Student Advocate Fell Just Short

This year’s City Council race was supposed to be a yawner.

And judging by the results, it was. In an uncontroversial election season, all nine incumbents reclaimed their seats last Tuesday.

But early Wednesday morning at The Count—the biannual Cambridge tradition where votes are tallied and winners are named—a 26-year-old dark horse candidate seemed to have turned conventional wisdom on its head.

Matt S. DeBergalis, a young MIT grad who campaigned door-to-door in Cambridge’s dormitories and promised to give the city’s college students a voice in local politics, had outpaced two incumbents in early returns of so-called “number one” votes.

The incumbent councillors rose to their positions through traditional avenues for Cambridge politicians. Some come from families with a tradition of involvement in Cambridge politics. Several served terms on the School Committee before moving to the council. Others did behind-the-scenes work in politics before deciding to run for office themselves.

And DeBergalis—a native of Indiana who went to high school in Puerto Rico and writes software for a living—does not fit the mold.

DeBergalis, who won more first-place votes than two of the sitting councillors, campaigned on a platform of student-centered issues, promising later hours for restaurants and more late-night transportation options. He launched a voter registration drive on the city’s campuses, challenging the conventional wisdom that the college students who live here nine months out of the year are not a major factor in city politics.

“I’ve been watching Cambridge politics closely for 35 years. Never did I see this coming,” says Glenn S. Koocher ’71, former host of “Cambridge Inside Out,” a local political television program. “There’ve been a lot of students who have run over the years. This is the first time anyone came close to legitimately threatening the incumbents.”

While DeBergalis’s ability to get out the student vote set Cambridge political pundits abuzz, the election results also showed another, subtler shift in city politics—the rise of neighborhood activists who made their names sitting on committees and fighting developers.

Three candidates who rose to prominence in their neighborhoods fared well in this election—but none well enough to unseat an incumbent.

Even though January will usher in a new council identical to the current one, some say last week’s election may represent a change in Cambridge’s political landscape—but it is too soon to tell whether this year’s trends are a one-time phenomenon or a permanent shift.

Student Takeover?

After the first round of ballots were counted, DeBergalis received the eighth highest total of first-place votes, beating incumbents E. Denise Simmons and David P. Maher.

He ultimately finished in tenth place, 137 votes away from a spot on the Council.

DeBergalis’ student-centered campaign engaged a constituency long ignored by establishment Cambridge pols.

A decade ago, when candidates canvassed door-to-door at Harvard, pundits called it a move of desperation.

Now, DeBergalis, who registered hundreds of students, has proved that the student vote can count. But since it didn’t count enough to get him elected, the question is now whether someone else on the council will take up student issues.

“I think for a lot of people it’s not that easy to turn around and target a new group of people. I think the councillors represent certain interests….It’s not as if they can just turn on a dime now and appeal to students,” DeBergalis says.

Still, the almost-was councillor is optimistic.

“I do think you’ll see in 2005, everyone will pay attention to [students],” he says. “I don’t think the group will be dismissed as it once was.”

Koocher, however, notes that nearly half of DeBergalis’ support base could be gone by the time the 2005 Council race begins. The transient nature of Cambridge’s student population—nearly a quarter of which leaves the city each year—lends itself to creating an unstable constituency.

Koocher points out that if DeBergalis runs again two years from now, he would have to recreate his momentum. DeBergalis says he hasn’t made up his mind on whether he’ll run again.

“He’d have about the same chance, which is coming within a hair of actually being elected,” Koocher says. “I can’t guarantee he would win. He would also have a major organizing task, because at least half of the voters he got will no longer be in the city.”

Robert Winters, a longtime Cambridge political observer and editor of the Cambridge Civic Journal, agrees that the student population’s future as a political force is still up in the air.

“[Students] won’t have much impact unless people can sustain it,” Winters says. “They have to press this and continue this into future elections as well. This could easily be a passing phenomenon.”

But Winters says he thinks DeBergalis has “more staying power than most.”

He praises DeBergalis’s focus on registering student voters and attending public meetings to take a more active role.

“Other young candidates who came along have never really done that,” Winters says. “He showed far greater commitment than anybody I’ve seen in ages.”

Still, this year’s student turnout was a vast improvement from past elections.

Koocher says it is important not to underestimate the power of the student vote.

“A lot of us always suspected that if there was a reason for students to be interested they could be an incredibly potent force,” he says. “No one [before DeBergalis] had ever come close like this.”

Turnout was up this year—20,080 ballots were cast compared with 17,688 two years ago—a trend widely attributed to both DeBergalis’ voting registration drive on campuses and to the fact that voters came out to weigh in on a controversial ballot question on rent control.

Status Quo

Winters calls DeBergalis’s performance “impressive” but says the eventual victory for the incumbents was what he expected all along.

“Incumbency is a very powerful thing,” Winters says. “It gives you name recognition, it gives you a leg up.”

Three of the candidates who closely followed DeBergalis came to prominence through neighborhood activism—and two of them say they are disappointed they won’t be able to change the way the city’s government works.

“City Hall is not nearly open enough to citizen participation,” says John R. Pitkin, who founded the Mid-Cambridge Neighborhood Association almost three decades ago and has served on several city boards. “The way that it operates, it’s a very closed institution, and it didn’t used to be and it doesn’t have to be.”

Carole K. Bellew, who made her first run for council this year, says her experience on the East Cambridge Planning Team taught her the importance of active community involvement and bringing the stakeholders to the table.

She criticizes the current councillors for their failure to attend neighborhood forums and city-wide meetings to discuss neighborhood development.

“I had kind of hoped that we might be able to pull some more of the kinds of people who want to be cooperative and want to be participating into the arena,” she says. “I really hoped that we could bring a different flavor to the council. I wanted more of a mix.”

But Pitkin and Bellew—and Craig A. Kelley, their counterpart from North Cambridge—are not altogether similar, Winters says.

According to Winters, there was not much overlap in the support for the three candidates, and he says voters tend to support their local activists but do not uniformly vote for a “neighborhood slate.”

In recent years, development issues have dominated local politics, and the ongoing presence of neighborhood leaders on the ballot is unsurprising.

And to some, students’ newfound influence at the polls is not a shocker either.

David E. Sullivan, a former city councillor who lost his first bid for council in 1977 and later succeeded in large part by appealing to the student vote, says he would like to see DeBergalis run again in 2005.

“It’s very similar to what happened to me in ’77,” says Sullivan, who met DeBergalis earlier this fall. “A lot of people didn’t take me seriously as a candidate…The fact that I did pretty well and lost in ’77 really helped me to put myself on a map. And I think the same thing has definitely happened with Matt this year. A lot of people didn’t know who the heck he was, and because of his very strong showing, clearly a lot of people are sitting up and taking notice.”

—Contributing writer Michael M. Grynbaum can be reached at grynbaum@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Jessica R. Rubin-Wills can be reached at rubinwil@fas.harvard.edu.