The campaign to end legal adult use cannabis sales in Massachusetts appears to be losing badly with the voters who will decide its fate. A new University of New Hampshire Survey Center Bay State Poll released Sept. 25 found that 71% of Massachusetts voters plan to vote against Question 8 on the Nov. 3 ballot, with just 24% in favor.
The poll, based on 590 respondents with a margin of error of 4 percentage points, delivers the clearest signal yet that the state’s $1.65 billion annual adult-use market is unlikely to be dismantled at the ballot box. Question 8 needs only a simple majority to pass, but with support sitting in the mid-20s six weeks before Election Day, the repeal campaign faces a formidable climb.
What Question 8 Would Do
Formally titled “An Act to Restore Sensible Marijuana Policy,” Question 8 would ban adult-use cannabis retail sales and recriminalize home cultivation, while leaving medical marijuana sales and adult-use possession of small amounts legal. If it passes, Massachusetts would become the first state in the country to reverse a legal cannabis market after years of operation.
The question reached the ballot despite months of legal challenges. As previously reported, a group of social equity cannabis operators, including Stem of Haverhill owner Caroline Pineau, sued in the Supreme Judicial Court to block the measure, arguing the attorney general’s summary concealed key consequences. The SJC rejected that challenge in June, and in July the State Ballot Law Commission overruled a final signature objection, invalidating only four of the 12,551 signatures submitted, and ordered the question printed on ballots.
Big Money, Little Traction
The poll numbers are striking given the repeal campaign’s financial edge. The Coalition for a Healthy Massachusetts has been bankrolled almost entirely by SAM Action Inc., the political arm of the Virginia-based prohibition group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, which committed nearly $3.2 million through the end of August, according to MJBizDaily. The cannabis industry’s opposition campaign raised roughly $1.54 million over the same period, a spending disadvantage of more than 2-to-1, though the two sides held similar cash reserves heading into the fall, about $980,000 for the repeal side and $947,000 for opponents.
The repeal effort has also been dogged by accusations that paid, out-of-state signature gatherers used deceptive tactics to qualify the measure, allegations the Ballot Law Commission found unproven but which, as MJBizDaily noted, may have soured voters on the campaign.
The partisan breakdown offers the repeal camp little comfort. Support was highest among moderates (43%), conservatives (42%) and Trump voters (42%), while only 23% of self-identified Democrats backed the measure in a state where more than 61% of voters chose Kamala Harris in 2024. Libertarians were the most lopsided group of all, with 91% opposed to recriminalizing sales.
A Trend Line Moving Against Repeal
The UNH poll is not an outlier, but it does mark a shift. Earlier surveys had shown opposition at 63%, and a UMass Amherst poll pegged it at 55%, with pollsters cautioning that an expensive ad war could tighten the race. Instead, opposition appears to have hardened as the campaign has intensified. Massachusetts voters legalized adult-use cannabis in 2016 with 54% support, and a majority still view legalization positively a decade later.
Observers believe the repeal groups chose Massachusetts as a testing ground partly because of the state’s relatively low signature thresholds and the symbolic weight of an East Coast, second-wave legalization state reversing course. Similar efforts have surfaced elsewhere: an Arizona repeal campaign fizzled earlier this year, while organizers in Maine were collecting signatures for a 2026 repeal question of their own.
Cannabis advocates see the lopsided polling as a chance to inflict lasting damage on their most persistent adversary.
What It Means for Haverhill
The statewide numbers carry particular weight in Haverhill, where voters face the opposite question on the same ballot. Caroline Pineau gathered more than 5,200 signatures to place a first-in-the-state local question before Haverhill voters that would allow cannabis social consumption lounges in the city, starting with the space she is building above her Washington Street dispensary.
The two questions are directly linked: a statewide repeal would wipe out the adult-use market that any Haverhill lounge depends on, rendering the local measure moot. With Question 8 polling at less than one-in-four support, that worst-case scenario looks increasingly remote, meaning the fate of social consumption in Haverhill will likely rest where Pineau wanted it all along — with local voters, not with a national repeal campaign.
If the poll holds and Haverhill approves its lounge question, the city that Pineau hopes will “set an example for other cities to follow” could open one of the state’s first consumption sites just as Massachusetts voters deliver a resounding reaffirmation of the legal market itself.
