Feb 16, 2009 – With Brian Murphy’s departure from the Cambridge City Council (and Larry Ward’s soon-to-be ascension to a Council seat on Feb 24), there are rumblings in East Cambridge about assembling a slate of candidates or recruiting individual candidates to seek a Council seat. The fact that Brian Murphy was essentially the successor to Jim Braude who was essentially the successor to Frank Duehay may be an indication of where there are some votes to be had this November.
All City Council and School Committee seats are at-large seats, so you can’t absolutely say that any one councillor succeeds another, but it’s still a good first approximation. Few would argue, for example, that Alice Wolf was succeeded in 1993 by Katherine Triantafillou and Kathy Born (a twofer with Ed Cyr getting bumped in that election), and Marjorie Decker’s election in 1999 was clearly at the expense of Triantafillou. “Mickey the Dude” Sullivan’s seat was passed to his son Edward Sullivan in 1949 and then to his brother Walter Sullivan in 1959 who passed it on to his son Michael Sullivan in 1993 who served until 2007. Lenny Russell was succeeded by his wife Sheila Russell in 1985, and the “Russell base” was effectively passed to David Maher in 1999. In recent years, the changing demographics of Cambridge have created opportunities for candidates like Craig Kelley and Sam Seidel, and those same shifting sands together with changes in voter turnout could create further opportunities for future candidates. That said, there’s nothing like the departure of an incumbent to create a scramble by other candidates for the “base” of an exiting incumbent. The Sullivan and Galluccio (Independent) bases are still very much out there to be courted, and now you can add Brian Murphy’s more CCA-oriented base to the mix.
Though it seems strange to have to say it, for those relative newcomers, the CCA (Cambridge Civic Association) was a local civic/political organization that was formed in 1945 out of three entities that had existed from the 1930’s. The CCA aligned itself with the politically advantageous issue of rent control in 1969 and essentially died when rent control was wiped out in 1994. The CCA soldiered on and continued to endorse municipal candidates through the 2003 election, though half-heartedly at best. There have been no substantive organized candidate endorsements since then, and the winners and losers are now primarily determined by demographics and incumbency.
As one measure of the votes that may be lurking out there for this year’s election, yesterday I ran the election software to determine who would have been elected in the 2007 election if Brian Murphy had been excluded. In that hypothetical, Edward Sullivan (Michael’s cousin) would have picked up the 9th seat. However, under the “Vacancy Recount” provisions in state law for Cambridge’s elections, the vacancy will be filled (officially on Feb 24) by Larry Ward. The basic logic of the procedure is that a vacancy should preferably be filled by that candidate who best matches the exiting incumbent. However, there really is no obvious match in this case among viable challengers. This observation should not be lost on those considering tossing their hat into the ring later this year.