On November 8th, 2022 the voters in Massachusetts will decide who will be their next Secretary of State. The Republican candidate in the race Rayla Campbell faces an uphill battle to unseat a Democratic incumbent who has been in office since “grunge” music was a hot, new sound coming out of Seattle. Who is Campbell and what sort of political ideas drive her political campaign?

Rayla Campbell was born in Massachusetts in 1982 and grew up in Scituate. She is married to husband John, and together they have three children. 

Campbell attended public schools and joined the workforce out of high school, before enrolling in vocational training at the Porter and Chester Institute of Canton to become certified as a dental assistant. She graduated at the top of her class. Her career path ultimately split time between stints in healthcare and the insurance industry until 2020 when she reinvented herself as full-time candidate for office and part-time radio show host, with sometimes controversial ideological commitments.

You can catch her radio show on Thursday mornings (9-11am) on WSMN 1590 (“Nashua’s Source For New and Talk”). Other hosts at the station include firebrand-for-hire Dana Loesch (Greatest hit: "I don't care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate!"), Bob Bartis and Bob Bianchi (hosts of the Racing Report), Karen Kataline (whose book “was the first to introduce the term “Princess by Proxy” and remains relevant as a cautionary tale about blurred boundaries and the sexualization of children”), and more. The two slots (11-12pm and 12-1pm) following Campbell’s show are currently available if you’d like to petition for airtime.

Aside from radio hosting, Campbell has been focused on her candidacy. First, in the 2020 congressional race for US House District 7, in which she competed as a write-in along with a slate of names that ultimately lost in a landslide to the incumbent and overwhelming favorite in the race Ayanna Pressley (D).

Campbell earned 39.6% (1,202 votes) of the vote in the 2020 Republican primary, far and away the winner in the Republican field, albeit in a vote with extremely low turnout. She did not fare as well in the general election, earning .2% (695 votes) of the vote as a write-in, losing out to Pressley (86.6%, 267,362 votes) as well as independent write-in candidate Roy Owens (12.5%, 38,675 votes).

The underwhelming result did not deter Rayla Campbell from choosing to run for Secretary of State in 2022. She was endorsed by the Massachusetts GOP at the 2022 Republican State Convention in Springfield in May, where she introduced herself to the delegates with a combative rhetorical style highlighted by her now-infamous claim about oral sex and sex education in public schools.

The genesis of Campbell’s political aspirations and the nature of her political thought are difficult to pinpoint. The biography at her campaign website skips over what motivated her turn to politics and the published platform (“My Platform”) mentions political keywords without connecting them to concrete policy recommendations. 

On “Elections,” Campbell:

“will provide OVERSIGHT and not be an OVERLORD of the elections state-wide.”

On “Protecting Consumers With Oversight,” Campbell will make:

“it a fair and level playing field keeping brokers on the up and up and protecting you the investor by enforcing the laws equally.  If violations are suspected we make sure they are investigated and if wrongdoing is found they are sanctioned or prosecuted.  This is my oath to the taxpayers an open and free marketplace, encouraging the production of capital or wealth not penalizing it.”

Along with protecting the opportunity for individuals to accumulate wealth, she also pledges to help corporations to do the same:

“Another equally crucial function of The Secretary of State is the oversight of corporations.  Unfortunately, Massachusetts is one of the most burdensome and costly states in the country behind only New Jersey to start a corporation or LLC.  The Fees are outrageous and the red tape is never-ending.  It almost dissuades corporations from starting here and growing.  How many businesses have steered clear of Massachusetts because of this is incalculable.  Massachusetts is anything but friendly territory for corporations.  It’s simply not good economic policy.”

The typical candidate will try to promote their platform and ideas through prolific public speaking engagements and a working rapport with the press. Campbell has not opted for either strategy. Her speaking engagements are few, generally restricted to small gatherings of party faithful. And her relationship with the press is conflicted, strained by the duty of journalists to fact-check Campbell’s frequent controversial and unfounded claims. Though Campbell received some sympathetic coverage as the target of unkind and racially-charged remarks by a political activist in July, the tone of her treatment in the press tends to be curt, if not wary.

A brief candidate profile by the Boston Globe can be quoted in its entirety:

Rayla Campbell

How would you describe the job you are running for?

Constitutional office and incredibly important.

Why are you best suited for this role?

I’m historic.

Please list your top three priorities if you win.

Protecting our constitutional rights. Transparency, accountability.

Campbell is correct that a political win for her would be historic. Women around Massachusetts are well-positioned to win high offices that have never had female leadership – and a win by a woman of color would be all the more of a rare and historic occurrence. It’s a prospect that might entice some voters to throw their lot in with Campbell, though it should be noted that the incumbent and white male candidate Bill Galvin (D) won a landslide victory over female candidate of color Tanisha Sullivan in the Democratic primary. If diversity in the Secretary of State office did not move voters in the first round, it’s hard to imagine it will move them in the general election.

A relatively rare extended interview, conducted by Keith Thibault of Fall River Community Media, gives us some insight into the person behind the political campaign, her political ideas, and what drew her to run for office.

In the interview Campbell cites her experience as a parent, worrying about her children’s education, as a strong motivation for entering politics. She also seems to hold a grudge against her 2022 political opponent, Bill Galvin, for his perceived mishandling of her status as a candidate in the 2020 race for US House District 7.

The air of grievance that hangs about her run for Secretary of State is further heightened by the ad hominem treatment of Galvin at her campaign website:

“The Secretary of State also needs to be an excellent communicator.  This is severely lacking with who we have in office now.  Bill Galvin is a misanthrope.  He doesn’t like people.  Sort of an important character trait when your primary function is communication and accessibility is it not?”

On the issues pertinent to the office of Secretary of State, Campbell discusses her worries about election integrity. She calls for the repeal of mail-in voting as part of the solution. 

She highlights the importance of the office for creating a political environment hospitable to business. Campbell calls for reducing fees and regulation associated with starting a business and demands improvements to the current website for the Secretary of State (a landing spot for many emerging businesses trying to navigate regulatory requirements).

In reference to Ballot Question 4, she pushes the lie, debunked many times over, that the Registry of Motor Vehicles will automatically register undocumented immigrants to vote if/when they are issued a driver’s license under the proposed policy.

Hump Day News reached out to Rayla Campbell with questions to help fill out our campaign profile. We have not received a reply as of press time. For a broader, if not deeper, perspective into the ideas that animate her political campaign, voters will have to tune in to WSMN on Thursday mornings or track her often incendiary posts on Facebook and Twitter. The latter can be a tough follow. Campbell participates in some of the most destructive patterns of social media usage, operating in an ideological echo chamber that cheerleads slander and the amplification of proven falsehoods.

In a highly polarized political landscape, however, the distinction between base slander and heroic truth-telling has become increasingly obscure. There is a constituency for Campbell’s controversial rhetoric, though it’s not clear that it’s a constituency of voters that is based in the largely-blue state of Massachusetts. For Campbell to win would require a historic upset. But as the candidate has said: “I’m historic.”