Higher Office Elusive For City Councillors

For most people, covering the distance between Cambridge City Hall and the Massachusetts state house in Boston requires a small cab fare or a scenic T-ride.

For Cambridge city councillors, the trip has proved much more difficult.

Two Cambridge city councillors faced an impasse this week as they tried to bridge the electoral gap between their seats in the city council chamber and seats in the state house.

In the race for the state Senate seat currently held by Senate President Thomas F. Birmingham ’72, Cambridge’s popular city councillor Anthony D. Galluccio took only 32 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s Democratic primary. A former mayor who in the last election set a city record for number of votes won, Galluccio’s credentials set him apart as one of the most popular city councillors in Cambridge memory.

State Rep. Jarrett T. Barrios ’90-’91 (D-Cambridge) won the race handily with approximately 48 percent of the vote. Everett alderman Carlos DeMaria Jr., a dark horse candidate, took 20 percent.

Galluccio now carries the baggage of being a three-time loser in his attempts to move up from city hall, as he has twice failed in bids for a state representative seat.

Across town, Marjorie C. Decker took 42 percent of the total vote in her race to win a representative seat away from State Rep. Paul C. Demakis ’75 (D-Boston). The seat was redistricted last year to include several Cambridge precincts and is now about evenly split between Boston and Cambridge.

Like the Galluccio-Barrios race, the Demakis-Decker race was more about personality than issues.

Decker brought in some big guns, enlisting the help of childhood friends Matt Damon, Class of 1992, and Ben Affleck. The two movie stars appeared in her brochures and recorded answering machine messages for her campaign.

Though Decker held her own in Cambridge, Demakis retained the seat, capturing 80-90 percent of the vote in many of his Boston precincts.

Demakis said yesterday that he thinks his experience carried him to victory and that he hopes to win over the Cambridge half of the district.

“I feel very confident that once people get to know me, they will support me as my Boston constituents do,” Demakis said.

According to local political observer Robert C. Winters, the Cambridge city council is a difficult place to launch a state political career.

“If you want to go for state office, the worst thing you can do is become a city councillor first,” Winters said, adding that leaving behind the city council for higher office is a “virtual impossibility.”

Cambridge’s proportional representation voting system, in which each candidate needs to receive only about 10 percent of the vote in order to win, does not help councillors gear up for a bigger election, Winters said.

“You can fool yourself into thinking that your overall potential is greater than it really is,” he said.

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