Connolly, a three term city councilor, has built his campaign around education reform. A veteran of battles with Boston’s entrenched teachers union over extending the school day, loosening seniority protections, and upending a school assignment system that’s a legacy of the city’s old busing days, he argues that the issue is central to both the retention of young, middle-class families, and to the advancement of the lower-income students who fill Boston’s schools. “This is a young city,” he says, “and we want to nurture all that young talent, all that diversity, to really go to a place where the city’s never gone before.”
The two candidates share broad agreement on the urgency of improving city schools; on the need to ramp up housing construction while spreading wealth out of the booming downtown, and into the neighborhoods; and on the danger that Boston is losing its middle class, and becoming a city exclusively of rich and poor residents.
But messy identity politics lie underneath these broad policy agreements. Boston is an overwhelmingly Democratic city, and its mayoral contest has become a tortured referendum on the city’s evolving identity.
Walsh enjoys deep support in the blue collar Irish enclaves along Boston’s eastern edge. At the same time, he has also become the darling of the progressive activists who catapulted Elizabeth Warren past Scott Brown. He’s pulled together an odd-looking coalition of lunchbucket Democrats, black and Hispanic politicians, union activists, and ultra-liberal whites from outside the downtown core. These folks have nothing in common, except for Marty Walsh.