New Bedford elections are won on doorsteps and in mailboxes

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Scott Pemberton smiled as I approached him outside the Wilks Branch library on Election Day afternoon.

It was about 2:30, not a high volume voter time, and Pemberton was one of only two sign holders outside the North End ward’s busiest polling station. 

I was trying to get a sense of Pemberton’s chances as I knew he had been working hard but wasn’t sure how effective a campaigner he was. I had a hunch he might be good because there is an earnestness about Pemberton and a sunny disposition that I thought might play well.

He told me he had knocked on the doors of every single regular voter in the ward. Twice.

There are slightly fewer than 11,000 registered voters in Ward 2’s six precincts but just 924 voters cast ballots in this year’s final election. So reaching every active voter is a doable task in this part of New Bedford. Still, even if you think a lot of those doors are two-voter households, that’s still a lot of knocking. 

But that wasn’t all. 

On Election Day, Pemberton said he dropped balloons with “Scott Pemberton for Ward 2 City Councilor” cards on the porches and driveways of the households known to be regular voters. The balloons were each weighed down by little plastic bags of sand.

The guy had thought of everything.

After a while, Scott’s mother, Vivian Ramos, came by. She was there to see what he needed and to relay information. Vivian had an obviously broken arm and she told me how she had broken it twice while on cruises. “No more cruises,” she said.

Such is the chicken-pie stuff of political campaigns in New Bedford. Mothers helping sons, sons giving out balloons, candidates knocking on doors.

Pemberton, who is a conservative candidate, didn’t talk to me much about the issues during the campaign. He offered little specificity about the problems facing the city in the New Bedford Light “Chat” that I did with the ward candidates.

That’s not unusual. James Roy, a progressive candidate who skyrocketed to a second-place finish in the citywide at-large race, also provided few glimpses into his positions on the issues during this politicking season. More importantly, Roy, like Pemberton, had been everywhere on social media and, of course, he had been knocking on doors.

That’s not to say that Pemberton and Roy were the only ones doing the up-close-and-personal thing. 

Four-term Ward 2 incumbent Maria Giesta, who lost to Pemberton by just 17 votes, had a healthy social media presence herself and also did some door-knocking. But a ward council position is easier to lose than an at-large one and Giesta was carrying a few battle scars from her eight years in office.

I also talked to the incumbent at the polls and she told me about her early years in D.C. as Congressman Barney Frank’s aide, living in a $450 efficiency two-blocks from the Capitol. Well-known in the ward, she talked about her brother playing sports with one of her firefighter supporters. 

Giesta was not mailing it in, but the affable Pemberton, who had run unsuccessfully three times before and had run the downtown Fifties’ Night the last couple years, seemed to have as much name recognition as the incumbent.

Someone else who was not mailing it in during the final election was Naomi Carney.

The incumbent rebounded from a seventh-place finish in the preliminary, to grab fifth place, winning the final at-large spot. Carney had gone around Ward 4 accompanied by former Ward 4 Councilor Dana Rebeiro during the final sprint and spent an astounding $8,200 since her poor showing in the preliminary. Much of that money was contributed over the years by conservative local businessman Jim DeMello, restaurateur Steve Silverstein and the police and firefighters’ unions.

Carney is conservative and Rebeiro is progressive, but both are Cape Verdean and know the importance of communities of color having a seat at the table when New Bedford government decisions are made. That’s a lesson the city’s more diversified Latino community has yet to fully absorb.

Also doing a whole lot of door-knocking and social media in this year’s election was Destination Soups owner Devin Byrnes. He finished sixth, just out of the running in the at-large race, 124 votes behind Carney.

It was a bitter disappointment for Byrnes, a well-known fixture on the lunch and downtown business community scene. Byrnes is a familiar face to many but he did not have Carney’s access to the well-to-do businesspeople who give to seasoned fundraisers. And he did not have Roy’s access to a ready-made, well-organized cadre of teachers’ union and social justice community volunteers.

It’s times like these that make me wonder about the New Bedford small business community. And whether New Bedford has gotten what it bargained for in the merger of the Fall River and New Bedford chambers of commerce, not to mention the invisibility of other downtown business groups in this year’s campaign. Those folks would have been expected to come out in a big way for a small businessman, and though they did to a point, not overwhelmingly. They are certainly not as engaged as the unions and local ideological partisans on both sides of the aisle.

The council candidates knock on doors to let people size them up. And there is a built-in advantage in door-knocking to any candidate who has a job or income situation that allows them to go up doorsteps during weekdays. Neither Pemberton nor Roy was the most articulate guy running this year but that didn’t matter in the end. Visibility on the stump, and the social media town square, trumps all.

This is not to say that personalities and door-knocking and social media are the only things that matter in New Bedford elections. Having the money to send the voter a professionally produced promo card counts too. Not to mention the money to mail it.

I do, however, think door knocking and advertising carry more weight than ideologies or a candidate’s positions on a given issue. We voters are not all students of politics, spending our evenings dissecting the candidates with a comparative positions-on-the-issues chart. How else to describe candidates as different as the conservative Scott Pemberton and progressive James Roy both polling big numbers in Ward 2?

You can say it shouldn’t be that way, but it is that way. We voters and citizens are the way we are.

Elections are a funny thing. American culture has grown so cynical about the political process that fewer and fewer people are taking part in them.

That can be discouraging for good, earnest candidates like Devin Byrnes.

But elections, as flawed as they are, are all we’ve got to work with in making New Bedford the kind of city we all want.

Email Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.

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