HUB MAYOR’S RACE GETS PARED DOWN TO A PAIR
Wu, Essaibi-George declare victory, will face off in Nov.
Michelle Wu was the first to declare victory in Boston’s preliminary election for mayor and Annissa Essaibi-George joined her soon after.
“I’m overjoyed to share with you in our home neighborhood of Roslindale that we are confident that we are in the top two,” Wu told several hundred supporters who gathered at Distraction Brewing Co. to watch as the results came in.
“I’m grateful for everyone’s love and support,” Essaibi-George said in her late-night speech. “I want to thank everyone who has stepped up.”
City election workers scrambled late into Tuesday night to count more than 7,000 mail-in ballots received on Election Day, which had to be cross-referenced with the completed voter lists returned from each polling location, officials said vowing all ballots would be counted that night. As of 6 p.m. more than 83,600 votes were cast.
All five major candidates in the historic field are people of color in a city that’s never elected anyone besides a white man.
“Boston is changing — the policies, the politics, who is at the table together,” Wu said during her 15-minute victory speech in which she said she was “humbled” to share a ballot with so many other people of color.
One major contender, City Councilor Andrea Campbell, conceded just before 11:30 p.m., telling supporters at her Dorchester event to “hold your heads up high” and vowing to “continue to push” for equity in education, public health and more.
But Wu said she’s taking nothing for granted.
“Tonight is not a victory celebration, it is a thank you for what we have been through together and a reminder that we have 49 days to get it done,” she said.
Boston’s election systems are nonpartisan; this is a preliminary election, where the top two overall vote-getters make it through to the Nov. 2 general.
Wu and then Campbell both jumped into the race last September against thenMayor Martin Walsh. Walsh, a popular incumbent, was gearing up for a run at a third term when he shocked the Boston political world by becoming President Biden’s pick for Labor secretary — a job about which he’d pooh-poohed rumors for months.
Walsh’s departure wasn’t set in stone until March 22, but it was quickly apparent he wasn’t long for this city. That opened the floodgates, with City Councilor EssaibiGeorge and city economic development director John Barros — two Walsh supporters — to dive into the race. State Rep. Jon Santiago also jumped in, but he dropped out in July and has since backed Janey.
Rumors swirled around other candidates, including
the resigning Police Commissioner William Gross, Sheriff Steven Tompkins and state Sen. Nick Collins, but they all ultimately didn’t run themselves. Gross has since endorsed Essaibi-George, and Tompkins supports Wu.
The race — which has continued to play out under varying levels of pandemic restrictions — was largely quiet throughout the spring and summer, with candidates opting to focus on raising money and beefing up their own organizations rather than making splashy headlines and attacking each other.
But that’s changed over the past month, as multiple candidates — mostly Campbell, but also Essaibi-George and Barros, to some extent — have trained their fire on Janey, using the acting mayor as a foil, creating news stories with criticisms that they’ve used to tout their own policy pushes.
Each of the candidates made their own pitch to voters. Wu, who conventional wisdom and polling alike had shown to be a frontrunner and the expected recipient of the first ticket into the general, framed herself along ideological lines as the big-ideas true progressive in the race, the woman with the plans, like her mentor U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who campaigned for her over the weekend.