Michelle Wu speaks after voting in Boston on Tuesday.
Allison Dinner/Getty Pictures
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Allison Dinner/Getty Pictures
Michelle Wu speaks after voting in Boston on Tuesday.
Allison Dinner/Getty Pictures
Boston voters have elected Metropolis Councilor Michelle Wu as mayor, town’s first lady and individual of coloration elected to the publish.
Wu, whose mother and father immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan broke a 199-year streak of white, male metropolis leaders. She moved to town from Chicago, attend Harvard College and Harvard Legislation Faculty.
She defeated fellow Democratic Metropolis Councilor Annissa Essaibi George, a self-described first-generation Arab-Polish American who was born and raised within the metropolis.
The competition between the 2 candidates marked a turning level in Boston politics, which has a historical past of fraught racial tensions and compelled desegregation. It additionally mirrored an more and more diverse metropolis the place Black, Latino and Asian residents now make up greater than half of the inhabitants and white teams proceed to shrink.
For a lot of, the race got here all the way down to competing visions of the longer term with Essaibi George’s model forged as extra of the outdated guard and Wu’s perceived as new-school Boston. Since her election to town council in 2013, Wu has change into a darling of the progressive wing of the occasion. All through the marketing campaign she championed local weather change insurance policies according to the Inexperienced New Deal, hire management and hire stabilization, which was narrowly voted down within the mid Nineteen Nineties, eliminating fares on the metropolitan space’s public transit system, and abolishing the Boston Planning and Improvement Company, arguing that it is time to “empower a planning dept to create a grasp plan for up to date zoning and clear, constant guidelines.”
In the meantime, Essaibi George emphasised her household roots within the metropolis and ran on a extra average platform. She opposed Wu’s hire management concepts and pledged to overtake town’s police division by including extra officers who will mirror the altering demographics, and boosting assets.
In New York on Tuesday, voters selected Democrat Eric Adams, the Brooklyn Borough president, over Republican Curtis Sliwa, the founding father of the Guardian Angels anti-crime patrollers. Adams would be the metropolis’s second Black mayor.
