Milton Valencia, “Michelle Wu says Boston is ready for change. But is Boston ready for Michelle Wu?,” Boston Globe (6/30/20)
“It doesn’t feel to me that people in the traditional power center of the city have noticed the city is changing, not only demographically but ideologically,” said Rachel Poliner, of the Roslindale and West Roxbury chapter of Progressive Massachusetts. (Wu was the only incumbent to get the group’s support.)
In recent candidate forums, Poliner said, members were less focused on neighborhood matters and more driven by big-picture issues: housing, transportation, the environment.
“There are issues that we really need action on,” Poliner said. “And there are processes that we believe we can engage in, in ways the city isn’t.”
New progressive strongholds have sprouted within the city, as well. The city’s highest turnout in 2018, by the percentage of registered voters who cast ballots, was in Wu’s neck of Boston: along the Southwest Corridor that stretches from Jamaica Plain through Roslindale and into West Roxbury, what Larry DiCara, a former councilor and longtime city politics observer, called Boston’s new “lefty strip.”
