In her first run for public office, Andrea Campbell upset Boston City Councilor Charles Yancey Tuesday, capturing about 57 percent of the vote in the preliminary election, which sets up a generational showdown between the two for November’s final vote.
Campbell, 33, finished first overall in the four-person field, leading with 1,982 of the total 5,553 votes cast to Yancey’s 1,159.
Campbell, an attorney, worked as a deputy legal counsel for former Gov. Deval Patrick.
In her speech to supporters at the Blarney Stone in Fields Corner Tuesday night, Campbell criticized her opponent’s campaign tactics.
“I expected a whispering campaign. I expected lies about my policy positions, attacks on my motives as to why I decided to run... But I think today and tonight was abundantly clear that my neighbors in District Four saw right through those lies,” Campbell said.
Yancey, 66, was not immediately available for comment after the unofficial results came in Tuesday.
Turnout on one of the hottest election days in memory was dismally low, with just over seven percent of eligible voters turning out, according to the city’s elections division.
District Four includes parts of Mattapan, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain and Hyde Park. Yancey has served as the District Four City Councilor since 1984.
With Yancey and Campbell moving on to the final election on Nov. 3, the campaign is over for the third and fourth place candidates, Terrance Williams of Dorchester and Jovan Lacet of Mattapan.
Campbell has out-fundraised, and significantly outspent, Yancey throughout the race. Starting with nearly nothing when she opened her campaign account in November of last year, Campbell raised over $27,000 before the end of 2014. She kept up a mostly stable pace of between $2,000 and $6,000 a month through most of 2015 and really turned on the gas as the race heated up over the summer - bringing in over $63,000 since the end of May.
Campbell’s spending has mostly kept pace with her receipts, except for the end of August, when her campaign reports she spent $31,679.44 between Aug. 16 and Aug 31. That influx of pre-preliminary spending landed Campbell’s war chest at just under $27,000.
At the end of this stretch of the race, Campbell has spent more than seven times what the incumbent Yancey has. In those first two weeks of August alone, Campbell expended more than Yancey’s total money on hand at the end of that period. Most of the challenger’s money has gone to mailings promoting Campbell.
Yancey’s fundraising has by no means been lackadaisical. By the end of August, the last month campaign finance data is available, Yancey had stockpiled $32,829.73 into his campaign account. The veteran councilor started the year with just $8,356 and didn’t really begin fundraising in earnest until February, when he brought in $2,600.
Another round of receipts in May brought Yancey’s coffers up to over $12,000. But the real cash didn’t start to flow until this summer, when Yancey raised around $9,000 each month.
Yancey has raised much more than he’s spent most months. To date this year, he has spent just over $13,000, a bit over one third of his total 2015 intake.
Jackson is seen as a potential challenger to Mayor Marty Walsh in 2017 and ended last month with just over $10,000 in the bank. Jackson showed consistent fundraising throughout the race, but will need to continue building a war chest to have any hope of taking on Walsh, whose coffers are bursting with over $1.7 million in cash.
Due to a reporting error, a previous version of this article incorrectly stated Boston Mayor Marty Walsh’s campaign resources. The number previously reported, $302,773.68, is Walsh’s current cash on-hand amount and does not include the bulk of his campaign’s funds held in other accounts, said Walsh political consultant Michael Goldman.
