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A new poll out this week should serve as a wakeup call to executives at operators such as MGM and Mohegan Sun who are working to get a casino built here. This poll's bad news for them: A majority of voters could end up being against a casino anywhere in the state.

Only 51 percent of 600 likely voters who responded to a Suffolk University survey say they approve of plans to open casinos in Massachusetts, while 37 disapprove and 12 percent were undecided. Among those who disapproved of casinos, 52 percent were opposed to casino gambling in general, while 39 percent indicated that casinos are OK elsewhere but not in Massachusetts.

 

In general, it didn’t matter which part of the state the respondents hailed from: Forty-five percent of the respondents in Northeastern Massachusetts approved of casinos, while the approval ratings in other parts of the state were in the 50s. The most statistically significant split was based on gender: Fifty-six percent of men approved of casinos, compared with 45 percent of women.

 

These poll results matter because of the potential for a ballot question in November. This ballot question could undo the state’s 2011 law that allows up to three casinos and one slot machine parlor here, not to mention all the time and the millions of dollars that the industry has subsequently poured into the state.

 

The casino companies are hanging their hopes right now on Attorney General Martha Coakley’s defense of the 2011 law, and her staff’s argument that a ballot question can’t be used to interfere with an implied contract, and thus constitute taking of property. (In this case, the implied contract is between state officials and the casino operators that have invested in the application process.)

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Kathleen Conley Norbut, M.Ed., LMHC