Former State Sen. Ben Downing launches campaign for Massachusetts governor, says leadership to tackle state’s big challenges is ‘sorely lacking’
Updated Feb 08, 2021;
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Former State Sen. Ben Downing, who opted not to seek reelection in 2016 and has worked in the solar energy industry in the years since, announced Monday he is running to become the Bay State’s next governor, seeking to address the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, racial inequality and climate change.
Downing, a Pittsfield native who now lives in East Boston, was elected to the state Senate in 2006 at age 24. The Democrat represented Western Massachusetts in the Legislature for 10 years before stepping down to take an executive leadership role at Nexamp, a renewable energy company.
Harvard professor Danielle Allen weighing run for Massachusetts governor
Updated Dec 15, 2020;
Danielle Allen, a political theorist at Harvard University, announced Monday she is exploring a campaign for governor.
She tweeted a campaign video, which opened with her reciting a quote by Toni Morrison: “If you’re free, you free others. If you have power, you empower others.”
The words, Allen said, “embody the soul” of her family. After graduating high school, Allen went on to earn degrees from Princeton University and a Ph.D from University of Cambridge before enrolling in a Ph.D program in government at Harvard.
Her final degree, Allen said, achieved a goal set by her grandmother: “a self-taught community nurse in the segregated South” who wished to see a grandchild go to college in Massachusetts, the first state in the nation to end enslavement.