A Reflection on Progress Made in the Framingham Mayoral Race
The election loss was a tactical defeat, but the change movement scored a strategic victory, establishing a bridgehead which will expand.
Note: This is my personal reflection on the election and its consequences. I was the challenger in the election - Geoff Epstein.
On November 4, 2025, the result of the Framingham Mayoral election was a victory for the incumbent Mayor, Charlie Sisitsky: 5,359 - 4,146. Voter turnout was surprisingly low at: 9,689 out of 42,090 registered voters, or 23.02%.
It was a disappointing outcome, especially as during the campaign the community responded in such an astoundingly positive way to the promise of new ideas, new energy and a new direction for the city.
From the outset, my campaign had two main objectives:
To win the election, to bring much needed change to the city
To make sure everyone in the community was up to date on the basic facts on how the city was doing
The first objective was obviously not achieved, but great progress was made on the second.
The Most Important Campaign Outcome
In coming months, that progress will be continued by expanding the group of residents who are both well informed on the true state of the city and committed to bringing positive change to Framingham, and engaging that group in an organized way to bring about that change. The outline of that will be provided later in this article.
Back to the campaign.
The Information War
In essence the campaign was an information war, which began on January 8, when the Mayor issued a press release affirming his intention to run for re-election in an email to the MetroWest Daily News:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aqU7ZkQt2TBElTuri8eLZBL2RyGdFlUi/view?usp=sharing
In that email, the Mayor made clear that the central focus of his campaign was the completion of various capital projects. He seemed to have a rosy view of the city in which no real challenges lay ahead for the next Mayor.
In particular, the Mayor made no mention of the major problems facing the city:
The education system was on a downslide.
The environmental effort was stalled.
Water & sewer bills were heading into unaffordable territory.
Residential development was out of control, with developers having an inside track in city government, and local neighborhoods being undermined by the Mayor.
The senior population was expanding, but its services were being cut.
With the Mayor obviously thinking that everything was just great in the city, it seemed clear that two things had to be done:
There had to be a serious effort to inform the community about the true situation in Framingham.
The Mayor had to get some opponents in his re-election attempt.
There were no obvious challengers in sight, so I started the ball rolling by organizing a campaign to run for Mayor, with those dual goals.
The MetroWest Daily News reported on that in a January 18 story:
In mounting such a campaign, there had to be an initial assessment of the campaign prospects, and here is how that looked at the outset, in terms of advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages
The principal advantages I had were:
A good grasp of the facts, showing the difficulties Framingham faced, based on almost two years of fulltime scouring through public data on city performance, and publishing weekly articles on all facets of city government in a Substack newsletter, The Framingham Observer, which was launched on March 19, 2023.
4 years of productive service on the Framingham School Committee.
Substantial prior campaigning experience.
Disadvantages
The principal disadvantages I had to overcome were as follows:
I had no support network, while the Mayor had a support network built up over 27 years of government service.
As of January 31, 2025, the Mayor had an enormous war chest of $66,518.94, built up over several years, largely funded by developers and other interests, who did not live in Framingham. My starting funds were $17.01.
The principal question for my campaign was:
Could enough of the community be convinced of the ground truth that the city was in trouble on education, environment, infrastructure, development and senior services, to win the Mayoral election?
Thus, the battle began.
A Brief Summary of My Campaign
My support network grew in leaps and bounds, with 20 volunteers turning up out of nowhere to help me meet the signature requirements to get on the ballot.
I was fortunate to attract 5 community members who staffed my steering committee with great energy and commitment.
Fundraising picked up and we managed to raise about $20,000 in donations from almost 120 donors, mostly Framingham residents, and none with real estate connections or associated with special interests.
I supplemented that with an initial $10,000 loan to the campaign to help counter the Mayor’s developer fueled money advantage.
A campaign website, Facebook page and YouTube channel were created to support campaign messaging.
We had successful meet & greets at the Heritage House and Shillman House in Nobscot, the main library, the Callahan Center, and at Open Spirit in Saxonville.
We had almost 300 yard signs deployed across the city.
Two volunteer media experts joined the campaign to design mailers.
Two mailers were sent out to 16,000 frequent voters and a third mailer added 6,000 newly registered voters to the distribution list. Two mailers were initially planned, but a mailer, specifically designed to address the Mayor’s education misinformation, had to be added. I upped my campaign loan to $23,000 to support the expanded mailer effort.
Almost 17,000 flyers were dropped at homes across the city, or handed out at businesses, by a team of 15 volunteers.
Debate performances and an interview on the Audrey Hall show were well received.
Multiple well attended standouts were held in the 2 weeks prior to the election.
48 volunteers provided great election day coverage at polling locations.
Endorsements were an uphill battle, as many potential endorsers were afraid of post-election Sisitsky retribution, but we got 14 brave souls to stand up and take the heat.
The Framingham Community & Government Chat group was initially a useful forum for posting campaign news, but after a while the Sisitsky camp organized a successful disinformation attack squad, which included two City Councilors and a Planning Board member, and even a college kid who was paid $1,000 to troll us. Facts were systematically undermined, doubt sown and personal attacks on me and my campaign supporters become commonplace. The failure of that forum to provide a useful information service to the voting community is a key motivator for future actions described later.
In all of the information battles, not once did anyone in the Sisitsky camp point specifically to any of the 180 articles I wrote for The Framingham Observer, nor any of the facts presented on my campaign website Facts page to try to prove that any of the facts were incorrect. So, the fact base of the campaign held up and will endure well past the election.
The information battle was almost won, but not quite.
The Mayor’s Campaign Defense
The Mayor’s campaign featured 3 principal components:
An avalanche of mailers designed to hide the problems facing the city.
An avalanche of endorsements.
An avalanche of personal attacks and misinformation in Facebook forums, as noted above.
The Mayor sent out 7 mailers, with 3 focused on marketing him as the ‘Education Mayor’ and one marketing him as the ‘Green Mayor’. The education and environmental mailers were masterpieces in deception, shifting attention from the failing school system and the stalled environmental effort.
The Mayor spent $95,000 on his campaign, most of it on this mailer blitz, exhausting almost all of his war chest. [My campaign spent a total of $38,000.]
In a remarkable turn of events, he also rolled out high caliber Democratic Party political power onto the ‘non-partisan’ local Mayoral battlefield.
Who would have expected Senate President Karen Spilka and U.S. House Minority Whip Katherine Clark to come out on the side of a Mayor who:
Cut $18 million in local education funding from the schools, damaging the educational prospects of our most disadvantaged children by blocking expansion of pre-K to all 4-year-olds, weakening vital language and special needs classroom aide support, prolonging the late bus problem for years, and thus causing 4 years of declining student performance and the flight of 200 experienced teachers and 8 principals from our schools. This was especially egregious as the Student Opportunity Act, design to help disadvantaged students, was completely derailed in Framingham.
Did not start a single new solar installation in his 4 year term, despite all of the great incentives made available in the federal Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022, thus stalling key environmental action in the city and passing up millions of dollars in annual savings.
Made Framingham much more unaffordable for lower income residents by raising water & sewer rates through the roof, to fund a $200 million water & sewer system deferred maintenance problem.
Backed a rezoning proposal in Nobscot, which would have brought tens of millions of dollars in profits to developers and the ruination of a vital neighborhood in the city.
Such is life.
What Lies Ahead For Framingham?
Now that the election is done, and the Mayor has secured a 2nd term, two paths are open to him:
He could continue as he did in his 1st term, in which case all of the city’s problems will grow worse, and the school system could founder.
He could recognize the factual ground truth of the city, which was illuminated in the election, and support real solutions to the problems we have in education, environment, infrastructure, development and senior services.
The path Charlie takes will become abundantly clear in the next budget cycle.
An appealing course of action to take, independent of Charlie’s possible actions, is to put together a plan to promote continuation of the change movement started with my campaign. Many of my campaign supporters have made it clear, post-election, that they would like to be part of such an effort, and we should act before the energy generated by the campaign dissipates.
A path forward would include the following actions:
Create a durable new organization to promote new ideas, new energy and a new direction for Framingham, capitalizing on the obvious community support for real change in the city.
Retire the Substack newsletter, The Framingham Observer, as an unsustainable, unpaid one man fulltime effort, and replace it with a new Substack newsletter, published weekly and run by a group of contributing editors, with articles drawn from a broad set of sources, focused on fact-based illumination of all aspects of Framingham government. This would spread the workload, and take advantage of the talent and commitment to change which is abundant in the community. The Framingham Observer will publish a few more articles prior to that transition.
Create a companion website which will promote easy to read fact-based information about city government.
Create a companion Facebook forum which will promote civil, fact-based discussion of all aspects of Framingham government.
Create and supply content to other media channels, including YouTube, Instagram, an Access Framingham show, …
Help expand the scope of the new organization to include fundraising to fuel its activities.
Help figure out how the Framingham community can regain control of its government, which is currently under the heavy influence of financial and political interests whose principal actors do not live in Framingham. The future of Framingham needs to be controlled by its residents, not powerful outsiders.
I want to thank again everyone who helped in my campaign. I have mentioned none of their names, as some fear Sisitsky retribution.
I also want to thank everyone who voted for me, and ask them to consider joining the effort to bring positive change to Framingham in a more tangible manner. There will be a strong outreach effort in future weeks.
The atmosphere created by the Facebook forum combat in the recent campaign is hardly an encouragement to anyone interested in engaging more significantly in political change. We mean to change that, so that we will see productive, civil political engagement across the Framingham community, always illuminated by facts.
Thanks, Framingham, for having me as a resident for the last 11 years. I want to keep on investing in this community to see Framingham rise, and realize its potential as a city.
too long!!!