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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Yes, it's Mayoral Election Day, really, Primary Day in Boston, with the heavy overhang of President Trump about to target Boston next, he says, for immigration enforcement like he's been talking about Chicago, partly because he doesn't like the incumbent, Mayor Michelle Wu. It's a nonpartisan primary election, a process that will narrow the field of candidates from four to two.

Remember, New York City's Charter Revision Commission just debated putting a similar nonpartisan open primary on our ballots this year, but that proposal was canned after members couldn't reach a consensus. You may remember this came as a relief to the Working Families Party in particular. They threatened to sue over concerns that a nonpartisan election would harm the system of fusion voting, as it's called, in the New York State Constitution, the impact of parties that are not the Democrats or the Republicans.

There's more than just procedural issues that are relevant here. Throughout New York City's race, as you know, candidate Zohran Mamdani has pointed to Boston's incumbent mayor, or maybe you don't know that Mamdani has pointed to Mayor Michelle Wu as an elected official he seeks to emulate. In the first debate in this year's primary, Mamdani chose Mayor Wu when he was asked as the most effective Democratic politician in the country.

Michelle Wu's rival is also drawing comparisons to Mamdani's rival, Andrew Cuomo, particularly when it comes to family name and wealth. Josh Kraft, that's Kraft with a K, a longtime leader of a nonprofit and heir to the New England Patriots, is running to unseat the incumbent mayor and pouring money from his own pockets into this campaign. To make the obligatory sports rivalry reference, there are things here that Jets fans will be able to learn from Patriots fans, and Yankees fans will be able to learn from Red Sox fans after today, I think.

Joining me now to preview the Boston mayoral primary, or not even preview, because it's going on right now, is Emma Platoff, political enterprise reporter at The Boston Globe. Emma, thank you so much. You must be busy up there today. Thanks for giving a New York radio station some time.

Emma Platoff: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Can we start with the electoral process? How does a non-partisan primary election work in Boston's case? What are voters seeing on their ballots today?

Emma Platoff: Great question. I keep being sort of a nitpicky person in the newsroom correcting people who say primary. The preliminary election is nonpartisan. When voters today look at their options for mayor, they're going to see four people. It just happens to be the case that the top two, the people we expect to be the top two vote-getters are both Democrats, and they will proceed to the November general election. Rather than whittling down the field by selecting a Democratic contender and a Republican contender, we're going to select the top two vote-getters and they will compete in the November election.

Brian Lehrer: Before we talk about them and what New Yorkers might learn from the particular choices, can you talk about some of the pros and cons of this process in Boston? As I was suggesting in the intro, a lot of New Yorkers like the idea of moving to a nonpartisan primary. A lot of New Yorkers hate the idea. What are some of the pros and cons in your experience as a reporter of this process in Boston?

Emma Platoff: I think to me the biggest factor here is turnout. If you just look four years ago, just under one in four Boston voters participated in the preliminary election and then in the November general election, that turnout was a fair amount higher. It was 33 or some odd percent. Basically, what that means is that in the election that more people participate, that is actually the crucial deciding vote.

I used to be a reporter in Texas, where statewide elections are all but decided in the very low turnout Republican primaries. I think the sort of argument here is, do you want to have an election where you have the highest number of voters, the highest turnout share making the crucial final decision?

Brian Lehrer: Listeners in Boston, or from Boston, or with connection to Boston, help us report this story. What do you think is at stake for your city on this mayoral primary day? What do you think New Yorkers can learn, obviously, in the midst of New York's mayoral election process from what's going on in Boston? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text, or with any questions for Emma Platoff, political enterprise reporter at The Boston Globe. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692.

Let's talk about some of the candidates. Let's talk about Mayor Wu. As I said, New York's Democratic nominee, Zohran Mamdani, has repeatedly touted Mayor Wu as a mayor he seeks to emulate. What's her record like? What are the accomplishments she's pointing to from her first term as she seeks reelection, and what might make her controversial to others?

Emma Platoff: Michelle Wu has been a longtime fixture in Boston politics. She was elected mayor four years ago after serving for eight years on the City Council. I think she would pitch herself as a pragmatic progressive. She has these big structural change ideas, but she wants to get it done in inches. She's willing to work with whoever will come to the table.

One of the things that's been really striking to me as a reporter covering both her first campaign four years ago and her first term in office, and now her reelection bid this year, is the ways in which that we-- We, in politics, often say that you campaign in poetry and you govern in prose. We've watched how some of her more progressive ideas have sort of become moderated while she's been in office. She ran on making Boston the first green New Deal city in the country. We've seen that translated. Boston now has a small municipal composting program, but that's just a pilot. It's not broadly available.

There are a handful of free bus lines in the city. I know that's one that you guys are talking a lot about in New York as well. We do not see the kind of broad-based, fare-free transit system that she talked about a lot on the campaign trail. I think it's interesting to think about how these progressive ideas get translated in the actual mechanics of the grind of municipal government. Certainly, that's a question that would face Mamdani as well if he's elected.

Brian Lehrer: Is Wu a democratic socialist per se, like Mamdani?

Emma Platoff: I have not heard her embrace that socialist label. I think what's also been interesting to me is even as you see Mamdani and others across the country point to Michelle Wu as this great figure to emulate, I think she's been a little bit more careful about embracing him in return. She's congratulated him on the election results, but we have not seen her exactly touting him in the way that he has touted her.

Brian Lehrer: Josh Kraft, her main opponent, has described Mayor Wu as out of touch with Bostonians and looking to make a name for herself on the national stage. Wu did gain a lot of attention for her defense of Boston in a congressional hearing on immigration policies with the House Oversight Committee. Do his critiques ring true with a lot of Bostonians? How are the polls in this race?

Emma Platoff: The polls in this race are extremely lopsided. Just last week, we saw one of the most, if not the most lopsided polls I have ever seen in my career as a politics reporter, which showed that Wu had 50 percentage points. She was pulling 50 percentage points ahead of Kraft. drawing 72% of likely voters to his 22%. It remains to be seen whether the numbers today will come anywhere, anywhere close to that. Certainly, she is heavily favored.

I think another, perhaps even more telling example is that when you compare favorability, she by far leads Kraft in favorability. Boston voters just like her more. They approve of her more than they approve of Kraft, her main rival.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "I've been spending a fair amount of time in Boston helping out my mom. Josh Kraft must be spending a ton on TV advertisements. I don't think I've seen any from Mayor Wu, who my mom loves," adds this listener, you want to talk about the money in the case and how people may be seeing that or not seeing that reflected in advertising?

Emma Platoff: Yes, I think money is sort of the factor in this race. Josh Kraft is the third son of Robert Kraft, the billionaire who owns the New England Patriots. We always knew that money was going to be a huge question in this race. Josh Kraft has far outraised the mayor, including $5.5 million of his own wealth that he's poured into the campaign. He also has a very well-funded super PAC that's supporting him. He is outspending her. His PAC is outspending the allied PACs that are spending on behalf of her.

In the newsroom, you can hardly go an hour without seeing two or three Josh Kraft ads on the television. At least from what we're seeing so far, those ads, even as they are reaching voters, do not seem to be persuading them to his side. The poll I mention was from Emerson College. From their February poll of this race to their September poll of this race, they actually show that Kraft lost support. That's a time period during which he spent something like $5 million and this affiliated PAC spent something like $3 million on his behalf. It's not, at least according to that one limited survey, it is not a good return on investment for him at this moment.

Brian Lehrer: His family is obviously well known in Boston. Was he before this race as an individual?

Emma Platoff: He was known in some circles for his longtime work as a nonprofit leader and philanthropist. Josh Kraft, he didn't join the family business in the way that his two older brothers did. He spent more than three decades working for the Boys and Girls Club of Boston, including as its leader in his final years before he left. He also has been the head, prior to the campaign, of the New England Patriots Charitable Foundation. That's the philanthropic arm of his family business.

I think there are a lot of communities, specifically communities of color in Boston that are really familiar with him, both through his work at the Boys and Girls Club, serving their families and their children, and also through his work with the Patriots Foundation. Candidly showing up with a check but doing much more than that is what people in those communities told me. They said he was always willing to do the dirty work as well.

He actually is running a campaign ad right now from a former colleague who says she remembers one time a child got sick, vomited on the floor at the Boys and Girls Club, and Josh Kraft unpretentiously just said, "Okay," and went to clean it up. He's been given a lot of credit by those who worked with him over the years.

Brian Lehrer: If you're just joining us, I mentioned in the intro what a big admirer of Mayor Michelle Wu, who's up for reelection, Zohran Mamdani says he is. We're taking your input and your questions if you have connections to Boston. Here's another one whose mom really likes Mayor Wu. Maybe she's very popular with a mom demographic, if there is such a thing.

Listener writes, I'm from Boston but now live in New York City. My mother still lives there. I grew up under Mayor Menino, and he was a beloved mayor. My mother has loved Mayor Wu, and the city has really transformed under her. With her opponent in Josh Kraft, I just see a candidate who's out of touch with the city and just the son of a billionaire trying to get into power. He has no experience in community building or governance."

Again, that's from one listener. You say the polls are unbelievably lopsided in Mayor Wu's favor. I'm putting you on the spot here. Maybe you don't have a good answer to this. If you had to guess at something that Zohran Mamdani may be watching from Mayor Wu's first term, that may have leaned pretty progressive, that he could learn from in terms of what's going to work, what's going to be popular, what's going to actually get implemented. I don't know. If she had to go through the Massachusetts state legislature, like a lot of Mamdani's court proposals would have to go through Albany. But what's a lesson from her, not just her campaign, but her four years now in actual governance that somebody like Mamdani, who wants the ends that he wants, might learn from Mayor Wu?

Emma Platoff: It's a great question. We do have a similar system here of home rule in Boston, where major proposals that the City has have to get approval from the Massachusetts State House. I think something that has really struck me about Michelle Wu, and I imagine might strike Mamdani as well, is she has-- while not delivering 100% of the progressive goals that she touted and championed on the campaign trail, she has managed to hold on to her progressive coalition. I'll just cherry-pick one example, which is bike lanes.

The City has, in recent months, they've taken some protective barriers out of the ground. There was a bus lane on a major thoroughfare in downtown Boston that was ripped up. These are things that you expect might infuriate or at least disappoint transit advocates who backed Michelle Wu largely because they saw her as a champion for bike infrastructure and for bus infrastructure.

We've seen that she has managed to hold together these progressive groups, this progressive coalition, and make the case to them, like, look, I'm doing the best I can do. I have these limiting factors. I have leaders at the State House who don't always embrace what I want to do. She's a champion for rent control. That's something that the state legislature has never been excited to embrace.

You don't see voters ditching her over those issues. I've been so struck in the dozens of conversations I've had with voters in the last few weeks about this race. A lot of them give her a lot of credit and a lot of grace, and they say housing is too expensive in Boston, but what can a mayor really do? Or like, I trust that she's doing her best on this. there's something. There's just sort of an intangible there. I think when. When voters trust you and they like you and they just think that you're doing your best, that allows you to hold on to support even when you don't necessarily deliver to the tee 100% on the issue that you laid out as a candidate or that you know may be particularly important to that person.

Brian Lehrer: Some texts coming in Listener writes, "Something nice about Kraft's advertisements is he doesn't really slam Mayor Wu. He says Trump is the common enemy. He only puts her down for spending a lot on a stadium." Think that's an accurate perception of his ads?

Emma Platoff: I think it's important to distinguish. There are the ads that Kraft himself is running, and there are the ads being run by the affiliated super PAC, so super PACs can raise and spend unlimited funds, and they are not allowed to coordinate directly with the campaigns. The super PAC ads that are being run on behalf of Kraft are certainly much uglier. They attack Woo more directly. It's exactly what you'd picture, sort of like ominous music and dark shading and all of that sort of scary political stuff.

I will also say in all fairness, Kraft himself, just in his statements and in the statements that come out from the campaign, as well as Wu, there has been a lot of nastiness on both sides of this race. Michelle Wu basically casts Josh Kraft as a nepo baby carpetbagger trying to buy an election. He says that she's out of touch, pie in the sky, doesn't listen, hasn't risen to the city's challenges. there certainly has been a lot of ugly rhetoric in this race, even if the tone of some of his campaign's own direct ads is a little bit softer.

Brian Lehrer: There's so much talk in New York now about President Trump trying to influence the election here by maybe offering Mayor Adams a job to drop out. Maybe also the Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa, to consolidate the anti-Mamdani vote behind Andrew Cuomo, making more possible that Mamdani would lose. There are others who think Trump would really rather have Mamdani as mayor as a foil next year during the congressional elections.

How much did he try to intervene as an opponent? I guess as a probably a fierce critic of Mayor Wu, who's such a fierce critic of his. I know it's in the news just in the last few days that Trump is saying, yes, ICE is going whole hog into Chicago and Illinois right now, and next is going to come Boston and Massachusetts seems to be his implication. We played a clip earlier in the show of border Tom Holman on a Boston television station just yesterday, basically saying, here we come. Have Trump or Homan tried to intervene in this race either for or against Wu?

Emma Platoff: I think to the extent, just speaking purely politically here-- I mean, obviously, there will be a human toll to any immigration surge that we see from the federal Boston. Politically, it really is good news for Michelle Wu to be attacked by Donald Trump. It is probably good news in the reverse, too. Probably the best day of her campaign so far this year was in early March when she appeared before the Republican-led House Oversight Committee and got to strike this calm but combative tone in pushing back against the federal government.

Trump is broadly loathed in Boston. People really like that she is standing up to the federal government, and that's something that she's being rewarded for, I think, at the polls today. The other interesting Trump element in this race, of course, is that Josh Kraft's father, Robert Kraft, has been a longtime friend of Donald Trump. He was a donor to Trump's inaugural committee when he first won, and has distanced himself a little bit after January 6th, but there's evidence that the two are in touch now.

Robert Kraft was credited with brokering some of these meetings with law firms and Donald Trump. That has been a challenge that Josh Kraft has to confront; distancing himself from this president, who is very unpopular here, and saying despite my father's politics, I do not support Donald Trump. I've never given to him. I've never voted for him. But it is a hard affiliation to shake.

Brian Lehrer: I wonder what their dinner table conversations are like between father and son right now. Listener writes, "Boston's [chuckles] crazy drivers will make it difficult for ICE to get around." Does that at least get a laugh from you?

Emma Platoff: [laughs] It certainly makes it difficult for the rest of us to get around, so [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: We know they'll have a tough time in New Jersey if they try to go to New Jersey. on the praise that Josh Kraft got after being with that kid who threw up and he unpretentiously, I think you described it, cleaned it up. Listener writes. "It really makes me shake my head in amazement when someone makes a big deal about a man cleaning up vomit, when this is something that women do without a second thought. Just throwing that in there." Another listener asks a serious question about the race. "Is Israel a factor in this race like it is in New York?"

Emma Platoff: I have not heard this come up organically as an issue among a broad swath of voters. Josh Kraft is Jewish. He would be the first Jewish mayor of Boston. He has given in the past to Republican and Democratic candidates for Congress alike, resting on their support for Israel. I think that there are certainly, in Boston, as in any other city, there are people for whom this is the top issue. But it is not something that we're hearing the candidates talk about a lot on the campaign trail.

Brian Lehrer: Let's get Zeke in Plymouth, New Hampshire, in here recently from Boston, as he says. Zeke, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Zeke: Hi, Brian. That's right, I'm-- [baby crying] Ooh, sorry.

Brian Lehrer: That's okay. Another baby makes their radio debut on the Brian Lehrer Show. What's the baby's name?

Zeke: Absolutely. Iris.

Brian Lehrer: Hi, Iris. Shh, Daddy's on the radio, or whatever your relationship to Iris is. Go ahead.

Zeke: Yes, I'll try to keep it brief. Just a few thoughts. I lived in Boston for a long time. I know Mayor Wu. I have great deal of respect for Mayor Wu. She's a very intelligent person, a very gifted politician, I think a good person. However, I think from inside Boston, especially sort of progressive Boston, among progressive Bostonians, Wu is really considered a centrist, not a liberal firebrand. That's much more of her national profile. In some ways, I was surprised to hear that. A few shots. didn't know about this, that Mr. Magdani had cited her as sort of a- I don't know, an example to follow.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Do you think that's an accurate perception? Iris, very good job being quiet while Zeke was talking. Do you think that's an accurate perception that she's perceived locally as more of a centrist, only nationally as more of a leftist?

Emma Platoff: I think it really just depends what yardstick you're measuring on. I think nationally, she certainly has. She wears that label and wears it proudly. There are progressive criticisms of her locally. Just one example that I think is really instructive: Four years ago, when Michelle Wu ran for office, she said she would not even accept contributions from police officers. This was 2021, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Police reform was a huge issue here as it was nationally.

Fast forward four years, Michelle Wu is proudly accepting and touting the endorsement of the largest police unit in the city. She's standing alongside the district attorney here, the prosecutor locally. You can see that she has shifted on some of these issues. You hardly hear her talk about the Green New Deal anymore.

In other cases, there are places where I think a truly held progressive belief or plan has been stymied by forces that are sort of beyond her control. Michelle Wu is the loudest proponent locally for rent control, but that's not something she can do alone as the mayor of Boston. It's something that would require sign-off from the state legislature, as we mentioned, I think, a few minutes ago. In cases like that, I think she would say, "What do you want me to do? I can keep pushing for this," but she doesn't have to control over all of those levers.

I think the caller certainly makes a very fair point here, that a lot of progressives have seen her shift or moderate, or in other cases, just sort of not win on these progressive issues that she ran on. I think her response to that would be, "I'm working on it."

Brian Lehrer: Emma Platoff, political enterprise reporter at the Boston Globe. Thanks for giving us some time on primary day up there. I'm sure you and your colleagues are really busy. Good luck with covering it today. Again, thanks a lot.

Emma Platoff: Thank you.

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