Shocker in Boston bodes ill for pre-Trump status quo

BOSTON — The day before Ayanna Pressley rattled national Democrats by overwhelming Rep. Mike Capuano, a popular, 20-year incumbent, in Tuesday’s primary, she brought her youthful canvassers to the campaign’s Jamaica Plain headquarters to fire them up for the offensive to come.

Pressley always delivers fire in public speeches, but the 44-year old Boston city councilor is careful and quietly analytical in dissecting electoral imperatives. In the midst of her oration, she explained her coming victory in one sentence.

“The district has changed,” she said, “the needs have changed, and given what’s happening in Washington, the job description has changed.”

Her volunteers needed no prompting to chant her campaign’s killer slogan, “Change Can’t Wait.”

Two hours earlier, a couple dozen Capuano supporters had gathered on the front porch of a supporter’s home a few miles north in the working class city of Everett.

Capuano, 66, did not offer a stemwinder. That’s not his style. He simply wanted to say thank you to longtime friends.

“You guys have done a fantastic job,” he said. “You’ve welcomed me into the community, as I knew you would . ... And I’ve tried to return the love and the respect and the appreciation to the best of my ability ... I really expect that we’ll do as well here as we do anywhere and it’s because of you.”

Capuano was right about Everett — it was the one jurisdiction he carried overwhelmingly. But his 65 percent share there was far less than hoped for, and on election night, he ended up conceding long before the media called the race.

Pressley didn’t just win. She swamped Capuano, 59 percent to 41 percent. The size of the margin seemed to shock even the victor.

Pressley’s surprise success has been compared to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s defeat of Democratic Rep. Joseph Crowley in New York earlier this summer, and there are certainly commonalities.

As Pressley noted, Massachusetts’ 7th Congressional District was not the same place that first elected Capuano in 1998. It was now majority-minority — it was drawn to be friendly to minority candidates. Many of its previously working-class areas, including Capuano’s own Sommerville, have drawn in younger professionals with no ties to the old white ethnic politics that the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill, who represented the area, knew so well.

At Pressley’s victory party, Julia Kehoe, 25, Clare Abreu, 34 and Dan Babek, 34, were elated at what their canvassing had wrought, and they were part of the new 7th District, working, respectively, on energy efficiency, biophysics and biotech.

But there were important differences between Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez. Pressley has deep roots in local politics, having worked for, among others, former Sen. John Kerry, with whom she remains close.

Pressley’s feat is likely to be replicated only in safe Democratic seats with racially diverse makeups. But there are quite a few places like that.

And Democrats everywhere need to take account of an argument she reiterated in her victory speech: that the problems of racial and economic inequality predate the rise of Donald Trump.

Being against Trump will likely rally Democrats in November’s elections, but many in the party are not interested in a simple return to the pre-Trump status quo.