Two challengers startle city politics in at-large race

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In New Bedford election history, it literally has never happened in the last 25 years.

Never in the last 2½ decades have two challengers won two of the top five spots in the preliminary election. If the results hold in the final, that will make both of the challengers a councilor-at-large.

This has not happened either in preliminary elections or the finals. It just doesn’t happen in the Whaling City.

That’s why Devin Byrnes and James Roy finishing fourth and fifth in the preliminary at-large race is so earth-shaking in terms of New Bedford politics.

Byrnes and Roy were helped by the fact that longtime Councilor-at-Large and former Ward 1 Councilor Linda Morad decided not to run for re-election after 20 years in office. So there was one open seat for a challenger to begin with.

Still, this preliminary election seems like a watershed.

Not only did Byrnes and Roy finish in positions that will make them a councilor in the next election, Jenny Arruda finished in sixth place, and also ahead of an incumbent at-large councilor, Naomi Carney. 

For the incumbent to climb back to fifth place in the final, she would have to leap over two candidates, but quite possibly three, with the meager two-vote margin separating Byrnes and Roy.

To give you an idea of how unusual this all is, only four times in the last 25 years has even one at-large challenger finished in the top five, ahead of an incumbent, in the at-large race. And in only one of those four cases did the incumbent return to win in the final election.

That was the legendary John Saunders, who in 1992 finished sixth in the preliminary, 192 votes behind another incumbent councilor, Steve Sharek. There was no open seat that year, but another former incumbent councilor, David Alves, returned to run at-large again after an unsuccessful mayoral run two years earlier. Alves easily won a seat on the council again.

But Saunders and the old New Bedford political Machine pulled off the trick of moving up to fifth. Of course they were helped by someone leaking the news that the fifth-place preliminary finisher, Sharek, had recently filed for a personal bankruptcy. Carney herself has filed for a personal bankruptcy, but that was 10 years ago and she has been re-elected five times since then.

Could it really be that after years of complaining that the incumbents always win the New Bedford at-large races, voters are finally in a mood to throw out at least one councilor? 

The idea that the same group of voters are voting for the challengers this year seems to be borne out by the fact that Byrnes, a soup and sandwich shop owner, and Roy, a teacher, finished just two votes apart, 1,644 and 1,642 votes respectively. This is despite their political philosophies seeming a bit different. Both would seem to be progressive on social issues, but from my conversations with them and from their reputations, I would expect Byrnes to be more conservative about spending and Roy more progressive about funding government.

Carney finished 239 votes behind Roy and 241 votes behind Byrnes, but to win that fifth seat she would also have to leap over a third challenger, Arruda, who finished in sixth place, three votes ahead of Carney.

The at-large system, in which the top five vote-getters win seats, is constructed so that candidates not infrequently finish closely in the final tally, and win or lose seats by a marginal number of votes. 

My perspective has always been that the at-large councilors are kind of like a New Bedford Senate. A candidate who could not win a two-person ward race can have an easier time winning an at-large seat when they only have to grab one of the five top spots in a race crowded with unknowns. The position seems designed to bring elected officials to the table who might not necessarily be the most popular but who might have the best interests of the city as a whole as their focus.

It’s not impossible for Carney to win in the final. She will have what’s left of the old political insiders and the conservative forces in the city.

Though she has a good bit of ground to make up, she might be helped by the fact that about twice as many voters will turn out in the final election as in the preliminary. This year that would be 11.5% of the registered voters compared to the 5.7% that came out in the preliminary.

A couple things may work against Carney. 

Clearly both Byrnes and Roy are running well-organized campaigns. Their big signs are all over town, helping them with name recognition that the incumbents already possess. Byrnes is a well-known downtown restaurateur and Roy’s wife Cynthia is the head of the activist group Save our Schools.

Byrnes has raised more than $3,800 and has almost $2,900 still on hand. Roy has raised almost $7,000 and has nearly $3,500 on hand. That makes them both competitive with Carney in terms of things like mailings and door-drops. Carney has more than $4,500 on hand, and all three have demonstrated the ability to raise money or report already raised money in October.

It has seemed clear for years now that there is frustration in some quarters of the city with incumbent city councilors, particularly councilors like Morad and Gomes, who have respectively been reelected for two and three decades.

But municipal politics is increasingly an endeavor that attracts fewer candidates with the resources to run an active campaign. And fewer and fewer voters are interested. A total of 9,425 city residents voted in the 1999 preliminary election when John Saunders finished sixth. Just 4,263 city residents voted in the 2025 preliminary election when Carney fell to seventh.

In case you are wondering, it is possible, though a bit unusual in New Bedford, for a challenger to crack the top at-large City Council wall.

Naomi Carney herself did it in 2003 when she bumped longtime Councilor George Rogers off the council after he had beaten a charge of distributing pornography to a minor and then denying that minor an Eagle Scout recognition by the state Legislature.

Neighborhood activist Debora Coelho did it in 2005 when she used her visibility in fighting violence on the streets of the North End to come from nowhere to a third-place finish, ousting Carney after just one term in her first of two stints on the council.

Then in 2013, Carney again ousted an incumbent when, as a former councilor 10 years out of office, she defeated longtime incumbent John Saunders. Saunders had sponsored a big City Council pay hike and dared voters to vote him out.

That’s the history, my dear New Bedford friends. Yes, they can “throw the bums out” once in a while in New Bedford.

But never have two challengers won at-large council seats in the same year since the 21st century began.

We are in uncharted territory, fellow voters. 

Email Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.

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