A savvy competitor could also get the message out that killing GLX keep tens of thousands of urban cars on the road in the last 4 miles of I-93 into Boston. A well targeted campaign along the I-93 commuter corridor could make a solid case that the pullout (by Baker) means dozens of hours per year in extra commuting time for all those Baker supporters up the suburban corridor. Some car-centric voters can be flipped with that kind of message.
Here's some more math to illustrate just how loathe Baker is to poke the dynamite monkey in the GLX communities:
Somerville @ 47% turnout, same % breakdown: +10,815 Coakley advantage in raw votes
Somerville @ 60% turnout, same % breakdown: +13,752 Coakley advantage in raw votes
Medford @ 54% turnout, same % breakdown: +4208 Coakley advantage in raw votes
Medford @ 60% turnout, same % breakdown: +4676 Coakley advantage in raw votes
Cambridge @ 51% turnout, same % breakdown: +19516 Coakley advantage in raw votes
Cambridge @ 60% turnout, same % breakdown: +22960 Coakley advantage in raw vote
If everything statewide remained exactly the same...and these 3 municipalities chucked in exactly the same margins of victory...but the voter turnout was just an average of 9⅓% higher in only those 3 GLX-constituent municipalities that stayed home in '14. . .
Baker's margin of victory shrinks from an already razor-thin 40,165 to an even thinner 33,316.
But in the real world, the damage isn't going to be limited there. Boston feels the loss just as acutely, and the Hub had an even more pathetic 41% turnout in 2014 for its 66-30 Coakley advantage, with 158,840 votes cast. Let's take our lab results from the 3 GLX-proper municipalities and push Boston to a still-anemic 50% voter participation. Coakley nets another 26,500 raw votes and now we're knee-deep in recountsville with ~6800 votes separating them.
Yes...canceling GLX can sink him. Just here. Just by making the GLX host cities angry at him. There are not enough conservatives in the 'burbs so impressed by the fiscal responsibility of a project cancellation to decide to go and vote where they otherwise would've had no intention of doing so, so there's no car-centric firewall for this. And furthermore, if this project can be canceled you'll get the South Coasters still clinging to improbable commuter rail hopes turning against him. He ran the table in all the small towns in that project's catchment area, got surprisingly close to a draw in Fall River, and firewalled himself with low turnout in Coakley's New Bedford blowout. Kiss all that goodbye too.
He will never move to cancel the project, because canceling the project is tantamount to canceling the remainder of his statewide political career. In any non-creampuff '18 matchup, the decision ends him...full-stop.
This thing will get built. There will be torturous hand-wringing and re-financing, more delays, and probably every legal maneuver to try to bounce or box in Skanska to try to keep the barn door as closed as humanly possible on contractors gaming the system. But there
will be bulldozers and cement mixers making an awful racket at those station sites for the 2018 election season. And probably a loaded gun to somebody's head to get at least *one or two* stations open even if it's a crippled schedule...just as showpiece campaign ad to say "Look, I saved GLX. It wasn't pretty, but we found a way and your patience paid off."
It will happen because there is no other way that gives the Governor of the Commonwealth a career after 1/8/2019. Or several other elected officials and several of his own appointees with aspirations, for that matter. Canceling it is a real, no-foolin career-killer for a whole gaggle of the most powerful pols in the state. And that is why they are handling this with the care of a fully-armed nuke instead of the usual cut-and-run playbook. They're the first ones to get vaporized if it blows.