Mike McCormack has beaten off a determined challenge for his job by former state police Sgt. Neal Maciel to be re-elected as Dukes County sheriff.
After weeks of heavy campaigning by both candidates, Mr. McCormack won handily on the night on Tuesday. In total, voters in the six Island towns preferred him 4,509 to 3,251. The third candidate, Warren Gosson, garnered just 405 votes.
With results in from the three largest towns on Martha’s Vineyard, Sheriff Mike McCormack appears to have beaten off a determined challenge for his job by former state police sergeant Neal Maciel.
Mr. McCormack secured a total of 3,081 votes from electors in Edgartown, Tisbury and Oak Bluffs, 573 more than Mr. Maciel.
In other races, down-Island voters heavily favored Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick over his Republican challenger, Charlie Baker — 3,356 to 2,125.
Vineyard voters will go to the polls to cast ballots in unusually close elections at the federal, state and local levels on Tuesday.
The closest of them, and one of the hottest contests in the nation, is the race for the 10th congressional district which includes the Cape and Islands. The most recent polling puts the seat, vacant due to the retirement of Democratic Cong. William Delahunt, as too close to call.
Joe Van Nes is about as far from being a political insider as you can get. The 25-year-old Vineyard contractor and landscaper is happy to admit that until about six months ago he was “utterly uninvolved” in politics and did not even vote.
“I voted when I was 18, just to do it, you know?” he said this week. “Then I lost faith in a system so obviously corrupt.
Jeff Perry, Republican candidate for the 10th congressional district, knows his script. When he talks about health care, for example, he usually uses the preferred pejorative term of his party: Obamacare.
But he puts the lines together well, and now he is an even-money chance to take the district long held by Democrats.
There are candidates of both parties who regurgitate the scripted talking points whole, but not Jeff Perry.
The difference between a politician and a statesmen, someone once observed, is that a politician’s time horizon extends only as far as the next election.
So it was in statesman mode that Cong. William Delahunt arrived at the Gazette office last weekend, for perhaps a last editorial board discussion with the newspaper. He will not be a politician anymore after the election. But he will leave, unlike most of the Democrats who (the polls tell us) will be out after this election, at the time of his own choosing.
