A 19-year-old who was his high school’s class president less than two years ago is now headed to Beacon Hill. Daniel Darris-O’Connor, a lifelong Billerica resident and Democrat, defeated longtime Republican state Rep. Marc Lombardo on Tuesday, ending a 16-year run and making the teenager one of the youngest people ever elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
Darris-O’Connor’s win in the 22nd Middlesex District was first reported by CBS Boston.
The seat had been held by Lombardo since 2010; the CBS report centered on the winner and did not include a response from the departing incumbent.
For Darris-O’Connor, the result was a rebuke to the skeptics who told him a first-time teenage candidate had no path. “When I launched this campaign nine months ago, some people said, you know, you’re never going to win. That’s not possible,” he said. “But this Tuesday, really, the voters of Billerica proved them wrong.”
The victory did not come out of nowhere.
Darris-O’Connor traces his interest in government to the COVID-19 pandemic, when he was a seventh grader with time on his hands and a new habit of following local and state politics. That interest carried him onto several town boards and committees, and then to an elected office: in 2025, at 18 and still in high school, he won a seat on the Billerica Select Board. A year later, he is preparing to represent the town that raised him in the state’s lower chamber.
He has been insistent that his age was not his platform. “I’m a younger candidate, but I didn’t run my campaign on my age. I ran my campaign on the issues that matter to our town,” he said. The issues he named were the ones straining household budgets across Massachusetts — the cost of housing, health care and energy, and what he described as years of weak representation for Billerica on Beacon Hill.
“We’ve long lacked a representative that shows up and fights for us. On day one, that’s what I’m running to deliver,” Darris-O’Connor told CBS Boston. “Tackling these issues, tackling the affordability crisis, rising costs of healthcare, housing, and energy, those are the real issues that are really impacting the whole country, but especially a state like Massachusetts.”
His youth still produced its share of lighter moments on the doorstep.
“Sometimes people thought I was the candidate’s son. Some people thought that I was an intern with the campaign,” he said. “But some of those lighthearted initial interactions led into substantive discussions about the campaign and the issues at stake.”
The Billerica result landed inside a broader Democratic surge.
CBS News reported a wave of Democratic wins nationally in Tuesday’s election, including a series of flipped districts, and Darris-O’Connor’s upset was one local expression of it. He was careful, though, to separate the national mood from his own race, saying his campaign was built on Billerica’s problems rather than any party message.
The attention that followed has been considerable for a town race. During his interview, passing drivers honked in support, and the new lawmaker-elect fielded calls from reporters at USA Today and other outlets as his story drew national notice. He said he intends to stay anchored to the community regardless, and hopes residents will keep bringing him their concerns — at the grocery store or anywhere else around town.
“I thank the voters of Billerica for having faith in me and being their next state representative,” he said. “There’s a lot of work to do ahead.”
Lombardo, among the more conservative members of the House minority, had represented the district for eight terms and was a familiar presence in debates over taxes and state spending. His defeat removes one of Billerica’s longest-serving elected officials and hands the seat to a lawmaker who will arrive with a markedly different agenda and generational outlook.
There is one more milestone on the calendar before the work begins. Darris-O’Connor turns 20 on Jan. 5 — a single day before he is scheduled to be sworn in as a member of the Massachusetts House on Jan. 6.
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Reporting in this article is drawn from CBS Boston
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