RC Rundown: What happened in the Boston Preliminary Election?
The 2021 Boston Mayoral Preliminary election is the culmination of nearly two decades of deep democracy organizing. It is the result of Black, latino, and AAPI candidates, as well as communities of color and young adults being organized and engaged in the civic and electoral process. Be it the elections that led to the rise of the diverse 2021 Mayoral candidate slate, or long-term issue organizing from a litany of movement organizations, this November election stands on the shoulders of so many ancestors.
Deep Democracy is a political giving and research framework, focused on identifying specific communities or geographic areas with high concentrations of communities of color, other historically oppressed communities, and college educated voters. When electoral candidates create a deep democracy playbook, it means that they will win and govern by building durable trust with voters and residents whose voice and perspective has been kept out of the halls of power and governance. While Boston’s preliminary elections provided its fair share of disappointments, they also affirmed the need for more investment in the deep democracy playbook. To win real change in Boston over the long term, we need to invest in the civic engagement infrastructure that incubates our Rising American Electorate: Black women, communities of color, young voters and progressive suburban white voters.
Neighborhood Base v. City Wide Coalition
The top four Boston Mayoral candidates displayed four different paths to city-wide success in Boston. While only Councilors Michelle Wu and Annissa Essaibi George advanced, each candidate’s pathway illustrates an approach to city-wide politics that can form the basis of a winning coalition.
Mayor Kim Janey and Councilor Anissa Essaibi George relied heavily on their neighborhood base. This is unsurprising for Janey, who previously represented the heart of Black Boston in her former council district. However, despite serving the entire city as an at-large councilor for nearly six years, Essaibi George relied heavily on her Dorchester base. As a densely populated and long-time power center for city politics, such reliance is not abnormal. Yet it’s noteworthy that Essaibi George did not rely on broad-based geography to build her coalition. While Mattapan and Roxbury neighbor Dorchester geographically, Essaibi Geroge saw scant support in these communities of color. Instead she succeeded in neighborhoods that were more demographically congruent with her base: South Boston and West Roxbury.
It’s unsurprising to see Boston’s racial and economic historical segregation play out in these traditional voting patterns.
By contrast, district Councilor Andrea Campbell had a strong citywide appeal. That broad coalition allowed her to place third, ahead of Janey. This comes with the more impressive caveat that Campbell entered this race without a traditional strong geographic voter base. Campbell broke 10% in nearly every precinct, missing the mark in just 22 precincts.
Some of this could be read through the tea leaves in the run up to election day. Campbell clearly demonstrated momentum in the press in the weeks leading up to the election. She was endorsed by the Boston Globe and was a regular fixture in the press hammering Mayor Janey on a variety of issues. In many ways this was reminiscent of John Barros’ 2013 run; based on this upward trajectory and where she ultimately placed in the race, a few more weeks could have led to a very different Boston general election. While Campbell narrowly missed the final, this speaks volumes about her strength as a candidate. Her results demonstrate that she is a rare politician who can knit together a city-wide coalition in Boston, and it bodes well for her in future elections in Boston or Boston-centric seats.
Councilor Michelle Wu won by combining the strengths of a neighborhood base and city wide coalition approach. Wu broke 50% in 32 precincts in the neighborhoods of Jamaica Plain, Allston, and Brighton. Similarly to Campbell, she rarely dipped under 10% in any precinct, missing this mark in just 3(including the famed Ward 1, Precinct 15, where the single registered voter sat out the election). Together, these approaches netted Wu 33% and a first-place finish in the preliminary. This rare combination of base-building strength and city-wide appeal will clearly be assets as she takes on Essaibi George in the general.
Stop saying Black Bostonians “split the vote”
In this historic election cycle, three of the five major candidates for mayor were Black Bostonians, and two of the top four were Black women. In a narrowly decided election, both lost out to Essaibi George by just over 3,000 votes. Importantly, this result did not reflect low turnout among Black voters in comparison to the electorate overall; turnout in predominantly Black precincts largely mirrored the city-wide turnout rate of 24.7%.
Since the election, several analyses have argued that Janey and Campbell “split the Black vote.” This fundamentally misconstrues two key facts. First, Black voters in Boston are not a monolith. Black candidates earn support from non-Black voters, and non-Black candidates earn support from Black voters. Every voter is entitled to select their preferred candidate based on any qualification or combination of qualifications. Discussion of “vote-splitting” often implies that every Black voter has an obligation to support only Black candidates.
Second, our analysis suggests that voters in many predominantly Black precincts did consolidate their support behind Janey.
83% of the variation in Kim Janey’s vote share was explained by the share of non-Hispanic Black voters in a precinct in the 2020 census.
For every 1-point increase in the share of Black voters, Janey’s vote share went up by .69 points.
This means that knowing the share of voters in a precinct who are Black allows you to predict Janey's vote share very accurately. In the precincts with the most Black voters, Janey frequently broke 50%. Conversely, she only netted roughly a quarter of the vote in precincts near the citywide average by Black population and rarely broke 10% in precincts with few Black voters. While it is impossible to discern individual votes from precinct-level data, these results are consistent with Janey winning around two thirds of votes cast by Black Bostonians this year.
While these results mean that most Black voters did not see their preferred candidate advance to the general election, this reality presents a new opportunity for community accountability for Boston’s next Mayor. Precincts with more Black voters cast far more ballots for candidates who did not advance, meaning that these precincts have many of the undecided voters who will decide the general election between Wu and Essaibi George. In the precinct with the highest share of Black voters in Boston — Mattapan’s Ward 18, Precinct 3 — more than three quarters of voters cast ballots for a candidate who did not advance, and this rate is typical for many other predominantly Black neighborhoods in Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, and Hyde Park.
We are already seeing the central role that Black voters will play in the general election. In perhaps the most important endorsement of the cycle, Janey backed Wu on Saturday, while Essaibi George recently announced a “listening and learning tour” in communities of color around the city. While the next Mayor of Boston will not be Black, she cannot win without making Black voters part of her governing coalition, both on November 2nd and for the next four years. Through Deep Democracy, Black voters can still shape the future of the city during this time.
Latino Vote
The Latino vote was, rightfully, a topic conversation for many in the lead up to the preliminary election. The early support of the influential Arroyo family for Janey was heralded as a major leg up in one of Boston’s fastest growing electorates. While this is not a question we can answer through precinct level data, Michelle Wu did well in all six all six of the precincts with the most Latino voters in Boston. She won between 35% and 42% of the vote in each. However, all six of these precincts are in East Boston, and it is just as possible that they broke strongly for Wu based on her plans to address coastal flooding or her endorsement from District 1 City Councilor Lydia Edwards. In Dorchester’s Ward 14, Precinct 9, where 50% of residents identify as Latino, she won 14.6% of the vote, among her worst showings anywhere in the city.
Latino voters in Boston are as varied and diverse as the city as a whole, and while we cannot make any concrete claims about how Latino voters voted based on the precinct-level data we have, evidence from public opinion polling suggests that Latinos broke largely as the city did, giving a first-place finish to Michelle Wu and breaking roughly evenly between the other three major candidates for second. In a Suffolk/Boston Globe poll conducted just before the election, Michelle Wu led Latino respondents with 26% of the vote, followed by Kim Janey with 20% and Andrea Campbell and Annissa Essaibi George with 17% each, with 14% still undecided. Still, a single poll represents just a tiny fraction of the citywide Latino electorate; in total, only 65 people who responded to the poll identified as Hispanic or Latino.
This does not mean that it is impossible to analyze the voting patterns of Latino voters or other hard to reach communities in Massachusetts; on the contrary, at Rivera Consulting, Inc we know this kind of research is possible. If we can do it for the census count, we can do it for our democracy work. It means having a qualitative research approach that compliments traditional electoral research and most importantly, has community experts and organizations like Amplify Latinx, City Life/Vida Urbana, Mass Voter Table, and community hubs across the state who organize their communities driving the work itself.
Understanding political preference is key to understanding near to long-term power building opportunities locally — a core tenet of Deep Democracy Massachusetts. We cannot expect to ask communities for their votes without building trust and shared power with them through deep organizing and investments from state officials and our broader philanthropic stakeholders. With statewide elections around the corner, the time has never been more urgent, and it is essential that as a movement, we make a collective investment in building our base, our trust, and our collective understanding.
At Rivera Consulting, Inc. Deep Democracy is a political giving and research framework, focused on identifying specific communities or geographic areas with high concentrations of communities of color, other historically oppressed communities, and college educated voters. We develop a mixed-method research approach that can provide a giving framework for sustainably supporting candidates and movement building organizations in deep democracy locations across an election cycle. We also assess campaign infrastructure and strategy of the larger organizing ecosystem to determine the impact of these factors in real time.