Guide to the Sept. 2 preliminary election
Welp buckle up folks
Bucking the usual format to provide a straight guide today. Well, relatively straight. But I do have to ask for some money first them’s the rules.
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Hard to believe but it’s time for the first official Worcester Sucks Election Guide of the 2025 cycle. The September 2 preliminary is less than a month away, mail-in ballots have already gone out to at least some voters, there was a refreshing albeit worryingly unseasonal chill in the air this morning. Before you know it, October’ll arrive, and with it, all the townie surprises Joe Petty can scheme into existence.
There are 15 or so races in the November 4 general election, between the city council and all the new school committee district seats. But only two had enough interested candidates to trigger a preliminary (more than double the amount of available seats): at-large council and its field of 14 candidates and the District E school committee’s field of three.
Today we’ll focus on the at-large council race. Aislinn Doyle over in the WPS in Brief department of this newsletter already did a thorough job laying out the District E race. I’ll briefly recap her work at the end and offer some thoughts of my own. But those of you primarily interested in the School Committee side of things should catch up on Aislinn’s work before continuing. Of course, you’ll only have a say if you live in the strange new carveout of the city that is School Committee District E!
Parts of Council Districts 3, 4, and 5. What a mess. I’ll say it again: We could have satisfied the lawsuit with ranked choice. Instead, we have this six-over-five district mess. That’s on Joe & Co. Hard to imagine it was an accident.
At-Large Council
We have 14 at-large candidates. Only 12 will advance to the general.
If you go no further, here’s the three-sentence version: Vote for King, Kamara, and Davis. If you want to use your remaining three votes (you have up to six but do not need to cast all six), consider Montero, Pepple, Sarkodieh, or Rosen. Do not vote for Petty, Bergman, Toomey, Colorio, Luster, or Mitra (the crank ticket).
Follow those simple steps and, knowing nothing else, you can rest assured you did your part. You helped make a positive change in this city.
Here’s what the ballot’ll look like, with some annotations from yours truly:
I don’t see a lane for any shocking outcome (though a boy can dream: Bergman places 13th, Bergman places 13th, Bergman places 13th). The preliminary only casts two of the fourteen off the island. The safe money is on Montero and Iandoli going bye-bye. No offense to either of them, of course. That’s just a balls-and-strikes-style analysis.
—Montero got fewer than 200 votes the last time he ran, in 2023, for District 5.
—Iandoli has raised precisely zero dollars. Fred Nathan, whom many have called the 12th Councilor, is the campaign’s sole listed employee and he has yet to complete his requisite treasurer training.
Everyone else on the ballot has better prospects than those two.
The results will, however, give us the best glimpse so far at the real state of the race—a proverbial licked finger held up to gauge the direction of the political wind. Will we see the townie backlash the cranks are hoping for? Or will Worcester follow New York and throw unprecedented support behind the most progressive candidates on the ballot?
We have our cranks, who will surely get the same amount of votes they get every year, minus any would-be voters who moved to Boylston, Palm Beach, or died since the last election. They’re certainly not adding any new voters. On the other hand, we have exciting new candidates making pitches to new kinds of voters in this notably growing, diversifying city. A preliminary that sees strong returns for King, Kamara, and Davis is a great sign heading into the general. Of course, the opposite is also true.
It’s a safe bet, however depressing, that Petty and Toomey will come in first and second, respectively. Rosen, the ultimate popularity contest candidate, will likely place third or fourth. Colorio, who absorbs the steady albeit small Republican bloc, will likely continue to hover around fourth or fifth, as our token Republican councilor has always done.
The real tallies to watch in terms of forecasting are Bergman (a Republican in Democrat clothing who serves the police and landlords exclusively) and King (a staunch progressive running to the left of Petty for mayor). If Bergman moves up and King moves down, that’s an alarm bell. If Bergman moves down and King moves up, that’s a bell of a different kind: a five-alarm “we can actually do this let’s not fuckin blow it” air raid siren.
There hasn’t been a preliminary for at-large council since 2019, and 2019 was about 40 or 50 years ago depending on how you count 2020.
In the last general election, King placed third, with 12 percent of the vote (10,108), and Bergman placed fifth, with 10 percent (8,668).
The Good Guys: King, Davis, and Kamara
Khrystian King is the council’s longest-serving progressive. Over four terms, he’s worked from a minority position (in the political sense and very much the other one too) to advance better accountability mechanisms for the police and city manager, more investment in mental health services, more affordable housing. He’s consistently pushed a... let’s just say reticent political establishment toward an actual reckoning with the city’s racial and class-based inequities. He’s got my vote, as he does for mayor in the general.
Quick wonk note: Worcester’s weird when it comes to the mayoral race. All at-large are technically mayoral candidates by default, but most “withdraw” by a certain date after the preliminary, leaving a smaller field of non-withdrawn actual mayoral candidates. I know… silly. So we can’t say for sure, but we can say with 99 percent certainty that the mayoral contest will be between Khrystian King and Joe Petty.
Cayden Davis is one of our most exciting newcomers. His candidacy is an extension of the indignation and mass demonstrations earlier this year over Candy Mero-Carlson’s transphobia—and the failure of the mayor and city manager to do even one single thing about it. A renter, a social worker, a trans man, a real sweetheart if you don’t mind my saying so, Cayden would be a tremendous addition to a city council with a majority outlook on gender that’s a bit... let’s just say Nancy Reagan.
Jermoh Kamara, a former school committee member, is a real asset for the city and for the progressive movement. It was a bitter twist of irony that Kamara, a young and politically talented Black woman, lost her bid for school committee reelection—in one of the new district seats meant to foster increased diversity on the school committee—to a real crank’s crank. Dianna Biancheria is a holdover from the Ray Mariano era of Worcester politics. She’s Italian in all the worst ways and, frankly, dumb as rocks. Like the rock Pokémon equivalent to Candy Mero-Carlson (obviously a fire type). The type of person most likely to discuss trans issues in the context of high school sports, if you feel me. I say all this to emphasize it was a particularly gross crime among the many crimes of the last election that Kamara was thrown out of the ring. We need her back in. And she’s hitting the right issues hard. Housing, housing, housing!
The Bad Guys: Petty, Colorio, Bergman, Toomey, Mitra, Luster
I simply can’t bring myself to give a paragraph each to the incumbents. Regular readers likely feel similarly tired. (This section is the sole cause of the fact that this post is two days past the Sunday morning deadline I’ve imposed for myself.)
Colorio, Bergman, and Toomey are Joe Petty’s id, ego, and superego. I’ll leave you to figure out which is which. They’re all just nasty. They exist politically to exact their petty revenges. They treat the position like reality TV. They are constantly aggrieved. They don’t know anything at all about how cities function—poorly or well. They think Mill Street is the big issue. They are manipulated in broad daylight by the police unions. They think that this manipulation grants them membership to the club. The real members of said club know there’s use in furthering the illusion. You can find all you need to know about Colorio, Bergman, and Toomey in a campaign ad Bergman has been running on Talk of the Commonwealth.
This past year, city government has been all too often been paralyzed by activists seeking publicity for issues beyond our city's control. We need to get back to business. And if reelected, I intend to do just that. I don't cater to chaos. Public safety, good streets and sidewalks, and low taxes are the types of issues we need to focus on.
The tagline: “Let's vote for common sense, not nonsense.”
The man is basically a personification of the concept of negative polarization. His entire pitch is “I’m not these people I don’t personally like” + “cops good, taxes bad.” (Someone needs to ask these cranks how they think the cops get paid.) His is a politics of pure grievance. And so smug too. You gotta hear how he says it.
Charles Luster is cut from the same cloth as our incumbent cranks. He has the singular honor of having pulled the grossest campaign stunt so far, releasing a four-year-old video of people doing drugs to advocate for a vaguely stated “clean-up” of the city.
Satya Mitra is hard to figure out. But more on that later. I have a whole-ass section on that.
The Rest...
Gary Rosen is fine, I guess. He has proven over the years that he can be amenable to good ideas and step outside the tribalism of his milieu to vote on the merit of something. He was all-in on fare-free buses (one of Worcester’s finest recent achievements), and on the Board of Health, he’s at least nominally called for safe injection sites. We could do a lot worse than Rosen, but also a lot better. We are more than likely stuck with him. He will almost certainly win a seat in November.
Jessica Pepple is an executive with the RFK health alliance. Sort of a Sean Rose type deal, from what little I’ve been able to gather. A self-professed bridge-builder, but when push comes to shove, a reliable centrist: The type who says the problem with the police is the “divide,” not anything they do or have done or will do. She told Talk of the Commonwealth as much in a recent interview, adding she’s “sick of the finger-pointing,” which is code for “the progressives.” The Worcester Business Journal has named her a power 100 player or whatever it’s called, making her and me colleagues.
Owura Sarkodieh was on the ballot in 2019, the last election with an at-large preliminary. He came in 10th out of 15. I’ve never met him or heard him speak. He’s a first-generation immigrant from Ghana and his website’s “About” page has a pretty neat bulleted history of Worcester—an endearingly strange addition. I’d be stoked if he advanced to the general. Netting 1,500 votes last time, it’s likely he will.
Far as my memory serves, Edson Montero was a nice enough if entirely apolitical guy when he ran for District 5 in 2023. He got six percent of the vote in that preliminary, a total of 192. I genuinely know nothing about Bernard Iandoli except what I mentioned up top.
Like I said, vote for Sarkodieh, Pepple, and Montero if you want. Or don’t! Doesn’t really matter. Blank votes are just as well. Just don’t vote for Gary Rosen. He doesn’t need the help.
A Note on District E School Committee
UPDATE 4:51 p.m.: I’m retracting this entire section because I made a tremendous oopsies. I thought you had two votes in the preliminary for District E school committee. You only have one. It says so clearly on the ballot. I am dumb.
Accordingly not a word of the argument I laid down in this section makes any sense. I deeply deeply regret the error. It’s an especially bad mistake because it muddies an already confusing situation. I’m sorry!
The version that hit inboxes an hour ago is still incorrect. Nothing to be done about that. I will issue a big bold retraction at the beginning of the next email.
Read Aislinn’s work on District E. She knows better than I.
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Thank you!! Now to a more ranging discussion…
Moneybags Mitra
Take a look at this graph, auto-generated by the Office of Campaign Finance’s website.
Point is: Mitra has raised a comical amount of money. Something sketchy is going on there. I’m not sure what, but I know it. Something over and above the obvious: that he’s a Chamber of Commerce plant. On his donor list are the usual suspects: Tim Murray, Mike Angelini, Craig Blais, etc., etc. The same folks who reliably fund the campaigns of Joe Petty and his four cranky horsemen.
In his expenditures, things get a little funky. We spent a good amount of time discussing it on the most recent Outdoor Cats (about 33 minutes in). Neither Chris nor I have really seen the $23,000 Mitra has apparently spent, at least not in the parts of the city I frequent. (I’ve heard some neighborhoods in the West Side are blanketed.) Regardless, where is all this money going?
I pulled all the data and put it in a Google sheet. There’s two tabs: contributions and expenditures. In the latter, we see he’s spent $4,000 on catering, $800 renting the Top of the Tower, another $700 printing invitations, and another $500 mailing said invitations. All of this for one fundraiser event at the Top of the Tower, obviously invite-only and in a lavishly hyped space that has no public hours but has nevertheless been covered by the local press in “next big thing” fashion.
Head over to the contributions tab and you’ll see a lot of donations on April 30, more than any other date. Among the April 30 donors is Vincent Pedone of the WRA, Worcester’s main conduit between government and real estate. I chuckled when I read his occupation: “executive director” next to his company “Worcester.” May as well be true. Other notables: Christopher Crowley of Polar Seltzer, Candy Mero-Carlson, and Felicio Lano, CEO of Northeast Properties. Most renters reading this will know Northeast to be one of the sketchier slum brokers you can do business with around here. A donation from the general manager of Saint-Gobain was logged a week later. You get the idea. Safe to say April 30 was the date of this lavishly catered fundraiser. Ah whoops, it was April 29 actually...
My bad.
A scroll through the Top of the Tower Instagram will show this hip new private event venue rented out for such events as “The Economic Forecast and Real Estate Forum” and a 25th anniversary bash for The Health Foundation of Central Mass. It is a space for those who “serve on boards.” And only those people.
The Top of the Tower is a fitting metaphor for Mitra’s candidacy. If you’ve never been there, he doesn’t serve your interests. The fact that he doesn’t have a single policy position listed on his website, despite working with at least two high-powered political consultants, underscores the point. The people atop the proverbial tower know what his policy positions are, and they’re the only people who need to. Only a quarter or so of his donations have come from within the city.
These are the ways of the “developer community,” for lack of a more precise term, and the local political elite who gain and lose access on the ability to serve that community’s interests. These are people who might look at the fracas this week over Mitra’s unprecedented $80,000 and scoff at us rubes who think that’s a lot of money. For them, it’s nothing. They are passing pocket change momentarily to a trusted friend whom they trust to pass it back eventually. None of the problems facing you or me in this city, especially the most glaring, like housing, affect these people at all. In fact, most are in a position to materially benefit from such a crisis worsening.
These are the same people who, last election, dumped an emergency $50,000 into a PAC named “Progress Worcester” that actively worked against every progressive candidate in the race. All of it done with plausible deniability and a compliant media class they can bank on not looking too hard at the “when” and the “why.” Certainly not spelling it out for their readership. And it worked out, for the most part.
This on-the-sly stuff happens all the time. It is the purpose of the Economic Development Coordinating Council that meets with the city manager weekly. It is the genesis of every silver-bullet scheme for the downtown. Textbook definition of “above-board corruption.” It’s what Gillian Ganesan was getting at in their recent piece on here, “Four precincts control the entire city.”
Historically, we have always been a city made up of immigrant workers, most often governed by a tight-knit group of fashy nativists who set up their own little gated community within the walls of city hall. In the early days of the 20th century, when unions were building a movement across the commonwealth, Worcester was the white whale of organized labor. The industrious capitalists of the municipality pitted ethnic groups against each other, using language barriers and neighborhood lines to hold organizing at bay. A strike would break out, and factory owners could bring in new workers easily, preying on desperation and division among the working class. Meanwhile, they, the ruling class of their day, stayed in perfect formation, in solidarity with each other against the population of the city. They all went to the same private schools, frequented the same clubs, sicced goons on immigrant workers, and spent their leisure time in the surrounding towns. Sound familiar?
The glue that holds our cranks together, which has always held them together, is a common interest in their own wealth. Our current crop spend money on each other’s races, shake hands with the same developers, and live in the same pricey neighborhoods. They barely have to do any actual campaigning, because in exchange for selling their council votes to the highest bidder, they receive support and name recognition.
They are not your friends. Never have been.
On Monday, Hank and Ben over at Talk of the Commonwealth spent a few minutes openly mocking this piece, seemingly because Thu Nguyen shared an excerpt on Instagram.
Hank: “But the one that, that caught my attention was ‘white devils with money to burn decided who governs a city of marvelous diversity.’” He reads it out loud, contemptuously, but doesn’t say what’s wrong with it. Where the lie is. Ben chimes in: “I hope they didn’t think they were breaking any news here.” They laugh together, two insiders going pshhhhh old news. But, of course, no wider analysis. No talk of what that reinforces or why it should change. Who it benefits, who it hurts. “This is a well-known phenomenon in Worcester where you have a couple of precincts. They’re usually kind of on the West Side over there. They’re usually more affluent. Have the largest voter turnout by far. And that’s where people pander to because that’s where your votes are coming from.” A moment later, Hank advises that Jermoh Kamara (specifically, for some reason) should do more pandering in those neighborhoods if she wants to win. “You got to get over to the West Side, right? I mean, like, I would spend more time on the West Side.”
Scoffing at the line about how rich white people decide elections, then a minute later telling the Black woman to spend more time courting the rich white people. Lmao. Not a single point Gillian makes in that essay gets refuted. Most of them get fresh evidence in real-time. The whole little three-minute segment is a trip if you want to listen.
Or you could watch my disingenuous edit made for parity and humor purposes and say, “Comrade Hank, welcome to the dark side.”
Poking around while researching this part, I found a reel that Talk of the Commonwealth made recently. Aerial pictures of the city taken from the Top of the Tower, mixed with a few from some sort of function—proof they were there, in on it, part of the club. The caption: “A great new venue in #Worcester. ‘Top of the Tower’ Radio Worcester.” Over the slideshow, muzak from the Meta stock library. “It’s a beautiful day / Don’t let it slip away,” the singer croons over a familiar I-V-VI-IV pop arrangement.
Apropos of nothing, I’m thinking about a scene in House of Cards Season 1. Frank Underwood’s young reporter/concubine inconveniences him for the first time. He turns to the camera and says “Proximity to power deludes some into believing they wield it.”
There is a baseline bargain that local media people make with local power brokers: The latter are never challenged, and the former gets to pretend they’re colleagues. They get invited to the fancy shindigs and they get to shoot the shit and they get the free tickets to the events and they get to be on a first-name basis with Movers and Shakers. I know it because I lived it while working under Walter Bird. All of that access goes away the second said media person stops showing absolute fealty to the power broker. It’s a delicate system of soft censorship. It is very effective.
An invisible line emerges. Few dare cross it. Cozy on their preferred side of such a line, a media worker might look out at the city skyline from the new exclusive clubhouse, among the Movers and Shakers at the invite-only event, and think to themself Don’t let it slip away...
Then, a few months later, such a media figure may feel compelled to ridicule the idea put forward in an alternative outlet that a small group of wealthy white people control the politics of the city. They scoff. Look at this loon, they tell their audience. What a ridiculous idea.
And in that moment, they fulfill their end of the bargain. The invites from “the club” keep coming.
It’s a dynamic to consider when you look at the difference between how Etel’s campaign finance has been covered and how Mitra’s has. For Etel, it was “look at all these out-of-state donations” (derogatory). For Mitra it’s been “ooooo he even got a donation from India” (glowing).
So many of the grossest political realities are bound up in this campaign that may on its face seem rather innocuous. The very real cash flow combined with the vague objectives and personal motivations of Mitra himself work together to demonstrate a tightly coordinated power elite who can effectively define political narratives and keep the whole growth machine humming along for their benefit. The only thing they don’t have is people power. So they’re perfectly happy with the current reality, where the wealthiest precincts decide elections amid reliably abysmal turnout. Our only path to ever possibly mounting a real challenge is a platform, a narrative, and a set of proposals that awaken some of the 80 percent of registered voters in this city who do not bother with municipal-level politics. We need at least 1,000 new voters to get anywhere.
Luckily for us, this is exactly what Zohran Mamdani pulled off in New York, and the folks who helped make it happen are happy to share notes. There’s a particularly interesting thread from a core member of the NYC Democratic Socialists of America chapter on how they consciously built a new “universe” of voters in an effort to buck old, self-destructive patterns.
Part of it included getting away from targeting the stock standard super-voters. Part of it was consciously going after previously overlooked neighborhoods full of renters and immigrants from majority Muslim and South Asian countries.
People involved in the good campaigns would do well to read the whole thing. (For a very deep dive, check out this one from a co-chair of the campaign’s election committee.) We need a similar change of course here. And we need to expand our people power through recurring small donations and volunteer hours.
Toward all of those ends, we put together a simple zine for the first Election Squad meetup last week. The maps were made by Hanna Ballentine and the cover illustration was by co-organizer Gillian Ganesan. A quick flip through will give you all you need to get connected and get going.
If you want a physical copy, they’re listed on the merch store for short money. Just enough to cover printing costs.
If you’re a campaign or a small business that would like a bulk order to distribute yourselves, feel free to send me a line (billshaner@substack.com)! Would love to put together some big packages. Already working on the next one.
I’ve also reformatted the Worcester Sucks Linktree to list the volunteer and donation pages for every even decent candidate. Please consider taking the time to get on some volunteer mailing lists and set up some recurring donations, however small. It all helps. The zine links out to the list via QR code.
The first Election Squad, by the way, went better than I could have imagined, and on a dreary rainy night. We had, I’d say, 50-60 people out at the peak of it. There were no speeches, just hanging, mixing, mingling. By design. Everyone took to the concept well—my biggest worry going in. I came away from it with my soul restored a bit and a few great new leads for stories.
The next one is bound to be even better. August 21 at Steel and Wire. 7 p.m. Then one in September, one in October, and one on Election Eve. The fate of the movement, long term and short, is bound up in our coming around to see that hanging out for the sake of hanging out is in fact deeply political. It’s among my deepest convictions. The thing needs non-transactional entry points. We don’t get anywhere without stretching our hands out to strangers and making them friends.
The power elite accomplish this by dangling the prospect of personal enrichment. The people power needed to combat the gravitational pull of that promise lies in an enrichment of a different kind—one that we have in spades and they miserably lack. It would be nice, at the very least, to make them sweat with strong preliminary performances from King, Davis, and Kamara. To at least call into question the entitlement they currently have to this place.
Ok I have to run to Milford to play a silly show in a park. I’m gunna be late I think. I can already feel the guys getting mad at me. So no extras today. Talk soon!
Desperately need a political editor. Even beyond the voting error the analysis makes absolutely no sense in dE. How is running another candidate from the "same" coalition going to prevent any infighting? Running another candidate from the same base is the BEST way to help Kathi. The progressive movement in Worcester is so laughably unserious.