Donnie Palmer: Giving It His All
“I’m not thinking about winning or losing, just going in there and giving it my all.”
Donnie Palmer, Professional BoxerThese are the words of 26-year old Spc. Donnie Palmer in 2010. He was in the Army, stationed in Fort Carson, Colorado, serving as a Carpentry and Masonry Specialist. He was also a member of the military’s World Class Athlete Program, chasing his amateur dream of becoming an Olympic boxer. Donnie Palmer has always dreamed big.
Bay State political junkies may have heard the name before, but the average resident will need a first-time introduction to the long shot Republican challenger trying to unseat Democratic incumbent Ayanna Pressley in the race for US House District 7.
Donnie Palmer is a 38-year old Bostonian, a single dad, and special needs educator. His professional life has been deeply influenced by his boxing experience, both in the ring and on the campaign trail. Though his athletic training in the military never led to the Olympics, he is a regular on the local fighting circuit, along with the occasional bout in Europe. His campaign tries to weave together these two threads into an image of the candidate as a gritty competitor who cares about and will fight for his community.
Palmer is no professional politician, though it’s not for lack of trying. His unsuccessful ventures into politics originate with a 2015 Boston City Council run to take on Frank Baker in District 3. The political novice enjoyed his career best results with 14.5% of the vote. Though a decisive knockout, it whet Palmer’s appetite for more.
Palmer returned to the fray a few years later with another Boston City Council run in 2021. He didn’t make it past the primary, earning only 2.5% of the vote.
Failure to make a dent in city politics did not deter Donnie Palmer from setting his sights on loftier goals. A year after his doomed Boston City Council run he is back in the thick of things as the GOP-endorsed congressional candidate for US House District 7. As with his Olympic ambitions, Donnie Palmer has always dreamed big.
It’s the toughest political battle he’s ever faced. Though Ayanna Pressley is no longtime fixture, having served only since 2019, she remains the unopposed Democratic-endorsed candidate in a district that leans Democratic by a landslide margin. Further, despite Palmer’s GOP endorsement, the party is not providing the financial support necessary to promote his campaign. According to the Office of Campaign and Political Finance, Palmer’s campaign coffers have sat at zero for all of 2022. To call his campaign “no frills” is generous.
But political campaigns run on ideas, not just dollars. Donnie Palmer aims to present himself as the committed ideological contrarian to what he calls the “corporate liberal interests” of his opponent. The actual substance of his contrarian takes, however, can be difficult to discern.
Whereas his opponent’s politics are comparatively easier to track through her advocacy work, public statements, and legislative record, Palmer is a cypher in the mode of always-online, Trump-era conservative trollery. His preferred method of communication is sloganeering on Twitter, where the conspiracy theories, slander, and Trump adulation flow freely, and the flag emoji-to-word ratio of his posts is alarmingly high.
Palmer’s campaign appearances are rare. He recently gave a short speech in Revere, which lies outside his district. He has guested on conservative radio talk shows. He can occasionally be found at Republican rallies. But the regular schedule of endorsement-seeking, coalition-building appearances familiar to typical political campaigns have not been a feature of Palmer’s run.
Palmer’s most high-profile “campaign event” so far was a misfired attempt to go viral. The stunt, criticized by members of his own party, involved a staged fight at the outskirts of a panel discussion in Somerville. The panel discussion was attended by Pressley and members of “the Squad,” frequent targets of Palmer’s online ire. Rather than trying to engage his opponent in public debate (for which Pressley can be justly criticized, not having called for a public debate with her opponent Palmer), Palmer’s apparent intent was to film a forced confrontation between any individual with a tenuous connection to Pressley and Shawn Nelson.
Nelson has fast developed a local reputation as a human hand grenade, available for the tossing at all sorts of events. In June Nelson was arrested for disturbing the peace at a neighborhood “coffee hour” attended by Mayor Wu. In September Nelson was arrested for allegedly striking a woman at a Boston City Council meeting. Given the track record, most observers discredit Donnie Palmer’s account of the incident, which framed it as violent, racist, anti-gay suppression of Nelson’s free speech at the behest of Mayor Wu and Ayanna Pressley. The incident is under police investigation.
Hump Day News reached out to Donnie Palmer via Twitter (his campaign website has a “Donate” link but no contact information) with a selection of candidate questions. We received no response, but we can redirect the reader to a short Boston.com candidate profile he participated in for his 2021 Boston City Council run.
With relatively little information to piece together Palmer’s political profile, apart from tweets and the Somerville stunt, voters may have difficulty projecting the challenger as a viable alternative to Pressley come November 8th. But Palmer is not giving up the fight. In fact, he has a professional boxing match against heavyweight Don Haynesworth scheduled just a week before the election. With luck Palmer will be in decent enough fighting shape to lick at least one of his opponents.
How should you vote on the ballot questions this November? HDN provides a round up and analysis of all four questions.