Election analysis: Flaherty made inroads in minority communities

By Andrew Ryan, Globe Staff

Most armchair analyses of Boston's mayoral election have drawn the same conclusion: Michael F. Flaherty Jr. lost the race in the city's minority communities. Even Sam Yoon, a city councilor with Korean roots who joined the challenger's ticket, could not help Flaherty close the gap with voters of color.

Charles Stewart III (Wendy Maeda/Globe Staff)

But beneath the superficial precinct tallies, a more nuanced statistical post mortem offers Flaherty encouraging news despite the 15-point thumping on Tuesday. The at-large city councilor from South Boston made "significant inroads into the minority voting community" in the six weeks between the preliminary and general elections, according to Charles Stewart III, chairman of MIT’s top-ranked political science department.

Many observers who pored over Tuesday's election results have concluded that Yoon helped Flaherty fare better in liberal, white communities, but did not buoy his support in minority neighborhoods. [Some of those analyses can be found here, here, here, andhere.]

But Stewart is a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his idea of fun is a linear regression line on a scatterplot graph. He crunched the election returns with racial data from the census. While the big picture did show that incumbent Mayor Thomas M. Menino continued his dominance among voters of color, a statistical analysis found another trend. Flaherty's support in minority communities grew from 5 percent in September to 26 percent on Tuesday.

"The good news," Stewart said, "is that bringing Yoon in actively into the campaign -- and I would also imagine taking Menino to task for not having enough minorities among his close advisers -- paid off in terms of broadening Flaherty support away from Southie."