Updated: 7:01 PM EDT Jun 13, 2021
A second Democrat is entering the 2022 race for governor of Massachusetts. WCVB has confirmed that Harvard University political science professor Danielle Allen will officially launch her gubernatorial campaign on Tuesday.During a May 30 guest appearance on WCVB's "On the Record," Allen said she was just a few weeks away from making a decision about whether to move forward with a run for governor.Former State Sen. Ben Downing, also a Democrat, declared his gubernatorial candidacy in February.Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, has yet to announce if he will seek a third term.During her "OTR" appearance, Allen says her COVID-19 pandemic policy work inspired to explore a run for governor of Massachusetts.According to Allen, she built the first national policy roadmap that advocated for the accelerated ramp-up of investment in testing and contact tracing, policies which have ended up in the Biden administration's COVID-19 response in various ways."As I did that work, I also had the chance to work here in Massachusetts at the state level and in other states around the country. That gave me a really clear window into the good work we could and should be doing to lay a foundation of flourishing on everybody by focusing on the basics of social infrastructure: how housing, health, education, jobs and justice fit together," Allen said."We left people behind. We left people out. People are disconnected. It shouldn't be that way in our prosperous state," she added.Allen, a progressive Democrat, said she grew up in a conservative family. Her father, political scientist William Allen, ran for the U.S. Senate as a Republican in California and was appointed to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission by former President Ronald Reagan.She says the turning point came in the summer of her junior year of college. She was interning for "National Review" in 1992 and became dismayed about how people were dismissing income inequality data during editorial meetings."That just seemed really wrong to me, in all honesty," Allen said. "It just seemed to me that we were actually responsible for the experiences people have in the present. It's not enough to say: 'Oh, maybe their grandkids will be OK.' We actually need to make sure that things are fair -- that life is empowering, that economic opportunities are empowering -- for everybody in the present."That was just this real moment of, kind of, opening up of fissures for me in what I understood about conservatism, and I began my journey in the direction of the political positions that I hold now on the progressive side."