Has Boston Mayor Michelle Wu Cracked the Code on Progressive Governance in Blue Cities?

Four years ago, a 36 year-old Harvard Law grad and City Councilmember named Michelle Wu rolled to victory as the first elected female, non-white mayor of Boston. Since then, she's racked up further governing successes: Boston these days is often touted as the safest big city in the country, and Wu has delivered progressive wins (albeit incremental ones) on free transit, fair housing and a municipal Green New Deal.

Wu, up for re-election this year, provided an eye-popping demonstration of her  broad popularity in the September primary. She blitzed her free-spending establishment opponent -- the son of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft -- by a whopping 49 percentage points, prompting him to raise the white flag and exit the race. In so doing, Wu has, in less than four years at Boston's helm, established herself as a national progressive icon who has seemingly cracked the complex code of turning movement left ideology into a successful governance strategy, and who now stands as a role model for other young, energized progressives on the cusp of taking the reins in blue cities like New York and Seattle.  

So what, exactly, is Wu's secret sauce of successful governance? How has she seemingly so rapidly turned the old, white ethnic, two-fisted Boston into a multi-culty latter day symbol of how progressives can not only win, but deliver tangible quality of life results on homelessness, crime and other hot button municipal issues?

For answers, we turn to Emma Platoff, the political enterprise reporter at the Boston Globe, who has been covering Wu's remarkable rise since the mayor's successful 2021 run. Platoff tells us that Wu is indeed a talented politician who has threaded the needle of being both a progressive standard bearer and a supple pragmatist, finding success by forging alliances with previous ideological adversaries -- like the police union -- and by triangulating against political forces she can not overcome. But we are left asking a question that only time can answer: will the progressive mayors who follow in her footsteps be able to emulate her success?

Our editor is Quinn Waller. 

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