After graduating from college, Michelle Wu began her career as a consultant with the Boston Consulting Group. Then, in an effort to provide for her family, she opened a teahouse.
She went back to Massachusetts to complete Harvard Law School’s J.D. program. It happened in 2009. After a year, she began working in the Office of Administration and Finance in Boston City Hall under Mayor Thomas M. Menino. After that, she worked for Mitch Weiss, Menino’s chief of staff, as a Rappaport Fellow in Law and Public Policy.
She also initiated the Boston Food Truck Challenge, which led to the opening of three food trucks on City Hall Plaza, and the Restaurant Roadmap manual for launching a restaurant in Boston. She subsequently started working at the Boston Medical Center’s Medical-Legal Partnership, where she helped low-income patients with legal issues. Also, she managed outreach to all constituency groups, including communities of color, the LGBTQ+ community, veterans, and women, during Warren’s 2012 campaign against Scott Brown. She was originally elected in November 2013 and subsequently re-elected three times, most recently in November 2019. She has served on the Boston City Council since January 2014.
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The top four finishers are chosen to be council members, and she came in second place to the incumbent Ayanna Pressley. She was only the second Asian American to serve on the council and the first Asian American woman to do so. She was the first woman of color and Asian American to lead the council, which she did from January 2016 to January 2018. When it was rumored that Wu would be casting her vote for Bill Linehan to lead the Boston City Council, there was controversy around her in the weeks before she took office. In the latter part of 2014, she gave birth to her first child while serving on the Boston City Council, making history. She backed Kim Janey for the position of next City Council president during her third term on the council.
Wu played a crucial role in assisting Janey obtain the support to become City Council president in the weeks leading up to the start of the 2020–22 Boston City Council term. At the time, the elected members were initially strongly split in their support between Janey and Matt O’Malley. On January 6, 2020, she also made the motion to propose Janey as the council’s president, and Janey was duly chosen. During her tenure, she has presided over a number of significant committees, including the Post Audit and Oversight Committee. Wu published a set of Green New Deal proposals for Boston in August 2020.
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Wu spoke out in favor of introducing a vaccine passport program that would start requiring vaccinations for indoor dining and other public indoor activities in August 2021 during the COVID-19. Wu will not run for a fifth term on the City Council in 2021; instead, he will run for mayor. Michelle Wu also supported Jay Gonzalez’ unsuccessful bid for governor of Massachusetts in 2018, Lydia Edwards’ unsuccessful bid for the Suffolk and Middlesex Massachusetts Senate district in the 2016 special election, and Elizabeth Warren’s unsuccessful bid for president of the United States in a speech at Warren’s official campaign launch on February 9, 2019.
She announced her candidacy for mayor of Boston in 2021 in a video that she shared on Twitter on September 15. Wu claimed when she entered the race that she was waging a “people-powered campaign to bring new leadership to Boston’s executive office.” Wu received Elizabeth Warren’s support for mayor on January 9. She was thought to have cemented her position as the front-runner in the nonpartisan primary election by early September, according to polls. Wu’s lead in the polls, according to Politico’s Lisa Kashinsky, is “commanding.”
