Will Only Minority Of Boston's Registered Voters Endorse Mayor Wu's Re-election In 2025?

Of the 435,532 residents of Boston who were registered to vote in Boston's November 2, 2021 mayoral election of four years ago, only 144,350 (or around 33 percent) of Boston's then-registered voters bothered to vote in that November 2021 mayoral election.. And 343,738 (or around 79 percent) of all of the then-registered Boston voters did not then cast ballots for U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren's protegee, then-Boston City Council Member Michelle Wu.

Yet although Boston's current mayor was able to then attract only 91,794 votes (or only around 21 percent) of registered Boston voters in Boston's November 2021 mayoral election (despite Wu's campaign committee collecting a lot of $1,000 contributions from wealthy individuals, a PAC supporting Wu's candidacy collecting tens of thousands of dollars from U.S. Senator Warren's long-time campaign fund-raiser, Paul Egerman, and Wu's campaign committee and the PAC supporting Wu's candidacy spending a lot of money to attract voters), Wu began a first term as Boston's mayor in this decade in January 2022.

In 2025, around 422,000 Boston residents are currently registered to vote. So, to win the endorsement for a second term as Boston's mayor by the majority of Boston's registered voters--in an election in which Wu's name is the only name on Boston's mayoral election ballot--Boston's current mayor would need to obtain at least 211,001 votes on November 4, 2025.

One reason that Boston Mayor Wu might still not be able to attract over 211,000 votes in the upcoming November 2025 Boston mayoral election might be that, during Wu's first term as Boston's mayor, Wu authorized Boston Police Department [BPD] cops to arrest 118 pro-divestment and antiwar student protesters and supporters on Emerson College's campus in Downtown Boston on April 25, 2024, in the Boylston Place Alley; where--inspired by the example of Columbia and Barnard student protesters--the Emerson College student protesters had set up a Palestine Solidarity Movement encampment.

And, in the course of breaking up this Emerson College campus encampment in the early morning of April 25, 2024, the BPD cops, according to an arrested Emerson SJP organizer who was demonstrating, "started ripping us from the crowd, throwing us down on the ground" and "they started beating people, even people who weren't arrested, dragging them on the ground."

Yet Boston Mayor Wu then later claimed in a statement "that the growing encampment needed to be removed in order to address the public safety and fire hazards that it presented;" rather than more candidly indicating that "the growing encampment" was being removed because of the special influence in Boston of some of Emerson College's big donors, political campaign committee contributors and lobbying groups like the ADL?