brendan halpin

Got a push poll from supporters of Josh Kraft last night. It came from research-polls.com, which, if you click through, has a website that lists no employees and looks wicked fake.

I fell down a little bit of a rabbit hole trying to find this company. The headquarters listed on their contact info is a shabby condo building in Fort Lauderdale (which immediately put me in mind of Kraft the Elder) owned by an LLC headquartered in an anonymous office park in Temple Place, Florida.

My internet research failed to uncover any grand conspiracy other than this: Josh Kraft, or someone who supports him, hired a “polling firm” that may or may not actually exist to send fake polls from a fake phone number [(413)-343-1039, which a couple of reverse lookup sites tell me does not exist, though another suggests that somebody owns the entire 343 exchange, so I called 343-1000 and went straight to a voicemail with no greeting.].

It’s May. The Election is in November, and Josh is already doing sleazy shit. Expect more, and worse. Was this fake poll commissioned by the campaign? Or did some fan of Josh Kraft who just happens to live in Florida and have essentially unlimited funds hire this guy pretending to be a company in his condo to send this stuff out off the books? Either way, it’s a preview of both the tactics and content we can expect from a Kraft campaign.

But let’s look at the poll, shall we?

It started with questions about how much you approve of Michelle Wu, Josh Kraft, Robert Kraft, and Donald Trump. So clearly Josh is worried about Wu hanging Trump around his neck. But you can see that from his yard signs, which say “Josh Kraft, Democrat for Mayor.” Mayor in Boston is a nonpartisan office, so Josh is clearly trying to shore up his non-fascist bona fides.

Anyway, I answered all the questions indicating that I think Mayor Wu is doing a pretty good job. I then got bombarded with “questions” that were really just talking points which then asked if these changed my opinion about Michelle Wu.

Oh yeah, and there was also a “how unfair is it to blame Josh Kraft for his father’s politics” question. I would argue not at all unfair. If he had big ideological differences from his Dad, he probably wouldn’t have a job at the Kraft Organization. Or live in a condo purchased by an LLC that shares a headquarters with The Kraft Organization.

Anyway, let’s look at some of Josh’s talking points.

He’s going to blame Michelle Wu for not doing stuff she said she wanted to do, but Massachusetts’ legislature, the place progressive ideas go to die, won’t let her. (Rent control and free public transportation, for example). This isn’t particularly honest, but she did run on these things, so I guess it’s fair to criticize her for not getting them done.

Josh is hitting the affordable housing issue hard. If you ignore the irony of the son of a billionaire who ostensibly lives in a condo his daddy’s LLC bought for him for 2.35 million dollars while also maintaining a home in Brookline casting himself as the affordable housing candidate, you’ll see from “costly regulations” above this is mostly about unleashing developers.

Josh seems to be working on the theory championed by developers and a handful of liberal white guys on bikes that if we just unleash the developers to build housing for rich people, it’s going to trickle down and make housing affordable for everyone. I can’t debunk this because it’s a faith-based argument and these folks will not be dissuaded from their faith in the wisdom and benevolence of the invisible hand of the market, but I’ll just say nobody can point to a place where this has been remotely successful.

Ugh, the stadium issue. Again, if you’re going to buy what Josh is selling, it’s important to ignore the irony, since the entire reason Josh is running is because his daddy is big mad at Michelle Wu for not giving him a soccer stadium. You can believe that if he were elected, Josh’s first official act would be finding some public land to give to his daddy for a stadium for his historically awful MLS team.

I live right by White Stadium, and nobody—not Tom Menino, not Marty Walsh, not Kim Janey, not the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, not anybody until Michelle Wu, has ever given a single shit about what was an embarrassingly decrepit hulk for decades. Half the stands weren’t usable after a fire in the 1990s. My son played soccer in White Stadium, and there was a manhole cover in the middle of the field. It was not a safe or nice place for Boston Public Schools kids to play, and the Kraft Foundation for which Josh works could have fixed it up decades ago and gotten a huge PR win besides. I mean, I know politics is politics and some candidates are going to opportunistically latch on to issues, but this is really appalling coming from Josh Kraft in particular.

Don’t believe the statistics! Believe our fearmongering instead!

You can expect mayoral candidates to talk about crime as though mayors have the power to stop crime, but it’s important to remember this: Josh Kraft is a fascist. He has donated his own money to fascist congressional candidates. And of course, his dad is besties with Trump, insofar as you can be besties with someone who has no friends. What Josh wants is jackboots on the streets. You can write off a lot of campaign promises as bullshit, but given Josh’s extreme proximity to fascists, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to worry about Josh calling in the United States Army to disappear the people suffering from addiction at Mass and Cass. It’s not unreasonable to imagine what Boston Cops like “Pepper Jack” Danilecki will do under an administration that expects and encourages them to be violent.

It’s clear to me from this fake poll that Josh Kraft’s strategy is going to be “don’t look at Trump. Think local!” But the thing is, even if you’re credulous enough to believe Josh Kraft cares at all about Boston’s working people, Trump’s policies are a quality of life issue for many Bostonians. We work in the universities and hospitals he’s trying to destroy. We don’t want masked thugs kidnapping our neighbors. Our cost of living is going up because of the incessant back and forth about tariffs which just happens to coincide with Trump insiders making a killing in the stock market.

My big takeaway from this push poll is that the Kraft campaign is really afraid of people making the connection between Kraft and Trump. They should be.