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BOSTON — Attention stayed on President Donald Trump during the first and only lieutenant governor debate Tuesday, closely following the contours of the showdown between Gov. Maura Healey and Republican challenger Mike Minogue last week.
Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll faced Republican Shawn Oliver, a New Bedford city councilor who is running on the ticket with Minogue against Healey and Driscoll, live on GBH’s “Boston Public Radio” Tuesday morning.
Like her running partner, Driscoll pointed to “headwinds” from Washington, D.C., on questions of affordability and immigration, while Oliver said the sitting administration’s refusal to work with the president has hurt Massachusetts.
The debate began with the topic that’s shaping up to define elections across the country this November: affordability.
Minogue and Oliver have said they would stop “overspending” and “overtaxing.” When asked what programs they would cut in the budget to do so, Oliver repeated a Minogue campaign talking point that the savings would come from reducing waste and fraud.
“When you talk about overspending, overtaxing, we go right to cutting to make things more affordable,” Oliver said. “I think what we need to do is first we have to make sure that we’re spending our money efficiently and effectively in the first place. So not so much looking to cut, but more to see where the waste and probably some redundancies are.”
Host Jim Braude pressed Oliver, saying Minogue wants to get rid of the gas tax that provides $700 million a year in state revenue.
“Where’s the $700 million of fraud, waste and inefficiency?” Braude asked.
“Yeah, well, that’s the thing,” Oliver said. “That’s why you got to bring in a third-party auditing firm, so that way we can come in right away and start auditing.”
Braude pushed again, asking Oliver if he knew that amount was there in waste.
“Well, you’ve got to look for it,” the candidate replied. “I know that in the past you’ve said no governor has found that much money, but I don’t think any governor has set out with the mission to find that much money.”
When asked about affordability and the 182,000 people who have left Massachusetts in the past five years, Driscoll defended her and Healey’s record.
“We want to do everything we can to lower the cost of housing, the key driver, and energy, and ensure that we can be the state that not only has young adults here — lots come here to go to school, lots more stay — we want to make sure more of those folks are staying here, putting down roots,” Driscoll said. She cited a tax cut Healey signed in her first year and a housing bill that allowed accessory dwelling units as-of-right and leveraged state-owned land for new development.
Driscoll then pivoted to another key theme in the debate: “That means standing up to Donald Trump. We’ve got gas and groceries at the highest price possible. Heating oil going up 75% this winter. There are definitely headwinds here, and many of that, much of that, is coming out of Washington, and we’re standing up to those every day.”
ICE in New Bedford
Later, Driscoll and Oliver got into a spirited exchange about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and whether the state has a responsibility to work with the federal administration.
A multiday surge of ICE arrests took place in New Bedford and surrounding communities last month. Host Margery Egan asked Oliver why he didn’t publicly say anything about those raids as a New Bedford city councilor.
“Nobody should be in fear of coming out of their house or going to their local shopping centers, or just going about their day. You should feel welcome in your neighborhood and your community,” Oliver said.
He then added, “I believe there should be a collaboration effort with our federal partners in law enforcement. When you don’t have the collaboration, they’re acting independently. They don’t know the streets. They don’t know the neighborhood. And these incidents, like we saw in New Bedford, are still happening. Yet you have an administration that says, ‘We’re standing up against ICE,’ but all they’re doing is just not speaking with them, not collaborating with them.”
An immigrant protection law Healey signed in August puts strict limits on communication and cooperation between state and local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities.
Driscoll said she and Healey traveled to New Bedford after the arrests took place.
“It was absolutely awful,” she said. “You had mothers left behind. These were men going to work, primarily, that were picked up in the early morning hours. … We saw what happened when ICE is in communities — kids don’t go to school the next day. Nobody feels safe. I was in a Guatemalan restaurant on Acushnet Avenue, and there was nobody there; everyone’s underground. That makes everybody less safe.”
She said the recent immigration law is “allowing people to be safe in schools, in hospitals, in daycare centers.” The law restricts federal civil immigration enforcement and warrantless arrests in sensitive locations including K-12 schools, childcare centers, and healthcare facilities.
Oliver agreed that ICE should not go into schools, hospitals or religious institutions “100%,” but countered, “if you were working with the federal administration, these things would not happen. That’s the true problem here.”
“The after the fact, during an election cycle to score political points, that’s not truly helping,” he said. “What is it that the governor and lieutenant governor are doing right now that is working with the federal administration to work on immigration reform to see what that’s going to look like? Nothing. So instead of campaigning on it for another four years, let’s do something about it. Let’s have an open dialogue with the federal administration so we can work on solutions.”
Driscoll replied, arguing that the governor and lieutenant governor’s job is to stand up for the state.
“Shawn, immigrant families are getting picked up in red states too, with governors cooperating with Trump,” she said. “We need to make sure in Massachusetts we’re standing up for the safety and communities, and for all of our immigrants that are here.”
Both candidates are first-generation Americans born to immigrant parents. Oliver’s mother is from the Azores in Portugal, and Driscoll’s mother was born in Grenada and raised in Trinidad.
Abortion and the audit
Oliver originally ran as the preferred running mate for Brian Shortsleeve, who lost the Republican primary to Minogue. Minogue and Oliver clashed this summer over nomination signature fraud allegations concerning fellow Republicans.
“The current governor and lieutenant governor have had the opportunity to be running together the last four years. Mike and I — it is a new friendship,” he said. “We are in constant communication. Spoke with him today, and we are crisscrossing the state.”
Oliver and Minogue personally disagree on abortion — Minogue has categorized himself as personally anti-abortion, but said he would uphold the state laws, while Oliver on Tuesday called himself a “pro-choice Republican.”
When pressed on whether he would support an initiative advancing toward the 2028 ballot to repeal a recent law to remove certain restrictions on abortions after 24 weeks, Oliver said, “I believe that the laws that we had prior struck a good balance, and that’s where I stand.”
He would not directly answer whether he would, as the lieutenant governor or a voter in 2028, support the ballot effort.
“A Minogue-Oliver administration has been very clear that — as a correction officer, my job is to uphold the law. Mike has said he will do the same thing when it’s law, and if the voters at the ballot box, through the petition drive, choose to repeal it, that’s what we will do; we will uphold the law,” he said.
Braude asked Driscoll about the legislative audit that 72% of voters supported in 2024, which the Legislature has largely blocked over constitutional concerns. Braude said that Auditor Diana DiZoglio recently said on GBH that she’s requested meetings with Healey for a year and a half and has never sat down with her.
“Maura and I have been really clear that we voted for the audit. We’re part of that 72%. We want the audit to happen,” Driscoll said. “We think the audit should happen. We think it should happen right away. We’ve been clear about that, both to the auditor and certainly to our legislative friends.”
Oliver countered, “Not clear enough, because they have the bully pulpit. They can be out there building coalitions. It’s not just governing from up top.”
