Bob Walsh comes out against the master lever

Republicans and other critics of the Democratic-controlled General Assembly tend to be the sharpest critics of the master lever, the device that enables voters to uniformly support  the  candidates of a single party. So it is something of a man-bites-dog story when Robert Walsh, executive director of the National Education Association Rhode Island, opposes using the master lever this November.

Walsh — one of the state’s key labor leaders — told me this earlier today:

I would certainly suspect that we won’t be encouraging any of our members to pull the master lever as they make their way down the ticket and make choices in each of the races . . . . So you can put us down as opposing the master lever.

NEARI has almost 12,000 members, so that’s a considerable bloc of voters.

What’s behind Walsh’s unconventional stance? He uses Warwick as an example, pointing to three candidates from the state’s second-largest city: US Representative James Langevin (a Democrat) is likely to get strong labor support; independent gubernatorial candidate Lincoln Chafee could potentially do well with labor; and Mayor Scott Avedisian (a Republican) is also viewed favorably by labor.

Walsh says:

Just using Warwick as a microcosm for the state, you could be suggesting picking candidates in all three columns. That is different than ‘go pull the lever’ and supporting a straight Democratic slate.

Walsh estimates that roughly 66,000 votes were attributed to the master lever in 2006. So if his analysis holds true, that number could considerably shrink this year, perhaps hastening the lever’s demise.