On Tuesday night, all of the incumbent councilors running for reelection won seats on the Boston City Council for both At-Large and District positions, according to results from the City of Boston’s official website.
With seven candidates running for four At-Large seats, Councilors Felix Arroyo, Ayanna Pressley, Stephen Murphy and John Connolly all won reelection in a tight race.
Ayanna Pressley, the first African-American woman elected to an At-Large position, was the frontrunner of the At-Large race, maintaining her lead with a little more than 20 percent of the vote.
Although he wavered between fourth and fifth place throughout the vote count, City Council President Stephen Murphy ultimately beat Michael Flaherty, former councilor who left to run for mayor, by less than 1,000 votes.
Candidates Will Dorcena and Sean Ryan both received about four percent of the vote.
In the tightest district race, Councilor Bill Linehan, of South Boston and Chinatown, narrowly topped Boston Public Schools principal and educator Suzanne Lee.
And while Lee was frontrunner of the preliminary election, Linehan clinched the District 2 seat by less than 100 votes.
Councilor Maureen Feeney, who has served on the Council for 18 years, chose to retire, leaving a seat open in District 3. Although Feeney and Mayor Thomas Menino endorsed John O’Toole, Frank Baker won the election by about 55 percent of the vote.
In District 4, Councilor Charles Yancey, of Dorchester, won reelection with almost 90 percent of the vote to candidate J.R. Rucker.
Councilor Tito Jackson, of Roxbury, who has only been serving on the Council since the beginning of the year, won the District 6 seat with more than 80 percent of the vote to candidate Sheneal Parker, who is also a Boston Public School teacher.
All the incumbent councilors in Districts 1, 5, 6, 8 and 9 ran unopposed and won reelection, respectively: Salvatore LaMattina, Rob Consalvo, Matt O’Malley, Michael Ross, and Mark Ciommo.
Thousands of Bostonians flocked to about 250 polling booths in and around the city from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. to cast their votes. While each city councilor brought varied views to the table, many people took different issues to heart when voting.
“I would love to see really substantive action regarding the public school system in the city to bring that back to the level of excellence that it once was,” said Frances Driscoll, outside of the Boston Public Library polling station in Copley Square.
Driscoll said that there seems to be popular support behind the issue, but that public education is not getting a lot of attention within the legislature.
“It’s not a priority,” she said.
Ellen Philbin, another voter at the BPL, said she wants city officials to pay more attention to those who are less fortunate when cutting government spending.
Philbin said the initiative to close public libraries on weekends in order to curb spending is a failure by the council.
“Unacceptable, the library is used by families, students – it’s a meeting place in our community,” Philbin said. “They need to keep that in the back of their minds as they make budget cuts and decisions.”
Phoebe Knopf, who voted in the basement of Myles Standish Hall, said she was also paying attention to policies concerning low-income residents.
“I work for the movement to get more low-income housing in our neighborhoods, to get [Criminal Offendor Record Information] reformed, to end the racial and gender divisions and for economic justice for people who are marginalized,” she said. “So the candidates who stood for those things were the ones who I voted for.”
John Wong, an Independent voter from the Back Bay, said he was thinking beyond social issues to big picture problems in both the local and national government.
“I’d like to see all elected officials, state, local, federal, to have term limits,” Wong said. “This is not a job for life. If you do a great job, great – if you don’t, goodbye.”
To bring this issue to a local level, Wong said that Mayor Thomas Menino, who has been in office since 1993, said he would only serve for two terms when he was first nominated.
“He’s now been mayor since as long as I can remember and he’s got to go,” he said.
Another strategy some voters said they took was to vote against the incumbents.
William Prokipchak said he “made it his business” to vote for new City Council members in order to inject new ideas into the government.
Prokipchak said he did, however, vote for one of the incumbents because she is a woman.
“We need a lot more women in government, especially people making decisions about reproductive rights and benefits to families and stuff,” he said.
Boston University College Democrats President Hannah Brown, a College of Communication junior, said she was “proud and surprised” most by Pressley’s win.
“She was supposed to lose to Michael Flaherty,” Brown said in an interview. “I think she’s such an important voice on the City Council and someone we couldn’t afford to lose and everyone thought she was going to get etched out this time. [Her winning] shows the electorate is willing to elect someone that wants progress.”
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