BOSTON — Mayor Michelle Wu has stopped pretending. On Wednesday she personally endorsed Latoya Gayle, the far-left, anti-police activist running to unseat Sen. Nick Collins — the lawmaker most responsible for killing Wu's signature tax hike — calling the first-time candidate a "powerful, principled voice" and pledging to campaign at her side.
Collins's offense was telling the mayor what she did not want to hear: control the spending. After watching Wu balloon Boston's budget by more than $1 billion — from $3.76 billion when she took office to $4.9 billion today — Collins refused to let her plug the gap with a tax hike on the city's employers, and beat her 33-5 on the Senate floor. "Latoya has stood with our families even when state legislators have not," Wu said of her pick — a thinly veiled shot at the man who stopped her.
What a Gayle win would cost you
Latoya Gayle, the Dorchester activist Mayor Wu has endorsed for the 1st Suffolk Senate seat. Via Instagram.
Own a business or a building? Keep your wallet where you can see it. The commercial tax hike Collins killed comes roaring back — onto office towers and storefronts that can barely fill the space they have. So does rent control, Wu's long-running dream of telling landlords what they may charge. It cratered housing construction more than 80 percent in St. Paul, and Boston's own homebuilding is already at its slowest since 2012. Gayle would be Wu's vote for all of it.
If you want cops on your street, look elsewhere. Gayle built her name in the 2020 campaign against the Boston police, pushing a civilian board to oversee the officers. "Police reform" is the polite word for defunding — and the cities that tried it watched crime spike, critics say, before quietly reversing course. Public safety isn't even on her platform.
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And if you're tired of the lectures, too bad. Gayle sells a career spent "centering families" and turning "lived experience into meaningful change" — activist-class buzzwords, now bound for the State Senate. Her union backers gush that members "see themselves reflected" in her. Reflection over results.
We've been here before
Boston has run this experiment before. In 2018 it dumped ten-term Rep. Mike Capuano — the state's only seat on the House Transportation Committee, who had hauled roughly $1 billion in federal money home for the MBTA's Green Line extension and hundreds of millions more for the city's bridges and harbor. He did not lose on his record. He was ambushed on identity — by a far-left movement that put representation and "change" ahead of results. Ayanna Pressley won by 18 points and became a fixture of cable news; what she has delivered for the neighborhoods back home, many voters are still waiting to learn.
Collins, by contrast, has spent more than 15 years as a constituent-services workhorse for one of the most diverse districts in the state — South Boston, Chinatown, the South End and Dorchester. He is a fixture in the neighborhoods he represents, turning up for the schools, the senior centers, the firehouses and the street festivals that rarely make the news — the unglamorous, show-up-and-do-the-work side of the job his constituents actually feel.
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Sen. Nick Collins with students and Boston firefighters at a neighborhood event in the 1st Suffolk District. Via Instagram.
His warning that Boston's real problem is spending has aged well, too. The mayor who fought him has since filed a budget that grows just 2 percent, the slowest in 17 years, freezing hiring and cutting hundreds of jobs to close a $48 million deficit. He was right. She caught up.
Sen. Nick Collins with constituents in the 1st Suffolk District. Via Instagram.
None of it has spared him. And what a Wu rubber stamp looks like is already on display at City Hall. The mayor's hand-picked allies dominate a City Council that rarely tells her no — and this spring, even as her budget moved to cut $12 million in grants including services for veterans, fire fighters, and police, the council voted to keep the raises it had handed itself and the mayor, Wu's own roughly $43,000 bump included. A legislature built to please the mayor stops being a check on her — and the council she helped elect has shown exactly how that goes.
The choice for the 1st Suffolk is simple: keep the senator who beat a tax hike and forced City Hall to live within its means — or hand Wu the rubber stamp she has been missing, this time in the State Senate, in the form of a first-time candidate running on her blessing and her unions' money. Gayle faces Collins in the primary on September 1.
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