by John Osborn
As it has in the past four presidential and senatorial elections, Harvard once again voted for a Democratic candidate on Tuesday and helped elect Rep. Edward Markey to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by John Kerry when he was named U.S. Secretary of State earlier this spring.
Markey received 975 votes while his Republican rival Gabriel E. Gomez received 686. Markey's 58 to 41 percent margin in Harvard was slightly better than the 55 percent by which he was expected to carry the state. There were seven votes for Richard Heos of the Twelve Visions Party, described recently in Boston Magazine as a "new agey," libertarian party.
Turnout in town was a low 42 percent, as 1,672 of Harvard's 3,965 voters made their way to the polls in sweltering heat, a number barely half that of the more than 89 percent of Harvard voters who took part in the Presidential election last November. Still, that number was better than the 37 percent that Secretary of State William F. Galvin had predicted for the state as a whole earlier in the day.
Harvard joined its neighboring towns of Boxboro, Acton, Stow, and Groton in favoring Markey, while Bolton, Ayer, Lancaster, Shirley, and most other central Massachusetts towns, with the exception of Worcester, went for Gomez.
Towns in northeastern and southeastern Massachusetts also favored Gomez, but it was not enough to overcome the strong Markey support in Boston, Cambridge, and other Boston suburbs, as well as most of Western Massachusetts.