How much has Boston really changed? Tuesday’s mayoral preliminary will bring us some answers.
Boston has never seen a field like the one vying to become the city’s next mayor. Just eight years ago, in the first open mayoral contest in 20 years, we ended up with the latest two in a long line of white, male finalists. Seeing this year’s candidates side-by-side at Wednesday’s televised debate — a field that includes three Black candidates, an Asian-American, and an Arab-American — made me want to pinch myself. Among those experienced, accomplished contenders was an acting mayor who is the first woman, and the first Black person, to hold the post. We’ve come a long way.
The city appears so ready to elect a woman to the top job at last that the only man in the field is running a very distant fifth: Though he didn’t make the final, John Barros was a star in that 2013 campaign, and the city’s former economic development chief is an impressive candidate this time around, too. But he’s barely registering with voters who are about to bring the city out of the dark ages, gender-wise.
Whatever happens on Tuesday will be historic. But how deep does Boston’s appetite for change go? Will we see a different electorate too? And do voters want the transformative policies most of these barrier-breaking candidates promise?
The polls have shown that, for a plurality of voters, the answer to that last question, at least, would be yes: At-large City Councilor Michelle Wu, among the most progressive candidates in the field, has opened up a sizable lead over her rivals, carried by her well-oiled campaign operation and by voters who are younger, recent arrivals in the city, and more liberal; they are drawn by her focus on climate change and her push for free public transit and rent control. She garnered the support of 31 percent of respondents in a recent Globe poll. Assuming that lead holds, it’s the close race for second that will show whether more of the city is ready for a new day. And that depends on who turns out to vote.
Higher turnout would reflect a stronger will to shake things up. That would favor City Councilor Andrea Campbell, the field’s strongest advocate for policing reform, its most impassioned voice for racial justice, and the candidate who has been most critical of Kim Janey’s record as acting mayor. Janey, too, will benefit if more voters make it to the polls, though name recognition and her largely effective star turn as acting incumbent gives her an advantage over Campbell. There has been much consternation this election cycle over these two Black women splitting the Black vote, but like other groups, those voters are no monolith. Still, it’s possible neither woman will make the final. That would feel like a taste of the old Boston, and would likely be played that way across the land.
But if it happens, “let’s not put this just on the Black community,” said political consultant Wilnelia Rivera, who personally supports Wu but is not working for any candidate in the race. “We live in a multi-racial city, and to win you have to have a multi-racial electorate that elects you.”
So far, early voting has been a bit anemic. In Boston, as everywhere, people are exhausted by the pandemic, and by politics in general after five-plus years of national crises. Unless there is a late burst of enthusiasm that drives younger voters, more recent arrivals and Black and brown voters to the booths Tuesday, the electorate will be weighted to the same voters who always exert outsize influence in city elections: older, whiter, and more conservative.
They’re more or less the people who carried former mayor and now US Labor Secretary Marty Walsh into the final in 2013. And they’re most likely to favor Annissa Essaibi George this year. Essaibi George is the status quo candidate, and she has aggressively courted police support. She wants no part of the movement that followed last year’s reckoning with police brutality, the outcry that called for reallocating resources away from police and into better social services. On Thursday, she escorted not only her own mother to the polls, but Walsh’s mother too.
If she makes it to the final, we’ll see the limits of the city’s appetite for change.
Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yvonne.abraham@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @GlobeAbraham.
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September 11, 2021 at 09:15PM
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Change is coming to Boston. But how much? - The Boston Globe
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