Niki wins!
As the photo shows, Niki Tsongas, newly elected democratic nominee for the 5th congressional seat, relishes her victory while happily answering questions from reporters. The election night gathering for the Tsongas campaign, which was held at the Doubletree Hotel in Lowell, ended on an ecstatic note with loud chanting and clapping, but earlier the atmosphere had been so tense, it was palpable. With tight numbers between Niki and close competitor Eileen Donoghue, the race was impossible to call until the very end. In fact, at one point when the Lowell results were first tallied and showed Eileen had beaten Niki in the city by nearly 3,000 votes (the number being spread around the room at the time), Gary Francis, WCAP news director, told me he was going to have to pack up and head to Longmeadow (where the Donoghue campaign was camped) to get his victory speech. Even Paul Marion, a UMass employee and friend of the Tsongas family, was worried that Niki would not be able to make up the votes from Eileen’s strong win in Lowell. According to Marion (whose wife’s family grew up with Paul Tsongas and held the first campaign party for him at their home), it was expected that Eileen would win Lowell but not by such a large margin. Since Lowell was one of the first cities to tally its votes, as results trickled in from other communities, the tension increased. The crowd didn’t have a reliable, up-to-date way to receive voting results, so much was left to hearsay as word spread across the room. (I noticed a guy with a laptop who proved to have access to reliable data, so I kept returning to him.) We learned that Niki had won Lawrence by about 500 votes, while Eileen had won Methuen with a 200 differential. For a complete breakdown of the results by town, check here. Most of the night, the race felt close—very close, which is a testament to the caliber of the women candidates because the race was definitely about the two of them. For additional photos and text,
Niki celebrates victory with Ellen Murphy Meehan, campaign manager.
Niki fields questions from broadcast, print and blog reporters while supporters wait for their candidate.
In the end, as Eileen Murphy Meehan, Tsongas campaign manager, noted, “We have chosen to elect a woman!” (It’s about time.) When Niki spoke, she made a point of commenting on the “remarkable people” who competed with her for the democratic nomination, and how they had all run a great campaign that focused on the issues. She also introduced and thanked a ton of people, most of whom were behind her on the stage and included elected officials who publicly supported her, as well as her staff and her family (including her three daughters and two of Paul’s aunts). The following is a list of some of the people Niki publicly recognized: Susan Fargo, Sue Tucker, Cory Atkins, Bud Caulfield, Rita Mercier, Rithy Uong, Vesna Nuon, and Brian Martin. I should also note that Jim Ogonowski won the republican nomination with 89% of the vote to Tom Tierney’s 11 percent. Jamie Eldridge was the third-place democratic finisher with 14%, Barry Finegold took 13%, and Jim Miceli got 6% of the votes.