THERE WAS A PARTY at 27 Francis Ave. last Tuesday night--several hundred fairly young and wealthy Cambridge residents were crammed into a small clapboard house making political chitchat and waiting for the Cambridge Convention '75 candidates to come in from their election headquarters.
In East Cambridge, there were no parties. The candidates were patiently waiting for the election commission to tabulate the turnout figures; the commission had predicted a record 63 per cent turnout and they were worried that perhaps the voter registration drive the Independents had ignored was going to make a difference.
But after yesterday's preliminary count, the hopes of the liberals have been all but extinguished and the Independents even have a slim chance of increasing their strength on the city's nine-member council and really taking over the city's government.
The strategy of Cambridge Convention '75, a lobby formed this year to present the liberals as a unified slate, seems to have failed. By registering new voters--taking advantage of the lowered voting age and the end of residency requirements--the Convention hoped to expand its constituency. It organized registration drives in areas where they hoped to find young, liberal voters; it set up tables around Harvard, MIT and Central Square. The results were promising: 5000 new voters added to the rolls.
But as Election Commissioner Edward J. Samp Jr. said earlier this week, the students just didn't turn out. In the Harvard Square area, where nearly 500 new voters were added to the rolls, there was very little increase in voter turnout from the last municipal election. While nearly 60 per cent of all registered voters showed up at the polls, very few of the newly registered ones did. The strategy seems to have failed because there was no real commitment to Cambridge on the part of the young voters and because there was no Cambridge Convention '75 follow-up. If the liberals had manned the phones, calling all the dorms, they might have strengthened the turnout enough to at least guard themselves against the possibility of backsliding.
THE INTERESTING ELEMENT of this last election was not the issues--the Independents said that there were none; the liberals used scare tactics, claiming that the Independents would end rent control and fire city manager James L. Sullivan.
At stake in the elections were different styles of local campaigning. A liberal victory would have been an upset because they eschewed the tactics of the Independents: the appeals to working class issues, patronage and flesh-pressing. The Independents relied upon the solid ethnic constituencies in East Cambridge, who turn out for them every year.
"We got our vote out, and that's what's important," Mayor Walter J. Sullivan said on election night. The vote total shows that his lead over all other candidates increased this year. More voters turned out, but they were Independent people. Of the over 27,000 valid votes, only 10,000 first-choice ballots went to the Cambridge Convention '75 candidates.
The initial polling does show a few changes from '73: Francis H. Duehay '55, a liberal who barely won re-election the last two elections came out third in the first round. He ran an active, fairly expensive campaign with mailings and parties that seems to have paid off, at least in getting Convention voters to switch from fellow liberal David A. Wylie to Duehay as their first-choice candidate.
The convention stopped candidates on the slate from campaigning actively against one another, but its major effect seems to have been to redistribute liberal votes from the favored Wylie to the underdogs Duehay and David Clem.
The lessons of this campaign are simply a reaffirmation of some old truths about voters. young people are not to be trusted at the polls, they usually don't show up; issues and conflict tend to change people's minds while a relatively stable situation calls for a repeat performance of the last election; and most importantly, established political machines are still the best way to win elections in Cambridge. * designates an Independent candidate. ** designates a Cambridge Convention candidate.
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