Gov. Charlie Baker is not running for president, he has said publicly on many occasions, both as a direct response from reporters and as an aside when talking about politics and the future.
That hasn’t stopped him, however, from doing the sort of things a person might do if they were running for president.
Baker “invited” CNN journalist Jake Tapper to his office in the State House recently to discuss, according to Tapper, why Baker “was seemingly so distressed about where the Republican Party was headed.”
During that rare national press interview, Baker laid out exactly what went wrong in the midterm elections for Republicans, telling Tapper that voters, especially in battleground states — you know, the kind upon which presidential elections hinge — are not interested in voting for political extremists.
“They just aren’t,” the Bay State’s notoriously moderate Republican said.
In a further part of the interview that aired Wednesday, Baker spoke to Tapper about immigration, an issue that would hardly touch Massachusetts shores were it not for the efforts of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to include the commonwealth in sending a plane full of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard.
“(That) doesn’t solve anything,” Baker told Tapper, before saying he wanted a closed border and then describing exactly the sort of national policy that would ease the immigration issue: an expansion of work visas.
Many of his party, Tapper said, would call that amnesty. Baker seemed to take offense.
“Work is amnesty?” he said. “For some it will be the argument, but if there was one message in Tuesday’s election it was folks need to figure some of this stuff out because what you’re doing isn’t working.”
Baker has also spent the last couple months engaging with Republican and Democratic leadership, making a pair of trips to meet with the Republican Governor’s Association and actively engaging with the National Governors Association.
He’s spent the last couple of months touring the state and flaunting his administration’s many accomplishments in the last eight years, effectively campaigning with no campaign to speak of.
“Charlie Baker is one of several governors who could be 2024 contenders. He’s been a governor in a blue state and understands how to position himself in a way that makes him acceptable to the moderate swing voters who decide elections,” Suffolk University Political Scientist Ken Cosgrove told the Herald.
“Governor Baker is very much a legitimate Presidential candidate if he chooses to be,” he said. “This brings up the biggest question any candidate who thinks about running for President has to answer: are they willing to put themselves and their family through the process of running for President and, even more dauntingly, serving in the White House?”
A spokesperson for Baker told the Herald Thursday that Baker “has been pretty clear in his public comments” about the matter.
Still, following former President Donald Trump’s Tuesday announcement he would run, Baker may be a good bet, Cosgrove says.
“The Republican Party needs to find a way to pick a single alternative candidate in short order – or hope Trump can’t tweak his message in a way that energizes his core while making him more acceptable to centrist voters as he seems to be trying to do. Baker is one of several governors who could appeal to normal voters because he seems normal himself and make Trump’s road more difficult,” he said.
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