Political Notebook: Golden Gate earthquake felt in Boston | Healey’s two tacks

November 15, 2024

By Gintautas Dumcius

When the fog in San Francisco lifted and the mayoral election tally rolled in, the outcome caught the attention of some people 3,000 miles away in Boston.

Daniel Lurie, the heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, took out incumbent London Breed, the first Black woman to hold the job, as voters signaled their unhappiness with the state of things in the city and ignored critics who said he was buying the job.

Lurie, a philanthropist with nonprofit sector experience, spent $9 million of his own money and focused on public safety. His mother kicked in another $1 million for the campaign, which ousted an incumbent mayor of the city for the first time in nearly 30 years.

Change the names, swap out jeans for cardboard and football, and in some quarters, there are questions about whether what happened on the streets of San Francisco could play out next year in Boston. Josh Kraft, who heads up the philanthropic arm of his family’s paper products-and-New-England-Patriots empire, has spent more than a year weighing whether to challenge Mayor Michelle Wu, who is gearing up to run for a second term in a city that hasn’t ousted an incumbent in 75 years. 

Kraft has opened up his checkbook at fundraisers for other local elected officials, sat for a 4,000-word profile in Boston magazine, bent the ear of political experts, and hired a consulting firm, Keyser Public Strategies. (Eileen O’Connor, one of the firm’s partners, chairs the board of MassINC, the parent organization that publishes CommonWealth Beacon.)

But while the chattering class inside and outside Boston City Hall loves to speculate and stir up trouble, some big caveats apply when answering whether one city’s tale is a preview of another’s election cycle, which could feature additional mayoral contenders, like South Boston City Councilor Ed Flynn.

If there is a spirited race for mayor next year, Boston will be in uncharted political waters, since Wu’s recent predecessors, Tom Menino and Marty Walsh, faced either fairly weak challengers or none at all in Menino’s case one year.

What’s more, super PACs – outside groups that can raise and spend cash with few restrictions – weren’t around 30 years ago when Menino’s reign began, and weren’t a factor in 2017, when Walsh cruised to reelection. Look for that to possibly change in 2025, particularly if the Kraft family decides to empty a cardboard box of cash into a super PAC, or the unions and environmental advocates wade in with theirs.

Then there is the Donald Trump factor: His return to the White House in January makes it “much harder for a rich white guy to run against the city’s first elected female mayor of color,” the Boston Globe’s Adrian Walker noted this week. Josh Kraft’s father, Robert, was a Trump friend until a few years ago, and the family has donated to both Republicans and Democrats over the years. Lurie, for his part, has a long history of working in Democratic Party politics.

But back to the two cities. Overall, Boston remains one of the country’s safest, with a much lower crime rate than San Francisco, which is also the more expensive place to live – one of the few places in the US that holds that distinction over Boston. 

San Francisco also allows ranked choice voting, meaning voters were able to rank up to 10 candidates. (Lurie’s strategy included lobbying voters to choose him second if he wasn’t their first choice.) While some activists want Boston to shift to that style, it’s unlikely to happen by November 2025.

And when it comes to the mood of the electorate, Boston voters have yet to indicate widespread unhappiness. In San Francisco, a progressive district attorney and several school board members were recalled in 2022, and some unions soured on Breed. Boston saw two progressive incumbent councilors lose their respective preliminaries in 2023, the first to do so in 40 years, but they were replaced by progressive candidates who were prominently backed by a union-supported super PAC and Wu herself.

Healey’s two tacks

Since the presidential election, Gov. Maura Healey has taken two paths, and two different tones, in responding to the results.

In her post-election press conference the day after, hours after Donald Trump’s victory became apparent, Healey said, “Whether you voted for the president-elect or not, we see you.” Hours later, she was on MSNBC, saying governors and attorneys general will “hold the line once again” on the rule of law and democracy.

On Thursday, speaking to reporters after testifying on a health care-related event at Suffolk University, Healey took aim at Trump’s nominee to run the US Department of Justice, Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican who has faced ethics investigations on Capitol Hill, including sexual misconduct allegations. “As somebody who was a former law enforcement official and attorney general, I find [the pick] totally unserious and appalling. Donald Trump should withdraw that immediately,” she said of the Gaetz nomination.

The more conciliatory tone was apparent in an earlier answer to a health care question, when as she said, almost in an aside, “I don’t like this term ‘red states.” The political term has been in circulation for more than 20 years. 

Asked to elaborate, Healey seemed to take a page from Barack Obama’s notes, when the future president came to the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston to deliver a career-defining speech that urged Americans to move beyond the partisan divide. “The whole divide between red states, blue states – we’re one country, you know? We’re the United States of America,” she said.

Healey added: “I’m focused on delivering for folks here, the needs of people here. Lowering costs, increasing housing are the top things I’m focused on. And as we go forward of course we’re going to work to protect people’s rights and freedoms here….we just need to find a way to work together in this country.”