Boston mayoral candidates Annissa Essaibi George and Michelle Wu met on the WBZ debate stage Wednesday night, with polls showing Wu still to be the frontrunner 20 days before the election.
The hour-long encounter ranged over now-familiar topics, including police reform, the quality of public schools, affordable housing and the seemingly implacable social crisis that exists in the neighborhood around the intersection of Massachusetts Ave. and Melina Cass Blvd., where homelessness overlaps with the opioid epidemic.
Here are three takeaways:
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1. Essaibi George is sharpening her elbows
With the most recent poll showing Essaibi George 32 points behind Wu, the former teacher wasted no time trying to encourage voters to give her a second look by drawing distinctions between herself and Wu.
Essaibi George identified the 2020 municipal budget vote as a specific instance where she and Wu differed on how to serve Boston's emergency service workers. She also emphasized her position against defunding the police while vowing to implement the recommendations put forward by the Boston Police Reform Task Force convened last summer.
Wu is the only candidate in the mayor's race who supports rent control, and Essaibi George pushed her to describe how that defining policy — unpopular among the city's small landlords — would work, an attack that Wu parried.
2. Wu is sticking with her strategy
Despite being pressed for specifics on addressing rent control, noisy dirt bikes and police reform, Wu adhered to big-picture descriptions of how her administration would work and the principles that would guide it rather than pointing to specific policies she would implement.
It's a tactic that has kept Wu at the top of the polls and helped her finish 11 percentage points ahead of Essaibi George in September's preliminary election.
It was a shrewd and classic front-runner strategy: avoid getting mired in devilish details.
3. Neither candidate wants to offend former mayor, now-U.S. Labor Secretary, Marty Walsh
Or at least, no one wants to offend Marty voters.
Asked for differences between themselves and the former mayor, both women gave safe answers.
Essaibi George, who has been described as a natural heir to Walsh — and drove his mother to vote early last month — described him as a "good" mayor who lacked her experience teaching, building a business and serving on Boston's City Council, all things that would contribute to her doing the city's work "in a very different way."
Wu, who was prepared to campaign against Walsh, now took a less vague stance, describing him as a "strong leader" for Boston. The distinction, she said, would be her willingness to "lean into the power that city government has," rather than taking "baby steps" towards change and progress.
