And yet, the NSRL is still not going anywhere. You gotta start convincing people that aren’t on board, and griping that someone is “anti tax/pro privatization” isn’t going to accomplish that.
The NSRL isn’t going anywhere for a number of reasons, starting with the lack of sufficient support within the Massachusetts Left. And at this point, the American Right definitionally opposes government investment in infrastructure and public services. Massachusetts is coming out of 8 years under the leadership of one of the few “moderate” Republicans still left in the party, and his deprioritization of investment in the T is literally laid bare every day, including today when the Orange Line somehow saw a major power issue that knocked out service on half the line. When a movement repeats again and again, “We don’t support public investment”, we should believe them.
I think the NSRL needs to gain the support of key politicians as individuals, who can wrap it into a larger platform, and then use their broader public support across their entire platform as leverage on this specific issue. I think Governor Healey is a good start, as would be Mayor Wu.
Riverside has the right idea. Ideology is not the only relevant factor when considering politics, salience and strength of preferred policy objectives is. It's reasonably likely that in the outgoing Congress there was a majority of people who would not, ideologically, have much if any issue with a transit tunnel project. The same is likely true of the state legislature. For most of those people, though, they simply care about other things
more, be it issues deemed more important or more urgent (even here there's a contingent that's very much wary of expanding the T prior to getting the existing system to work properly), or projects more directly beneficial to their states, districts, or regions. (I.e. you might well find MA reps, say from out west, who don't have any ideological objection to spending on a large public works project, but who object to spending it in
Boston rather than, say, Springfield).
A project's lack of salience is a way easier hurdle to overcome than ideological opposition. "Griping that someone is anti-tax/pro privatization" is, correct, not going to convince that someone who's not on board to come aboard. That's because people like Pioneer's objection is ideological. Convincing them to come aboard, as F-Line correctly notes, would run completely counter to everything they believe in, because their whole shtick is anti-government. The same is true for anyone (this particularly at the federal level) whose ideology is predicated on either small-statism (what's left of the Reaganite-Thatcherites in the GOP) and the own-the-libs Trumpists; the most you can hope to achieve with such people isn't to convince them of a project's merits (because they have a vested political interest - and often an identity interest - in not believing what you'd need them to believe), it's to buy their support with pork barrel spending...problem being that a lot of them are incentivized against that because it's seen as giving the "enemy" party a win, which makes primaries very uncomfortable. Not an impossible lift, but not super easy. Getting people predisposed to be okay with a project to
care about it (salience) ought to be the goal. Baker was a dead end because of ideological opposition. Healey is making the right noises, but not rejecting a proposal out of hand isn't the same as supporting it. Advocacy should be directed towards making people and politicians treat the project as a high priority, not simply as a "nice to have" pipe dream. TransitMatters, Dukakis, Moulton, and others have done good work thus far, and should continue to. (And, it's worth noting that even token support from a governor is a big plus, because it's a hell of a lot easier to build up momentum when you don't have a near-guarantee that it'll all be for naught like you did with Baker & Company.)
