Q&A #3: Start Your 2014 Engines

"David" asks:

After Election Day, who will be the first MA politico to announce their intentions for the next cycle? Will they wait a decent interval?

I don't get the sense that anybody's ready with a 2014 campaign waiting under a tarp in the garage, ready to take out immediately. 

I do hear that a couple of lesser-known gubernatorial prospects are poking around; if they decide to pull the trigger on a run, we'd probably see some open moves shortly after the new year.

It's possible that Tim Murray could decide to announce that he's running early, to try to block out others from jumping into the race. But since I doubt that would have much effect, I suspect he'll hold on a little while -- at least until we know a little more about how embarrassing the Michael McLaughlin mess might be for him.

Steve Grossman will probably step up his fundraising, but I don't see any reason for him to make any announcement soon. The big question mark surrounds Martha Coakley, but I suspect she's not going to answer that question right away. Ditto for any congressmen who might be thinking about it.

And as for announcing for other 2014 races... well, an awful lot of that depends on who's running for governor, right? There could be a lot of juicy open seats to gun for, but we might not know which ones for a while.

What we could see -- in addition to any underdog gubernatorial hopefuls getting an early start a la Deval's early 2005 launch -- is open positioning for the lieutenant governor race. That could pop early.