Mayor Michelle Wu Doesn’t Boast About Breaking Barriers
By Romen Basu Borsellino | 01 Oct, 2025

Boston’s first mayor of color doesn’t talk about her ethnicity much, in sharp contrast to the front-running mayoral candidate of that other big city.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu took some shots at rival city New York while on appearing on the Daily Show

When Daily Show Host Ronny Chieng recently sat down with Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, he had one one simple question:

“How did you become Mayor?”

It was a seemingly generic inquiry that could have been posed to any mayor in the country: Los Angeles’s Karen Bass, Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, San Francisco’s Daniel Lurie.

But anyone with even a slight familiarity with Boston’s fraught history with desegregation in schools, housing, and sports, knew exactly what he was asking Wu, the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants. 

She didn’t take the bait, instead giving an answer about hard work, family, and love of her city that very well could have come from Bass, Johnson, or Lurie.

Wu, a pianist, has sat in with the Boston Pops

So Chieng asked again, this time slightly more pointedly: “So how did you become the Mayor of Boston?  You still haven’t answered.  I don’t know if you’ve been to Boston but THIS is not the demographic for Mayor of Boston.”  The crowd laughed.

“You might be surprised by Boston,” Wu replied with a smile.

Chieng, not satisfied with her answer, asked a third time.  No dice.

He asked a fourth time.  Nothing

And a fifth time, only to get a variation of the same answer.

Finally, after his sixth attempt at asking, Wu laughingly threw her arms in the air.

“How hard do I have to say it!?” she shot back.

Chieng, finally accepting defeat five minutes into the interview, moved on to another topic.

The Daily Show Host, and certainly some of his viewers, may have been disappointed with her unwillingness to engage in a full scale conversation about identity. 

But few can argue that Michelle Wu, one of the most popular mayors in America, knows what she’s doing. 

NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani hasn't shied away from his identity.

AAPIdentity

On September 9th Boston voters went to the polls for the non-partisan Mayoral primary. While there were several names on the ballot, it was effectively a two way race: Incumbent Mayor Wu, running for a second term, and businessman Josh Kraft, son of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.

Despite being outspent five-to-one, Wu received over 71% of the vote, beating Kraft by a stunning 49-point margin.

While both candidates were eligible to advance to a repeat head-to-head in the November election, Kraft dropped out of the race just two days after Wu’s landslide primary victory. 

Wu is now running unopposed, making her second term a near-certainty.

Michelle Wu’s initial 2021 Mayoral victory made history in a number of ways:

Due to a vacancy, she was sworn into office just two weeks after the election.

She was the youngest mayor of Boston in 80 years. 

And not only did she become the first Asian to hold the position, she is the first person of color entirely. 

Wu has more than earned the right to thump her chest over each one of these achievements.  But as her interview with Chieng made clear, particularly on the issue of her ethnicity, she prefers to shy away from identity politics. 

Beyond mentions that her parents were immigrants or more subtle characteristics that only fellow AAPI transplants might pick up on — learning piano as a kid, playing badminton, and feeling pressure to go to Harvard —she generally sticks to policy or more broad talk of family. 

Boston v. New York

In theory the intense rivalry between the cities of Boston and New York should cause acrimony between the two cities.  After all, we are currently in the midst of a Yankees-Red Sox playoff series. 

Which is why it might be surprising that Zohran Mamdani, the frontrunner to be New York’s next mayor, has been consistently citing Wu’s own Mayorship on the campaign trail. 

When Zohran gets pushback on his plan to make all public buses free, for example, he cites a pilot program that Wu ran in Boston.  He told the New York Times Editorial Board “What Michelle Wu’s pilot program showed is that dwell-time at bus stops can go down by 23% if you’re using all-door boarding.”

And Mamdani doesn’t just mention Wu with regards to specific policies.  Per the Boston Globe, “In the first debate in his race, he went so far as to name Wu as the most effective Democrat in the nation. He has often cited her as a politician he would emulate”

In a sit-down with the New York Times editorial board, Mamdani said the following:

“I think of Michelle Wu in Boston in many ways as a model for the kind of work you do as a legislator, then becoming a mayor, and also speaking to the possibility of being a mayor at around the same age as her.”

While Wu has not endorsed Mamdani — not that he needs it at this point — she’s praised the campaign that he’s running:

“It’s inspiring to see that someone who ran a campaign based on a joyful, positive vision of getting things done that matter to people wins out over millions of dollars of negative attack ads and a much darker vision of what cities are and what they stand for.”

But while Mamdani and Wu have age and policy in common, their relationship with their respective ethnicities appears to differ. 

In June, back when Mamdani was still polling second in the primary, New York publication Gothamist ran a piece, titled “Identity politics out of style?  In NYC’s mayor’s race, Mamdani leans into his.”

They point to his Bollywood-style campaign videos and ads that are running both Urdu and Hindi.  Not to mention the viral video of Mamdani eating biryani with his hands.

As Gothamist accurately states, “Mamdani has embraced his immigrant identity and has loudly proclaimed his Muslim faith, rather than downplaying it.”

Should Mamdani win, he will join a number of AAPI mayors of major cities in addition to Wu, like Cincinnati’s Aftab Pureval, Seattle’s Bruce Herrell, and San Diego’s Todd Gloria. 

Political Strategy

It should go without saying that one’s relationship to their identity is highly personal.  Who are we to judge how much Michelle Wu does or does not feel comfortable talking about her identity? 

From a purely political standpoint, however, it may make sense.

While New York is just 30% White and approximately 15% AAPI, Boston is a different ballgame at roughly 50% White and 10% AAPI.

And Wu is aware of some of the ways in which Asian Americans are perceived. Speaking with San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu during an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation event in San Francisco, Wu did open up a little about the perceptions of Asians in this country, noting that “Asian Americans have been the sort of stereotyped perpetual foreigner in the many 100s of years that we’ve been here.”

And in fairness to Boston, the city has come from being known as “the most racist city in America” in the 70s. 

But some feelings may be hard to get over, like the fact that Mark Wahlberg, who is practically hailed as Boston royalty, once beat a Vietnamese man unconscious with a wooden stick while screaming anti-Asian slurs at him.

Michelle Wu is, above all else, an economic populist who has resonated with voters of nearly every background by talking about the cost of living. 

And in some ways, simply allowing her actions to demonstrate that she is not a “perpetual foreigner” is more powerful than talking about it.

One could even make the comparison to Barack Obama, whom civil rights leader Jesse Jackson once decried for distancing himself from his African American identity and “talking down to black people.” 

Or Kamala Harris, who President Trump accused of hiding her identity, asking “Is she Black or Indian?”

And, yet, the successes of the first two people of color to achieve the Presidency and Vice presidency, respectively, speak for themselves.  As does Michelle Wu’s staggering 71% vote total. 

And if she can maintain this level of popularity through her second term, we may even see some Obama and Harris-level political aspirations from Wu.