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.