One candidate boasts endorsements from progressive icons Bernie Sanders and Ayanna Pressley. Another voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and opposes abortion.
Such is the ideological spectrum on display in the four-candidate Democratic field vying to fill the Winthrop and Revere seat held for decades by former Massachusetts House speaker Robert A. DeLeo.
As voters cast their ballots to replace him, they will not just choose the successor for a powerful moderate and the chamber’s longest-serving speaker. The race’s outcome also will send a potentially meaningful signal as to whether the centrist Democratic politics DeLeo embodied will continue to dominate Beacon Hill, or if voters want a Legislature more in line with the state’s liberal reputation.
The general election, scheduled for March 30, has also drawn a Republican and an independent, both of whom will face off against the winner of the March 2 primary. The winner of the Democratic primary is widely expected to prevail.
The race has been further complicated in the past week by bombshell sexual harassment and abuse allegations leveled against one candidate, Valentino Capobianco, a former legislative aide who’d been embraced by several high-profile Massachusetts Democrats. Many pulled their support in the wake of the allegations unearthed by GBH News last week.
The stakes are high for Massachusetts progressives, who have the opportunity not just to add another ally to the 160-member House, but also score a symbolic victory by seizing DeLeo’s seat. DeLeo’s centrist approach often chafed more liberal members of his party, and many considered his House more moderate than the state Senate.
The speaker’s gavel has already passed to Ron Mariano, a DeLeo lieutenant who has seemed more willing to use his post to publicly criticize Republican Governor Charlie Baker. Now, voters could fill DeLeo’s House seat with a loud progressive voice and grow the ranks of Beacon Hill’s lawmakers of color.
Progressive Massachusetts, along with Pressley, Sanders, and the Massachusetts Teachers Association, have backed 27-year-old Juan Jaramillo.
“Replacing Bob DeLeo with someone who’s a progressive Latino labor organizer is a powerful statement about moving forward — both for how people understand that district, and valuable for the politics of the building,” said Jonathan Cohn, elections committee chair for the group. “This is a major opportunity for an upgrade.”
The weight of replacing DeLeo isn’t lost on the Democratic candidates, either.
“We’re not just filling any state representative seat,” said Jeff Turco, an attorney who backed Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. “We’re filling big shoes.”
All four candidates have experience on Beacon Hill — including as an intern for DeLeo, in Jaramillo’s case. Also running are Alicia DelVento, a master’s student in public health, and Capobianco.
GBH news reported Tuesday that Capobianco faces allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment, including seeking to perform sexual acts for money even when he was asked to stop, and attempting sexual acts with women who were inebriated and did not consent. The alleged incidents occurred between 2006 and 2016, GBH reported.
Capobianco said in a statement that “these things simply never happened.” He said some of his past behavior was “juvenile” and “overly enthusiastic,” but “not predatory.”
Democrats including Attorney General Maura Healey and former US representative Joe Kennedy III withdrew their endorsements of Capobianco, saying they had not been aware of the allegations when they initially backed him.
One woman wrote to Healey that “Tino has an unfortunate history of making women feel uncomfortable and unsafe. There are a multitude of women, mostly young women in our community that have personally experienced inappropriate behavior from Tino, myself included,” according to GBH.
The allegations against Capobianco have reshaped the race in its closing days, said Dimple Rana, chair of the Revere Democratic City Committee, which has endorsed Jaramillo.
The accusations “make a difference for me,” she said, and will convince women voters in the district to support someone else.
As the campaign nears its end, sharp ideological differences have occasionally produced fireworks.
Jaramillo, whose family emigrated from Colombia 20 years ago, has prodded Turco on social media and in candidate forums, saying Turco “might have me deported” and bashing him for “trying to buy this election.”
“I have six children, I’m used to hearing juvenile conversation at times, and I’ve heard it again from Mr. Jaramillo,” Turco shot back at a candidate forum this week.
In the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Sanders was the top choice in Revere and Joe Biden won the most votes in Winthrop. Rana said the district, which has grown more diverse, is ready for a shift to the left.
“The district has changed a lot since the time that Robert DeLeo was first elected for the seat,” Rana said. Jaramillo “represents our values as a working-class city. We need a fighter, a champion.”
Winthrop’s population is mostly white, with 9 percent of people living below the poverty line, according to census data. In neighboring Revere, Hispanic residents make up about a third of the population; 13 percent live below the poverty line.
“The district believes in a lot of the big structural change that needs to happen in our community,” Jaramillo said.
For Turco, a self-described “moderate, John F. Kennedy Democrat,” replacing DeLeo would also mean sticking closer to the former speaker’s ideological mold.
Turco voted for Trump in 2016 because he was “repulsed by Hillary Clinton’s policies” and said he is antiabortion, though he acknowledges it is a “settled issue” in the Commonwealth.
“I’m a working-class Democrat like the neighbors I grew up with — union workers, pipe fitters, police officers, firefighters,” Turco said. “The people of this district respect our law enforcement and want accountability in our education system.”
DelVento, for her part, said she would carry on DeLeo’s work to prioritize the district, though she would take a more aggressive approach on issues such as climate change. She also pointed to her public health expertise as crucial to recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“At the end of the day, I’m a community organizer,” she said. “That’s the perspective I want to bring to Beacon Hill.”
Emma Platoff can be reached at emma.platoff@globe.com. Follow her @emmaplatoff.