It was pretty easy to guess that the meager support a Boston Olympics was receiving in early polls would quickly dissipate as the details spilled out.
But who would have guessed it would happen this fast?
The latest, a statewide poll released Wednesday by the Emerson College Polling Society,asked the question, “Do you want Boston to be the host city for the 2024 Summer Olympics?” Respondents said “no” by a 48-42 margin.
The closer to Boston, the lower the support: in Suffolk County, where Boston is the county seat, the poll showed 59 percent opposed and just 36 percent for.
Given the lack of people paying attention, support will continue to crumble as more people find out just what is at stake here.
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One other note from the article:
No one in Boston or Colorado Springs either a) vetted the language or b) realized the impact of language in the “joinder” agreement between the city and USOC that not only prevented city employees from criticizing the bid but also asked they promote it. That effectively denied free speech to a group that would include police, fire, teachers, sanitation and more….
Walsh had called the offending clause, “boilerplate,” but there is no evidence of it in any agreement Chicago signed in its failed 2016 bid effort.
If the language denying Boston employees, officials and representatives free speech is just boilerplate language – routine and to be ignored — why wasn’t it included in Chicago’s bid?
In what other ways is Boston willing to go above and beyond to crack down on free speech and our constitutional rights to ‘win’ the games?
What’s noteworthy about this poll is that its timeframe included the (partial) release of the bid and what I’ll call “joindergate” for lack of another word. The more people find out, the more they know it’s a bad deal we’re being sold.
It’s starting to resemble the guy who wandered Athens with a lamp.
In the broader world the qualified support species is displacing the avid booster species in the way ring necked pheasants have decreased due to a reduction in thicket coverage while the forest preferring turkeys are having a huge comeback.
The grouse population is doing fine and growing.
Maybe the way to read it is that most people weren’t paying attention and the news cycle timing resulted in a set of booby trap explosions around location and civil liberties issues before the booster opinion stroke squads had proper time to deploy and convince their imaginary chumps that ankle grabbing is the thing to do?
And we know the polls and public opinion won’t mean anything if we can’t get a vote. The momentum may be shifting, but there is still plenty of time before the bid is defeated.
But I am very happy with the trend, especially as we move from gossamer concept to grubby details.
It’s hard to object to the lace filigree of vague concept allure but grubby details draw opponents like trout to a mayfly hatch.
A six-point deficit two years out is “dead”. More than 4 out of 10 support, but there are no real supporters.
Confirmation bias detected.
maybe dying would be more accurate, but the way these kinds of projects move in the polls makes dead pretty apt.
This is not the type of thing in which the more people know about it, the more they want it. It’s the opposite — and it’s been that way in democratic countries for a long time now.
Is soft support and opposition. Few people are as dogmatic as the Boston2024 committee, or you. Most of us are waiting for details with varying levels of openness.
Yes, one side saying “here are all the horrible rumors!” is proving effective. And a wave of sparkling ads about greeting the world and improving Boston to do so will prove effective on the other side. I can’t imagine getting 80% support as the IOC asks in any democratic society (pretty much for anything, really), but crowing about a small swing in a poll with no published margin of error seems premature. But hey, whatever floats your boat.
… as if there are built in protections against an electorate with mood swings and low information? If they could sell an unalloyed evil like casinos they can sell something like the Olympics (which do have legit good and bad points) without breaking a sweat. The more I talk about it the more I’m seeing the anger over casinos boiling over to the Olympics… The support for the Olympics also (according to this poll) seems to break along support for casinos with Western Mass supporting them and closer to the city getting less so…. though that broadens the MOE for city-dwellers…
FYI, the poll MOE was 4.1% at a confidence 95% (It was at the end of the press release). The Olympics were only one corner of the hat the pollsters were testing: they asked about sports teams and protesters
Which is like a maybe. There isn’t much unqualified pom pom waving unconditional support. Nor is some groundswell of public clamor in the offing.
The conditionals are more likely to turn toward no when the fundamentals sink in, like the poor site choices, when taken in total.
That is probably the main pattern to watch, conversion from maybe to hell no and that is what I find comforting as an adversary.
I live in Boston and don’t know a single person who wants the Olympics to come here. I am sure they must exist somewhere, but I haven’t met one yet.
I was interested to observe that the letters printed in the Globe today contains one on the pro-side from a guy living in Reading and two on the opposing side from JP and Melrose. The guy from Reading said it would “jump-start a vision for our city’s future” (meaning Boston, not Reading). I wonder if suburban visions for the future of Boston may have a different emphasis than that of people who actually live in it.
It’s awful and very self absorbed.
but don’t get me wrong. I was not trying to trash Reading. It is just that I think that people living outside of the city are less likely to put as much weight on the upheaval and potential cost to Boston residents and homeowners.
I assure you people get pretty oblivious to the realities of a city from that comfy distance.
As a kid I was allowed to go to Cambridge on my own but Boston was evil.
I don’t imagine it’s changed all that much. It was a seething heap of go go real estate speculations, a real fever. It was also heroin central for the North Shore in the early 70s.
I stopped by a few times last year waiting on the 136 bus. There are newer mall culture simulacra buildings near the depot. We used to call it ‘downtown’ and ‘uptown’ looks like it had some odd traffic calming features setup.
It also looks like every last particle of sellable land has been turned into strange bulwarks of large apartment/condo complexes making it seem like even more of a barracks for the American Dream than it did when Nike Missiles were there.
BOSTON 2024 EXECUTIVE BID COMMITTEE
COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY ENGAGEMENT COMMITTEE Co-Chairs:
Robert Caret, President of University of Massachusetts
Katie Lapp, Executive Vice President of Harvard University
Gloria Larson, President of Bentley University
Israel Ruiz, Executive Vice President of MIT
GOVERNMENT AND COMMUNITY OUTREACH COMMITTEE Co-Chairs:
Former U.S. Senator William “Mo” Cowan, Senior Vice President and COO at ML Strategies
William F. Coyne, Esq.
Massachusetts Senator Eileen Donoghue
INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY COMMITTEE Co-Chairs:
Joseph L. Hooley, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, State Street Corporation
Juliette Kayyem, Professor at Harvard Kennedy School and CEO of JNK Solutions Group
Jeff Leiden, CEO of Vertex Pharmaceuticals
Bill Teuber, Vice Chairman of EMC
PUBLIC RELATIONS AND MARKETING COMMITTEE Co-Chairs:
Karen Kaplan, Chairman and CEO of Hill Holliday
Doug Rubin, Founding Partner of Northwind Strategies
OLYMPIC AND PARALYMPIC MOVEMENT COMMITTEE Co-chairs:
Cheri Blauwet, MD, Sports Medicine Physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Spaulding Rehabilitation Network (Paralympic Athlete)
Ralph Cox, Founding Member and Principal of Redgate Real Estate Advisors (1980 U.S. Hockey Team)
Bob Reynolds, President and CEO of Putnam Investments (Trustee, US Ski and Snowboard Team Foundation)
FUNDRAISING AND FINANCE COMMITTEE Co-Chairs:
Roger Crandall, President and CEO of Mass Mutual Financial Group
Steve Pagliuca, Managing Director at Bain Capital and Co-Owner of the Boston Celtics
MASTER PLANNING COMMITTEE Co-Chairs:
Tom Alperin, President of National Development
David Manfredi, Founder and Principal of Elkus-Manfredi Architects
LEGAL COMMITTEE Chair:
R. Robert Popeo, Chairman of Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky & Popeo, P.C.
2024boston.org has had this listed posted on their website for quite a while.
Doug Rubin’s name was on it the whole time, far as I know.
This is not news.
I wrote about this back in November.
I co-organized an Olympics opposition meeting in JP back in November, and Doug Rubin and some other people from Northwind showed up to see what we were up to. We allowed them to stay because, unlike Boston 2024, we have open meetings.
There are at least three other identifiable Dems on the list.
If we do get a public vote on this will it likely be just Boston, statewide, or something in between? Also, which of those do y’all think it SHOULD be? I can honestly see arguments for all of those options.
The procedures and requirements for statewide vs local (nonbinding) ballot questions are quite different, and AFAIK those interested in a ballot question have not made any decisions.
I think there should be a statewide vote because it will definitely affect the the State budget. There should also be votes in towns with proposed venues. If a town turns down hosting a venue, the organizers can try to find another place to put it. If the City of Boston votes no, then that would probably kill it.
The big question for me is exactly what should be voted on.
“Do you support or oppose holding the Olympic Games in and around Boston in the summer of 2024.” Things like costs, property, rights, etc. would be part of the campaign, but I can’t imagine how one could write a question with those details without it being somewhat loaded.
that there will be different questions filed at the state and local levels. At the state level, there will need to be a lot of legal craft in the drafting and there may even be more than one question from groups of different persuasions. A simple question about no funding for the Olympics would have to be written so as to not prohibit normal capital plans for the next decade that have already been authorized. Moreover, if the legislature enacts laws authorizing the Olympics and they appropriate even so little as one dollar, these laws cannot be overturned by ballot initiative. It is highly unlikely that the legislature will act before the IOC decides on its choice in 2017 so Olympic opponents will likely act before then, if only to make the bid difficult for the IOC to accept.
Count on Doug Rubin and company to try to enlist Spoonworks to do their bidding in a counter measure for ballot access.
Any ballot proponent will need to find $500,000 just to get the signatures in the two step process needed to surmount a legislature that will not likely accept a ballot question (if the legislature is inclined to oppose the Olympics, others won’t need to go to the ballot).
As individual cities and towns consider their own ballot questions, a squeeze will be applied to the bidders. If Cambridge, Somerville or Lowell object to the games in their spaces, then the bid backers have an even bigger problem to face. Each community that says no makes it more difficult for the bid to proceed.
I will state again that I am not opposed to the Olympics coming here. The bidders just have to do it right or they will get the snot kicked out of them. In this instance, it is easier to play defense than offense.
And while someone mentioned that there are at least three identifiable Dems on the Olympic Committee list, I counted five alone who have sought or held public office, in addition to Rubin plus DeLeo’s attorney (Popeo), plus, plus, plus. This game is wired and it will not be played by amateurs.
…for the non-binding question by location this likely to be? Unless this involves rewriting law I don’t think the legislature would be involved either way, and I’m not sure MA allows questions requiring/prohibiting funding like CA does making the state so difficult to manage fiscally.
It was I who said three, but looking again I can find four that I know of who have sought or held office, all Dems: Mo Cowan, Eileen Donoghue, Juliette Kayyem, and Steve Pagliuca. I was not aware that Popeo is Deleo’s attorney.
$200,000 last year to represent him during the Probation Department trial.
I’m hearing a rework of the old Addams Family theme.
“Popeo gave Deleo a chance to get awayo,”
“Deleo gives Popeo more weight to have his sayo,”
“Popeo and Deleo now hoist a foist to see.”
It uses “Coming Through The Rye”
When Deleo meets Popeo coming to the trial,
Then Popeo tells Deleo ‘Oh what briefs we’ll file'”
This could be rare sport. If the ward heelers won’t go easily, there’s nothing stopping us from regularly ridiculing them.
The other earworm was driving me crazy.
The least I can do is try provide an antidote from one slice of my nonsense by coughing up a different one.
I believe it represents an advance in musical and poetic form, as well as in specificity of subject matter.
It also allows those who wish to build out their own added stanzas. It is a true folkloric form rather than the faux form of a television theme jingle.
It would really be a fun challenge to come up with a full ballad along the lines of the Beverly Hillbillies, even though there once was a band called the Beacon Hillbillies with mandolin from the legendary local Jimmy Ryan.
It would be nice to see the corporatist wing of the democratic party finally fall on its conceited face. And this is a wonderful opportunity to stoke that overdue outcome.
In a sense, it reminds me of Andrew Jackson’s ruthless battle with Nicholas Biddle. This Neo-Biddle mandarin gaggle here essentially got carried away by its own expanding self importance and needs to be throttled, like yesterday.
I oppose this mess for the same reason I’d oppose any attempt to jam something that doesn’t fit on-the-ground realities. An enlightened polity does not live on credentials alone. You kinda have to engage the grubby public, early and often.
And this is particularly noticeable when the mandarins concoct something so gloriously high handed.
The most compelling opposition basis I see here has come from Mimolette and Hesterprynne when they almost casually observe that the way the boosters have gone about this is the best reason to question their fitness to be foisting the mess in the first place.
It makes me think of John McPhee’s great quote summarizing Anchorage Alaska along the lines of.. “Anyone who made a city this badly shouldn’t be allowed to build another one.”
Are credentials and wealth enough to get this crappy contraption over the line or is the time at hand to finally move beyond them?
And don’t overlook the potential of a ballot question in said host city. It would be funny to see Bostonians punt as well.
It is interesting to see the sudden cessation of booster fluff in local legacy media as if the boosters are deer in the headlights of unanticipated and broad based hostility. Wouldn’t it be in their interest to keep some steady run of support articles, however shallow, running in as many media outlets as possible?
Maybe it’s a back to the drawing board moment to reset the PR plan.