A retrospective on the 2024 election

On the night of November 5th, 2024, Medford passed two of the three local ballot questions that a team of volunteers, a few of my colleagues, and I had been campaigning for. Question 7, which will put $3 million to the Medford Public School system and $500,000 to the department of public works, passed with 14,847 for and 13,304 against; Question 8, which will put $4 million towards the Medford Public School system, passed with 14,660 for and 13,518 against; and Question 6, a debt exclusion that would have funded the building of a new Fire Headquarters, failed with 13,458 for and 13,965 against. This is the second-best outcome I could have hoped for in the local elections, and with 29,543 voters out of 44,100 registered, this represented 67% voter turnout in Medford. And, nationally, a red wave swept the country as Donald Trump was elected to a second term. I’ll use this post to offer my thoughts on this turn of events.

Despite long odds, the overrides succeeded

According to the latest data from the state databank, override votes only succeed a little over 41% of the time, and overrides that have been put on the ballot during November in presidential election years pass only 35% of the time.

Override win and loss rates in Presidential election years, non-presidential election years, and municipal (i.e. odd-numbered) election years. This override was voted on under “November Presidential”.

Given those numbers, in a municipality that had never had an override vote before, with a ballot measure proposed by a progressive city council in an election year that saw a huge red wave nationally — these were pretty long odds, and I’m proud that they passed.

The reason they passed was because, first, our organizing team was very strong, consisting largely of volunteers who put a ton of their free time into outreach; second, there was very solid reasoning for it passing, and the campaign made a very clear case for that; the third was just the nature of the opposition. I avoided discussing them too much during the election, but, now that the results are in, I’ll offer my thoughts a bit more freely.

The strange messaging of the opposition

A big reason these overrides succeeded, I think, is because the opposition campaign really just lied a lot, and in doing so they undercut themselves and their own credibility. Even after the election ended, they sent an email claiming that City Councilors were proposing to raise their own salaries during the next Council meeting:

From the latest email, referring to a proposed ordinance in which we discussed limiting the ability of elected officials to raise their own salaries

In reality, if anyone followed that up and read the text on the agenda, they would have found that my colleague’s resolution actually proposed to do the opposite of that: prevent elected officials from giving themselves raises during the current term. (This led to a contentious post-election Council meeting.) Besides that, their messaging was just odd. At one point, they claimed that I was endorsing a vote against the ballot measures and even removed my refutation of this on Facebook.

This was a pattern of behavior. Their mailer said that the overrides were for $37.5 million (a number that they arrived at by adding the $30 million debt exclusion, paid over a 30-year period, to the annual $7.5 million from questions 7 and 8 — the actual number would have been $9.5 million); and even after it was explained time and time again that you cannot pay for operational expenses from a savings account, they continued to repeat the claim that we can simply pay teacher salaries from our free cash reserves.

So why did they do this? I think they just saw it as a propaganda technique. It’s not unusual for right-wing groups these days. If you come up with a simple lie and repeat it ad nauseum, people will believe it. “K.I.S.S.” — “Keep it simple, stupid” — works even if what you’re saying isn’t actually true, and misinformation is even more effective with the scattered information environment that the internet age has wrought.

Another reason is just the leadership of the opposition. All Medford's ringleaders are mostly old guard politicians and former political candidates who really dislike the progressive majority on City Council and School Committee, as well as a few business owners and out-of-town developers who own literally millions of dollars in property that they didn’t want to see more taxes on. There may have actually been honest arguments against the overrides, but those in charge of the opposition campaign were simply unable to develop that message. Instead, they chose to lean into misinformation.

Ultimately, most of the voters of Medford saw right through it, but the vote was still closer than I’d like. I thought the margins would be around 60-40 and didn’t anticipate the shift that was reflected in the national election. Obviously, the misinformation had some effect — particularly, I think, on seniors who get their information through word-of-mouth and have less computer access. And there were significant geographic divisions in how the vote was distributed — Medford is quite literally divided down the middle on this. 52% means that we won’t have to lay off 40 teachers next year, but it isn’t a resounding mandate, and it means that we need different outreach techniques.

Question 6

While overrides have a 41% passage rate on average, debt exclusions have a passage rate of nearly 90%. So the failure of Question 6 was unique. The reason, of course, was that the leadership of the Firefighter union opposed it, and around a thousand voters who otherwise voted for Questions 7 and 8 decided to side with them. Fair enough. I’d like to see a new fire headquarters — after all, the firefighters have been asking for one for years — but the next attempt at a debt exclusion will probably need to be for the new high school.

The National Picture

In terms of the national picture — the next four years are going to be awful if Trump does anything that he said he would do. Political pundits and a huge swath of the voting population have been trying to figure out why he was re-elected. The most convincing argument I’ve seen is that the post-COVID economy’s bad and just about every incumbent government in a developed country this year lost re-election.

Source: Financial Times

Anyway, it’s something I’m still thinking about. I think that the left is really going to have to revamp its messaging strategy — ours is just not that great, and I’m criticizing myself as much as anyone for that.

The silver lining of all this is that it will energize organizing on the left (and hopefully trigger some much-needed introspection). If you’d like to get involved, join the Our Revolution Medford mailing list, or the Medford Democratic City and Ward Committees, or the wonderful advocates at Safe Medford.