Boston.com says Sam Yoon is in for Mayor meaning a busy election in Boston. Three candidates mean a preliminary and a lot of campaigning. Let’s hope that the Bostonians who came out for Obama and Patrick will realize that this race is just as important to their lives.
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This is great news for all of us. This means we are going to have a real campaign for Mayor of Boston. I’m looking forward to hearing from all the candidates over the coming months. So glad there is a real progressive in the race with a 21st century take on city government.
Change has been in the air lately. I am sure Menino is not too happy to run against a change candidate like Sam. It is time Boston had new leadership – sixteen years is long enough for one person.
Mayor Kevin White was mayor for 3 terms, and he wisely decided not to run for a fourth term.
Thought about running again in 1983 and decided not to, had polls showing he could win again despite 40+% negative rating.
Kevin White was in there for too long, imho. Kevin White did the right thing by not running for a fourth term. His own arrogance and enamourment of power, coupled by Boston’s school busing crisis, ultimately killed him politically.
It’s tough enough to beat a machine politician like Menino one on one. It’s much much harder when the “change” or the “anti” forces are split between two challengers.
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p>Yoon, Flaherty, McCrea… v. Menino. If they all stay in, I’d expect Menino to win something like 55-25-13-7.
There will be a preliminary in September. Final will be just the top two.
I get a run-off with a plurality, but even if Menino takes a majority? I googled around, but just got city council election results, which may not be indicative of election law for the mayor’s race…
For Mayor and District City Council: Top two vote-getters move onto final (no matter the spread)
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p>For City Council At-Large: Top eight vote-getters move onto final (no matter the spread)
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p>Basically the Preliminary Election narrows the field to double the number of people that there are seats for and those people move onto the Final Election.
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p>1 Mayoral seat = 2 candidates
1 City Council District seat (9 districts) = 2 candidates per district
4 City Council At-Large seats = 8 candidates
Menino and Flaherty seem to me to be one one side of a political divide that Yoon and McCrea are on the other side of. My impression is that the latter side will end up mostly Yoon, even though the former side may have higher turnout. Overall, looks like both Flaherty and Yoon have reasonable chances. A lot will depend on their campaign strategies, of course, and we haven’t seen those yet.
but my instinct is that the breakdown of the political divide is irrelevant.
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p>Menino might not take 55 one-on-one, but with the non-Menino vote split, none of the other candidates will get enough cross-appeal traction and momentum.
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p>Just instincts here, very early in the race. Maybe after the prelim the non-Menino losers endorse the non-Menino winner and he catches fire… but I’d really be surprised.
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p>Who knows — maybe Tommy calls it a career.
I really don’t see how any of these candidates are going to beat Menino, assuming he chooses to run again.
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p>On the other hand, having more candidates will make it much harder for Menino to duck out of debates.
and then people will be wishing for fresh blood, so to speak.
After all, when he ran four years ago, he got a bunch of “attaboys”, but nobody expected him to win against John Connolly, Patricia White, Ed Flynn, and Matt O’Malley for an open at-large seat: they all had more connections within the city and the political realm. It’s only in retrospect that it makes sense that he won. Who would have thought that Boston would actually want a former schoolteacher or a housing expert to be in charge of anything in Boston?
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p>This year will be similar: there’s no reason to expect that Sam will win, especially against two Boston insiders, other than that he sees the problems that are in Boston better and has solutions that the other guys can’t see or can’t enact.
Sal DiMasi endorsed Yoon in his first race and it helped him greatly
And he did know DiMasi from past work with affordable housing, but the endorsement’s not something that Sam had in his back pocket from Day 1 when he first started running. It would have been a lot easier if DiMasi had endorsed him earlier. đŸ˜‰
This:
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p>is where fresh blood is needed, so to speak.
Anyway, there will be a debate or two, which should be fun to watch.
He’s just hired a technology/data/political consulting group (Cence and Cincotti) according to his OCPF records. So that is an obvious check in the YES column. But maybe they’re just on to run the numbers for him with a Menino, Yoon, Flaherty, McCrea Preliminary Election and a Menino/Yoon or Menino/Flaherty Final Election. We’ll see…
Although there will be a run off this certainly helps the incumbent.
I would like to know if Yoon cut a deal with Menino.
Don’t know Yoon that well and I know he is a darling of we progressives, but he strikes me as a lightweight.
I agree, this looks like a move that will play to Menino’s benefit. I can’t see Yoon winning this election- he’s not a Boston native, the majority of his campaign funds come from out of state donors, and he has less experience than either Flaherty or Menino. From what I’ve seen, he also has a pretty poor attendance record in the City Council, which will surely be brought up as the campaign progresses.
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p>I’d say Yoon’s candidacy will just serve to divide the anti-Menino vote and make him harder to topple.
Let’s assume that Menino wins the preliminary election in September. Does having two serious candidates whipping up the anti-Menino vote until that point make any difference or do the third place finisher’s votes just stay home/default to Menino in November?
Some people in my ward called Barack Obama lightweight, and look where he is now! Like Obama, it didn’t take Sam too long to realize that structural change in government must come from the highest office. Sam is ready to lead Boston in a new direction.
Yoon as done an admirable job raising money. He raised more than enough to bankroll his successful re-election campaign in 2007 even as Arroyo faltered.
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p>He has made an impressive show of raising money from Asian-Americans around the country and in boosting his “war chest” with $80 K for the end-of-year filing in 2008.
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p>Yet, despite this efforts, Yoon currently has just $140,000 in the bank. Menino has more than $1.4 million in the bank (ten times Yoon’s resources). Flaherty has about $590,000.
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p>Unless thinks really explode for Yoon (and without the support of Boston’s development and legal “consulting” community I find it hard to believe they will), he simply does not have the resources to compete in a race that will almost certainly feature two million dollar campaigns.
Yoon’s $140,000 comes mostly from out-of-state Asian American donors. Meaning that while Yoon’s already having a hard time garnering the same kind of financial support Menino and Flaherty have, he’s having an even harder time garnering support locally. Californians may be able to give Yoon their money, but they can’t vote in a mayoral election. I think Yoon’s limited experience and meager record will keep him from substantially challanging candidates who have longstanding roots in Boston.
but don’t forget that two of the people Yoon beat to get on the council had the last names of White and Flynn.
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p>He’s still a long-shot, but Boston roots don’t count for everything.
that he seems to be focusing on Asian support and Asian support alone. The Globe’s coverage of his candidacy promotes him as a “pioneer” who is “breaking barriers,” but I haven’t seen him reach out beyond the Asian American communities in California and New York. I’m sure the black and latino communities in Boston will require a little more than “Is a Minority” when selecting someone to represent their interests.
Most of Yoon’s contributions come from Boston – they are just small donations from ordinary people. It is hard to get the fat cats to go against the establishment. Why should he not use the Asian angle to raise money – elections are expensive and he needs to get his message out. At least he wont be in the pocket of the city’s developers.
58% of his contributions (above $50) come from out-of-state.
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p>Those under $50, I concede, probably come mostly from in the state but we have no way of knowing.
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p>I agree with you that out-of-state contributions are no worse (ethically) than those from in-state and better than those from the city’s developers.
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p>But I also woudl argue that the lack of support (to the tune of millions of dollars) from traditional Boston donors is a bad sign for Yoon’s candidacy.
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p>He simply does not (despite incredible efforts in December 2008) have enough to really compete.
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p>Hennigan got crushed and ended up with a campaign debt (money she mostly loaned herself from second-mortgage “income) of over $700,000. Yoon does not have that level of personal finances.
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Maybe you should stop by more often. There’s a reason Sam gets votes in Black and Latino communities in Boston.
I hope his attendance record as mayor is better than his attendance record as councillor.
Is this about the budget meetings that he skipped in his first few months when he wasn’t on the budget committee and had no decision-making power? I don’t show up for meetings where I have no vote, I already know what they’re going to cover, and I’m not part of the committee, either.
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p>Nobody ever talks about the meetings that Flaherty didn’t attend for committees that he wasn’t part of. Why? Because the attendance doesn’t matter and there’s no official attendance record. Unless you’re Sam.
I don’t see why Menino should be afraid of this crew.
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p>Again and again candidates have come at Menino with more activist platforms and been destroyed. This is because Menino is a little to the left of the voting population. So candidates who come in to the left of Menino are already chasing the smaller part of the vote.
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p>The real challenge to Menino will come from the right, somebody who believes that there is a place in the city for good wages in private, for-profit ventures and not just in collecting more state and federal handouts for white elephant development projects that chew up our last open spaces.
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p>Maybe McCrea could do it but it looks to me like he’s in the bag.
I think he was great, but he’s done.
It was my honor to serve in his Administration for 10 years and I’m proud of those years in government, seeing efforts like Main Streets, Backstreets, “Leading the Way” I and II (affordable housing, much of it via the City’s CDC and non-profit network), the Office of New Bostonians, Boston 2:00 to 6:00, Empowerment Zone funding, the Youth Opportunities program for at-risk youth, dramatic expansion of parkland such as Millenium Park and the East Boston Greenway and much more.
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p>Today, there are new issues on which his Administration is making its mark, “Green” jobs and technology initiatives, foreclosure prevention and protection, new approaches to public safety in partnership with the Boston Foundation and others, “Boston About Results” to track city service delivery, a public health initiative to reduce minority disparities, a $40 million plan to jump start development projects, revitalization of public housing developments such as Washington – Beech and others, a plan for the national stimulus money, partnering with Mayor Bloomberg of New York to chair Mayors Against Illegal Guns and more.
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p>At 66, Tom Menino still makes it to more neighborhood events than any of his rivals. After 16 years, his favorability is still high and a huge percentage of Bostonians claims to have met him. He is particularly well regarded in the African-American community, which was the strong foundation of the Patrick and Obama campaigns in the City. And as Bay Windows has pointed out, he has been in the forefront of GLBT issues in the City. He supported the SEIU janitors fight for better wages and conditions and he supports that union’s effort to organize local hospitals.
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p>I’m sure that if the Mayor decides to run, he will have a substantive record on which to campaign and a sense of where the city needs to go the next four years. I don’t always agree with him, I supported Gov Patrick and Senator Chang-Diaz early on (and Hillary, hey, 2 of 3) and I think City Hall should stay downtown in some form, but comparing the records, I’ll stick with the incumbent.
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p>One final caveat and disclosure, I did once buy Kevin McCrea’s Red Sox seat via the Sox’ now defunct “Replay” system for season ticket holders. It’s a great seat, first row in right field, so Kevin, since you’ll be campaigning around the clock and won’t be able to make any games, I am available for the Yankees and Mets series’ …
Menino was a manager, not a visionary. Which means nothing dramatic to ooh and aah over, no national headlines, but a city that was (more or less) run better than average for that time period. Plus, he gets points from me for being the most prominent Massachusetts politician (alongside Ted K) who loved his job and wasn’t just biding his time until a better job opened up.
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p>But he’s out of ideas, and out of approaches. So are the people around him. Can we find him an ambassadorship somewhere?
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p>PS: Because it’s so awesome:
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That video rules!
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p>Mostly right worth a 5. He still has a vision and a dream to be an excellent manager and he still thinks with plain hard work he can revitalize the neighborhoods. Drive around the neighborhoods of this city to see how the burned out vacant lots have been transformed into affordable housing.
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p>Perfect. Worth two 6s. Saw him a week ago come into the third Saturday monring event, feeling cranky with a left over cold only to lumber up to the podium and absolutly light up a very diverse crowd of 400 low wage workers from SEIU 615 with a thumping speech about the importance of their Union and their jobs keeping the city safe and clean. And then he stayed for another 45 minutes to listen to Barney Frank’s speech (Thank God I didn’t have to follow him.)
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Love it. Worth three 6s bet Tom will love it too.
Well, maybe.
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It seems to me that Flaherty won’t offer anything drastically different than Menino, just Menino with a younger face, attitude, and slightly more innovative list of priorities. Yoon is the real challenger. If it comes down to Menino-Yoon that’s a race, if it comes down to Menino-Flaherty I suspect it will mirror the Menino-Hennigan numbers with maybe a few more points against Menino.
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p>What is more important is taking down Dan Conley that man is a real incompetent. Make fun of Menino all you want he has done a decent job, the time for a change argument applies much better to Conley. I am sure Flaherty would make a great DA and he should focus on that challenge and let Yoon take on Menino.
Like virtually all political junkies, I enjoy this horse-race analysis, but we are skipping perhaps the most important question: who would be the best Mayor of the City of Boston? Back to where we started — Sam Yoon’s candidacy: what has Yoon actually accomplished while on City Council and how does that predict what he would accomplish as Mayor? The Herald today provided a devastating list of what (little) Yoon has done substantively. It was thin to say the least. Say what you will about Flaherty, he has a record to run on, and for better or worse, so does the Mayor. Maybe this is too old school of me, but I actually think candidates should be qualified and have experience.
Funny you say that. I heard a few people say the same thing along the way about our current President. Somehow he was able to get by that criticism and beat the Clinton’s and the GOP… I’m just saying I don’t think that’s a deal breaker.