The rent control issue has, however, produced several splinter candidates who are running on a platform of rent control for Cambridge. Most are felt to have little chance of election.
The elections will probably preserve the long-standing balance of power between the City's two informal factions.- The Cambridge Civic Association, (CCA), a good government group, and the so-called "independents" (non-CCA candidates.)
Currently, there are four CCA supporters on the council as against five independents. Three school committee-men are CCA and three are independents, but the current mayor, Walter J. Sullivan, who chairs the committee and often casts the deciding vote there, is an independent.
When the council elected today is seated in January, its first order of business will be to elect one of their numbers the new mayor. Though he presides ?? council meetings, the mayor is for practical purposes, only one more councillor there. His only real influence comes from his swing position on the School Committee.
At present, no one is willing to predict whether Mayor Sullivan-one of the City's most accomplished politicians-will win re-election to the post in January, but his chances are probably good.
The new council will also have to decide whether to retain the City Manager. Cambridge's most important official, in his post. Two years ago, the question ?? whether to fire the then City Manager was a major issue in the council campaign. This time, however, the fate of the current City Manager, James L. Sullivan, has not been such an issue.
New York
New Yorkers will go to the polls today for or against their dashing liberal mayor, John Lindsay. The election climaxes a long and often brutal campaign that has shattered both major political parties in New York City.
Those voting against the Mayor will vote for either Republican-Conservative John Marchi, a Staten Island State Senator, or Democrat Mario Procaccino, the city's Comptroller. Lindsay, who lost the Republican primary to Marchi in June, is running on both Liberal and Independent tickets.
The final tally of the New York Daily News straw poll- never wrong in a mayoral election-indicates that the anti-Lindsay vote will go 27 per cent for Procaccino and 23 per cent for Marchi, with Lindsay getting a 48 per cent plurality.
Whatever the results of the election, New York's party system will never be the same. Most liberal politicians have deserted their party's standard-bearers to support Lindsay. These include Herman Badillo and Percy Sutton, Democrat boroughpresidents of the Bronx and Manhattan and New York's Republican Senators, Charles Goodell and Jacob Javits.
The effect of these desertions has been greater on the Democrats. Seven of nine New York voters are Democrats, and the liberal majority of these seem to have revolted against Procaccino, thereby gutting the party organization which traditionally has run New York.
The Republican party in New York small and conservative, has long been at odds with Lindsay. A Lindsay victory today-one which would come without official party backing-would place the Mayor in a strange position in national Republican politics. It is questionable whether party regulars on a national level would give the Mayor many brownie points for a victory built around Democratic support and a campaign that turned opposition to President Nixon's Vietnam policy into a major issue. Both Nixon and Governor Rockefeller tacitly endorsed Marchi in the election.
While Lindsay goes into today's election the front-runner, he was considered the underdog at the campaign's outset. Procaccino, who won the Democratic primary with less than a third of the vote against four liberals-Former Mayor Robert Wagner. Badillo, Norman Mailer and Congressman James Schener-saw his initial strength erode quickly over the summer and fall. Political columnists blame his apparent decline on his failure to make any reconciliatory gesture to his party's disaffected middle-class liberals, his inability to branch out beyond the law-and-order issue, and his "hot" image in the recent three-way television debates.
As usual, it is New York's large Jewish vote which holds the key to the election. Lindsay carried 3 per cent of it in 1965. He will have to do at least that well today to emerge victorious tonight.