Keller @ Large: Hidden Winners And Losers Of Boston's Preliminary Mayoral Election

BOSTON (CBS) - It took a while, but we now know the obvious winners and losers in Tuesday's Boston preliminary mayoral election.

But what about the hidden winners and losers?

Let's start with some clear winners:

• They take a lot of heat when they miss one, but local pollsters should take a bow for their work on this race. They were right on the money about Michelle Wu's frontrunner status, Anissa Essaibi George's late surge into second place, and both Andrea Campbell's momentum and Kim Janey's lack of it. From Suffolk to Emerson and beyond, score one for the poll takers.
• Like them or not, the Boston Police were winners on Tuesday. The Patrolmen's Union won their bet on Essaibi George, and the force, in general, survived a tough stretch of headlines with their public approval and political clout largely intact. It will be interesting to see if Wu, who largely let Campbell take the lead on criticizing the police during the preliminary, picks up that gantlet in the final.
• And another target of some bad headlines, former Mayor Marty Walsh, came out a winner. His old friend Essaibi George demonstrated that the Walsh coalition lives on and his legacy remains a positive for scores of voters. Plus, when pollsters threw Walsh's name into their tests of candidate approval ratings, he regularly topped the field.

I know, you're a Bostonian; you want me to cut the happy talk and get to the losers:

• One thing that went down hard last night was the "possession myth" - that being acting mayor was close to an automatic ticket to the final. It worked like a charm for Tom Menino back in 1993, but he enjoyed a nice, quiet two-month run as acting mayor, which catapulted him to victory that fall. By contrast, Janey's six-month stint was riddled with tough calls and controversies, some of them - like her unfortunate comparison of vaccine passports to Jim Crow-era documents used to suppress blacks - self-inflicted. So much for possession being nine-tenths of the law.
• Another myth that should be put to rest - that the black vote in Boston is a monolith that can be harnessed by a single candidate. Efforts to do so failed in 1993 and again this time. Such consolidation may happen someday, but faced with multiple appealing choices, we saw once again that black voter behavior can't be assumed to follow strictly racial lines.
• And a final loser, perhaps the biggest of the night: the passive-aggressive citizens who always whine about their ballot choices but don't show up in preliminaries or primaries to shape the ballot.

If you're willing to outsource your precious voting rights to others, that's your call. But don't be complaining if you don't like the choices they make.