I will admit that I am a bit surprised at how things turned out. All of this discussion should be caveated by noting that turnout was quite low. That is not a surprise, given that we are talking about a preliminary election in an off-year local election that does not even have a mayoral race on the ballot, but it means that very small numbers of individual voters are enough to decidedly swing things one way or another.
That said, I was expecting Melodie Goodwin, David Moscaritolo, and Michael Terounzo to be higher in the results, what with Goodwin being an incumbent on the School Committee, Moscaritolo being a fairly prominent member of various boards and civic bodies around town, and Terounzo a sitting City Councilor. I also thought that with all the noise around town about “budget transparency” since this past spring’s fight over the FY26 school and city budgets, the candidates that have most loudly associated themselves with that rhetoric would have done better.
As for the top three vote-getters, Elizabeth DeNeeve is an incumbent, but the other two are—as far as I can tell—relative newcomers to the scene. That’s not a knock on them or their fitness/readiness for office; they just aren’t familiar names. Diteman and Craig-WIlliams ran as a slate with DeNeeve, though, and the three have positioned themselves as the progressive bloc in the race, so I think they were probably able to motivate enough of that base around town to get them up to the top of the rankings.
I noted yesterday that these results might provide some insight into how budgets might play out as those discussions start to kick off again in earnest later this fall. While we won’t know for sure until after the general election, there are at least hints in these results that while the critics of the School Committee and the GPS administration have been able to kick up some dust, there maybe isn’t a lot of “there” there.
Again though, the numbers here are very low, so it only take a small number of voters to shift things one way or the other, and I think we should be cautious in drawing conclusions about the general sentiment around town from these early results.
