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Two Senate seats that between them have known four occupants since 1991 will change hands, and Winchester — split down the middle between them, unable to decide either — watched both from the sidelines.
Kate Lipper-Garabedian won the Democratic primary for the Fifth Middlesex Senate seat. Erika Uyterhoeven declared victory in the Second Middlesex. One of those claims rests on a nearly complete count. The other rests on a map with a hole in it.
Lipper-Garabedian’s win survives the math
Lipper-Garabedian, a state representative from Melrose, had 12,671 votes, 61.3% of the ballots counted so far in the district, with five of six communities reporting: Malden, Melrose, Reading, Stoneham and Winchester precincts 1, 2, 3 and 8. Carey McDonald had 5,167 votes, 25%, and Ryan O’Malley 2,849, 13.8%.
Only Wakefield remains. It has supplied roughly 15% of the district’s vote in recent cycles, and Lipper-Garabedian represents part of the town in the House. Her lead is more than 7,500 votes. There is no arithmetic in which one community of that size reverses it.
She succeeds Jason Lewis, the Winchester resident and former Town Meeting member who has held the seat since 2014 and is retiring. Lewis endorsed her, as did 1199SEIU in mid-August, five legislators and more than 35 local officials, including six in Winchester.
The structural read on this race all summer was blunt and, as it turned out, correct: Two Malden city councilors would split the district’s largest city while Lipper-Garabedian consolidated Melrose.
Malden was in fact the one community where she did not finish first. McDonald carried it, 2,874 to her 2,227. It made no difference anywhere else on the map.
McDonald entered the race late and reported $26,288 in itemized fundraising, with 72% of gifts at $100 or less. O’Malley, who was endorsed by the Massachusetts Teachers Association, took no political action committee money and raised little. Lipper-Garabedian ended June with $70,027 on hand.
Uyterhoeven claims the Second Middlesex with Cambridge uncounted
Uyterhoeven declared victory with three of six communities counted and the district’s third-largest bloc still dark.
The state representative from Somerville had 10,509 votes, 38.4% of ballots counted so far, to state Rep. Christine Barber’s 8,459, 30.9%. Burhan Azeem had 4,036, 14.8%. Matt McLaughlin had 3,751, 13.7%.
Thomas E. Hopcroft, the Winchester School Committee member who ended active campaigning in late July, but remained printed on the ballot, drew 596, 2.2%.
That is 27,351 votes counted, from Somerville, Medford and Winchester precincts 4 through 7.
Somerville is what moved Uyterhoeven. She took 6,816 votes there against Barber’s 4,391 — a home-turf margin in the district’s largest bloc that erased an early Medford and Winchester lean toward Barber.
Uyterhoeven represents the 27th Middlesex in the House, entirely within Somerville, and she carried the city she knows best by more than 2,400 votes.
Cambridge has not reported. Its four in-district precincts — Ward 7 Precinct 1, Ward 8 Precinct 1, Ward 10 and Ward 11 — supplied about 19% of district ballots in the 2024 primary and nearly 22% in the last genuinely contested one, in 2020, when the district cast 55,810 votes and the Cambridge portion accounted for 12,123 of them.
Azeem, the Cambridge vice mayor, is the candidate expected to carry those precincts outright. His fourth-place standing Sept. 1 says nothing about that. It says only that the part of the district where he is strongest has not been counted.
What the numbers do not say yet
The four Second Middlesex candidates spent the summer agreeing on nearly every goal — housing, transit, climate, affordability — and disagreeing on how Beacon Hill should function.
Barber ran on an inside game and a decade of enacted law, with endorsements from the outgoing Pat Jehlen and Gov. Maura Healey.
Uyterhoeven ran on transparency, public committee votes and confrontation with legislative leadership, backed by labor and teachers.
Azeem ran a Cambridge-powered housing-production pitch with outside super political action committee spending on his behalf.
McLaughlin ran on a working-class biography and a municipal argument that the Legislature has failed cities.
None of those distinctions is settled by a plurality. Uyterhoeven's 38.4% is a share of the votes counted so far, not of the district, and a fragmented four-way field can produce a winner who never approaches a majority. That is not unusual here. Jehlen herself entered the Senate in 2005 with 38% in a four-way special primary, and Lewis won his 2014 special with 43%.
Neither successor inherits what the retiring senators built. Jehlen leaves after 20 years and a committee chairmanship. House seniority does not convert to Senate seniority, and both winners would arrive as freshmen with no automatic claim on either predecessor's committee standing.
Winchester’s split map, and its small voice
Winchester votes in both races and decides neither. Precincts 4 through 7 belong to the Second Middlesex, where they have supplied about 4% to 5% of district ballots in recent primaries. Precincts 1, 2, 3 and 8 belong to the Fifth Middlesex, roughly 7% of that district’s vote.
Whole-town Senate totals are meaningless in either contest, and the town has no single state senator.
The pre-election-day numbers suggest local interest ran well above the state’s. Winchester voters cast or returned 2,364 mail and early ballots before polls opened Tuesday, 13.7% of the town's 17,222 registered voters, against a statewide rate of 10.7% — 555,525 ballots out of 5,184,354 registered voters. Of the statewide early and mail ballots cast, 464,616 were Democratic.
Everything posted on Sept. 1 is unofficial and subject to certification. The Fifth Middlesex is one community from complete. The Second Middlesex is not, and the community it is waiting on is the one that has most to say about the candidate currently running fourth.
Will Dowd is a Massachusetts journalist who covers municipal government and community life for Winchester News. He is also the founder and editor of The Marblehead Independent, a reader-funded digital newsroom.
