Excitement is swirling throughout the neighborhoods as voters get closer to the day when they can finally choose the candidate of their choice in the Super Tuesday Primary Election, March 3.
All over the neighborhoods, residents, neighbors and coffee klatches have been weighting their options – mostly on the Democratic side of things – and evaluating candidates in person and over e-mail for months.
Naturally, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and her many allies in elected office have brought out their organization heavily in the last few weeks to canvass for her in her home state.
That was the case last Saturday, Feb. 20, when Councilor Michelle Wu led off a canvassing effort in the South End for Warren – organized by the Warren Campaign. It was handed off to Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, who ran events in Jamaica Plain as well.
Congressman Joe Kennedy III was also out for Warren over the weekend in Cambridge – rallying voters for his own U.S. Senate campaign and using it as a platform to pledge support for Senator Warren.
Kennedy remembered being first in line outside of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s office as a Harvard Law School student, waiting for the then-professor to get off the phone so he could ask her about “some crazy complexity in the bankruptcy code.”
According to Kennedy, it became apparent that Warren was trying to get whomever was on the other end of the line off the phone. And as the conversation wore on, he realized who it was.
“It was Harry Reid,” the Massachusetts congressman recalled Monday. “And she was getting the Senate majority leader off the phone as they were talking about her oversight of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (the 2008 bank bailout that Reid appointed Warren to oversee) to talk to a law student about the bankruptcy code.”
Kennedy says it was a small but emblematic example of Warren’s commitment to working to take on structures that lead to societal inequities, from teaching her students about contract law and the bankruptcy code to setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
“She did it because she believed that her students could perform and understanding that parts of this stuff were hard, but we all had the potential to get there,” he said. “I see that same Elizabeth Warren in the way that she’s approached this campaign.”
This Saturday, there is a push from Sen. Bernie Sanders in Boston.
The Vermont senator, who is leading early on in the Primary battles, will appear on Saturday at the Boston Common for a massive rally.
Naturally, at the individual voter level, discussions vetting candidates have been going on for months. Neighbors having weighed the entrance of Michael Bloomberg into the race, the fizzling of Joe Biden and the detailed health care plans put forth by Warren and Sanders.
Few have been as active as the South End Seniors group, which meets weekly on Tuesdays. The group has actively been vetting candidates over coffee and e-mails since last August – perhaps before.
Moderator Betsy Boveroux said in recent weeks the group has been so focused on the intricacies of the impeachment saga that few words have been uttered about Super Tuesday.
As for March 3, we have been so focused on the impeachment, the coming Primary has barely gets a word,” she said. “Judging by the people who speak up, we are a ‘Beat Trump’ crowd. Bloomberg is a welcomed addition to the list, but the ‘stop and frisk’ issue causes some concern…We have one vocal Bernie supporter too.”
The polling locations in the downtown area for March 3 include the following:
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