It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town

If you’re looking to dig into Boston’s mayoral scrum, today’s Boston Herald is the place to go.

The feisty local tabloid devotes three full pages to the preliminary race.

The City Hall bakeoff also gets a column from Suffolk University’s Herald embed John Nucci, along with half of Matt Stout’s Pols & Politics piece.

Crosstown, the Boston Globe has . . . well, a lot less. There’s this story on B2 (print headline):

Conley criticizes rivals on casino

Says councilors should back citywide vote

Suffolk County district attorney and Boston mayoral candidate Daniel F. Conley on Saturday doubled-down on his calls for a citywide vote on a proposed casino in East Boston and sharply criticized the city councilors running against him for not holding community hearings on the issue.

But despite his repeated calls for a citywide vote, council members continued to stand by their decision to allow East Boston residents exclusively to decide if their community becomes home to casino gambling.

The stately local broadsheet also features this opinion piece by Boston Review managing editor Simon Waxman.

Can Boston break identity politics?

In Boston, identity politics have been such a powerful influence in local elections that candidates have literally changed their identities. Early in his career, future US House Speaker John McCormack rewrote his family history to better align it with those of the local political bosses and to erase any hint of Protestantism. Among other revisions, his Scottish-Canadian father and Boston-born Irish-American mother became Irish immigrants. He was inspired in part by John Way, a Yankee Democrat who repeatedly failed to win office despite running on a staunch pro-Irish-Catholic ticket.

In the 1960s and ’70s, Louise Day Hicks, William Bulger, and others updated identity politics in Boston. Hicks gained popularity as a defender of working-class white interests against desegregation and what she called “civil rights infiltrators.”

And, Waxman writes, “in 1983, the only time a black candidate made it to the final round of a Boston mayoral contest, an electorate sharply divided on racial lines handed Ray Flynn a landslide victory over Mel King.”

What does he want?

For Bostonians to rely less on racial identity in their voting decisions, and “for the candidates to set out individual agendas and give the voters more, and perhaps better, reasons to support them.”

When does he want it?

Now.