WHEN ALLISON CARTWRIGHT kicked off her campaign earlier this year for an elected but obscure post involving the Supreme Judicial Court, the presence of the effort’s architect was hard to miss.
That’s partly because East Boston state Sen. Lydia Edwards was visible over Cartwright’s shoulder, her face on a large screen affixed to the office walls of the Prince Lobel law firm. Edwards couldn’t make it that May evening in-person, but she wasn’t going to miss an event that had been months in the making, starting with a cold call to Cartwright in the hopes a political unknown would run for the little-known job.
“I have never fought this hard for any candidate,” Edwards told the crowd.
Cartwright’s nonexistent name recognition aside, there were other hurdles if she was to become the SJC clerk for Suffolk County, an administrative post. Cartwright’s campaign was limited in fundraising ability; she couldn’t personally make appeals due to her day job as an attorney with the Committee for Public Counsel Services.
When Cartwright beat Boston City Councilor Erin Murphy with 59 percent of the vote on September 3, it was considered a win for Boston’s progressives, as the campaign had become a proxy battle between them and the city’s moderates and conservatives. But it was also the latest victory for Edwards, who has garnered a reputation for an independent streak while standing on the winning side of recent races for city councils in Boston and Revere, as well as state attorney general and Suffolk County district attorney.
In several of the aforementioned campaigns, Edwards’s endorsed candidate beat the candidate backed by Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, which is more than can be said for New Balance chairman Jim Davis and public relations mogul George Regan.
Of course, Edwards has had some misses, too, such as the mayoral race in Framingham, where her candidate, incumbent Yvonne Spicer, was ousted in 2021.
On top of the campaign trail and State House duties, Edwards, who is in her early forties, was sworn in last year as a judge advocate general (JAG) officer in the Massachusetts Army National Guard. Then there’s the matter of her own reelection to the state Senate: In November, she faces a GOP opponent, Winthrop’s JeannaMarie Tamas, who has just several hundred dollars in her campaign account.
What’s next after that? Edwards is widely viewed as a future statewide candidate, perhaps for US Senate whenever a seat opens up.
While a Boston city councilor, she had eyed a 2022 run for attorney general, but as she considered it in 2021, Gov. Charlie Baker was still weighing a run for a third term, and Attorney General Maura Healey seemed likely to stay put. After Edwards turned her attention to a 2021 special election for state Senate, Baker opted out of another run for the corner office, and Healey opted in, opening up the seat she’d held since 2015. Andrea Campbell, Edwards’s former City Council colleague, fresh off an unsuccessful run for mayor, ended up in the job instead. In politics, timing isn’t everything, but it counts for a lot.
The other thing? The people with you in the campaign foxhole.
In the recent SJC clerk race, Edwards recruited Cartwright after Maura Doyle, who had held the post for nearly 30 years, called Edwards to let her know she was stepping down in 2024. Doyle was also gauging Edwards’s interest in running for the job, which comes with a hefty six-figure salary. Instead, Edwards started making calls of her own to find a candidate.
Months later, on the night of the September 3 election, Cartwright’s backers, including Wu and Doyle, gathered for a victory party at a Jamaica Plain restaurant. Edwards was again off-site, this time at boot camp in Fort Moore, which is on the Georgia-Alabama border. Sitting in the woods under a “hooch” – military slang for a makeshift shelter – her phone started buzzing with news of Cartwright’s win.
“When Erin [Murphy] got in, we were definitely nervous,” Edwards said weeks later. “An at-large councilor who had money, name recognition. And we were trying to work with Allison on how to do a stump speech, you know? But we got there.”
Steward’s go-to firm
Gov. Maura Healey called this week a “new chapter for health care” as most of Steward Health Care’s Massachusetts hospitals were transferred to new operators like Lawrence General Hospital and Boston Medical Center. It was also the end of a lucrative era for firms on and around Beacon Hill.
The long list of companies that have counted Steward as a client on and off includes Northwind Strategies, whose employees have managed campaigns and communications for various Massachusetts pols, corporations, and nonprofits. Northwind also did some lobbying for Steward, according to documents on file with the secretary of state’s office.
As Steward barreled into bankruptcy this year, and after finally filing in May, the headlines kept getting worse. In September, the Boston Globe’s investigative team identified “15 instances in which Steward Hospital patients died after failing to receive professionally-accepted standards of care due to equipment or staffing shortages.” Steward’s chief executive and chairman, Dr. Ralph de la Torre, left the company this week after US senators lashed him for refusing to comply with a subpoena.
But de la Torre has kept on Northwind. While Longacre Square Partners’ Rebecca Kral has taken incoming media fire for de la Torre, Northwind’s Doug Rubin has also been working, behind the scenes, to help de la Torre as the yacht enthusiast’s reputation has run aground.
That adds a somewhat awkward veneer to the mess, since Rubin was one of the key figures involved in Elizabeth Warren’s 2012 election to the US Senate, and the Cambridge Democrat has become one of de la Torre’s biggest critics, calling him a cruel and cowardly businessman who used the hospitals as his “personal piggy bank.” She has also suggested that de la Torre be charged with involuntary manslaughter.
Warren was unaware earlier this week that Rubin was working for de la Torre when CommonWealth Beacon asked her about it as she left an unrelated event in downtown Boston.
Reached by phone, Rubin didn’t want to comment. His current client list also includes Auditor Diana DiZoglio and her audit-the-Legislature campaign, and he recently launched a data platform called Northwind Climate.
“I have a tremendous amount of respect for Senator Warren and her positions,” he said, but otherwise declined comment.
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