Helder S. “Sonny” Peixoto is not your typical City Council candidate—he has never held elected office, and he paints himself as an outsider in a campaign whose frontrunners have racked up endorsements and political experience.

An MBTA police officer whose only newspaper coverage this summer stemmed from a skirmish with his wife’s ex-husband, Peixoto is the consummate anti-politician.

He called the remaining local political party—the Cambridge Civic Association (CCA)—“a country club within itself” after he didn’t gain their endorsement.

But according to a recent poll conducted by Peixoto’s own campaign, he’s number four in the city—out of a pool of 19 candidates seeking nine council seats, including incumbents.

“The poll is 500 phone calls,” Peixoto says. “It wasn’t a push poll at all.”

The Decision To Run

Peixoto, who made an unsuccessful bid in 1999 for a council seat, says he decided to run again this year when he heard that one-term CCA councillor Jim Braude—known for his liberal stances on everything from street perfomance ordinances to zoning—had decided against running.

“It was the worst news—he kept it very secret, that he wasn’t going to run again,” Peixoto says.

In his effort to gain the support of Braude’s would-be constituency, Peixoto tried to get the endorsement of the CCA, known locally as the activist liberal party.

He was unsuccessful.

“It wasn’t so much criteria as it was a process issue,” CCA President Ken Carson says. “A really simple one—that is, that we had put out an announcement about interviewing candidates who were interested in the endorsement, and there was a deadline. Mr. Peixoto did not contact us before that deadline passed.”

All six of the candidates that did actually make the deadline received the CCA endorsement, Carson says.

Even without their endorsement, Peixoto says that he agrees with CCA on many issues.

“I support many of their causes, and will work with them,” Peixoto says.

But as for Brian Murphy, one of the CCA’s top candidates—who bills himself as the “pragmatic progressive”—Peixoto says that the first-time candidate is not original.