Fueled By Outside Money, Boston’s Mayoral Slugfest Gets Personal

Connolly has been unable to beat back an autumn surge by his  opponent, Marty Walsh, an affable state legislator and former labor union  official. The race for Boston mayor has become a chippy, intensely personal  affair that’s breaking along cultural and class fault lines, and fueled by an  unprecedented influx of outside super PAC money. Connolly has gotten the worst  of these exchanges; by the time he sat in his debris-strewn campaign vehicle  days before Tuesday’s election, shuttling between an interview for a local  access TV show and a meeting at a senior citizen center, he sounded spent and  confessed to feeling numb. He admitted that he’ll be outgunned on the ground,  but found hope in internal polls that had the race tied. In the last days of a  campaign, you take hope wherever you can find it.

Boston hasn’t had a real, hotly contested race for mayor in 20  years, since the current officeholder, Tom Menino, won the first of his five  terms in office. It’s been 30 years since the city’s last open mayor’s race. So  the current contest is as historic for the fact that it’s happening at all as it  is for what Walsh and Connolly are saying on the campaign trail.

The contest itself has been an odd tweener of a race. Boston  retired old-school, machine-dominated politics when Menino declined to seek a  sixth term early this year. At the same time, seismic demographic changes in the  city haven’t yet re-molded its ways. Boston is a rapidly growing, gentrifying  city. Young, educated, and relatively wealthy residents are streaming into the  city’s core. These new residents are driving Boston’s economic future, but most  of the political power still rests in the city’s clannish outer  neighborhoods.

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