The Prizblog

At about 8:20pm, last Tuesday night, I was at Union Street Bar for the Setti Warren post-election party when the first unofficial results from the election came across my iPhone. 

Ward 8, Precinct 2:

Warren: 205

Balser: 345

Right then, I knew Warren had a real shot.  The bottom line was that Setti was going to capture the north side of the city.  That we knew.  The question was, would Ruth’s supporters come out in sufficient numbers in Wards 7and 8 to completely nullify Setti’s north-side advantage?  Ruth was expected to trounce Setti by a two-to-one margin in Ward 8.  Particularly precinct two.

It didn’t happen.  In the end, Setti’s grass-roots effort garnered the requisite amount of support necessary to secure a 463 vote margin of victory.  As I reflect on Setti’s remarkable victory, and the campaign’s journey over the course of the past year, I can honestly say it was an extraordinarily well run, disciplined campaign that set a grassroots course from day one, and simply never waivered.  All the credit in the world goes to the campaign brass, in particular Deb Shah, for that work.

The premise of the grass-roots campaign is deceptively simple:  you need to get more votes than the other guy, right?  In order to make sure that happens, you need to get more of your voters to the polls than the other guy.  Duh.  Thus ends the deceptively simple part, and begins the hard part: months and months and months of voter identification, followed by a relentless Get Out The Vote (GOTV) push.  And that’s really how Setti Warren went from a guy few knew to the Mayor Elect of Newton.  He identified voter after voter – supporter after supporter - and made sure they voted on election day.  Simple.  But hard.

Sure, the late endorsements helped.  Hell, everything helped.  We won by 463 votes.  But we never would have gotten that far if Setti wasn’t a compelling candidate with a positive message who was absolutely dedicated to winning this thing, coupled with a maniacly orgainzed and disciplined campaign dedicated to identifying voters and getting them to the polls.

The voter identification, the house parties and the the campaign’s positive message allowed Setti to pick up key supporters in July and August, sufficient for Setti to get past Ken Parker in the September 15 preliminary, and come in a close second to Ruth Balser.  She won the 9/15 preliminary by “only” 872 votes, when she was expected by pundits to crack a lead of 1,000.  She took 36.1 percent of the vote to Setti’s 30.6. 

In ward 8, however, she beat Setti two-to-one, 845 to 406.  In Ward 6, precinct 3, she won 302 to 177.  In Ward 7, precinct 1, she won 151 to 85. Roughly 34 percent of Newton’s registered voters showed up for the 9/15 preliminary.  Although we fully expected an additional 10,000 voters on November 3, if the percentages had stayed the same, Ruth would have won.

But the percentages didn’t hold.  Not only did Setti take each and every Ward and Precinct on the north side of the city, 1 through 5, he actually cut into Ruth’s southside stronghold.  In Ward 6, Precinct 3, where Ruth had beaten Setti 63% to 37% on 9/15, Setti cut the lead down to 54% to 46%.  In Ward 8 overall, where Ruth captured a commanding 67.5% of the vote on 9/15, Setti managed to trim her lead to 61.5% to his 38.5%.

In the end, it was enough.

Forum on Newton's Financial Future

The campaign’s voter outreach and identification had led, inexorably, to a city-wide base of support.  That support led to endorsements.  Those endorsements finally coalesced at the right moment to allow Setti to hold his October 18 forum on Newton’s Financial Future, attended by community leaders, characters and egos usually too big for one room, such as Geoff Epstein, Dan Fahey, Paul Colletti, Dori Zaleznik, Marcia Johnson, Ted Hess Mahan, Laura Thompson, and myself, to name a few.  Setti ran the forum with aplomb.  Gail Spector, editor at the Newton TAB, called it a turning point.  And it was.

But as I looked around the room that day, I realized that exactly three people in the room were on board with Setti in June – Marcia Johnson, Ted Hess Mahan and I.  About a week later, someone asked me why, if that forum was such a success, it hadn’t happened earlier.  The answer is simply that it couldn’t have.  Those people weren’t ready in June or July, but had come around by October.  The campaign had peaked at the right time.

There was absolutely zero room for error in this thing, and everything had to happen exactly the way it did.  It really is astounding to look back on.

We’re not done with this election on the Prizblog:  next time, we take a look at down ballot numbers, voter trends, and lessons learned.