Last Saturday’s beautiful weather made it a perfect day for Neil Miller to knock on doors of registered voters. Whenever someone answered, he launched into his pitch, that a city election is approaching and he is working with A Better Cambridge to promote candidates who support affordable housing. He was in Cambridgeport, and the people he talks with are renters, most of whom moved to the city for work. A number of them take the time to engage with him – one puts down his golf clubs, another delays a walk with a friend. Most of them take the ABC candidate slate he offers, a couple of newcomers get voter registration forms, too. “We are definitely for more housing,” said Charlie, a renter on Watson Street who is in his mid-20s.
Miller, 29, doesn’t look like one of the puppet masters of Cambridge politics. He’s a slight, bespectacled redhead with a sprinkling of light freckles, wearing a rumpled plaid shirt with a recalcitrant button-down collar. But Miller is the campaign manager of A Better Cambridge’s Independent Expenditure Political Action Committee, or Super PAC. It paid for the cards he’s handing out, and it coordinates volunteers to canvass voters across the city. But the Super PACs were fingered as having outsized influence on Cambridge’s City Council in a recent candidates’ forum, with one candidate even saying every candidate would toe the Super PACs’ line.
“I find it a little bit hard to believe that Patty Nolan, who has never been endorsed by ABC, voted for [multifamily housing] because of ABC,” said Miller, who started his master’s in public policy degree at the Harvard Kennedy School this fall but has lived in Cambridge since 2019. “I don’t think that A Better Cambridge is responsible for division in local politics and divisiveness in local politics.” Miller points out that while Super PACs allow unlimited contributions, ABC’s caps the contributions to its Super PAC at $500.
His fellow purported puppet master, Phillip S. Balboni, chair of the Cambridge Citizens Coalition independent expenditure PAC, says “that’s profoundly wrong” and laughs. “We send out a postcard and we send out yard signs. If that has dramatically influenced the election of city councillors, I would be very surprised.”
“It’d be nice to think we could have that impact,” Balboni added. “But it’s not true.” He notes that CCC-backed candidates have not achieved the group’s major goals.
Similarly, Randy Stern, the chair of the other Super PAC in Cambridge at Cambridge Bicycle Safety, says his group is hardly fearsome. “There are people who oppose the bike lanes who call us the ‘bike lobby,’ it’s kind of a pejorative term. They try to make it seem divisive, as if we’re this powerful force.” Stern says the work is just bottom-up politics and building awareness.
Stern notes, too, that Cambridge Bicycle Safety has endorsed 12 candidates in the current race, including five who either have not always voted in alignment with it or indicated in responses to its questionnaire that they would not.
To be sure, the amount of Super PAC money in Cambridge politics is not on the national scale, or even that of Boston, where Super PACs spent more than $3 million on advertising to support candidates in the recent mayoral primary. In Cambridge, since the 2023 City Council election, the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance shows the Cambridge Super PACs have raised $87,304.44 through Sept. 28, the bulk of it – $62,822.68 – by Cambridge Bicycle Safety.
Still, Cambridge’s proportional representation system and low voter turnout for municipal elections means that a few hundred votes can be the difference between winning office or being defeated.
Miller says the ABC PAC believes it helped get Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler elected in 2019, which gave the Affordable Housing Overlay zoning reform the extra vote it needed to pass. But Miller thinks money didn’t have much to do with it. “The biggest impact [the PAC] has had is by canvassing. Last time we knocked on 7,000 doors; this time our goal is 10,000 doors.”
Miller also thinks the Super PACs as a group have helped increase voter turnout, which rose from 29.6 percent in 2019 to 34 percent in 2023. “That’s democracy, and we aren’t going to apologize for more people voting on issues that are important to them,” Miller said.
Polarization rising?
Balboni, who has lived in Cambridge for 38 years, does think the political climate in the city is more polarized than it used to be. But that’s partly because for many years the city has benefited from a thriving local economy and effective city administrations. “I think the issues over the last decade have become more sharply defined,” he said, notably bicycle lanes and especially housing costs.
“If they’ve become more polarized it’s because people who have a lot of passion are sort of demonizing those of us who want something other than they want,” he said. He does think there are important issues being overlooked, such as the city’s finances.
Stern, meanwhile, said he has lived in Cambridge for 50 years and “There certainly were times in the past where I think the city council was more divided than now,” such as when rent control was the big issue in the 1980s and 1990s. “This is the United States, and there are people with different opinions. Especially in Cambridge, people have opinions.”
But the PACs don’t inflame opinion, Stern said: “I feel like we have a positive effect by educating voters more about the issues and about what’s possible. I don’t see that as a chilling effect.”
This story has been corrected to reflect the correct year in which Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler was elected and clarify which zoning reform was passed afterward. On October 1, it was updated to correct that A Better Cambridge limits contributions to its IEPAC, not from it.
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Money is especially a problem when a PAC spreads disinformation. Some good journalism on such claims would help.
I’ve seen a PAC claim to be pro-housing while endorsing candidates who consistently oppose pro-housing policies.
Or claim that zoning reform is responsible for a triple-decker renovation producing three units, a project unrelated to zoning reform because it does not increase density.
Or claim that African American homes in Cambridgeport are being demolished. In fact, two are a funeral home owned by an African American family who chose to sell and retire. The other is not African American owned.
Too often, these statements are made without even basic fact-checking.
Money in politics is already problematic. When it is coupled with disinformation, it becomes especially toxic.
“Cambridge Super Pacs have raised $87,304.44 through Sept. 28, the bulk of it – $62,822.68 – by Cambridge Bicycle Safety” – that IS the BULK – and likewise a huge chunk of city budget isbeing spent on bike lanes, something many residents use, but also many do not. My impressino is that ABC is a slick, well-organized pact with money and volunteers to heavily promote their misguided single-issue of affordable housing. They label anyone who disagrees as a NIYBYer. In that way, they have created division among residents and promoted short-sighted solutions to this complex problem. CCC, another pact, is not as organized or slick, but goes a long way toward informing with solid articles and statistics to help us understand what is at stake.
Avejoe: Many donors to your so-called “pro-housing” PAC aren’t Cambridge residents at all, but funding outside interests and pockets. In contrast, the PAC you condemn is backed by local residents — the voices that should shape our city’s future. And let’s be clear: your PAC’s definition of “housing” is mostly luxury units, not affordability and the claim that zoning reform delivers cheaper apartments has no evidence behind it. What it does deliver is demolition of existing homes and replacement with units out of reach for most Cambridge families. No one pretends gentrification began with upzoning — but it has absolutely accelerated it. And pointing out that homes in an historically African American neighborhood are being displaced is not “alarmist.” It’s simply the truth.