By JOSH RESNEK
What goes on at Everett city hall – or what doesn’t go on at Everett city hall or what might go on as the future unfolds at Everett city hall is the major concern throughout the neighborhoods of this city and inside city hall with two weeks remaining before voters come out for the primary.
Not as many voters will be coming out for the primary compared with elections when presidents, senators, and governors are up for election or re-election and primary votes grow bloated.
We are told again and again by those who claim to know that about 52-5500 out of Everett’s 23,000 registered voters will cast a vote in the primary.
Six thousand voters coming out for the primary would be a stampede.
How to look at what might happen with any certainty?
This is almost as impossible as predicting the weather – which changes here from hour to hour, day to day.
This we know: there will be two winners on primary night September 21.
What we don’t know is who will finish on top, who will finish second, and who will finish out of the money.
Even knowing this – if such a look into the political crystal ball were a possibility – we need to know who wins and by how much, who comes in second and is out of first by how much, and who is dumped and where those dumped voters go in November.
Here’s the thinking with two weeks to go.
If either Gerly Adrien or Fred Capone were to top the primary ticket, the presumption is that the mayor is done.
But not so fast.
The mayor doesn’t have to top the primary vote to win the November election.
He just needs to be close.
If he is not close, that is problematic for the man who claims he will be the mayor forever.
If Adrien wins by several hundred votes and tops the ticket on primary day and the mayor comes in second there is the widespread belief among old Everett types that she cannot win.
Why?
Oldtimers caught up in old stereotypes about how people voted and who they vote for predict that Capone’s votes will not go to Adrien if she wins or comes close.
Capone’s votes, not all of them, but most of them, they claim will go to the mayor.
In a perfect world where color and gender lines are drawn tightly, such thinking is right on the mark.
However, there is the feeling held among the mayor’s higher-ups and the mayor himself that no one really knows what exactly is going to happen on the 21st.
Is there going to be a Black, Brown, Hispanic minority voter, women’s voter uprising of the type that blew Congressman Mike Capuano out of office?
Is such a thing coming? Hard to say.
We know this, the mayor wants to meet Adrien in the final, not Capone.
The mayor believes that his voters will not vote for a Black woman and that his voters, are basically Capone’s voters.
If Capone comes close to the mayor and he fails to get 50% of the vote, he’s a got a real battle ahead of himself.
Adrien’s voters will not vote for the mayor – and not because he’s a racist but rather, because voting for Capone would be the right thing to do for Black people wanting to be heard at city hall for the next four years.
In other words, If Adrien wins a marginal victory or finishes close to the mayor and Capone is dumped, the odds remain with the mayor.
If Capone comes in second and is within 500 votes of the mayor, Adrien’s votes will go to him in the final.
Most of us understand that all this speculation is basically rubbish as elections pay no heed to rules and regulations or philosophies. All elections have a life force of their own.
This will be true in Everett this time around.
If the mayor’s time has come, he is gone, and many councilors will be gone and the new city government arising out of this extraordinary change will come to form a new city government very different from the one in place right now.
This is a very real possibility, and no one knows this better than the mayor.
On September 21 we find out if the mayor still has the right stuff to manipulate and to control the Everett city government or whether all his bluster, hate, jealousy, and bullying has enough support to get him another four years.
We know this for certain, the city is a changing place.
Just how much the changes will impact the outcome on September 21 is what we will find out.