Menino will face Flaherty in final
Incumbent mayor claims lion’s share of votes, Flaherty beats Yoon, McCrea to challenge. Of Boston’s 353,683 voters, roughly 80,000 residents turned out to cast ballots yesterday
And then there were two.
Thomas Menino, the four-term incumbent, and City Councilor Michael Flaherty will battle for the mayor of Boston on Nov. 3 after besting City Councilor Sam Yoon and businessman Kevin McCrea in yesterday’s preliminary election.
“We have a great city here,” Menino told Metro yesterday afternoon. “I hear too often from folks running for this job that there are a lot of problems. ... But we continue to grow and manage our finances better than most cities.”
“I’m excited to be in this race, as a city kid,” Flaherty said at a Dorchester campaign stop. “I’m the candidate in this race who can learn from Boston’s past and at the same time embrace our collective future.”
“It’s exciting,” Quinn Eureka, 30, who voted in Jamaica Plain, said. “It seems like a pretty active race. It’s important to make my vote heard.”
Yet the turnout yielded differing opinions.
“I think the turnout is great,” exclaimed MassVote Executive Director Avi Green. “It means we’ll have a barn burner of a race.”
However, the head of the city’s election department, Geraldine Cuddyer, expressed some disappointment. She had hoped to reach a 30 percent turnout rate given the “unprecedented” mayoral and city council races along with good weather.
A look back at early strategy
Throughout the mayoral campaign, City Councilors Michael Flaherty and Sam Yoon repeatedly blasted Mayor Thomas Menino and his 16-year tenure, but they avoided attacking each other. In such a strategy, both challengers may have potentially missed an opportunity to better distinguish themselves in the preliminary election, according to Paul Watanabe, a political science professor at UMass-Boston.
Still, Flaherty and Yoon each ran on platforms of change, and it is with Boston’s growing group of new and younger voters where both contenders could boast an advantage over Menino. Despite the outcome of the Nov. 3 election, this mayoral campaign — the toughest since Menino took office in 1993 — has given Bostonians a glimpse of the city’s future, Watanabe said.
“The election produced greater interest but also gave people a real look at not where the city has been but where it is going,” he said.