Why and how Council candidates lie and mislead

by Itamar Turner-Trauring
Last updated 29 Sep 2025, originally created 23 Sep 2025

As a newcomer to Cambridge politics, many City Council candidates will have opinions that sound almost the same. In some cases this is because they really do have similar views, and then you can rely on ranked choice voting to make sure your vote goes to one of them. In other cases, however, it’s because the candidates are lying to you about their positions.

Differentiating between the two is quite useful when it comes to deciding who to vote for!

In this article I’ll cover:

The reasons candidates choose to mislead potential voters.
Some examples from current candidates, so you can see this in action and learn to identify some of the techniques used.
Some ways to identify lying or obfuscating candidates.

Why candidates lie

To understand why candidates lie, it helps to consider a candidate who isn’t lying about their beliefs, and specifically Councilor Wilson’s thoughts on separated bike lanes:

Councilor Ayesha Wilson, cosponsor of an order to cancel the [separated bike lane] project, said, “This isn’t a life, I mean, this isn’t — I really despise the fact that we have this conversation in a matter of life or death.” Minutes later, she dismissed cyclists’ deaths as “sadly, accidents happen.”

Given three people on bikes were killed by motor vehicles in Cambridge in 2024, in ways that were quite preventable, this sounds rather heartless.

Separately, when asked about the City’s Vision Zero plan, a commitment to reduce deaths and severe injuries from traffic crashes to zero, Councilor Wilson stated:

“I also believe we need to revisit the Vision Zero plan. This commitment was made pre-pandemic. Does this commitment still work for us post-pandemic?”

Now that we’ve had a pandemic, keeping people (mostly pedestrians and people on bikes) from dying in traffic crashes is apparently less important.

As a candidate seeking the public’s votes, expressing this position so bluntly:

Sounds bad to those who lack strong opinions on the subject.
Will certainly lose her the votes of many voters who think that getting run over by trucks is both bad and preventable.

So what is a candidate to do? How do they maximize votes while holding opinions that much of the public might find offensive?

For many candidates, the solution is to lie or obfuscate.

The key principles of misleading voters

A less scrupulous candidate who holds an opinion that might be offensive to large parts of the public can:

Lie, or at least obfuscate, their position when talking to voters in general.
Make sure the people who do agree with them know that they really are on their side. This can be done by using key phrases that less informed voters won’t notice. Alternatively, candidates might rely on existing knowledge of aligned voters. This works in Cambridge because there are many highly-engaged voters who support awful positions, whereas less engaged residents often assume good things will just happen.

In other cases, candidates are good at lying to themselves, so they might sincerely believe they support affordable housing even as they attack any real-world affordable housing project. If you’re good at lying to yourself, you can sell the lie much more effectively!

In either case, it’s easy for less informed voters to be misled.

Some examples from the 2025 election

John Hanratty: Coded opposition

If you visit Hanratty’s website you might get the impression he supports affordable housing. He has a picture of an affordable housing project, and he says he wants “inclusive, community-centered housing”! What could be wrong with that?

In fact, he is opposed to the Affordable Housing Overlay, the quite successful law that has allowed almost all recent affordable housing projects to get built. You can kinda sorta tell if you read what he writes carefully:

“Let’s rethink our approach to affordable housing. That means ensuring that development supports quality of life, respects existing communities, and includes better transportation, open space, and local infrastructure.”

The key phrase to notice is “respects existing communities”: the idea is that when the NIMBY neighbors try to kill an affordable housing project, as they always do, they should be listened to. The project whose image he uses on his site was the one whose meeting radicalized me because the neighbors tried to kill it. If it was up to Hanratty, it would have been built to the neighbors’ specification: either much smaller, or not built at all.

E. Denise Simmons: Lies

If you read Mayor Simmons’ page on bicycle lanes, you will see that she says:

“I believe I have voted in favor of creating/funding/expanding the bicycle lanes whenever they have appeared before the council…”

This is a flat out lie. For example, Simmons:

Did not support the 2019 Cycling Safety Ordinance.
Did not support the 2020 Cycling Safety Ordinance.
In 2024 voted to delay bike lanes by two years.
In 2025 voted to cancel, and lacking that indefinitely delay, the Broadway bike lane project.

Simmons has, in fact, fought against bike lanes since 2017.

Tim Flaherty: Obfuscation and lies

Flaherty’s headline message talks about “safe bike lanes”. But if you read enough further, you will learn that:

He wants to review the safety of existing separated bike lanes, despite all the evidence they actually make things safer.
He suggests “the direction of bicycle traffic to streets with low traffic, with less speed, and with less busy through streets.” In other words, no bike infrastructure on any of the busy major streets, which are exactly the ones where the most injuries happen.

He is of course unwilling to promise to support the Cycling Safety Ordinance, the reason we’ve been installing more separated bike lanes and one of the main reasons Cambridge is getting safer to bike in.

In short, he is deeply opposed to evidence-based measures that actually make people safer, and the headline of “safe bike lanes” is the opposite of his actual policy.

All of this isn’t quite lying: if you read far enough, you can see that headline isn’t accurate. But some of his handouts don’t have any of the explanatory text of his actual policies. As such, they are outright lying, as they claim to support bike lanes even as he actually opposes them.

How to spot lies and obfuscations

Here are some techniques that can help you spot candidates who are being less than honest.

Close reading

Sometimes reading carefully beyond the headline will help you discover that the headline is the exact opposite of the actual policy. This is the case with Flaherty’s website: you need to pay attention to the details.

Support for or opposition to existing policies

It’s very easy to say “I support affordable housing”; essentially every candidate says that. However, many candidates are opposed to actual current policies that result in affordable housing. So figuring out of a candidate supports the Affordable Housing Overlay will tell you how sincere they are about their support. And support (or lack thereof) of the Cycling Safety Ordinance will tell you about their real support for safer transportation infrastructure.

Candidate questionnaires by various organizations are a great way to see what candidates actually say about specific policies. It’s no surprise that Hanratty complains about “extremely detailed questionnaires”: it’s harder to bullshit people when asked specific questions about specific policies. Here are some useful ones, let me know if there are additional ones I missed from this election cycle:

Shibboleths

Often candidates will use coded language that tells their supporters they don’t really support the policy, but which are hard to spot if you’re not in the know. We already saw Hanratty’s talking about “respect[ing] existing communities”.

Here’s a similar example from Cathy Zusy; I’ve bolded the key phrase: “increasing affordable housing while ensuring new development fits the character and scale of our neighborhoods.” This is code for “no taller buildings,” which would result in vetoing almost every affordable housing project started in the past few years. This allows Zusy to claim to support affordable housing while make sure opponents of affordable housing projects know that she is actually on their side.

Slate endorsements

To give an example, the CCC is opposed to taller buildings, and therefore it is opposed to all recent affordable housing projects. As a result, if a candidate is endorsed by the CCC but still claims to support affordable housing, you should be suspicious of this claim.

I talk more about slates here.

A lack of respect for voters

These obfuscations and lies suggest that at least some of these candidates have a deep contempt for voters and residents who disagree with them. Rather than stating their opposition clearly, they claim to support policies completely at odds with their actual beliefs and actions, with the assumption that you won’t notice and might be tricked into voting for someone you disagree with.

So beyond the policy issues involved, it behooves you to learn to identify candidates who are doing this, so you can vote for someone who respects you enough to tell you the truth about their positions.

A bit more

Song of the day: Blue Monday, as covered by The Iron Boot Scrapers.