Photo by James Sanna | Banker & Tradesman Staff
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu walked away from the preliminary election in the city’s mayoral race Tuesday with the biggest margin of victory any mayor has had in a while.
She won an even 72 percent of the vote to the 23.1 percent her main challenger, longtime nonprofit executive Josh Kraft, took in – nearly a 49-point margin.
The incumbent mayor took 264 out of the city’s 275 precincts, with only South Boston and a small corner of southeast Dorchester going to Kraft.
Kraft tried to make housing affordability and development policy one of the centerpieces of his campaign, alongside the controversy over Wu’s plans for the city schools to share the city’s White Stadium with a professional soccer team.
Did that get any traction with voters? We talked with one of Boston’s most experienced political reporters, MASSterlist editor Gin Dumcius, to hear what he saw on the campaign trail.
The short version: Right now, President Donald Trump and the threats he’s made towards the city are all anyone seems to be focused on, even to the exclusion of perennial angst about the current state and future of the Boston Public Schools.
But if the mayor’s 48.9-percentage-point margin is prologue for the general election in November, it will hand Wu even more power to push her agenda through, including upzoning commercial districts in the city’s neighborhoods through the Squares+Streets program and continuing reforms to how developments are approved.
Watch our full conversation:
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