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Erika 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 during the Sept. 1 primary, 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 while preliminary results have yet to appear from Cambridge.
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 2nd 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.
Everything posted on Sept. 1 is unofficial and subject to certification. The 2nd Middlesex is not yet complete, 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.
