By Michael Blanding | Photography by Adam DeTour
The smell of marinara sauce and cannolis wafts over Hanover Street in Boston’s historic North End. Aaron Michlewitz, MBA ’13, can barely walk a few steps without running into someone he needs to talk to. “How are you?” he says to a short elderly woman passing by. “We got $75,000 for that program.” She walks away beaming, as he explains that the budget just passed at the State House included an earmark for a program to assist neighborhood seniors.
At Caffé Vittoria, a cafe dating from the 1920s, vintage fixtures hang over the bar and paintings of Italy decorate the walls as tourists and locals alike bustle among the tables. “I’ve known him since he was a kid and he’s never changed,” says a woman in a Bruins jersey as Michlewitz stops at her table to chat. “He does well at his job, but he’s an even better human being.” At another table, a local firefighter busts his chops as a photographer takes pictures. “You want to get him in his Little League uniform?” he says. “I’ve still got it.”
You’d never know from his easy interactions with locals that Michlewitz is one of the most powerful legislators in Massachusetts. As chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, he oversees the negotiations over the Commonwealth’s budget, helping to decide where precious funds are allocated. As if that weren’t enough, he represents 3rd Suffolk, one of the state’s most powerful districts, including not only the North End but also most of downtown Boston, including parts of Beacon Hill, Chinatown, and the South End—as well as the Suffolk University campus.
Michlewitz still lives in the North End, where he grew up, his Polish-Jewish last name an anomaly in a neighborhood that was almost entirely Italian. While the neighborhood has changed a lot since then, he still knows many of the locals, who greet him or accost him as he walks to and from the State House every day. “I always joke if they see me, they say, ‘Why aren’t you working?’ And if they don’t see me, they say, ‘Why don’t you come around?’” He rarely holds office hours in the neighborhood, he says, because people know where to find him. “I don’t change my routines very much in terms of where I get my coffee—unless I really need to avoid someone,” he jokes.
Despite his position in House leadership—and scuttlebutt predicting even higher offices for the 45-year-old representative—Michlewitz remains at heart a neighborhood guy. For more than a decade, he’s focused his legislative work on championing those who lack a voice in politics—including immigrants and the elderly—and ensuring rights for women and LGBTQ+ people. More than fancy titles, he seems genuinely driven by making a difference for the people in the North End he passes on the streets on the way to work, and those like them in other neighborhoods he serves.
His path to elected office came through constituent services, the roll-up-your-shirt-sleeves grunt work done outside of the limelight. “Aaron is not the type of elected official who goes looking for headlines,” says John Nucci, Suffolk’s senior vice president of external affairs, himself a former Boston city councilor and school committee president. “In politics, there are show horses and there are workhorses. Aaron is clearly a workhorse.”
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As chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Aaron Michlewitz oversees negotiations over the Commonwealth’s budget. As if that weren’t enough, he represents 3rd Suffolk, which includes not only the North End (where he grew up and still lives) but also parts of Beacon Hill, Chinatown, and the South End—as well as the Suffolk University campus.
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A North Ender through and through
Sitting on a red leather couch in his oversized office in the State House, Michlewitz doesn’t come across as a typical politician, puffing up his own accomplishments. Despite the shelf full of awards and citations behind him, he appears calm and mild-mannered, even shy, wearing a blue shirt with a slightly frayed collar, his short dark hair just beginning to gray around the temples.
Michlewitz earned his community bona fides growing up in the tightknit environs of the North End. “You knew everyone who lived next door to you and everyone across the street,” he says. “There was a big community feel.” The son of a doctor, Michlewitz never suffered for his non-Italian last name, says Paul Scapicchio, a former city councilor from the North End a decade his senior who became something of a political mentor. “He never had to prove himself or be a tough guy,” says Scapicchio, now head of the lobbying firm The Novus Group. “No one ever picked on him. He was just a very quiet, nice kid who everyone liked to have around.”
Growing up, Michlewitz was crazy about sports, participating in youth leagues for baseball, basketball, street hockey, and even candlepin bowling. “It was very emotionally charged and competitive,” Michlewitz says. “It was just constant.” That same love of competition got him interested in politics at a young age, where he’d follow the local races and read both the Globe and the Herald every day—even walking into Scapicchio’s office at age 17 to volunteer with this campaign. Originally thinking he might be a sportswriter, he studied journalism as an undergrad at Northeastern, before having second thoughts about the newspaper industry as it struggled in the late 1990s.
His introduction to public service began the summer after his freshman year, when he got a job at City Hall helping out with events for then-Mayor Tom Menino. “It turned out I had a good time setting up stages and sound systems, driving around the city,” Michlewitz says. The summer gig turned into a part-time job, and then a full-time career after he graduated in 2001 and was hired as events manager in the mayor’s special events and tourism office.
From that vantage, he got to observe Menino—Boston’s longest-serving mayor, from 1993 to 2014—who was famously dubbed the “urban mechanic” for his emphasis on the day-to-day concerns of Boston’s neighborhoods. The experience was a formative one for Michlewitz. “I got to see firsthand how much he cared about each individual community,” he says. “He loved the job and he always centered it on the people. He didn’t turn it off.”
He took that “serve the neighborhoods” credo to heart when the state representative from the North End, Salvatore DiMasi, became speaker of the house in 2004, and offered Michlewitz a job as constituent services director, handling the day-to-day tasks of serving community members and helping connect them to government services. Running for office himself wasn’t on his mind. But in 2009, DiMasi was indicted on corruption charges based on a kickback scheme for lucrative software contracts and forced to resign. Serving on the constituent side of the office, Michlewitz had nothing to do with the scandal; and with the 3rd Suffolk seat suddenly open, some neighborhood activists approached him about running for the seat.
“It’s not something I ever computed in my head,” Michlewitz says. “Growing up in the North End, the name ‘Michlewitz’ is never something you would figure would be on a political sign. But some folks felt like we needed to keep the seat in the North End, but come at it with a more inclusive perspective.” Michlewitz was a “reluctant candidate,” Scapicchio says. “He didn’t covet that seat. Other folks in the neighborhood suggested it to him.” Once he threw his hat in the ring, however, he gave it his all, beating his opponent in the Democratic primary by less than 200 votes.
Once elected, he brought his constituent focus to the role, determined to represent all of the people in his diverse district. Asked about his proudest early accomplishment, Michlewitz doesn’t hesitate to point to his role in helping create bilingual ballots for Chinese Americans to make it easier to participate in elections. He also focused on helping to create job-training programs for refugees and immigrants, as well as for the unhoused population at the Pine Street Inn, the state’s largest shelter, located in his district. “I love this kind of work,” he says.
“I love the battle of trying to get things done and grinding through the process—the idea that you can change someone’s trajectory with a small neighborhood issue or a big piece of legislation.”
“I love the battle of trying to get things done—the idea that you can change someone’s trajectory with a small neighborhood issue or a big piece of legislation.”
—Aaron Michlewitz
At the same time he focused on legislative priorities, Michlewitz was also pursuing his MBA at Suffolk’s Sawyer Business School with a focus on public administration. In fact, he started his degree before running for office, thinking that the State House already had enough lawyers, but that he could add a unique perspective by studying business and nonprofit organizations. Michlewitz says the program gave him both an industry and a nonprofit perspective, and a greater awareness of the importance of economic development and growing jobs, as well as the myriad challenges business owners can encounter.
Nucci, who was teaching as an adjunct professor at Sawyer at the time, remembers Michlewitz as someone who sweated the details, bringing real-world examples from the State House into the classroom. “His classmates certainly benefited from that.” One class in particular that stands out to Nucci is the media relations course he taught, where, despite Michlewitz’s natural aversion to the spotlight, he threw himself into the coursework. “He knew that public officials operate in the public eye and have to communicate with the press on a regular basis, and he was interested in refining those skills,” Nucci says.
His business training certainly helped when he was tapped in 2019 to chair the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees the state budget. Michlewitz completed one budget and was just about to start on his second when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, throwing the state’s finances into turmoil. “We had to purposely shut down the economy, and there was a lot of uncertainty and concern,” he says. While the state’s budget is north of $50 billion, only about $30 billion is discretionary spending. Initial projections called for a $6 billion in cuts to balance the budget.
“That would have drastically affected people’s quality of life in terms of what we would have been able to provide,” Michlewitz says. He and other state leaders decided instead to hold off and produce a temporary budget while the pandemic played out. Michlewitz walked to the State House every day, continuing to steer the committee with a skeleton staff. Sure enough, because of federal subsidies and stronger-than-expected tax revenues, the cuts never materialized, and the state looked at surpluses instead. Even while some progressives called for spending increases, Michlewitz counseled staying the course, putting money into the rainy day fund and controlling expenditures.
“Just as we were cautious in our deliberations on how to handle going into COVID, we wanted to be cautious in handling how we came out it,” he says. At the same time, he continued to push for spending to benefit the Commonwealth’s most vulnerable citizens, emphasizing programs for those experiencing homelessness and food insecurity, and increases for early education. After a federal program to provide free school lunches during the pandemic expired, Michlewitz helped Massachusetts become one of seven states to continue the program, in part using money from a new 4% tax on income over $1 million passed by voters in 2022.
Sweating the details
While Michlewitz might miss the ability to have direct impact on people’s lives in his district through constituent services, he is becoming accustomed to the potentially even greater impact he can have through control of the state’s purse strings. “The role has definitely required me to expand my horizons and thought processes,” he says. “The most difficult thing has been getting out of the mindset of being a local district guy helping an individual constituent get through an individual problem and thinking more like a statesman.”
Case in point: Michlewitz has taken on a higher profile on issues beyond the budget. When the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision came down overturning the right to an abortion in June 2022, he took the lead in negotiating with the Senate to strengthen abortion rights in Massachusetts by allowing women to terminate a pregnancy after 24 weeks in the case of a fetal abnormality without leaving the state. A year later, he was awarded with a visit to the White House on the anniversary of the Dobbs decision to meet with Vice President Kamala Harris, along with other state lawmakers. “It was very humbling,” says Michlewitz.
Such high-profile accolades have led some in state politics to mention Michlewitz’s name as a potential candidate for speaker of the house when the current speaker, Ronald Mariano, eventually retires. Michlewitz brushes off such aspirations. “Some people have my road mapped out for me, but for me it’s never been about the next thing; it’s always been about the job before me. One thing I’ve learned is that if you just do your job, opportunities will arise.”
It’s the kind of thing that politicians are supposed to say—but if Michlewitz’s track record is any indication, he means it. “Of course I’m biased, but I think his potential is limitless,” Scapicchio says. “But if you were to ask Aaron, he would want to be remembered as a good husband and neighbor and friend. He’s not fixated on getting ahead.”
As for Michlewitz, even as he takes on a higher profile in the State House, he confesses that he still handles individual calls from constituents. “I don’t even tell my staff,” he says. “People call with a housing issue or need help with a government office. They don’t care what I do up here,” he says with a smile. “I just know that if I don’t help them with their issue, then I’m going to be in trouble.”
Thinking like a statesman