She doesn't live in the 8th, although it's a distinction of yards. Perhaps redistricting will shift her out of the 7th.
Or she moves (at her age and without a large personal fortune safe assumption that she's a renter). As an at-large councilor and with the "difference in yards" she has all the flex in the world to do that while escaping any carpetbagger criticism.
This makes me think she's got nothing to lose upping her visibility in 2021 with the Mayor run to keep all options open for primarying opps in '22. Lynch was thought to be vulnerable to a challenger this year, but all the campaign money got sucked up to the 2 open seats and Neal's late-breaking surprise of a tough fight in the 1st CD that there were no stray resources left for Lynch or Captain America in the 6th to have to worry about in their primaries. Though to Lynch's credit he did seem to sense he had vulnerabilities to sew up and took the challenger he did net seriously with more rigorous debate slate and event schedule than the average reelection year. Wu can weigh her "Pressley" options there in '22 or if it's not an amenable environment just return to the Council in '23 with enhanced power base easy. There's almost no tactical downside to her trying this, especially at that young an age. As per my original post in the thread, I don't think the Flaherty comparison holds. Flaherty was a mirage when he took on Menino on similar "fall up to an enhanced power base" gamble...he ended up shooting his entire karma load and half his brainpower in that bid and has been an absolutely rudderless has-been since returning to the Council. Agnostic to Wu's political takes she's very much more multi-dimensional than Flaherty was so I don't see any similar risk here.
I don't think this is necessarily going to be a very exciting race. Inertia is so overpowering with the Boston Mayorality that it's inconceivable to amass enough dirt on Walsh to topple him. I expect this to be a debate of ideas rather than a debate of candidates, because Wu has wider leverage playing a longer game for herself and Walsh is simply looking for 4 more years as the transitional term to joining the "Instututional Mayor" ranks that gets his likeness carved into statues and on granite placemarkers all over town. The two of them will be talking over each other on kind of different wavelengths rather than pairing off for all that many head-to-head skirmishes.
Plus, we always get inferiorly compared to NYC...and NYC's '21 race is going to be a high-stakes barnburner already shaped by the effigies springing up for imploding outgoer de Blasio. This is comparatively a snoozer...no spectacle of de Blasio's year from hell hanging over Walsh (if Marty gets dinged on anything for his COVID handling, it's so far inside the margin of error as to be infinitely debateable), the historical institutional intertia, and a pre-narrowed field where both candidates can "win" something for their legacies even with only 1 winner getting the office. NYC is going to be a junkyard brawl just for narrowing a large field of divergently-aligned challengers into a small one, with who can trash the unpopular lame-duck hardest writing the bulk of the newspaper copy. It'll be overblown to a degree that a lot of NYC v. Boston comparisons are overblown...but it may actually be true that the NYC race makes for more scintillating daily
Globe reading than the hometown race.
boston.cbslocal.com
