Well, it looks to Jose Tosado has a busy seven weeks ahead of him.
While Tosado was, technically, one of the winners of yesterday’s mayoral preliminary election, the City Council candidate can’t be too happy with his numbers at the polls. As the second-place finisher in yesterday’s election, Tosado will go on to the Nov. 8 general election—but he’ll be going into that election handicapped by his not-especially-impressive performance this week. Tosado won just 3,170 votes yesterday, a distant second behind incumbent Domenic Sarno’s 8,254. School Committee member Antonette Pepe came in third, with 2,269, which knocks her out of contention.
Sarno, meanwhile, has got to be feeling good about yesterday’s results; even if all of Tosado’s and Pepe’s supporters had joined forces, in a sort of anti-incumbent bloc, the mayor would still have come out ahead with 60 percent of the vote.
What do yesterday’s results mean for the November election? While it might be tempting to dismiss the preliminary results as relatively meaningless, given that just under 15 percent of the city’s eligible voters bothered to turn out to vote, it’s hard to imagine that the turnout for the November election will be that much bigger: in 2009, the last time the city voted for mayor, only 25 percent came out to vote. At the end of the day, then, it’s still that core group of residents who will make the decision—a decision that this year has special import, since the mayoral term will be expanded from two years to four starting with the results of this election.
One conclusion that can be drawn from the results: Springfield voters are not exactly clamoring for change—or, at least, not the change they’re being offered. While Tosado’s campaign has worked hard to cast him as a forward thinker with progressive ideas for the city, many voters, it would appear, aren’t on board with those ideas. Or maybe they’re not buying the idea of Tosado—who entered city politics via Mike Albano’s 1995 mayoral campaign and sat on the School Committee and then the City Council during the years of the city’s fiscal decline—as a “change agent.” Pepe, meanwhile, ran a fierce and fearless campaign, but in the end, perhaps, couldn’t shake critics’ charge that she was too negative.
Tosado now has a little less than two months to win over voters, and perhaps that task will be easier with the narrower field, and with more public attention turning to the race. Still, no doubt he’d be feeling happier today had he pulled off the kind of victory that Holyoke’s Alex Morse did yesterday: the recent college grad topped his city’s mayoral preliminary yesterday by one thin, but oh-so-meaningful, vote over incumbent Elaine Pluta, and now heads into November with a lot of momentum, and a lot of charged-up supporters.
