The city’s 91-year Irish-American and Italian-American mayor’s succession has ended, and Michelle Wu and Anisa Etheby George faced off in November.
BOSTON-Michelle Wu, an Asian American progressive who campaigned on climate change and housing policy, won first place in Boston’s preliminary mayoral election on Tuesday. The city won 33% of the vote. Only white people are selected.
As a front-runner, the 36-year-old Ms. Wu marked an amazing departure for the city, whose politics has long turned to community and racial confrontation.
As the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, she did not come from Boston, but by proposing radical structural changes, such as providing free public transportation in the city, restoring rent control, and introducing the country’s first city, she built her enthusiasm as a city councillor. Followers-level Green New Deal.
Due to the difficulty of counting ballots for mailing and drop-in boxes, the counting of votes proceeded slowly at night, and many results were calculated manually, and the full unofficial results were not announced until 10:00 on Wednesday morning.
Ms. Wu, like all the top candidates in the campaign, is a Democrat. She will face off in November with the second place, Annissa Essaibi George, who received 22.5% of the vote. Ms. Essaibi George was raised in the Dorchester community of Boston by immigrant parents of Tunisian and Polish descent. She positioned herself as a moderate and won the recognition of traditional power centers such as the Firefighters Union and the former police chief.
The 47-year-old Essaibi George criticized Ms. Wu’s approach as “abstract” and “academic” and portrayed herself as a hands-on manager similar to former mayor Martin J. Walsh who left in January. Walsh) when President Biden appointed the Secretary of Labor. In a debate last week, Ms. Essaibi George promised voters that if elected, “you won’t find me on a soapbox, you’ll find me in the neighborhoods, doing the work.”
It is expected that the November 2 showdown will test the consensus reached by many National Democrats after the New York mayor primary election: moderate black voters and elderly voters will bring the Democratic Party back to its center, especially on public safety issues.
For weeks, opinion polls have shown that two leading black candidates—acting mayor Kim Jenny and city councillor Andrea Campbell—have been arguing with Ms. Ethiopian George. But the voter turnout in the non-party preliminary elections was very low, with less than 108,000 votes. Ms. Jenny and Ms. Campbell seemed to have parted ways in the black ballots, each with a vote rate of just under 20%.
The prospect of an election without a black candidate has disappointed many people in Boston, and it seems that Boston is closer than ever to electing a black mayor.
“Boston is a northern city,” said 62-year-old John Harriet, who had supported Jenny in frustration. “They have black mayors in Atlanta, Mississippi, and other places in the South. I think this is ridiculous. Really, I don’t know. I don’t know what will happen.”
Democratic adviser and commentator Mary Ann Marsh said that low turnout is beneficial to Ms. Ethiopian George, who “has all the super voters in the older white community”.
It created a clear tension in the general election. Between a progressive, Harvard-educated transplanter and a senior neighborhood politician, she used the Boston accent as a badge of honor and told voters that she wanted to be ” “Mothers, teachers and mayor” are what the city needs.
Their most obvious difference lies in police reform, an issue that may touch the city’s ancient and painful racial and ethnic dissatisfaction.
“There is no sharper contrast,” Ms. Marsh said. “I hope it will show the best in Boston. I am worried that this will bring the worst.”
Once a blue-collar industrial port, Boston has now become a center of biotechnology, education, and medicine, attracting a group of wealthy new immigrants with higher education. The soaring cost of housing has forced many working families to choose substandard housing or long-distance commutes.
Ms. Wu is a native of Chicago and moved here to study at Harvard University and Harvard Law School. She talked about these newcomers and their anxiety, admitting that her flagship proposal is “challenging the limit”.
“Sometimes, others describe them as’pies falling in the sky’ because they are bold and working for the brightest version of our future,” she said. “A lot of the things we celebrate in Boston started with a vision that initially looked like a pie in the sky, but it was exactly what we needed and deserved. People are fighting for them.”
She said that throughout its history, Boston has been a laboratory for new ideas such as public education, and movements such as abolitionism, civil rights, and marriage equality.
“This is a city that knows how to fight for justice,” said Ms. Wu, who believed that Senator Elizabeth Warren, her law professor, helped her get into politics.
But Boston’s most loyal voters are concentrated in predominantly white districts, and many people are skeptical of Ms. Wu’s many policies and George Floyd’s call for police reform after the murder of Minneapolis.
These voters gathered around Ms. George Ethiopia, who was the only candidate opposed to cutting the police budget and in favor of increasing the number of police officers on the streets of Boston.
During the victory celebration that began shortly before midnight, Ms. Essaibi George, accompanied by her teenage triplets, began to criticize Ms. Wu and her policy platform.
“We need real change. It’s not just ideas or academic exercises, but hard work,” she said. “I don’t just talk, I work. I do. I researched it deeply and solved it. That’s how my parents raised me. This is how this city made me.”
She continued to poke holes in Ms. Wu’s two iconic platforms and won the cheers of the crowd. “Let me be clear,” she said. “The Mayor of Boston cannot allow T to be free. The Mayor of Boston cannot enforce rent control. These are issues that the state must resolve.”
Supporters of Ms. Essaibi George gathered on the corner of Dorchester on the eve of the election, wearing her campaign’s iconic pink T-shirt, mostly white, and making public safety a top issue. Robert O’Shea, 58, recalled the popular “Dirty Water” in 1965, praising the polluted Charles River and its “lover, robbers and thieves.”
“Well, when this matter is written, no one wants to be here,” he said. “Look how it is now. I see this city is developing so fast that I can’t afford the house I live in.”
“It’s all great, although the socialist aspect of it scares me a bit,” he said, noting that several of his relatives are all Boston police. “But people need to be safe. People need to feel safe at home before they can save the world.”
One reason Boston may be more receptive to progressive candidates is that it is a very young city, with about one-third of the population between the ages of 20 and 37.
Larry DiCara, a 72-year-old former Boston City Councilman, said that its manufacturing jobs have almost disappeared to make way for wealthy, better-educated immigrants. “Those who may read The Times but don’t People who must go to church.” The increase in violent crime in the summer did not cause shock, which may have shifted New York’s votes to Democratic mayoral candidate Eric Adams (Eric Adams).
Jonathan Cohn, chairman of the Democratic Committee of the 4th District who supports her, said that Ms. Wu has no choice but to build her own political foundation around a series of policies because she cannot rely on race or neighborhood relations.
“Politics here are often conducted in a real way,’what church, what school, what community’, she is trying to turn it into a policy discussion,” he said.
When Ms. Wu entered the city council in 2014, the agency was primarily concerned with voter services, but in the following years it became a platform for national-level policy, climate change, and police reform. Policies that Ms. Wu is concerned about, such as free public transport and the Green New Deal, have become her mayor’s platform.
Some observers questioned whether Ms. Wu’s policy platform was sufficient to win her in the November election.
“People just want this city to serve them, they don’t want good policies,” said the 81-year-old Cigibbs, who served as the city’s first black city councillor Thomas Atkins and Rep. Barney Frank’s Political assistant. She said that the next mayor of Boston will be in a rush to control a powerful force within the huge city government.
“Voters are smarter than we thought, and some of their interests will not extend to all these fantastic ideas of free public transportation and the Green New Deal,” she said. “They will choose the person they think is the most capable.”
Boston is developing rapidly, and its Asian and Hispanic populations are also growing rapidly. It sees a decline in the proportion of non-Hispanic white residents, who now make up less than 45% of the population. The proportion of black residents is also declining, from approximately 22% in 2010 to 19%.
After Mr. Walsh became the country’s labor minister, Ms. Jenny, who was then the chairman of the city council, became the acting mayor in March. Many people believed that she would participate in the general election. But she was cautious about her new role and basically followed the script when she appeared in public, and was criticized by her competitor, Ms. Campbell, a Princeton-educated lawyer and active candidate.
Municipal elections, especially primary elections, tend to attract low turnouts, and are white and older than the entire city. Steve Koczela, president of MassInc’s polling panel, said that changes have only begun in Massachusetts in recent years, and Massachusetts has seen a series of dissatisfaction from progressive women of color.
Post time: Sep-16-2021
