Election Night at Rivera Consulting
Deep Democracy, Movement Campaigns, and Where We’ll Be Breaking it Down
When Councilors Michelle Wu and Annissa Essaibi George share a ballot for the 10th time in their political careers next Tuesday, a lot of focus will be on how and where they’ve spent the past seven weeks. But the reality check that #mapoli needs to consider is that it took at least two decades of philanthropic and political giving to engender the conditions that allowed Wu and Essaibi George to establish and develop their relationships with Boston voters in the last decade.
In our recent whitepaper on What Boston’s Preliminary Elections Show Us About Deep Democracy, we found that both councilors built impressive citywide maps in the 2019 at-large election. Only Wu translated these results into support in the preliminary election this year, while Essaibi George fell back on her core base areas. This was particularly interesting given Essaibi George’s strong city wide performance in past at-large races. Despite her past success, in the preliminary she failed to gain mayoral traction even in neighborhoods where she had won at-large support. Wu runs what many organizers and changemakers call a movement building campaign, while Essaibi George runs traditional political campaigns.
These campaigns are called movement building campaigns because they ignite traditional likely voters and expand the electorate by reaching out to unlikely voters while expanding tables of civic engagement and governance beyond Election Day. These campaigns seek not only to win elections, but also to usher in movements that enable future policy change and advocacy. They lead with their values and back it up with multiracial campaign teams that successfully execute the art and science of these campaigns. Activists are trained in relational organizing, partisan electioneering, learn campaign plans to win and how their contributions are vital to success. By increasing their ownership, their activism extends beyond election night.
That's how Deval Patrick became Governor in 2006 and 2010, it's how Ayanna Pressley became the first Black woman elected to Congress in 2018, it's how organizations like Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts continue to elect people to local City Halls and Beacon Jill, and it's how this evolutionary moment also took hold locally in Boston. They flipped the playbook of conventional campaign logic. We see this difference between the two camps as a manifestation of Deep Democracy; Councilor Wu earned citywide support by building trust that carried over across years and election cycles.
Each candidate’s citywide trust and support will be tested on Tuesday night, and Rivera Consulting will be breaking it all down with you in real time. Based on the preliminary results, and the flurry of endorsements Wu has received since her preliminary victory, she is going into Election Day with a serious advantage. While we think it's unlikely that Essabi George can make up this margin, to do so, she would need to maintain her preliminary support, win about five in every eight voters who supported a candidate who did not advance, and would need to maintain roughly a percentage of support among new voters turning out in the general election.
Based on this benchmark, here’s roughly the support share we expect each candidate will need in each precinct in order to win.
As the results come in on Tuesday, we’ll be checking in against this benchmark and other metrics as we break down the results (check out our Youtube Live coverage of the prelim).
We will be covering the results live on Youtube from 8:30 to 10:00 on Election Night. The Rivera Consulting team will be joined by Mass Alliance Executive Director Jordan Berg Powers, Rich Parr from MassInc, and young leaders from I Have a Future and Teen Empowerment. Throughout the night, we will keep you informed as results come in and provide you with our analysis of all things #bospoli.
Rivera Consulting will be relying on community partners to help us track returns in our new and improved election spreadsheet, which breaks down new results from each precinct to paint an overall picture of the election. We set up the tool to keep ourselves, and all #bospoli pundit hive accountable. On the RC Run Down, and in the spreadsheet, we provide context for which precincts were good for each candidate, and what they would need to win or lose there. Most of all, this tool is meant to serve as a reminder that early results do not necessarily reflect the city as a whole.
We hope that you will join us on our YouTube Live to break down the results with us! There will be a lot to discuss, and we’re looking forward to having you in the conversation!
Thumbnail image credit: Matthew Lee, the Boston Globe