Team Unity councilors at risk in at-large race

Yawu Miller

The city’s four councilors of color were out in Dudley Square Monday morning, greeting morning commuters with a small army of volunteers holding a multicolored barrage of signs bearing their names — Charles Yancey, Chuck Turner, Felix Arroyo and Sam Yoon.

As commuters streamed by on foot and in cars and buses, the candidates and soldiers in the Team Unity campaign repeated “Vote November 6th” like a mantra. As they packed their placards into volunteers’ cars, Yoon examined his own maroon-and-white sign.

“We should put ‘November 6’ on these signs,” he said to a volunteer. “Right across the bottom.”

Yoon’s voice betrayed an unease that’s buzzing among political activists in Boston’s black, Latino and Asian communities.

While at-large councilors Arroyo and Yoon are fighting to hold onto their seats, there seems to be little awareness of the Nov. 6 election in communities of color.

In contrast to the 2005 election cycle, when challengers Patricia White, Matt O’Malley, Ed Flynn and John Connolly vied with Yoon to knock off an incumbent with well-funded campaigns that garnered attention in the daily newspapers, this year’s race has flown largely under the radar.

Because there are only nine candidates for the four at-large seats, there was no preliminary balloting in the at-large race, a development that has the at-large candidates running in relative obscurity.

The apparent lack of electoral awareness is not atypical in an off-year with no mayoral or presidential race on the ballot. In fact, it’s the norm. Black, Latino and Asian voters have long been considered less likely to vote in off years than their counterparts in the voter-rich, predominantly Irish neighborhoods of South Boston and West Roxbury. Ditto for white progressives in communities like Jamaica Plain and Back Bay.

“Felix and Sam don’t have a strong geographical base,” noted Giovanna Negretti, executive director of ¿Oíste?, the statewide Latino political organization. “You can’t say they can win with Roxbury and Jamaica Plain.”

Observers are questioning whether second-time challenger Connolly, who finished fifth in the 2005 at-large election, will bump off Arroyo, Yoon or Stephen Murphy, all seen as vulnerable.

Connolly has aggressively courted votes in communities of color and with white progressives. And he is not the only one making a bid for Arroyo and Yoon’s base in communities of color — Murphy is touting his support for legislation to reform the state’s Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) system, aimed at preventing businesses contracting with the city from discriminating against people with criminal records.

Neither Murphy nor Flaherty supported rent control, rent stabilization or tenant collective bargaining legislation advanced by Team Unity, the combined political campaign organization of the four councilors of color. But both say they support affordable housing.

Flaherty has torn a page from Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards’ book with his campaign talk of “two Bostons,” citing a growing gap between the haves and have-nots in the city. He has offered no concrete policy solutions to close this gap, but gained recognition in a Boston Globe editorial published Monday for highlighting the issue.

Retired teacher Bob Marshall, who is volunteering for Turner’s campaign and Team Unity in this election, called Flaherty’s “two Bostons” line hypocritical, citing his call for neighborhood schools.

“What is he doing about closing the gap between the two Bostons?” Marshall questioned.

It’s not certain whether the white at-large candidates will resonate with voters of color, but their efforts have netted some high-profile support.

Gov. Deval Patrick is scheduled to hold a fundraiser for Murphy next week at Anthony’s Pier 4 restaurant, an apparent payback for Murphy’s early support for Patrick’s gubernatorial campaign.

¿Oíste? endorsed Flaherty after he supported a council proposal calling for voting rights for documented immigrants.

Team Unity campaign operatives say they are reaching out to voters in the areas that typically support Arroyo and Yoon — Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, the South End and the predominantly Latino sections of Jamaica Plain and Roslindale.

Some Team Unity supporters are calling for a targeted voting strategy.

Marshall says he’s asking his neighbors to bullet vote for Team Unity candidates who appear on the ballot in Roxbury — Arroyo, Turner and Yoon.

“I’m not voting for anybody else,” he said. “These councilors have been on the front lines when it comes to dealing with communities of color.”

But the combined campaign is having trouble amassing sufficient volunteers to distribute the Team Unity literature — a crucial component in efforts to turn out the vote in communities of color.

For Arroyo and Yoon, success depends largely on who will turn out. In the last off-year election in 2003, Arroyo garnered 75 percent of the vote in predominantly African American Ward 12. Flaherty got 25 percent of the vote.

In South Boston’s Ward 6, Flaherty garnered 86 percent of the vote to Arroyo’s 25 percent.

While people of color make up more than half the city’s population, the whites in Flaherty’s voting base turn out in greater numbers.

Negretti is hoping voters of color reverse that trend.

“This is a time when people really have to pay attention to what’s happening,” she said. “We have a new school superintendent. Crime is out of control. The police need a lot of supervision. We have an increasing rate of foreclosures. We really need friends on the council. Without Team Unity, we’re looking at some really dark times.”