Marc Laredo is mayor-elect, the City Council has a bunch of new members coming, and the School Committee is seeing a near-complete turnover.

The turnout for this election was 37.6 percent. That’s a sharp increase from the 2023 local election, which had around 25 percent of registered voters turn out.

The big winner of the night was Laredo. Not only did he defeat his opponent, Al Cecchinelli, with a staggering margin of 77.1 percent to 13.4 percent., but also because most of the Laredo-endorsed candidates for City Council and School Committee won. And the margins of victory for his School Committee candidates over those endorsed by Newton Teachers Association show a potential political mandate for the mayor-elect when it comes to Newton’s schools.

Here are a few takeaways based on the preliminary numbers from the city clerk’s office.

People are passionate about parking

The ballot question asking whether the city should repeal its winter overnight parking ban may have also brought more people to the polls.

Law students Jeremy Freudberg and Peter Klapes drafted the ballot question, saying the ban was outdated and problematic for people without off-street parking options near their homes.

But voters disagreed and rejected the idea in what was the slimmest margin of the night. And the ballot question had a lower percentage of blanks (around 4 percent) than any of the City Council or School Committee races, signaling that there was more energy for and against the city’s parking ban than for or against any candidate in Tuesday’s election.

So, it would be safe to say that boost in turnout was propelled by the parking debate. Newton’s overnight winter parking ban runs from Dec. 1 to March 31.

Barbara Darnell of the Newton Highlands Area Council and School Committee candidates Victor Lee, left, and Jonathan Greene, right, talk to voters at Upper Falls Village Day on Sept. 14, 2025. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

School Committee slate sweep

The 2023 election was focused on housing, zoning and the village centers. But since then, a teacher strike followed by another tense school budget battle have put the schools at center stage for a local culture war at a time when the mayor was heading out of office, two School Committee members were reaching term limits and several others opted not to seek reelection.

Every School Committee candidate endorsed by mayor-elect Marc Laredo won while every candidate endorsed by the Newton Teachers Association lost.

Consider these similar victory margins across the city with School Committee races:

• In Ward 2, Laredo-backed candidate Linda Swain defeated Christine Fisher 41 percent to 27 percent (32 percent of ballots were blank or write-ins for that race).
• In Ward 5, Laredo-backed candidate Ben Schlesinger defeated NTA-endorsed Jenna Miara percent 41.5  percent to 32.5 percent, (26 percent were blank or write-ins for that race).
• In Ward 6, Laredo-backed Jonathan Greene beat Mali Brodt 42 percent to 30 percent (28 percent of ballots were blank or write-ins for that race).
• In Ward 7, Laredo-backed Victor Lee beat NTA-endorsed Jim Murphy in the biggest School Committee victory margin, 49.3 percent to 23.1 percent (27.4 percent of ballots were blank or write-ins for that race).

In each race, the winner had a margin of victory greater than 10 percent, and in Lee’s case it was almost 18 percent.

City Councilor Joshua Krintzman, left, is staying on the City Council for a fifth term, and Cyrus Dahmubed, right, will be joining the City Council in January. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

Dahmubed bucks a trend

The City Council races focused largely on housing and economic development, and Laredo did well with his endorsed candidates there, too.

For the Ward 4 at-large seats, Laredo endorsed incumbent Joshua Krintzman and newcomer John Chaimanis. Krintzman won handily with 51 percent, the only candidate in a contested race to get above 50 percent. But Cyrus Dahmubed—an architectural designer who ran on increasing and diversifying the city’s housing stock—got 40 percent, which put him ahead of Chaimanis, who got 37 percent.

It’s difficult to gauge the meaning of blank ballots in three-way races, since some people check off only one name and others don’t check off any. This race, for example, had more than 16,000 blanks which would fall at about 71 percent.

Maybe Dahmubed’s victory was the result of a firestorm ignited by comments Chaimanis made on Facebook about the city’s transgender student locker room policy. Maybe it was because Krintzman and Dahmubed effectively ran together as a team and clearly Krintzman is popular. Perhaps it was a mix of all of those factors, but either way, Dahmubed withstood the Laredo storm.

In the race for two Ward 6 at-large seats, Laredo only endorsed one candidate: Lisa Gordon. And Gordon cleaned up. She won 47.2 percent of the vote.

The other winner was Sean Roche—an advocate for more housing who has been at odds with Laredo many times—with 37.5 percent. Ted Gross trailed with 21.1 percent.

The turnout and vote percentages show that Newtonians were more active and engaged in this election than in 2023. In 2023, the main issue of contention was a zoning overhaul that hadn’t happened yet and the fear that it would bring an army of developers intent on erecting tens of thousands of apartments in the village centers—which never happened. But in 2025, the biggest fight was over a school budgeting drama that had happened in real life before the voters’ eyes.

Any election theme that involves children brings parents to polls in droves. And this election also carried with it the message that a Proposition 2 1/2 override was needed in the next couple of years to fund the schools, which had even people without kids in the schools keeping an eye on the School Committee races.