“A lot of us always suspected that if there was a reason for students to be interested they could be an incredibly potent force,” he says. “No one [before DeBergalis] had ever come close like this.”
Turnout was up this year—20,080 ballots were cast compared with 17,688 two years ago—a trend widely attributed to both DeBergalis’ voting registration drive on campuses and to the fact that voters came out to weigh in on a controversial ballot question on rent control.
Status Quo
Winters calls DeBergalis’s performance “impressive” but says the eventual victory for the incumbents was what he expected all along.
“Incumbency is a very powerful thing,” Winters says. “It gives you name recognition, it gives you a leg up.”
Three of the candidates who closely followed DeBergalis came to prominence through neighborhood activism—and two of them say they are disappointed they won’t be able to change the way the city’s government works.
“City Hall is not nearly open enough to citizen participation,” says John R. Pitkin, who founded the Mid-Cambridge Neighborhood Association almost three decades ago and has served on several city boards. “The way that it operates, it’s a very closed institution, and it didn’t used to be and it doesn’t have to be.”
Carole K. Bellew, who made her first run for council this year, says her experience on the East Cambridge Planning Team taught her the importance of active community involvement and bringing the stakeholders to the table.
She criticizes the current councillors for their failure to attend neighborhood forums and city-wide meetings to discuss neighborhood development.
“I had kind of hoped that we might be able to pull some more of the kinds of people who want to be cooperative and want to be participating into the arena,” she says. “I really hoped that we could bring a different flavor to the council. I wanted more of a mix.”
But Pitkin and Bellew—and Craig A. Kelley, their counterpart from North Cambridge—are not altogether similar, Winters says.
According to Winters, there was not much overlap in the support for the three candidates, and he says voters tend to support their local activists but do not uniformly vote for a “neighborhood slate.”
In recent years, development issues have dominated local politics, and the ongoing presence of neighborhood leaders on the ballot is unsurprising.
And to some, students’ newfound influence at the polls is not a shocker either.
David E. Sullivan, a former city councillor who lost his first bid for council in 1977 and later succeeded in large part by appealing to the student vote, says he would like to see DeBergalis run again in 2005.
“It’s very similar to what happened to me in ’77,” says Sullivan, who met DeBergalis earlier this fall. “A lot of people didn’t take me seriously as a candidate…The fact that I did pretty well and lost in ’77 really helped me to put myself on a map. And I think the same thing has definitely happened with Matt this year. A lot of people didn’t know who the heck he was, and because of his very strong showing, clearly a lot of people are sitting up and taking notice.”
—Contributing writer Michael M. Grynbaum can be reached at grynbaum@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Jessica R. Rubin-Wills can be reached at rubinwil@fas.harvard.edu.