The city election is over and the voters — the 13% of whom came out to the polls — have spoken.
Despite another year of complaints about the need to oust some of the long-term councilors, every single incumbent who ran for re-election was returned to office, with the exception of Ward 1 Councilor Brad Markey.
And even Markey lost in a fairly close election to Councilor-elect Leo Choquette, 53% to 47%. He tallied just 114 fewer votes than Choquette out of 2,160 ballots cast.
Despite the incumbents’ fairly easy victories, the actual results show that three longtime incumbents — Mayor Jon Mitchell and Councilors-at-large Linda Morad and Naomi Carney — have lost significant popularity. Each of them are garnering an increasingly small share of the vote over the last four years.
Mitchell faced the same weak opponent — the resume-padding Tyson Moultrie — that he faced four years ago. But his share of the vote fell from 72.01% to 63.89% this election.
Longtime incumbent Councilors Morad and Carney also saw their share of the votes drop over the last four years. Morad went from a 14.7% share of the five-winner at-large race in 2019 to 10.96% this year. Carney dropped from a 13.19% share in 2019 to 10.96% this year.
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Morad finished in second place in the 2019 at-large race but in a tie for fourth and fifth this year. Carney finished in third place in 2019 but in a tie for fourth and fifth with Morad this year.
A third city councilor — 32-year incumbent Brian Gomes — has been more up and down over the same period. At one time Gomes regularly finished first in the at-large race, but he fell to fifth place in 2019 after a short-lived 2019 exploratory mayoral campaign. He rebounded to second place in the low-turnout 2021 off-year election, but then fell again slightly to third place this year.
Meanwhile, incumbent at-large councilors Ian Abreu and Shane Burgo, on the council for just eight and two years respectively, took the two top spots in this year’s at-large race. Abreu has finished first in the at-large race for the last three municipal elections.
Dwindling support for longterm New Bedford office holders
With all the advantages that incumbents possess in New Bedford’s election system, that says to me that despite the long-term councilors having survived this year, they are becoming less popular.
Mitchell should particularly pay attention.
There was very little media coverage of this mayoral campaign, so his dropping 8 percentage points in his share of the vote versus a weak opponent should be concerning to him.
Mitchell has been in office a long time for a New Bedford mayor, so there has been a longer amount of time for voters to become disenchanted with one thing or another that he has done. The cliche about New Bedford mayors is that the longer they stay in office, the more people they have to say “no’’ to.
Taxes are high in the city. A lot of that is related to Massachusetts’ outdated property tax system, which skews against lower-income city residents whose urban communities, because of macro-economic trends, have lost much of their industrial revenue base.
Certainly, his strained relationship with the City Council and members of the legislative delegation hasn’t helped the incumbent mayor.
Mitchell has also been repeatedly, and I think somewhat unfairly, criticized for allowing the wind turbine staging industry to come into the city. Some fishing interests have alleged, without much concrete evidence yet, that it could potentially hurt that industry.
Whether deservedly or undeservedly, Mitchell has some reputational repair to do.
Morad and Carney have problems on the same level as the mayor. A political consultant would tell them to take a different approach than they have been.
The two incumbents, both in their second decade on the council, garnered a spate of negative publicity this year over salary increases they tried to push through for a small group of city employees.
Morad, long a would-be mayor, also took it on herself to second guess the recommendations of every single salary increase that Human Resources Director Judith Keating had recommended.
Carney was even worse than Morad on the pay increases. She recommended sending all retiring city employees out with a bang by granting them a pay boost beyond Keating’s salary reclassification that had already raised their pay. That would have resulted in some city employees’ salaries increasing as much as 50% in one year.
Morad and Carney have also been obstructionist on myriad administration initiatives. A few years back, they lobbied heavily against an increase to the water-sewer bills that will result in larger increases to those bills down the road and delayed the city from being able to borrow from state low-interest loans for a year.
The long-term councilor controversies didn’t stop there.
Councilors Morad and Gomes tried to push through ballot initiatives that would have rolled back the popular Community Preservation Act and the four-year mayoral term. Both of them have long opposed the initiatives that the majority of city voters have backed.
The voters may still have liked Carney, Morad and Gomes more than this year’s most competitive challengers — Scott Lima and Devin Byrnes. Or it may have been that many voters just didn’t know about the challengers. All of the incumbents are operating in a local media environment that is much less attended to by the public than in the past.
A lot of the at-large race is about name recognition, especially with all the incumbents being listed first on the ballot. The city should consider making the order of the ballot up to a lottery, as other communities have.
So yes, it’s true that most of the incumbents survived. But all of them received a significantly smaller share of the vote than they had garnered in the past. The challengers need not be overly discouraged.
If the incumbents continue to govern the way they have these last four years, eventually their ships of state are going to sink. Even in New Bedford.
Email columnist Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.
It defies belief that Morad could survive. She’s been nothing but obstructionist to the administration and rude in meetings and to the public. She and others have been in office far too long with far too little change to justify their continued political existence.