WBUR News2%
Payback politics? Wu backs challengers to state senators who blocked her tax plan 66%
By Gintautas Dumcius54% Eve Zuckoff87%
7/14/2026, 5:49:06 AM
Keywords: Michelle Wu, Massachusetts Politics, State Senate, Will Brownsberger, Nick Collins, Election, Boston
BS Summary: This article contains 12 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, False Dilemma, and Halo Effect, with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 13.4% saturation with 194 hits. Analysis detected 614 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,449 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 60.7% and a BS Rank of 66% (5,479 of 15,741 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 65.20% of the article peer group.
Since Boston Mayor Michelle Wu began her second term in City Hall, much of the speculation about her future has focused on which higher office is next.
But seven months in, she seems to be leaning into the locally popularized maxim that all politics is local.
Rather than eyeing a U.S.
Senate seat, she has set her political sights on shaking up the state Senate.
In a highly unusual move in the insular world of Massachusetts politics, Wu is backing Democratic primary challengers against two longtime incumbents.
She is the first mayor in recent memory to openly campaign against state senators who have blocked her priorities.
Marty Walsh, her predecessor and a former Beacon Hill lawmaker, avoided rocking the boat in his endorsements and stayed loyal to friends even as they notched losses at the ballot box.
Wu’s mentor, Tom Menino, operated by proxy and backchannels, tasking a so-called “machine” with helping his chosen candidates on the presidential campaign trail or in campaigns for open seats in statewide and city elections.
Wu is more direct.
Beyond the traditional playbook of City Hall workers helping harvest votes in their off hours, Wu personally hits the campaign trail, knocking on voters’ doors and introducing candidates to her extensive network.
“The safe personal political thing to do is to keep your mouth shut and try to go about your business and try to go along to get along,” Wu told WBUR.
But in dealing with the Trump administration, economic headwinds, climate change and more, she added, “We can't have our own state senators within the Boston delegation be yet another obstacle holding the city back.”
The two senators — Will Brownsberger and Nick Collins — disagree.
They’ve called her proposal to shift some of Boston’s property tax burden from residents to commercial property owners bad city policy that would set a bad precedent for the rest of the state.
But the fight has now shifted from Beacon Hill, where mayors often run into roadblocks due to the urban-suburban divide in the Legislature, to the campaign trail, where Wu has fielded some of her biggest successes.
In her 2021 mayoral run, and 2025 reelection campaign, she won double-digit victories.
Then there was the 2023 ouster of an incumbent city councilor.
She personally knocked on doors at night in support of Enrique Pepén, a political newcomer and her former director of neighborhood services, who defeated Ricardo Arroyo, a member of a prominent political family in Boston.
This time around, Wu is throwing her might behind two people.
Latoya Gayle, an education activist, is challenging Collins in a district that includes South Boston as well as part of Dorchester and the South End.
Daniel Lander, a former Wu aide, is challenging Brownsberger, whose district includes Belmont, Watertown and part of Boston and Cambridge.
That’s left insiders wondering what the endgame is.
Is she flexing political muscles with an eye on higher office, seeking payback after they blocked her tax shift, or simply looking to send a message that she believes they don’t represent Boston’s best interests?
Wu is adamant she didn’t recruit either challenger.
When asked about that, Brownsberger turned to the example of Thomas Becket, the English archbishop assassinated by several knights after the king, as the medieval-era story goes, vented about him as a “troublesome priest.”
Brownsberger added, “If you criticize somebody enough, you're really inviting an opponent.”
But Brownsberger said he welcomes his first competitive race since 2012 and touted a legislative record that includes criminal justice reform.
He also took aim at the 35-year-old Lander, who he intimated is using the run for office as a steppingstone.
“ I'm not climbing a ladder,” said Brownsberger, who is 69.
“I'm growing like a tree, putting out strong roots, spreading out sheltering branches that can make such a difference for this district.”
Collins, who moved up to the Senate from the House in a 2018 special election and hasn’t experienced a serious challenge since, decried what he called the mayor's "us versus them" approach when all involved are Democrats.
“If you do the math and if she were to succeed in her campaign to oust myself and a colleague, you're still at pretty low numbers” for Senate members who support the tax shift, he said.
### The mayor’s picks
Lander, who grew up in Cambridge, was drawn into politics by Elizabeth Warren’s first campaign for U.S.
Senate in 2012.
“ I still remember seeing the YouTube video that went viral of her talking about how big companies, CEOs should pay their fair share, because we all contribute for the roads, the public schools, the public safety,” he said.
(In a rare move for Warren, she has endorsed Lander’s bid.)
Wu, who was mentored by both Menino and Warren, also worked on that campaign, but she and Lander didn’t meet until Lander had a fellowship in City Hall under Walsh.
When they were both working on Warren’s 2020 presidential run, they became friends over po’ boy sandwiches on a trip to New Orleans to talk with College Democrats of America.
When Wu geared up to run for mayor in 2021, Lander signed on.
He said that “snowballed” into working for the Wu administration as an adviser.
He first began thinking about challenging Brownsberger largely due to the failure to pass a real estate transfer fee that would’ve funneled money toward affordable housing, he said.
Speaking with WBUR on a patio outside Time Out Market in Fenway, where he now lives with his husband, Lander called Brownsberger an “architect” of an ineffective state Senate, wracked by incrementalism.
“ I think it is this culture that Sen.
Brownsberger has really encouraged, where we just can't hope for urgent action on anything, even on places where there is broad consensus,” Lander said.
Four miles away, inside a bakery on Dorchester Avenue, Latoya Gayle, a mother of four and an education activist, similarly layed into Collins, focusing on his 2020 vote against omnibus police reform legislation that came after a police officer killed George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Like Lander, Gayle said she was not primarily motivated by the senator blocking Wu’s tax shift, though she also welcomes Wu’s support.
“I run into people in places like South Boston who have just told me, ‘Oh, I saw you just did something with the mayor.
You got my vote.’
They don't even ask a question,” she said.
“And so I think she definitely has a lot of influence on folks.”
### The endgame
Asked what the mayor’s potential endgame is here, longtime Boston journalist Yawu Miller said “settling political scores” is one idea that’s been widely discussed.
“She's known in political circles as somebody who carries a grudge,” said Miller, who is the editor of the Flipside, a nonprofit news outlet.
“That's a tradition in Boston politics.”
Gayle, Brownsberger, Collins and Lander all said that’s a question for the mayor.
Ask Wu, and she says it’s not about revenge.
Rather, the senators are voting “against the interests of their constituents,” and that is “unacceptable” to her.
“She's known in political circles as somebody who carries a grudge.
That's a tradition in Boston politics.”
As for building muscles for a run for higher office, she and those close to her have said repeatedly she has the job she wants.
That leaves delivering a message via challengers.
If Collins and Brownsberger were to go unchallenged, that would have been its own message that perhaps she couldn’t accept.
In her support of two newcomers, there may also be an implicit rebuke of the wait-your-turn-politics so pervasive in Massachusetts politics.
That’s not too different from Warren, then a Harvard professor, jumping into the 2012 U.S.
Senate race or Ayanna Pressley, a former Wu colleague on the City Council, beating a longtime congressman, Michael Capuano, in 2018.
Wu herself did not wait her turn when she launched her challenge against Mayor Marty Walsh, who decamped for the Biden administration months later.
But if Lander and Gayle lose, “it could show signs of weakness for Wu,” Miller said.
“Traditionally, mayors have not done well trying to influence legislative elections in Massachusetts, and this year could be different because the times are different,” said Larry DiCara, a close watcher of Boston politics and a former City Council president.
(He has also donated to Brownsberger, Collins and Wu.)
In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani made his own run at established Democrats.
His slate of progressive Democrats won their primaries in June, and involved the ouster of the head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
“That's why,” DiCara said, “the stars might be aligned for Mayor Wu.”
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