By Alex Frandsen

On Nov. 7, Boston will hold its mayoral election. Incumbent Martin J. Walsh will take on challenger Tito Jackson, who has served as the city councilman for parts of Fenway, Dorchester, the South End and Roxbury since 2011.

Now, I’m certainly no Nate Silver, but I feel extremely comfortable making a prediction about the outcome of this race: Jackson is going to get absolutely smoked by Walsh.

Nothing against Jackson. He’s an admirable politician who’s fought hard to represent the interests of his constituents and he’s been unafraid to take on powerful city entities, including Northeastern University itself. Way back when he first announced his candidacy, I even wrote a column discussing how his entry into the race was a very good development for the city of Boston.

His task, unseating a current mayor, is a gargantuan one. The most recent Boston Globe poll shows him trailing Walsh by 35 percentage points, and with the election just days away, it seems unlikely that we’ll see a mayoral race miracle for Tito.

With such a deficit, it would be an easy assumption to make that Jackson is an inferior candidate, one who’s unprepared to take over as leader of a major city like Boston. But even if Jackson does have faults, his real problem is years of Boston political precedent. Incumbent mayoral candidates simply don’t lose here, with mayoral turnover much lower than cities of comparable stature.

We’ve only had four mayors since 1968, a figure lower than those for San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Washington and Los Angeles. Walsh’s predecessor, Thomas Menino, held the position for a staggering 21 years. When Walsh won his first election it was because Menino was ready to stop down, not because Walsh defeated him in an election. In fact, the last time any mayoral incumbent lost to a challenger was 1949.

Of course, as we all learned in our high school government classes, incumbency almost always comes with advantages. But even so, the stranglehold that incumbents have held over office in Boston is strangely secure.

So why is this? For one, mayors don’t have term limits in Boston. Once elected, they’re free to hang around as long as they please, so long as the voters keep propping them up. For another, Boston’s mayors have been relatively free of scandal, a claim that many other cities, including Washington and Seattle can’t make.

But there’s also a hidden element at play, one that should create some cause for concern: voter apathy. Boston’s mayoral elections rarely generate a strong turnout, a crucial ingredient for any candidate hoping to unseat an incumbent. Even the 2013 election, which was the first between two fresh candidates in decades, barely got 20 percent of the city’s population to turn out. Walsh and his then-opponent John Connolly got just 142,000 votes between them, which, for context, is just over half of the number of votes cast in Boston in the most recent presidential election. When you consider the fact that Clinton thumping Trump in Massachusetts was a foregone conclusion, that number becomes even more depressing. Eligible Boston voters just don’t care that much about mayoral elections, a fact that bored out in the preliminary mayoral contest.  

Boston holds its elections in off-years, which has been proven to be linked to low voter turnout, so that certainly doesn’t help things. But regardless, there’s a lot of blame to go around. And part of that blame falls on our shoulders as students attending school in College Town, USA.

Our demographic has been known to talk big political game on social media and then back it up by being a no-show at the polls. If we really want to be a part of this city, if we really want to make this more than just a four (or five)-year stopover before we begin our careers, it should start with civic engagement. I’m not even advocating for voting for Jackson, because Walsh upholds a lot of the progressive values that we young people generally hold dear. I’m just advocating for showing up at the polls and ticking a box. Any box, as long as you’re actually participating.

There are 152,000 of us in this city, so if even just a third of us showed up to the polls, we would be guaranteed to make an impact. I know, I know, local politics aren’t quite as sexy as presidential races. But if we college students head to the polls in droves Nov. 7, we’ll be able to do the very thing we so fervently post on Facebook about: create change. And in the process, we might just make the mayoral election a contest worth paying attention to again.