Josh Reynolds/AP Photo
Mayoral candidate City Councilor Annissa Essaibi George greets campaigners outside a polling place in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, September 14, 2021.
Boston, one of America’s most progressive cities, may soon get a pro-developer, pro–police union mayor. How this has come about tells us a lot about tribal politics, white privilege, and dysfunctional election systems.
Here is the backstory. Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, who was expected to run for re-election in November, resigned abruptly in March to become Joe Biden’s labor secretary. Walsh straddled the old Boston and the new Boston. He was a building trades guy who was also a genuine racial liberal.
When Walsh stepped down, Kim Janey, chair of the city council, became acting mayor. Janey, an African American woman, quickly rebranded herself Mayor Janey, and resolved to run for a full term. This upstaged a stronger Black candidate, City Councilor Andrea Campbell, a much-admired leader who had declared for mayor seven months earlier.
Under Boston’s system, there is a preliminary election in September and then a runoff between the top two candidates in November on Election Day. Boston has the unfortunate practice of holding mayoral elections in off years, which guarantees low turnout. This is intended to favor incumbents, but when there is no incumbent there can be weird results.
This election drew several candidates. The strongest was another highly regarded and progressive member of the city council, Michelle Wu, who is a strong environmentalist and a protégé of Elizabeth Warren. Unlike Janey and Campbell, Wu is not a local. She came from Chicago to Boston to attend college and law school, and stayed.
The one real conservative in the race is yet another city councilor, Annissa Essaibi George. She is of Tunisian and Polish extraction and her supporters like to describe her as a person of color. Essaibi George has the strong support of the police union, and of local developers.
Her husband, Doug George, is a developer. In the preliminary election, Republicans poured massive sums into her campaign via a PAC, including half a million dollars from Jim Davis, the CEO of New Balance shoes, who is a local Trumper. (Yes, we even have them in Boston.)
The future of progressive politics in Boston could well depend on whether large numbers of African Americans will turn out in November.
On Election Day last week, Wu placed an impressive first, with 33 percent of the vote. But with the Black vote split, Essaibi George edged out Campbell and Janey for the runoff.
Wu carried the white liberal areas such as Jamaica Plain, Allston-Brighton, Back Bay, and Beacon Hill. Essaibi George carried traditional Irish and Italian Boston in communities such as Roslindale and West Roxbury.
The Black community was divided and deeply disappointed. With the election of Boston’s first African American member of Congress, Ayanna Pressley, it appeared that the mayoralty was next. However, Boston’s Black population is only about 19 percent, and Black voting turnout is typically well below that.
The future of progressive politics in Boston could well depend on whether large numbers of African Americans will turn out in November to support an Asian American progressive woman—Wu’s family is from Taiwan—and what reasons Wu can give them for doing so.
White social-conservative voters are organized and motivated. For much of the white working and middle class, life was better a couple of generations ago, before deindustrialization, before busing took away their local schools.
Ordinary whites of that era may not have felt privileged, certainly not compared to white elites. But compared to people of color they were, and are. Today, traditionalist white voters are inclined to vote for a candidate who represents stasis rather than change.
What’s the takeaway? First, even if politics on the conservative side are tribal, it is crucial that progressive politics operate in terms of broad coalitions. If Wu is elected this year with strong Black support, a Black mayor should be next. And Wu needs to earn that support.
Second, we’ve learned once again that primary elections are dysfunctional, even with runoffs. If Boston had used ranked-choice voting for the primary, Andrea Campbell would likely have been a finalist. It’s also high time for Boston to move its mayoral election to either a presidential year, or an even-numbered year with House and Senate elections, to get decent turnout.
Note that all of this happened in a deep-blue state, where there are no obstacles to voting. But even here, the undertow of the power of developers, police unions, corporate money, and tribal politics is fierce. It would be great to see Michelle Wu overcome all of that and begin the process of reforming it. But this is by no means guaranteed.
