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Boston City Council District 8 special election: Durkan crushes Haywood
Political fundraiser Sharon Durkan handily beat Suffolk County prosecutor Montez Haywood with a 40% margin.
Political fundraiser Sharon Durkan prevailed over Suffolk County prosecutor Montez Haywood Tuesday night in a special election for the Boston City Council‘s District 8 seat.
Durkan, a 32-year-old Beacon Hill resident, won with about 70 percent of the vote, or nearly 2,000 votes, according to the city’s unofficial election results. Haywood, a 43-year-old West End resident, garnered a little over 800 votes.
The seat went up for grabs in early April after Mayor Michelle Wu tapped Councilor Kenzie Bok to run the Boston Housing Authority, for which Bok previously worked.
Durkan will finish out Bok’s term, which ends at the end of the year, and said previously that she would run for a full term this year. This would mean she would need to keep campaigning through November.
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District 8 currently encompasses Beacon Hill, Back Bay, the West End, Fenway, Boston University, and stretches into the Longwood Medical area and Mission Hill. It will stay largely the same once the new City Council district map, which was approved in late May, goes into effect.
The District 8 race
Durkan, a progressive who’s worked for Wu, Sen. Ed Markey, and Boston City Councilor Ruthzee Louijeune, ran on issues like accessible housing, healthcare, and open spaces.
Haywood, a Boston prosecutor for 17 years, was endorsed by the Boston Police Patrolman’s Association and said he would fight for “clean and safe streets.” He ran for the District 8 seat before in 2019 and came in last in a five-way preliminary election.
Durkan gathered a litany of impressive endorsements while running for Boston City Council, including Markey, Wu, Bok, four other city councilors, several state senators and representatives, several labor unions, and two major environmental organizations.
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This was mirrored by her fundraising, which the The Boston Globe reported totaled $66,000 at the end of June. Haywood had reportedly raised only $8,000 at that time.
Meet Sharon Durkan
According to her biography on her website, Durkan was raised by “working-class” parents in rural Georgia. Her activist days date back to high school, during which she petitioned the school to provide laptops for every student and helped found her school’s first-ever recycling program.
While attending Smith College in Northampton, her website says, she got involved with College Democrats of Massachusetts. In 2014, she graduated from the college with a bachelor’s degree in government.
Durkan has been a renter in Beacon Hill for eight years now, according to her website. Since moving to Boston, she’s worked for numerous progressive political candidates. In 2019, she was elected chair of the Boston Ward 5 Democratic Committee.
Reactions to the results
Neither Durkan nor Haywood responded to a request for comment on the election results Tuesday night.
Durkan tweeted Tuesday night: “Thank you, District 8! With your support, we won every precinct of the district. I am so thrilled to be your next City Councilor, and I couldn’t be more excited to get to work.”
Haywood thanked his campaign volunteers on Facebook Tuesday night and said his campaign would continue. He told the Boston Herald earlier Tuesday that he planned to keep running for the seat and go up against Durkan again in November.
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Durkan said she could “feel” the strong support while campaigning, the Herald reported. “Over and over again, we were talking to people who have never had a friend in government,” she reportedly said.
Haywood reportedly told the Herald he hoped the district would find him the more qualified candidate despite Durkan’s overwhelming support from local political elites.
“It’s not lost on me that the inside baseball, the political machine that is the Democratic Party in Boston, is sided with Sharon,” he reportedly said.
Durkan addressed this during her speech to supporters Tuesday night, the Herald reported, saying that while her getting “every single endorsement” could feel “sinister,” it simply meant that she connected well with people in government.
Bok and Louijeune both congratulated her on X Tuesday night.
More on Boston City Council
What’s next
Durkan joins a city council that’s been rocked by scandal after scandal after scandal over the last year. City Council President Ed Flynn, who endorsed Durkan, admonished several councilors earlier this month for bringing negative attention to the elected body.
The most recent scandals followed a fraught internal fight over Boston City Council redistricting that resulted in the original map being overturned in court.
But Durkan told the Globe earlier this month that despite the council’s recent drama, she’s still eager to lead.
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“Honestly, constituents are not interested in any sort of infighting. They’re interested in [councilors] getting stuff done for them,” she reportedly said.
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