Boston Mayor-elect Marty Walsh
Tuesday's elections brought a number of contests, scattered across the country and in many cases under the radar, with real implications for working people and unions. Some of them made national headlines: the landslide election of Bill de Blasio in New York City, for instance. But let's look around at some of the other progressive wins.
While de Blasio's victory was pretty much a foregone conclusion by Tuesday (surprising, given that just a few months ago he wasn't given much of a chance in the primary), no one really knew how the Boston mayoral race would come out. The win, by four points, went to Marty Walsh, who started his working life as a union worker and went on to become president of Laborers Local 223 and general agent of the Boston Building Trades Council. Walsh defeated City Councilor John Connolly, who was running on an education platform—backed by corporate education reform groups like Democrats for Education Reform.
Corporate education reformers also took a loss in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where:
The city Board of Education slipped out of the hands of Mayor Bill Finch and Schools Superintendent Paul Vallas on Tuesday, despite the surprise win of a Republican school board candidate.
In the election, the majority of the nine-member school board tipped in favor of the Connecticut Working Families Party.
Vallas was originally put in place after the elected board was dissolved by the state; an elected board was brought back by a court decision and now this election has shifted the balance of power. In Douglas County, Colorado, on the other hand,
right-wing pro-voucher school board incumbents won, boosted by money from
the Koch brothers and Jeb Bush.
Public workers in Cincinnati also had a win, with voters overwhelmingly defeating a measure to replace the city's pension plan with a defined contribution system.