The Harvard Crimson and Cambridge Chronicle report that eight of nine incumbent Cambridge City Councillors were re-elected Tuesday. Transfer votes from DFA Cambridge endorsee Jesse Gordon helped put newcomer Craig Kelley over the top, and shut out fellow DFA candidate Sam Seidel. So much for Party discipline. None of the challengers endorsed by DFA were elected and the two incumbents endorsed by the group finished seventh and last respectively.
"Thanks to Cambridge’s idiosyncratic proportional representation (PR) system, Kelley owes his unexpected victory partly to the failed campaigns of his closest political competition. A trio of progressive challengers — including Gordon, Kelley, and Seidel — scored well with Cambridge’s progressive voters. When Seidel and Gordon were eventually eliminated in last night’s tally, a substantial number of their votes transferred down to Kelley, boosting him over incumbent David Maher and onto the council," the Crimson said.
Gordon’s 615 votes went primarily to Kelley and Seidel after he was eliminated, the Crimson said. Defeated incumbent David Maher’s votes put incumbent Ken Reeves and Kelley over the top, and eliminated Seidel, the newspaper added.
"Kelley, an environmental consultant, also ran in 2003, placing 12th.Former council candidate Matthew S. DeBergalis said Kelley’s pastsupport gave him a strong advantage over this year’s other first-timechallengers," the Crimson said.
(From an insider on Jesse Gordon’s campaign) Regarding “party discipline” – please understand that Cambridge politics runs deep. Factors such as incumbent vs. challenger status, professional background, and neighborhood base loom large; in contrast, DFA is a fledgling group, in a city where no one is acknowledged until they’ve been around a decade or three. It’s no surprise that Cambridge voters, even Cambridge progressives, drew a clearer distinction between “challenger/incumbent” than “DFA/non-DFA”.
“Party discipline” is not a factor here – Craig Kelley, Sam Seidel, and Jesse Gordon are all registered Democrats. For that matter, so is David Maher, the defeated incumbent.It is rare for an incumbent to be defeated in Cambridge. This year, we had three strong challengers, and thanks to Cambridge’s single transferrable vote system, that boosted the stronger of the three high enough to defeat an incumbent.What did fail, though it was close, was the alliance between Gordon and Seidel. The idea was that by recommending each other as #2, we’d assure that one of them would elect the other – whoever got more #1 votes and transfers from weak incumbents would be boosted when the other was eliminated. As it turned out, Jesse sent 162 transfer votes to Sam Seidel, and 111 to Craig Kelley. That was not enough of a margin to push Sam over Craig’s lead, so two rounds later he was eliminated and his transfers elected Craig.What succeeded, though, was former challenger John Pitkin’s idea of challenger slate – vote for these four challengers at the top of your ballot, in whichever order you prefer, and you will make it much more likely that one of them wins.Craig Kelley’s big advantage was that this was his second run, and he had a pretty big base to build from 2003. Of the three strong challengers, he had the most #1 votes, and stayed ahead through enough rounds to be the one elected by people voting a Pitkin-style challenger slate.The Crimon’s analysis is quite good.(They do miss the fact that Jesse Gordon actually had accumulated 704 ballots by the time he was eliminated – until we see the raw ballot data, we won’t know the actual distribution of #2 votes on Jesse’s 615 #1 ballots)It’s Cambridge’s unusual proportional representation + STV system that makes things like alliances between candidates, and a challenger slate, effective in proportion to the number of voters who go for it. It changes the whole way people campaign. I think that’s one of the lessons people not in Cambridge should take from this election.(Alliances are effective in “approval voting”, which is effectively what cities like Boston and Somerville have for at-large city council – but under such a system, alliances do not have power proportional to the number of voters who support it. Rather, an effective alliance will either win or lose together. It’s a way of multiplying the winner-take-all effect.)
It’s also worth note that it clearly damaged progressive incumbents to have progressive challengers running. There is no doubt that Simmons, Reeves, Davis, Decker, Murphy (and Maher!!!) would have performed better without challenges from the left slugging them for the last six months. I do think its a pretty major loss to the city to lose Maher, but welcome Mr. Kelley. Lets hope he contributes as much to the property taxes and zoning debates as David did.