Election night notebook dump

Welp

Welp, it went bad. Just a few notes for tonight to “have something up.” More involved analysis over the next few days.

Let’s start with the bright side. Candy Mero-Carlson, the worst of the cranks, got toppled by an insanely strong showing from Councilor-elect Rob Bilotta. The boy did it.

Here’s my interview with him for the WCT3k election night stream.

He’s sort of the only one that did. Read all the results here.

Etel losing is personally devastating in a way that’ll take me a while to properly articulate. Both she and Rivera did better than they did in 2023. Etel added votes in every precinct save for one where she stayed level. Rivera added more in every precinct besides one where he dropped slightly. Overall, Etel picked up about 300 votes over last election. Rivera picked up 900. Blank votes dropped by about 100. The money pumped into Rivera’s campaign by the chamber of commerce paid off, I suppose. The police unions whipping votes for Rivera and ratfucking the fire department union endorsement of Etel must have helped as well. Rivera certainly didn’t pick up any votes from the campaign forum last week. Hoo boy he was bad. He still lacks even a whiff of a message. But, remember, he’s going to a body where those with actual politics are punished for the crime of it.

The Chamber of Commerce was not funding Mero-Carlson the way they were funding Rivera. The Chamber and the police unions… Barad-dûr and Orthanc. They showed what they can do when they want to. They replaced our best city councilor with a man who may prove to be our dumbest city councilor yet.

Vindicated yet again in my analysis that Worcester is a city that punishes you for caring.

Joe Petty won mayor, of course. But Khrystian King beat Kate Toomey for second-highest vote getter, a psychic victory, if a pyrrhic one as well. It’s not like it changes the math.

Otherwise the at-large race was crank city. Gary Rosen back on, in fourth, Moneybags Mitra coming in fifth, Bergman beating out Kamara for sixth by less than 30 votes (fuuuuuck).

Brutal.

In D1, Economou beat Linhares, coasting on name recognition and the same Chamber backing that put Rivera over Haxhiaj. But Linhares put up impressive numbers for a first-timer, netting about 3,000 votes.

In District 3, Fresolo beat Pezzella, giving us the funnier of two bad outcomes. Now we wait for the indictments to roll in.

In District 4, Ojeda rinsed Kostas, which is cool.

What we’re left with is two progressives, two centrists and seven cranks. We went from the losing position of 8-3 to the even more losing position of 9-2.

If you take it as fact, as I do, that Toomey is merely a surrogate for Rick Cipro and/or Anthony Petrone, we are looking at an all-male city council. It’s older, it’s more conservative, it’s a lot more beholden to the Chamber of Commerce. The prospect of getting anything good through the body becomes slim to none.

On School Committee side, no surprises. Roy narrowly beat Nelly Medina again, which sucks so bad. The margin was a thoroughly depressing 92 votes.

Sue Mailman and Maureen Binienda took the two at-large seats. Sue closed the gap between her and Binienda, from 2,500 votes in 2023 to about 600 in 2025.

In District C, Biancheria handily beat Feanna Jattan Singh. This makes Feanna the second candidate of color in a row to lose to a member of the townie jobs cartel in a district created to give new candidates of color a better chance of winning seats. What a failure of a reform, huh?

The School Committee’s membership remains completely unchanged from the 2023 election. Crazy.

Oh and overwhelming support for Candy Mero-Carlson’s ballot question on something the city will never do because the city can’t actually do that. What a joke.

That’s 16,000 voters about to slowly find out they were lied to. Great work.