I just think this is an amazing statistic.
In the Globe poll 57 percent of residents said they had personally met the mayor, up from 54 percent a year ago. Extrapolated from Boston’s adult population of about 450,000, that means Menino has personally met about 250,000 voting-age residents. The polling figure lends credence to Menino’s oft-stated belief that his electoral success stems from his countless meet-and-greets in the neighborhoods.
Tough to beat an incumbent mayor in a large-ish city who has personally met a majority of his voters.
The entire poll is available here.
Please share widely!
What percentage of Bostonians have lived in Boston for a year or fewer? Fewer than three years?
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p>It seems that those numbers should be pretty high. The college populations in A-B, Fenway, and elsewhere. Recent immigrants to the USA. Empty nesters who’ve moved to the city.
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p>Frankly, I don’t buy 57%. I’m not sure how they chose the recipients of the call (robodialer?), but I think Boston is tough to poll due to young population without landline and immigrants.
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p>Let’s say nobody ever entered or left Boston, aged into the 18+ bracket or died. 250,000 residents over 16 years is meeting 42 people each and every day of his 16 years. Sure, he knew some people before he became mayor, and sure he’s got days when he meets more than 42 new people. But really… people die, people move out, and many Bostonians have only been 18+ and living in Boston for a few years. I’m just not buying it.
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p>Now, maybe it doesn’t matter. Loosely speaking, college kids nor immigrants impact an election much, and if people feel like they’ve met Menino then, for the purposes of understanding their behavior, they have met Menino.
Does shaking the guy’s hand count? Hearing him speak? Sometimes people have loose definitions of what “met” means. Honestly, I wouldn’t be shocked if 10-20% of the people who have “met” him mean that insofar as they’ve seen his picture in the newspaper =p
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p>This is why polling is not infallible. Ask people if they’ve “met” Jesus himself and I bet 10-20% of this country says they did.
Participating in the sacrament of the Eucharist causes one to commune with Jesus in a very intimate manner, far beyond simply “meeting” Him. Perhaps that was a bad example, Ryan =D
the Eucharist counts as “meeting” Jesus, Joe. Don’t forget, I was confirmed Catholic and took it seriously for many a year. I am familiar with the sacrament. My point is basically confirmed.
of the both the transitive and intransitive forms of “to meet”.
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p>Also, I would think that Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament gives people a different way to meet Jesus.
and the conversation comes full circle.
same difference, no?
I almost went with a metaphor on how my friend loves her Scottish family’s recipe for blood pudding, but she wouldn’t claim to have “met” the pig…
It’s pretty high. I’m impressed.
…in how this compares to other similarly sized cities. You would probably also have to control for the length of tenure for the incumbent as well.
He shakes your hand for a second. There, you’ve met him.
the case, but if those people feel they’ve “met” him and liked him, then all that matters is that perception on the way to the polls. P.S. There’s a word for this: charisma. It wins elections.
“They Want Sources….”
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p>”Err, Gwackamoka,” (on my nachos).
As David says, this is why he wins. Geez, if you told him about a busted street light while shaking his hand, the thing woud be fixed by the end of next week. Was riding up Blue Hill Ave. with some native Bostonians today, and heard about how much it’s improved, and it was all thanks to Menino.
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p>The guy makes sure that potholes get filled and graffiti gets scrubbed. Any mayor who does that has the job as long as s/he wants it.
I first met the Mayor about a decade ago when I was invited to a breakfast about affordable housing. I had just completed a project with 20% affordable housing where the City had required no affordable housing. I asked if I could get 10 minutes of his time to talk about building more and he said “we’re already doing enough” and walked away as fast as possible.
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p>The Mayor is a decent person who cares about the city but I am amazed at what level of performance people tolerate from their elected officials. Nearly half of our students are dropping out of high school, only one in eight gets any type of college diploma, the shootings are up and according to the FBI we have twice the rate of violent crime per capita than NYC.
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p>Meanwhile, the Mayor wants to make 2/3 of the budget cuts to school department and is threatening police layoffs. But yet no reform, despite the Financial Commission’s report on tens of millions of possible cost savings that could save those jobs. According to the Boston Municipal Research Bureau switching to the state health care plan alone would save around $25 million in health care costs which would allow us to afford to not cut a single police or teaching job.
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p>I appreciate the BMG’ers thoughtful insight into the facts about what is going on in the city and how we may improve things. We need an educated electorate to choose our leaders on more than just whether they shook someone’s hand. Our founding fathers spoke about how important an informed public was critical to democracy, and this is one of the best avenues for that in today’s weakened media world.
is that challengers need to really strain their shoe leather. Figure out who votes and shake their hand. Between now and Sep 22 you’ve got about 120 days. You shake 200 distinct voting hands each day and you’ve gotten 24,000 shakes — about 25% of the number of voters who turned up in 2005.
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p>Start shaking!
Your view of Menino is unrealistic. Menino is not a great mayor, but he is fairly harmless. Yes the quality of life in Boston is inferior to other parts of the state. Menino favors institutions over individuals and has set the city on a course to have fewer permanent residents. But the changes you are proposing are minor and will do little to change any of that. You think you’re bringing in big change but you’re not.
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p>On the problems you point out, he has few solutions but he is not necessarily the cause. For instance on education, kids fail/drop out of BPS because they are in low-income families. Same with crime, crime is going up because the economy is bad.
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p>Lots of the people on the city’s payroll are there as charity. Menino extorts small amounts of money from universities and developers and gives people jobs. Is there a better system? Sure but are you proposing it?
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p>The simple fact is that the economy of the state is weak and the cities are the most marginal areas, and so the riskiest investment. Menino at least has not destroyed business, as many liberals would like him to. He uses favoritism and honest graft to do some social spending. The state and Deval Patrick are doing their best to kill business and Menino and the other Democratic mayors have done nothing to oppose him, instead just beg for crumbs.
We only have your word on what happened at that breakfast ten whole years ago. Perhaps you caught him at a bad time. Did you make any other attempts to talk to City Hall about the issue? Is it possible that as a developer you gave him the impression that you were actually trying to drum up business? It’s not like you have not ignored any number of questions directed at you on this site that you did not feel like answering.
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p>It would be nice if you would link to reports that you cite so we can see them for ourselves without too much digging.
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p>The most recent report on the Boston Municipal Research Bureau’s web site is entitled
Personall Level Unsustainable Amid Fiscal Stress, and starts with:
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p>and in the next paragraph concludes that:
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p>That presents a very different from the one that you were trying to paint.
are the results for the various match-ups between Menino and the other candidates. He blows all of them out of the water. That kind of lead is going to be extremely difficult to overcome, especially over issues like “openness” and getting rid of the BRA, which may be good ideas but won’t have much resonance with most Bostonians, when they have more pressing worries.
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p>I also found it interesting that it seems that the Boston firefighters’ endorsement of Flaherty has hurt more than it has helped.
I don’t think those numbers are necessarily “more significant” at this point. The election is a good ways off, and people this far out are often persuadable, especially because they likely don’t know much about anyone other than Menino. My point, though, is that if Menino has indeed personally met 57% of his electorate, that may render those 57% much less persuadable than they ordinarily would be.
In November, it will be votes that count not how many people say they met Menino. Furthermore, this is a mayoral race we are talking about, not president or governor. This race is not going to get intensive daily coverage, not even on this site, and the candidates are not going to be getting a lot of free publicity. There will be few debates, and if they are anything like past ones, no more than 5% of the electorate will actually watch one of them. Menino has tons more money than the rest of the candidates combined. So a 40+ point lead is extremely significant.
personal contact translates directly into votes. ‘Nuff said.
What questions haven’t I answered? There may have been threads that I have not returned to but I am super busy and only check in every few days. I (or my staff) respond to every question that is emailed to us. Sorry if I haven’t followed protocol.
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p>I could go on and on about how Menino doesn’t respond. I followed up that meeting with a letter asking for a meeting and it was never responded to. I recently made a public records request that was ignored until I got the Secretary of States office to intervene and get the Mayor to turn over the information that the City actually has 100 million dollars more in the bank then they did a year ago at this time and more than 100 million than just last October.
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p>If you go to my website at http://www.kevinmccrea.com you will see that I have referenced that BMRB report and agree with it. I am the only candidate of Menino, Yoon, Flaherty that says flat out that we need to reduce payroll. Not sure where you get your information from. However, we should not be cutting teaching and public safety jobs first, but rather last.
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p>In the last 5 years the Mayor has added 1200 jobs to the payroll, of those 200 are police officers and 100 are teachers. (with declining enrollment) We need to look at those other 900 jobs first.
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p>Hope that answers the threads if not, please email
electkevin@gmail.com
Obviously he wanted to use the federal cash for affordable housing as a tool to pressure developers to do what he wanted. He doesn’t want you developing land willynilly without giving him a cut.
If elected, who is going to run your existing business? Are you going to be mayor 100% of your time, or are you going to continue to be involved in outside interests? How are you going to avoid conflict of interest?
I will stop doing my development work and be Mayor full time. I will continue to manage my rental properties.
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p>I don’t believe that someone should be involved in activities that have such a direct conflict of interest.
and thanks for the answer…
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p>Managing properties has no conflict, as if to say the City of Boston has no regulatory responsibilities on rental property?
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p>I have no idea what kinds of rental property you run Mr. McCrea, and I’m certainly not accusing you of being a slum lord… but the suggestion that there couldn’t possibly be a conflict of interest because you’ll only be managing (and not also developing) properties strikes me as a bit of a stretch.