A passing truck driver leaned on the moment Wednesday as Governor Maura Healey stood on a grassy strip between the northbound and southbound lanes of Route 79 in Fall River, yelling, “Boooooooo! Boo Maura Healey!” The Democratic incumbent, six days from Election Day and seeking a second term, brushed it off without missing a beat. “You can't win them all,” Healey said. “It's ok. If he only knew, all right?”
The heckle came during what was Healey's second event of the day in Bristol County, a region both she and Republican nominee Mike Minogue are working hard to win over before Tuesday, according to fallriverreporter.com. Earlier that Wednesday, Healey held an energy-focused event at Attleboro's senior center before heading to the Fall River waterfront to discuss redevelopment of Route 79 and the city's shoreline. Healey and Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll were slated to headline a campaign rally in New Bedford that evening for themselves and other Democrats on the ballot, as 1420 WBSM reported. “We are six days out from the election. Early voting is on,” Healey said, noting she'd seen many people around the state who had already cast ballots and that much was at stake.
Minogue, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, spent Wednesday afternoon visiting businesses and residents in Boston's North End, with plans for his own rally in Fall River on Friday. Both campaigns have landed on the same message in the campaign's closing days: lowering the cost of living. As WCVB reported, Minogue and Healey are each emphasizing plans to cut energy bills, with Minogue pledging to “get rid of one-third of our energy bill, which I will do as governor,” while Healey points to her administration's move temporarily removing clean energy charges from electric bills and expanding heating assistance programs.
Why Energy Costs Are Driving the Final Push
The affordability fight isn't just rhetoric — the numbers behind it are stark. Heating oil customers are expected to face the steepest cost increase this winter, a projected 31.3% jump, while electricity, propane and natural gas heating costs are forecast to rise 9%, 8.7% and 8.6% respectively, per the same WCVB report. Those projections help explain why Healey has shifted toward what The Boston Globe describes as an “all-of-the-above” energy approach, a pivot the paper notes has alienated some climate activists even as utility costs became a defining issue of the race.
The Route 79 waterfront backdrop for Healey's Fall River stop wasn't incidental — it's the site of a $115 million project that reconnected neighborhoods to the Taunton River waterfront and aimed to improve safety, according to fallriverreporter.com's earlier coverage of the corridor's completion. MassDOT has since released an invitation to bid seeking developers to transform the former highway land into a mixed-use district, the outlet reported, though the evidence does not indicate whether a bid has been awarded or whether construction has begun.
A County That Used To Be Reliably Blue
Bristol County wasn't always this competitive. In 2004, the Kerry-Edwards ticket won the county by more than 28 points, according to WBUR. Since then, the station reports, the county has bucked the state's overall leftward drift, and in 2024 it nearly became the first Massachusetts county in decades to vote Republican in a presidential race. Statewide, Donald Trump carried 87 of Massachusetts' 351 cities and towns in 2024, including 33 that had backed Joe Biden in 2020 — and Acushnet delivered the strongest Trump support of any community in the state, at 61.5%, per WBUR's analysis.```No, that's not accurate syntax — let me continue properly.
The county-level numbers diverge depending on the source. WPRI reported that Trump won at least 11 of Bristol County's 19 communities in 2024, nearly doubling his 2020 total of six, while The New Bedford Light put the figure at 11 of 20 communities, including Fall River, which Trump carried for the first time. Trump gained support in every Bristol County municipality compared with four years earlier, according to WPRI, though Fall River turnout dropped to 47% in 2024 from nearly 62% in 2020.
How Healey's 2022 Numbers Stack Up Locally
The shift shows up clearly when comparing Healey's 2022 gubernatorial numbers to the 2024 presidential results in the same cities. Healey won every precinct in Fall River four years ago with about 56% of the vote, but Trump won the city outright in 2024, according to fallriverreporter.com. Trump also flipped Westport and Somerset, two towns Healey had carried in 2022, part of what WBUR describes as his strongest Massachusetts gains concentrated in rural areas including Bristol, Hampden and Worcester counties.
New Bedford and Attleboro tell a more mixed story. Healey won all but one New Bedford precinct in 2022, taking about 59% of the vote there, and Kamala Harris still managed to edge Trump in the city in 2024 — but by only about 60 votes, per fallriverreporter.com's reporting. In Attleboro, Healey won her first gubernatorial run in 2022 with nearly 9,000 votes, just over 56% of the total, while Harris took about 54% of Attleboro's vote in the 2024 presidential contest.
Down the ballot, Bristol County races have swung both ways. Republican Kelly Dooner flipped the Third Bristol and Plymouth state Senate seat in 2024, a district Democrat Marc Pacheco had held since 1993, The New Bedford Light reported. But Democrats held their own elsewhere: Steve Ouellette won the 8th Bristol District state House race by 143 votes, while Mark Sylvia won the 10th Bristol District race with 53% of the vote to Joe Pires's 47%, according to the same outlet.
An Unprecedented Slate of Republican Candidates
This year's ballot reflects just how much the political map has moved. The 2026 midterms mark the first election in at least 50 years in which Republicans have nominated a candidate for every state legislative seat in the greater Fall River area, and the first time in half a century that a Republican is running for Bristol County district attorney, according to fallriverreporter.com's reporting on Healey's waterfront event.
Healey's Wednesday stops in Attleboro and Fall River were official events and not formally part of her reelection campaign, though they came as early voting continued statewide. One Attleboro resident told the governor directly, “I voted for you,” during her visit to the senior center there. With Election Day six days away at the time of her remarks, both campaigns are treating Bristol County not as a formality but as genuine contested ground.
