Housing, Not Pro-(or Anti-) Development argued that housing is measured by whether people can live where their lives are, not by how much gets built. A minimum lot size is one of the plainest ways a town prices people out, and a 5,000-square-foot ceiling takes that tool away without telling anyone what to build. The question still moves the decision up a layer, and towns that already allow small lots lose nothing while those that don’t lose the choice. It polls 65 to 21.

Question 5 rewrites the 1986 tax cap. Under current law the cap grows each year from the previous year’s cap. Under Question 5 it would grow from the previous year’s actual revenue, which sits below the cap in most years, and it would count the Fair Share surtax on incomes over a million dollars, which the Legislature exempted in 2023. Refunds would come far more often. Its backers are business and free-market groups, and the labor and faith coalition that passed the surtax in 2022 opposes it. The August dispatch held up Fair Share as a clean funding mechanism, a named tax for named purposes with its revenue publicly tracked. Question 5 would leave the surtax in place and put its proceeds under the same ceiling as everything else. It polls 58 to 20, with a fifth of voters undecided or unsure what it does.

The other five sort more easily. Election Day registration (Question 4) and a conservation fund drawn from sales tax on sporting goods (Question 6) poll well. A union for the state’s public defenders (Question 2) leads with many unsure. Repeal of recreational marijuana sales (Question 8) trails 31 to 61. Question 9, a referendum on the 2024 gun law, asks voters whether to keep it, and 70 percent say yes.

Maine: the fracture, closed by convention

Maine’s Democratic Senate primary was the region’s version of August’s schisms. Gov. Janet Mills, recruited by national Democrats, suspended her campaign on April 30, and oysterman Graham Platner won the June 9 primary with more votes than any Democratic primary candidate in the state’s history. On July 10 he withdrew, after a run of reports about past posts, a tattoo, and allegations from several women. On July 25 a party convention chose Troy Jackson, the former state Senate president and a logger from Allagash.

The replacement has run better than the original was expected to. Marist had Jackson ahead of Sen. Susan Collins 51 to 47 among registered voters in early October, and Suffolk had Collins ahead 49 to 47 among likely voters a week later. Cook rates it a toss-up. Jackson raised $20.4 million from July through September, about four times Collins’s total. Maine elects its senators by ranked choice, so third-party votes transfer, and a three-point race can turn on second preferences.

The governor’s race is less close, and it runs under different rules. Mills is term-limited. Hannah Pingree, who won the Democratic nomination in a ranked-choice runoff, leads Republican Bobby Charles 49 to 38 in Suffolk’s poll, with independent Rick Bennett at 8. Maine’s constitution requires governors to win by plurality, so ranked choice doesn’t apply, and Bennett’s voters, unlike the Senate race’s third-party voters, won’t have their ballots transferred.

New Hampshire: the libertarian state’s open seat

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen is retiring. Rep. Chris Pappas beat a DSA-backed challenger for the Democratic nomination, and former Sen. John E. Sununu, Trump-endorsed and the brother of former Gov. Chris Sununu, beat former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown about 70 to 26. Pappas leads in every poll since the primary, by seven in NPA’s and five in Rasmussen’s, and Cook still calls it a toss-up. Outside spending has passed $50 million in a state with fewer than a million registered voters.

Sununu’s case rests on a New Hampshire character he helped define in the Senate, where he fought the PATRIOT Act’s surveillance provisions. Voters rate his character above Pappas’s by ten points among independents, and they still prefer a Democratic Senate. The state has the country’s largest legislature, four hundred House seats, and no broad income or sales tax. Its governor, Kelly Ayotte, led Democrat Cinde Warmington 49 to 39 in UNH’s August survey, the latest available, so a split result, a Democratic senator alongside a Republican governor, is the likeliest outcome.

Vermont: the governor of the right wants to consolidate

Vermont is the one place in New England where the usual labels on local control have reversed. Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican who won 73 percent in 2024, has spent two years trying to consolidate Vermont’s roughly 119 school districts, which spend about $2.5 billion a year on some 73,000 students. Mandatory mergers failed in the Legislature, and the compromise he signed brought voluntary merger committees, a new foundation formula, and a tax on second homes, none of it effective until 2029. His Democratic challenger, Amanda Janoo, opposes forced mergers and has promised no forced school closures, arguing that small schools should be kept open for the people likely to move to Vermont in the coming decades.

So a Republican governor is running on the efficiencies of a larger unit, and a Democrat on the town’s right to keep its school. Vermont Public’s poll found strong majorities of both parties’ voters opposed to giving up local control of school spending. The polls disagree about the race itself: Vermont Public has Scott ahead 44 to 34 among likely voters, UNH has Janoo ahead 49 to 43. The Municipalist Current traced the argument that the town, not the state, is the natural unit of self-government. Vermont is the rare state where that argument has a candidate, and she belongs to the party usually counted on to centralize.

Rhode Island: the incumbent falls, the independent climbs

On September 9 Rhode Island Democrats denied Gov. Dan McKee renomination, the first time since 1994 that the state’s voters had turned out a sitting governor in a primary, and gave it to former CVS executive Helena Foulkes. The anger that beat him ran less through left and right than through the Washington Bridge, a main crossing into Providence closed for repairs for more than two years.

The general election has a candidate from outside both parties within reach. Ken Block, a Barrington software engineer who founded the Moderate Party in 2010 and ran in the Republican primary in 2014, trails Foulkes 44 to 35 in the Emerson/WPRI poll, with Republican Aaron Guckian at 10. Block has the best favorability of the three, 46 to 19. His best-known reform was the campaign that got the General Assembly to abolish the master lever, the single box that cast a straight-party ballot. Republicans haven’t won a statewide race in Rhode Island since 2006. Taxes and spending top the list of what voters want the next governor to address, followed by housing and electricity bills.

Connecticut: the quiet case

Gov. Ned Lamont is seeking a third term against Republican state Sen. Ryan Fazio and led him 58 to 38 in Quinnipiac’s October poll. The Democratic majorities in Hartford aren’t in danger. Connecticut is the region’s reminder that one-party control is often uneventful, and its interest for this collection lies in what an unthreatened governor does with a third term.

What to watch

In Massachusetts, watch whether Question 1 passes by the margin the 2024 audit did, and whether the Legislature treats it the same way. That fight will run through the courts in 2027 rather than through the ballot. Question 3 is the measure most likely to change who gets elected, and the one with the narrowest lead, against the most organized opposition. Question 7’s margin will show how far voters will let the state reach into town zoning. In Maine, the Collins–Jackson race may come down to ranked-choice transfers, so the first-round count on election night may not settle it. In New Hampshire, watch whether independents split their tickets between Pappas and Ayotte. In Vermont, a Janoo win would give the town-school side of the consolidation fight a governor for the first time, three years before the compromise takes effect. And in Rhode Island, Block’s share against Foulkes will show how far a candidate without a party label can get in a state whose voters no longer have a straight-party lever to pull.

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Sources: WBUR, A new poll takes the temperature on the Mass. governor’s race — and all 9 ballot questions; UMass Amherst Poll, Gov. Maura Healey holds 25-percentage point lead over Republican challenger Mike Minogue; WBUR, Markey defeats Moulton in U.S. Senate primary; WWLP, The nine ballot questions of 2026; CommonWealth Beacon, Massachusetts 2026 ballot questions, explained, Question 1: public records, Question 3: all-party primaries, Question 5: tax cap rebates, and Question 7: starter homes; Marist Poll, Midterm elections in Maine, October 2026; Suffolk University, Maine poll, October 14, 2026; Wikipedia, 2026 United States Senate election in Maine and 2026 Maine gubernatorial election; WABI, Pingree speaks after winning Democratic nomination for Maine governor; Time, Why Republicans still think they can flip New Hampshire’s Senate seat; Political Wire, Pappas leads Sununu in New Hampshire Senate race; WCAX, No major surprises in NH primary results and UNH poll shows Ayotte leads Warmington in NH governor’s race; WCAX, Scott, Janoo offer sharply different visions for Vermont education reform; VTDigger, New poll shows Gov. Phil Scott leading Amanda Janoo by 10 points; UNH Survey Center, Partisan headwinds hamper Scott in race with Janoo; Emerson College Polling, Rhode Island 2026: Foulkes leads independent Block by 9 points; Wikipedia, 2026 Rhode Island gubernatorial election; What’s Up Newp, Ken Block is running for governor again, this time as an independent; 270toWin, 2026 polls: Connecticut governor.