Socialist Alternative/CWI-USA candidate receives 6.5% in Boston Council election

On Tuesday, November 6th, over 6.5% of those who voted in Boston’s city council election cast their ballots for Matt Geary, the candidate of Socialist Alternative.

This was in a city-wide election for City Council in which everyone in Boston could vote for up to four candidates. With each voter having up to four individual votes, 2.4 percent of all votes cast were for Matt, and this amounted to over three-thousand votes.

Socialist Alternative campaigned almost exclusively in working class areas, and we got a much higher percentage of the vote in many areas where we had a presence. For instance, at the polling station near Matt’s apartment, in one of the most notoriously crime-ridden and poorest areas of Boston (Upham’s Corner), Matt got well over 20% of all votes cast. In the polling station near my apartment, in a multi-racial working-class area, Matt got over 10% of all votes cast.

In terms of actual percentage of people who voted for Matt in those areas, the figures are much higher! When we analyse the full results, we will likely find many more working class areas with a disproportionately high number of votes for Socialist Alternative.

This was not a typical election campaign. Matt Geary is only 22 years old, and Socialist Alternative used this election to explain its programme rather than to gather votes. Some weekends, we had numerous activities in addition to people knocking on doors.

We did not spend our time going around to “civic associations” of political junkies that organize their friends and families to vote for candidates based on arbitrary ‘personality’ traits. We declined all invitations to attend meetings of Democratic Party hacks. Instead of taking short-cuts to votes, we focused on raising the banner of socialism and explaining our ideas.

When we decided to run a candidate for office (for the first time), we did so mainly to learn from the experience. We learned a lot, mostly from our mistakes, but also from our successes. The most fun part of our success was the candidates’ forums, in which we were given a ready-made audience to explain our ideas and expose the politicians. Matt did extremely well, and the Democratic Party politicians’ squirming was a priceless sight.