BOSTON (WHDH) - With two women of color advancing to the final election, we now know history will be made in Boston, where residents are poised to elect their first mayor who is not a white man.
City Councilors Michelle Wu and Annissa Essaibi George will be competing to become the city’s first woman of color holding the top job. According to 7NEWS pollster, the preliminary played out just as he predicted but the results have been a long time coming.
“Remember it was only 100 years ago women got the right to vote. You know, it was 160 years ago Black men had the right to vote,” he explained. “So, I think some of those voting changes that gave people greater access to the ballot box is being shown in the democratic process and people voting for their candidates.”
However, Boston will not make history by electing its first Black mayor. Kimball said acting Mayor Kim Janey split the Black vote with City Councilor Andrea Campbell and former Director of Economic Development John Barros.
Kimball said that had Janey or Campbell been running alone, they likely would have easily advanced to the general election.
Cheryl Clyburn Crawford, who runs MassVote, a nonprofit trying to increase voter turnout in minority communities, warned against blaming the candidates.
“If you don’t your vote doesn’t count, right? So, what is there to say,” she asked. “In the Black community we did not come out to vote in the numbers we should have.”
It is the Black vote that could be the deciding factor in who is elected the next mayor of Boston. Kimball said Wu and Essaibi George will be fighting hard to add Janey and Campbell’s voters to their column.
“We tend to vote for people who look like us. So that’s something that’s going to be at play here in the general election,” he said. “Where are these voters going to go and really are they going to be able to motivate them to come out and vote again.”
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