Candidates Prepare for 'Big Day' at Polls

Voters across Cambridge will mark their ballots and choose a new City Council today, bringing to an end an intense campaign season for 19 candidates—12 of them challengers—vying for nine seats.

Challenger Ethridge A. King and his wife and campaign manager Astrid King have worked to woo the voters of Cambridge for months, and have taken the past few weeks off from their jobs to work exclusively for the campaign.

The Kings—like many of the challengers—campaigned hard through the last day yesterday, trying to garner the crucial number one votes they need to get elected.

They both admitted that they are a little nervous for the big day—and that they consider the remaining campaign “a run against time,” Astrid King said.

Yesterday, the Kings went door-to-door, distributing last-minute flyers in Cambridgeport, the campaign’s “home base.”

“We mailed here, we had events here, we brought our steel drum band through here,” Ethridge King said. “I figure my strength will come from here.”

In the brutal cold, on a street dominated by the red, green, blue, yellow and turquoise signs for incumbent councillors—from progressive Henrietta Davis to the well-established Michael A. Sullivan—the Kings canvassed unfazed.

Ethridge King’s volunteers, family and friends were making get-out-the-vote phone calls from various locations—including his home, where he had 10 extra telephone lines installed for campaign phone-banking, he said.

But the candidate said he likes the street work best.

“I’d much rather be out in the cold than calling on the phone,” King said, confiding that his business suit attire included a thermal shirt.

At the Village Grill and Seafood, a fish-and-chips joint where the Kings took a late lunch break, King confided to a woman beside him in line that “tomorrow’s the big day,” handing her a campaign leaflet.

She burst out laughing in confusion.

“Oh, I thought you were going to get married or something,” the woman said.

But a little girl in the shop knew King by name.

“Are you Ethridge King?” the girl asked. “I ate your ice cream.”

King—who held ice cream socials at nearby Dana Park over the summer—knew what the little girl meant, and stopped to talk to her mother before he sat down for his meal.

“I like him, I like him!” the girl exclaimed, jumping up and down, as she left with her mother.

Over their fish and chips, the Kings disclosed their last minute game plan, which involved a “blitz” of 9,000 phone calls, sign-holding and leafletting in squares, and—today—strategically placing volunteers near polls to remind Cantabrigians to vote.

They hope that the weather will be on their side.

“If it rains, it’s going to be bad for new candidates,” Astrid King said. “Tomorrow’s supposed to be sunny and in the 50s.”

Although Ethridge King grew up in Cambridgeport, he is not hoping for the support of his childhood buddies because most of them left the neighborhood after rent control ended in 1995, King said.

“They’re all gone,” King said, “because of skyrocketing real estate costs and [the end of] rent control.”

One of King’s major issues is his opposition to the idea of rent control—which he dislikes because of the “dependency atmosphere” it created—preferring instead to push for more city-subsidized home ownership programs, he said.

After they leave the fish and chips shop, the Kings start campaigning on the street—Astrid taking the left and Ethridge taking the right.

Walking down the street, taping their leaflets to doors, Ethridge frequently outpaces his wife, turning his head often as if to check that she was still there.

They leaflet every house—even those with signs advertising other candidates. When one man called out from his upstairs window, “I don’t need that,” King hopped back up the doorsteps and removed the leaflet, which he put on the next door—seeming completely unperturbed.

And the afternoon had its brighter moments.

King ran into an old friend, Kevin, and the two shared a fairly elaborate handshake before King gave him a campaign flyer.

“You know you’ve got my vote, man,” Kevin called.

As the day wound on, King became more philosophical.

“You don’t know what really moves a voter to vote for you,” he said.

Astrid King admitted that the weather was beginning to get to her—but the couple continued to canvass through their neighborhood.

“Gotta keep on going,” she said. “One more day.”

—Staff writer Lauren R. Dorgan can be reached at dorgan@fas.harvard.edu.