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To say the Boston City Council has been making itself look bad lately would be an understatement. Some lowlights: last November, Frank Baker accused his colleague Liz Breadon of importing sectarian tensions from Ireland into the council’s ongoing redistricting fight. In May, a federal judge tossed out the council’s approved map after multiple councilors joined the legal fight against it. An anonymous commenter who seems to work for the council, and may actually be a councilor, has been taking potshots at colleagues in the Globe’s online comments section. Dueling accounts of a recent death in a South Boston housing project led Kendra Lara to accuse three unnamed colleagues of trafficking in homophobia and transphobia. And Lara herself — apparently driving with a revoked license in an unregistered, uninsured car — recently crashed into a home in Jamaica Plain, yielding an upcoming court date and eliciting a public scolding from City Council President Ed Flynn.
Before you scoff, consider where things stand now. Despite the cliché that politics is a blood sport in Boston, the city’s electorate has been minimally invested in municipal matters for years now. In 2021, when Michelle Wu and Annissa Essaibi George were vying to become the first woman and first person of color elected to lead the city, just a third of the city’s voters cast a ballot — down from 2013, when 38% of voters turned out and narrowly backed Marty Walsh over John Connolly as mayor. In municipal election years that don’t feature mayoral contests, turnout has been even less impressive, generally totaling somewhere in the teens.
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Which brings us back to the potential upside of the council’s recent dysfunction. As dismaying as the aforementioned incidents have been, they’ve also made it clear that — despite widespread stereotypes of Boston as a deep-blue, progressive oasis — the city’s political identity is both unsettled and hotly contested. The current crop of councilors, and the people who elected them, have deeply different visions of how Boston government should work and the values that should guide it. (You can sense those disagreements elsewhere, too, including the simmering showdown over the Wu administration’s traffic-calming measures in West Roxbury.)
Sharp divisions and a sense of high stakes can be real boons to voter engagement. Consider the 2020 presidential election, which was the most fraught and exhausting of my lifetime, but also brought more voters to the polls than any such contest this century. Consider, too, Boston’s mayoral battles in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when racial tensions linked to school desegregation were coming to the fore. In 1967, when incumbent Kevin White fended off a tough challenge from busing opponent Louise Day Hicks, a whopping 68% of voters cast ballots; four years later, when White and Hicks squared off again, 64% did.
As those numbers suggest, more engagement doesn’t necessarily mean greater civic health. Still, when political apathy spreads the way it has in Boston lately, it’s hard not to hope for some sort of development that manages to reinvigorate the electorate. Maybe — inadvertently — the Boston City Council is about to provide it.
