Woburn Elections: Winners Say It Came Down To Door-Knocking

WOBURN, MA — Want to win an election in Woburn? You better do the work, if the winners of Tuesday's elections are to be believed. All three non-incumbents who won office said that going out and knocking on doors was what put them over the top.

Ward 3 Alderman-elect Jeff Dillon, who beat Claire Malaguti for an open seat, said he made a commitment to knock on every door in the ward. Dillon, a property manager, will replace Mark Gaffney, who decided not to seek re-election. Many voters in the third ward said they personally met Dillon during his campaign, while the heard much less from his opponent, a perennial candidate who got just 15.5 percent of the vote.

In the school committee race, seven candidates vied for five open seats. The three incumbent candidates won re-election and got the most votes, but the two newcomers who will join them on the committee, Andrew Lipsett and Colleen Cormier, both credited shoe leather campaigning for their victories. Cormier and Lipsett even credited each other with having run active campaigns of talking to voters.

Across the board, incumbents won re-election Tuesday, making the three winning open seats the only non-incumbents elected.

"Right from the start, when I started going out knocking on doors in the first week of August, I made a commitment to knock every door in ward three," said Dillon. "And I think I pretty much got all of them."

Dillon said he's "pretty well known in my little district," but knocking on doors was very important to winning support across the ward.

"I got a good amount of feedback from going door-to-door. A couple of people that met me where kind enough to invite me to a coffee with the neighbors, which was very positive," Dillon said.

Ward 3 voters said the same thing: Dillon won them over by talking to them.

"He came to my house, met my kids. They liked him," said Ward 3 resident Mike Hamilton, who supported Dillon.

"Jeff Dillon put his best efforts out — I met him," said Jennifer Mahon, an education advocate who said she was mostly focused on the school committee election.

The school committee candidates found the same technique effective, they said.

"Knocking on doors, that's how you get votes," said Cormier, a pediatric nurse and public health graduate student. "If you don't go out, why should anyone vote for you?"

"I think what we saw while campaigning — both myself and my fellow newcomer Colleen Cormier — was that people appreciated the personal communication: knocking doors, talking with voters directly, attending events, and being accessible," said Lipsett, a high school history teacher.

And the door-knocking helped guide what issues to focus on in office, candidates said.

"Some of the best and deepest conversations I had were with people living in our city's low income housing communities, or people who had struggled to get their children the services they need, or immigrant families that were trying to navigate an unfamiliar school system," Lipsett said. "We need to make sure that people feel their voices are heard, their concerns are prioritized, and their children matter."

Dillon listed a number of complaints he heard from voters while campaigning that he wanted to make a focus, including street and traffic conditions.

"From going door-to-door, one of the problems they talked about was the amount of traffic that we have now, and unfortunately sometimes the speeder traffic," he said. "Also condition of streets —some of them need to be paved."

Turnout was modest Tuesday, but broke 30 percent in ward three, versus 25.9 city-wide.