Residents in Cambridge will have to wait until a December runoff to find out who their next mayor will be, after no candidate topped 50% of the vote in Saturday’s regular election.
The runoff will feature Lajan Cephas, the City Council president who garnered 637 votes for 42.52%, and former mayor Andrew Bradshaw, who took 614 votes for 40.99%. A third candidate for mayor, former city commissioner La-Shon Foster, took 247 votes for 16.49% and will not appear on the Dec. 3 ballot.
A little over 1,500 of Cambridge’s 9,000 registered voters went to the polls, city officials said. The winner of the mayoral race will replace Mayor Stephen Rideout, who won a 2022 special election to finish Bradshaw’s term. Bradshaw resigned earlier that year after being charged by the state prosecutor’s office on 50 counts of distributing revenge porn on Reddit.
All of Cambridge’s five city council races were decided on Saturday and will not require a runoff. Two of the five commissioners were reelected, and one commissioner lost her bid for another term.
In Ward 5, Commissioner Brian Roche ran unopposed. In Ward 4, Commissioner Sputty Cephas was reelected with 54.14%.
In Ward 2, Shay Lewis-Sisco was elected to replace Lajan Cephas. She took 50.96% of the vote over three opponents. In Ward 1, Brett Summers ousted Commissioner Laurel Atkiss, 54.56% to 45.44%. And in Ward 3, Frank Stout was elected with 73.46% of the vote.
In the mayoral election, both Bradshaw and Cephas have been addressing the importance of economic development in Cambridge and the need to account for decades of racial and economic disparities in the city. Perhaps the biggest issue in the election is the future of a city-owned waterfront property at the northern end of Cambridge, which has been mired in bureaucratic, political and managerial gridlock for the past few years.
Cambridge, a city of about 13,000, is 47.4% Black, according to the 2020 Census, and 38.19% white. With Foster out of the mayoral race, that could work to Cephas’ advantage, with a Black candidate, Cephas, and a white candidate, Bradshaw, running head to head.
By Josh Kurtz
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