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    It’s a ‘Brawl in Beantown,’ as Progressive Allies Clash in the Boston Mayor’s Race

    For years, they were “sisters in service,” taking on the old guard and boosting one another’s careers. A rare open mayoral seat changed that.BOSTON — Not so long ago, Boston’s leading progressives called themselves “sisters in service,” linking arms to take on this city’s overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male old guard.For a time, they headlined one another’s fund-raisers. They marched together at the head of parades. They even shared a campaign headquarters, unthinkable in the sharp-elbowed history of this city’s politics.But that time is over.Over the past month, Boston’s mayoral election has become a fierce competition between four women of color, any of whom would represent a departure from this city’s norm.With a preliminary election on Tuesday set to winnow the field to two, City Councilor Michelle Wu, a favorite of the city’s young left, appears poised to take one spot. The other is up for grabs, with sparks flying between the two Black front-runners, City Councilor Andrea Campbell and Kim Janey, the acting mayor.The spectacle has elated some — a historic shift in the city’s leadership now seems almost inevitable — and discouraged others. Denella Clark, a supporter of Ms. Janey’s, is upbeat about her candidate’s chances but said the battery of attacks had been draining.From left, members of the Boston City Council, Lydia Edwards, Michelle Wu, Annissa Essaibi-George, Andrea Campbell, Ayanna Pressley and Kim Janey after a meeting in January 2018. Ms. Pressley is now in Congress, and Ms. Janey is the acting mayor. Keith Bedford/The Boston Globe via Getty Images“It’s been worse than I expected,” said Ms. Clark, president of the Boston Arts Academy Foundation. “It’s different because it’s rivals in the Black community and it’s women. I just really didn’t expect the women to be going after each other.”Alisa Drayton, who is supporting Ms. Campbell, said the close race was nerve-racking for many Black voters, who have waited decades for a chance to elect one of their own.The city she grew up in, during the busing crisis of the 1970s, was so blighted by racism that she could not safely walk through some of its white enclaves, she said. The election of a Black woman, she said, could finally free Boston of that old stain.“To see one of our own, born-and-raised Black women to go to that runoff, it’s important,” said Ms. Drayton, a financial services professional.The race was upended in January, when President Biden selected Boston’s mayor, Martin J. Walsh, as labor secretary, and he — the lone candidate representing the city’s white, working-class, pro-union tradition — bowed out of the race.That left the women. Two formidable progressives had already begun campaigns — Ms. Wu, 36, a Harvard-educated lawyer who has foregrounded policies on climate, transportation and housing; and Ms. Campbell, 39, a Princeton-educated lawyer who grew up in Roxbury, the historic center of Black Boston, and who has pledged to challenge the city’s police.Michelle Wu, a candidate, joined canvassers in Boston’s Copley Square in May.Philip Keith for The New York TimesThen Ms. Janey, 56, a longtime community activist and president of the City Council, was vaulted into a leading position as acting mayor, bathed in positive press coverage as the city’s first Black and female mayor. Another strong contender emerged in City Councilor Annissa Essaibi George, the daughter of Tunisian and Polish immigrants, who has positioned herself as a moderate, promising more harmonious dealings with the police and developers.A fifth candidate, John Barros, who is the son of Cape Verdean immigrants and served as Mr. Walsh’s economic development chief, has struggled to get traction.From the outset, it promised to be a bruising race. The number of undecided voters was small, and the ideological differences between top candidates narrow, said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center.“If you’re a strategist, you can’t just convince the undecided, you have to knock down someone,” he said. “You’re going to have this elbowing that’s going to accelerate into a street fight.” As summer turns into fall, he said, “It’s going to be a brawl in Beantown.”‘The umbrella is gone’The glow of Ms. Janey’s swearing-in had barely faded when her City Council rivals began to jab her.Ms. Campbell was particularly aggressive, delivering a battery of crisp news conferences in which she urged Ms. Janey to release legal documents in a police scandal, make deeper cuts to the police budget and move faster to mandate vaccines for city employees.Ms. Janey’s City Council colleagues quickly cooled to their new mayor, complaining that she was imperious and unresponsive in her new role; in June they voted, 10-1, to give themselves the right to remove her as Council president, a largely symbolic step that showed they could remove her as mayor.As a relative newcomer to city politics, Ms. Janey may have been viewed as “skipping the line,” said Erin O’Brien, a professor at University of Massachusetts Boston.“She’s been under the umbrella of the Council, that sisterhood, and now the umbrella is gone,” she said.Ms. Janey has been cautious in her new role, sidestepping hot-button issues that could hurt her in the general election, and remaining largely scripted in public appearances.She was gaining ground this summer, outpacing her rivals in fund-raising, when she made a misstep: Asked about New York-style vaccine passports, she batted away the idea, comparing them to racist policies that required Black people to show their identification papers.Kim Janey was sworn in as the first female and first Black mayor of Boston by Chief Justice Kimberly S. Budd at City Hall in March.Maddie Meyer/Getty ImagesMs. Campbell zeroed in on the comment. She held a news conference the next morning, saying Ms. Janey’s remarks “put people’s health at risk, plain and simple,” then highlighted the remark in a fund-raising letter, then made an appearance on MSNBC.Her energy and confidence impressed the editorial board of The Boston Globe, which endorsed her last week, praising her “restless impatience with the status quo and a willingness to charge headfirst into political risks.”Ben Allen, a Janey supporter, complained this week that a “relentless stream of criticism from other progressives” had clouded Ms. Janey’s achievements as acting mayor, which includes the introduction of a mental health crisis response force and quadrupling the assistance provided to first-time home buyers.“She’s not only doing a good job, she’s enacting a progressive agenda,” said Mr. Allen, 41, a mathematics professor.Poll results released on Tuesday by Suffolk University showed that Ms. Janey remained in second place but suggested her momentum was flagging; she had support from 20 percent of likely voters, a two-point drop since June. Ms. Essaibi George and Ms. Campbell have both gained support, rising to 19 and 18 percent.Ms. Wu, the only candidate not born in Boston, has built a commanding lead of 31 percent, cobbling together a coalition that underlines how swiftly this city has changed: She is dominating with Asian American voters, voters who have recently moved to Boston, highly educated voters, and voters who identify as left-leaning.“She lights up the board demographically,” Mr. Paleologos said.Boston is growing, according to recent census data, while its percentage of non-Hispanic white residents is declining, dipping from 47 percent in 2010 to less than 45 percent now. The city’s Black population is also declining, from about 22 percent in 2010 to 19 percent now. There is swift growth in its Asian and Hispanic communities.Although Ms. Wu has benefited from a young, energized base — elements of the “Markeyverse,” which fueled the surprise re-election of Senator Ed Markey, reunited into a “Wuniverse” — she could encounter headwinds in the general election because of her positions on housing and development, like her support of rent control.It is a departure, in itself, that so much of this race has centered on policy. Boston’s campaigns have long turned on ethnic rivalries, first between Anglo-Protestants and Irish Catholics, then drawing in racial minorities as those populations increased.Boston’s mayors relied so heavily on turnout from ethnic enclaves that they had no need to build a multiethnic coalition by presenting a bold vision, the way Fiorello La Guardia did in New York, said the historian Jason Sokol, author of “All Eyes Are Upon Us: Race and Politics From Boston to Brooklyn.”“They did not have to express any vision, nor did they end up governing with much vision,” he said.The results of Tuesday’s preliminary election could guide the city into very different matchups for a November general election, including one that pits Ms. Wu against Ms. Essaibi George, who draws her core support from white neighborhoods.Ms. Clark said she feared that the battle between the two Black candidates could lead in that direction, closing a rare window of opportunity for the city, whose Black population is gradually waning with the rising cost of housing.“I firmly believe, if Kim does not stay in there, we will not see a Black elected mayor in the city of Boston,” she said.Wilnelia Rivera, a political consultant who supports Ms. Wu but has also worked closely with Ms. Janey, said it had been difficult for many activists and campaign workers to make a choice.“I lost some friends along the way because of it,” she said. But she added that even those bruises were a marker of something positive: that the center of power in Boston had moved.“It is a triumph, and when I’m in calls now with colleagues in other parts of the country and talk about the Boston race, they’re flabbergasted,” she said. “The transformation that has happened here is very real, and it’s happening in real time.” More

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    The Race to Lead Boston Is Suddenly Wide Open

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Race to Lead Boston Is Suddenly Wide OpenThe selection of Mayor Martin J. Walsh as labor secretary has shaken up the mayoral race in Boston, which has struggled with police reform and an extreme racial wealth gap.Kim Janey, the president of the Boston City Council, will become the acting mayor if the current mayor, Martin J. Walsh, is confirmed as labor secretary.Credit…Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe, via Getty ImagesJan. 9, 2021, 3:39 p.m. ET[To read more stories on race from The New York Times, sign up here for our Race/Related newsletter.]BOSTON — Sometimes the guard changes slowly. Sometimes it changes overnight.That is what is happening in the city of Boston, which has been led by white men since its incorporation in 1822. With the nomination of Mayor Martin J. Walsh as President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s labor secretary, the 2021 mayoral race is suddenly wide open, and the front-runners are all women of color.If Mr. Walsh is confirmed and resigns from his mayoral post, his replacement as acting mayor will be Kim Janey, president of the City Council, a 56-year-old community activist with deep roots in Roxbury, one of Boston’s historically Black neighborhoods. Ms. Janey has not said whether she plans to run.The two declared challengers in the race are also, for Boston, nontraditional. Michelle Wu, 35, a Taiwanese-American woman, has as a city councilor proposed policies on climate, transportation and housing that have won her the support of progressives.And Andrea Campbell, 38, a city councilor who grew up in public housing in Roxbury, has drawn on her own painful personal history — her twin brother died of an untreated illness in pretrial custody — to press for policing reforms and equity for Black residents.Andrea Campbell, a member of the Boston City Council, at a hearing in 2019.Credit…Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe, via Getty ImagesOthers are expected to jump into the race, but it has already deviated from the long-established pattern in this Democratic city, in which one figure from the white, working-class, pro-union left would hand off power to a similar man of the next generation.Paul Parara, a radio host who, as Notorious VOG, grills local politicians on his morning show, said Mr. Walsh’s departure cleared a path for long-awaited change.“I’m ecstatic that Marty is going to Washington,” said Mr. Parara, who works at 87FM, a hip-hop and reggae station. “It does represent an opportunity for Boston to turn the page, and elect someone who looks like what Boston looks like now.”The percentage of Boston residents who identify as non-Hispanic whites has steadily dropped, to 44.5 percent in 2019 from 80 percent in 1970.“Oh, we’re about to Georgia Boston,” he added, referring to voter mobilization that has reshaped the politics of that state.He said he hoped the next mayor would impose greater pressure on police unions, which he said had negotiated advantageous contracts with the city and which, as the Boston Globe has reported, remained more white than the city’s population as a whole.Mayor Walsh has been tapped to join the Biden administration.Credit…Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York Times“I think that’s going to change,” he said. Mr. Walsh, he added, “is a labor guy, and that’s what benefited the police — they were negotiating a contract with a labor guy.”A new mayor could also rethink development in Boston, where a technology boom and housing shortage have squeezed out poor and middle-income families, or grapple with the city’s egregious wealth inequality: In 2015, the median net worth for white families was almost $250,000, while that figure was $8 for Black families, according to a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.Mr. Walsh, who has been mayor since 2014, has responded to progressive activists, but he has also styled himself as a consensus-builder, trying to satisfy a range of stakeholders, including the police and developers.His successor may, for the first time in the city’s history, emerge from “a left that derives from the civil rights movement, or the residents of color in the city or the left-wing intellectuals in the city,” said David Hopkins, an associate professor of political science at Boston College.“We don’t have a model of what a different type of mayor would look like because we really haven’t had one,” Mr. Hopkins said. “What’s so interesting about this situation we’re in now is that there isn’t an obvious next Marty Walsh figure in line to take the baton.”Despite weeks of hints that Mr. Walsh would be tapped as labor secretary, the news of his selection seemed to catch many off guard. The power of incumbency is extraordinary in Boston; the last time a sitting mayor was defeated was in 1949.So many people were now floating possible runs that Segun Idowu, the executive director of the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts, renamed his Twitter account Not a Boston Mayoral Candidate.Michelle Wu, a city councilor, spoke last year at a campaign event for Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.Credit…Mary Altaffer/Associated PressOn Saturday, Ms. Wu received a heavyweight endorsement from Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, her former professor at Harvard Law School and the person she credits with steering her into politics.“Bostonians can count on Michelle’s bold, progressive leadership to tackle our biggest challenges, such as recovering from the pandemic, dismantling systemic racism, prioritizing housing justice, revitalizing our transportation infrastructure and addressing the climate crisis,” Ms. Warren said.But after a year of national soul-searching about race, voters may be drawn to a candidate from the heart of Boston’s Black community, like Ms. Campbell or Ms. Janey.When she started her campaign in September. Ms. Campbell focused squarely on the city’s history of inequality, noting that “Boston has a reputation as a racist city.”“I love this city,” she said. “I was born and raised here, as my father was before me. But it’s important to realize that this isn’t just a reputation nationally. It’s a reality locally. Plain and simple, Boston does not work for everyone equitably.”Progressives should not presume that young voters will turn out for a city election, warned David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center.Historically, participation has skewed older and whiter than the city as a whole, with a disproportionate number of votes cast in white, middle-class enclaves like West Roxbury and Hyde Park. Turnout in recent mayoral elections has consistently remained below 40 percent.The city has changed so much and so rapidly, though, that past experiences may not be an accurate guide.Mary Anne Marsh, a Democratic strategist, noted that Representative Ayanna Pressley pulled off the biggest political upset in the state’s recent history, ousting a 10-term incumbent and fellow Democrat in 2018, despite being outspent two-to-one.“Southie is not the old Southie,” Ms. Marsh said, referring to South Boston. “Southie is a lot of young professionals, it’s not South Boston, Irish, Catholic labor families anymore. It is mostly young millennials. It’s a very different place, and that’s true in many pockets of the city. People will be very interested in the race.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More