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City Council Prelim election results are in. The eight making the cut are probably no surprise:

The Herald and the Globe have comparable analysis. Like many, I was surprised by Connolly’s strong showing - sure, he’s from a political family, but this is his first run, and his profile has been lower than Patricia White’s. Some have been surprised by Yoon, but I’m not; I expected he would do well with progressive and non-white voters put off by the Irish political machine network. In fact, I was receiving emails from people outside of Boston urging me to vote for Arroyo and Yoon. Adam at Universal Hub remarks, "Whites may now make up a minority of the city’s population, but you wouldn’t know it from the finalists in Tuesday’s vote: Of the eight people advancing to the final election in November, six are white Irish Catholics." There’s a different way at looking at it, of course: the only two non-marginal non-white candidates did very well in the preliminary election, that Yoon can come from obscurity to 5th place his first time out (and on a modicum of a platform) is a signal that there is a real place for non-Irish-machine candidates in the future. It also may be a sign that opposing the BU bioterror lab can get you lots of instant support (Maura Hennigan, take notes).

Of course whether appealing to Irish machine or progressive-minority coalition (or both), this race so far has not been about issues. You have to dig to find out that Patricia White supports the BU lab, or that Matt O’Malley wants to relax the city residency requirement for employees. I’m still not sure if Sam Yoon or Stephen Murphy are for or against neighborhood schools. It’s for this reason that I’m hoping more candidates reply to my survey. At it stands, it’s pointless to blame voters for not turning out. No issues were at stake yesterday because neither candidates or supporters wanted there to be. They wanted it to be simply about competing tribes. Let’s change that.