For a long time, the glue that held together the various constituencies of Fall River politics was the Democratic ward committee.
The city’s nine ward committees were little outposts of the party with a presence in every neighborhood of Fall River. Each committee had up to 35 members elected from the surrounding neighborhood, many of them unionized factory workers, teachers, and mail carriers.
“We would caucus in a bar room or a club or the back of a church,” recalled Fall River Mayor Paul Coogan, a former high school vice principal.
For most of his life, Coogan said that if you had a problem in Fall River, you could see your neighbors on the ward committee, and they might put you in touch with a Democrat at City Hall or the State House who could fix it. Politicians listened to the ward committees, Coogan said, because the committees helped get them elected.
“When you ran for office, you’d go to the ward one committee and say, ‘I’d really appreciate your support,’” he said. “And then you’d try to build your organization out from those. But they’re just — it’s not as strong a system as it used to be.”
The ward committee system fell to the wayside during a chaotic era of Fall River politics following the Great Recession. One mayor was removed from office in a recall election, and the next mayor, elected at just 23 years old, is now serving a federal prison sentence for bribery. By the time Coogan took office in 2020, he was Fall River’s eighth mayor in just 14 years (a total that includes a pair of acting mayors who served only a few months each).
The instability at the top of the local Democratic Party shook the foundation as well: core groups of engaged members left their ward committees, and some committees stopped meeting altogether, forfeiting their organizational status in the process.
Then, with the arrival of the pandemic, Coogan said people got used to relying on their phones to figure out what was going on in Fall River politics and make their voices heard.
“You pop on there and you can throw out a message that used to be carried forth by all those ward people,” Coogan said.
Declining voter turnout
The gradual loss of face-to-face engagement between ward committees and average people in Fall River has coincided with a slow decline in voter turnout. At first, this was mostly noticeable in municipal elections. Then, during the presidential election this month, a majority of the city’s voters stayed home. That shocked the city’s top election official, Ryan Lyons.
“Traditionally, in the city of Fall River, we usually have a 62% to 64% voter turnout,” Lyons said. “The drop down to 47% struck me as very strange in this city.”
Compared to 2020, Trump increased his base in Fall River by less than 1,300 votes, which is hardly a major swing in a city of 94,000 people. But there was a steep drop in turnout for the Democrats. Kamala Harris received almost 3,500 fewer votes than Joe Biden, opening the door for Trump to win Fall River. With 50.1% of the vote, Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to carry Fall River since 1924, when former Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge won the presidency.
Deindustrialization plays a part
“No one around here really ever voted for Republicans,” said Adam Oblatore on a recent walk through the Flint neighborhood of Fall River. Oblatore had just waved to a pickup truck driver flying the Trump flag and honking his horn.
“But lately, like you just seen the guy drive by,” Oblatore said, “Trump, Trump, Trump. Everyone's Trump around here now.”
Oblatore, who is unemployed and hoping to start a second career as a barber, describes himself as apolitical. But it’s clear his opinion of Democrats has changed a lot based on what he sees on the internet.
“We're in this reality era, like everybody knows everything about everything because of phones and internet and Google and so it feels like everyone's becoming more aware,” Oblatore said. “I always looked at Democrats as the good people, and Republicans are more like the ‘they want to enslave you’ people. But it's actually the opposite, and I feel like a lot of people are starting to realize that now.”
Oblatore shared his thoughts in the shadow of an abandoned factory, a reminder of another seismic shift in Fall River politics. During the 1980s, the Flint Mills had employed more than 1,000 unionized garment workers. The various textile and garment workers unions created a close connection between the city’s residents and the Democratic Party.
Bert Barao was 16 when he got his first factory job in Fall River, making dress shirts at the Flint Mills for brands like Brooks Brothers and Saks Fifth Avenue. Barao said his union used to bring Democratic politicians into the city’s factories to meet the workers.
“I remember them having access to the shop floor,” Barao said. “They would show up during breaks. All these workers would gather in a cafeteria, and all of a sudden there'd be someone who was running for elected office there, and passing a leaflet around. And it was all about, you know, maintaining jobs and having job security.”
Barao met Democratic candidates running for everything from the city council to the state legislature to Congress. In 1980, he met Ted Kennedy during his presidential campaign. Barao said union leaders could motivate thousands of Fall River’s factory workers to go to the polls for specific candidates.
“When you're an organized worker, you just know that politics are all local, and it affects you, your livelihood and your paycheck,” Barao said.
But during the late 1980s and early ‘90s, many of Fall River’s manufacturing companies relocated to countries with cheaper labor, enabled by the free trade deals passed under presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. The factory where Barao got his start closed in 1988. Another unionized factory where Barao found work in Fall River closed three years later.
Back to basics
Barao now works as a tailor at a suburban mall near Boston. He also serves as the regional president of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees, which goes by the acronym UNITE HERE.
Ethan Snow, another leader in Barao’s union, said UNITE only has about 200 members left in Fall River, down from thousands in the 1980s.
“This was a major union town,” Snow said, “and it’s crazy, but that was all erased in just a few decades.”
To rebuild, Snow said labor leaders need to unionize the big employers that moved into Fall River after the factories closed, like Fall River’s Amazon distribution center. Snow said unions remain the most effective way to connect workers to a more progressive movement for improving the government and the economy.
“They're trying to figure out how to survive and how to move forward,” Snow said. “They're reaching out for anything that's going to give them some explanation, that's going to give them some ability to regain some of the status and the footing and the power that they once had.”
Within Fall River’s Democratic party, some leaders are also looking back to the ward committees as a way to reconnect with voters. Two defunct committees recently started meeting again, and membership across the remaining seven is slowly starting to rebuild under a new chair for the city’s Democratic party committee.
