Primary School 2/21/23
Madison mayor preview and some other tidbits
Wisconsin Local & Judicial Elections Round 1 Preview
Attention Wisconsinites: This is your last reminder to go out and vote today in the Supreme Court election. The big, exciting runoff isn’t until April, but to even give Democrats a chance to flip the Supreme Court, one of them—Everett Mitchell or Janet Protasiewicz—still needs to make it out of today’s primary.
Madison Mayor
In 2019, Madison Ald. Satya Rhodes-Conway unseated 22-year incumbent Paul Soglin by a wide margin. Her first year in office succeeding Soglin’s decades in charge was marked by the outbreak of COVID-19 and the dawn of George Floyd-inspired BLM protests. While Rhodes-Conway did well handling the former, her response to the latter left much to be desired. She instituted a curfew, consistently failed to reign in police attacks on protesters, and privately even seemed to take their side. Despite Madison’s progressive reputation, that hasn’t affected her electoral odds this year. No, it was the ounce of sympathy she showed the protesters that has inspired a pair of challengers against her. Rhodes-Conway now faces two opponents.
Her main opponent is Gloria Reyes, Madison School Board member and former cop. Reyes is, of course, running on being more pro-cop than Rhodes-Conway, but she has other priorities. For instance, she’s going to bat for single family zoning. In a city of 80 square miles. Did we mention she’s disproportionately funded by the real estate industry? Also on the ballot is Scott Kerr, a former government employee running on vague, fiscally conservative platitudes and $0. Not on the ballot, but running a write-in campaign instead, is social worker Daniel Howell, who says he’s running to address racial issues. Kerr and Howell are unlikely to advance beyond today, but may take enough votes to force a runoff.
The two potential runoff candidates have taken different approaches to today’s election. Rhodes-Conway’s campaign has spent $48K this year, leaving her with only $8K left, while Reyes spent very little and will have $29K on hand for the runoff, if one happens. The former is going for a knockout blow today, hitting 50%, while the latter is planning for a runoff. Well, hopefully that’s the case. Normally you associate that pattern of spending with an underdog who desperately wants to make it to the runoff.
Madison Common Council
We’re not going to examine each Council district—there are 20 of them in a city of 270,000—so we figured we should pass along Progressive Dane’s list of endorsements.
CA-30
LA City Council President Paul Krekorian briefly took a look at running for Congress and decided against it, all in the last week. This may be the first potential candidacy we've seen come and go so quickly that we didn't have time to include it in an issue before it was over.
CA-SD-25
Two new Democratic candidates announced bids for the seat of termed-out state Sen. Anthony Portantino (who’s running for CA-30) shortly before our last issue, evading our notice at the time. Former Sierra Madre Mayor John Harabedian and Alhambra City Councilor Sasha Renée Pérez both announced campaigns. Harabedian lost to Kathryn Barger, the lone Republican on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, in 2020; elections for the Board of Supervisors are technically nonpartisan and can be won in the lower-turnout first round with a majority, unlike regular partisan top-two elections in California, both of which bear more responsibility for Barger’s victory than anything Harabedian (or Barger) did. Pérez just left office as mayor of Alhambra (the office rotates among city councilors), and in that role she was in the news after a mass shooter in the neighboring city of Monterey Park was disarmed by bystanders at a dance studio in Alhambra, preventing the shooter from carrying out another attack. (One of those bystanders, Brandon Tsay, was President Biden’s guest at the State of the Union.)
VA-SD-14
Del. Jeff Bourne, who had been rumored as a candidate for the soon-to-be-upcoming special Senate election for Jennifer McClellan’s district and/or just the new version of that seat in the regular summer primary, has surprised everyone by deciding against running for any office this year to focus on his family instead. This leaves the race between progressive former Richmond mayoral candidate Alexsis Rodgers and moderate Dels. Lamont Bagby and Dawn Adams.
Chicago Mayor
After the veritable onslaught of polls for Chicago Mayor in last week’s Primary School, it feels somehow empty to have only two to report since then. The first of the pair is this week’s effort from 1983 Labs, fielded 2/9-2/13, which is the only poll we’ve seen showing activist/influencer Ja’Mal Green separated from the back of the pack:
Lori Lightfoot 15%
Paul Vallas 13%
Willie Wilson 12%
Chuy García 10%
Brandon Johnson 7%
Ja’Mal Green 7%
Victory Research fielded a poll 2/12-2/15 and found the more traditional grouping of five leading candidates:
Paul Vallas 23%
Lori Lightfoot 17%
Brandon Johnson 16%
Chuy García 14%
Willie Wilson 12%
Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s cantankerous and blunt speaking style got her in a bit of trouble over the weekend, as she told voters at a Black South Side church that South Side voters considering a candidate other than her should stay home because a vote for any of those candidates is, she said, effectively a vote for Paul Vallas or Chuy García, two of Lightfoot’s highest-polling opponents as well as the only two non-Black candidates on the ballot—the clear implication being that Black Chicagoans should either vote for Lightfoot or not vote at all. Progressive Brandon Johnson and conservative Willie Wilson are also contenders for the April runoff, and remarks like this (in addition to just sounding bad—politicians should never be saying “don’t vote,” which is why Lightfoot walked those comments back yesterday) demonstrate that Lightfoot is concerned about losing Black South Side voters to the pair in numbers sufficient enough to cost her a runoff spot.
Houston Mayor
State Sen. John Whitmire, a painfully centrist Democrat, is a frontrunner in the mayoral race already. After Whitmire got the endorsement of Houston’s police union last week, the path for an overtly conservative or Republican candidate running to Whitmire’s right is a little narrower.
Nashville Mayor
The surprise retirement of first-term Mayor John Cooper left the field to succeed him unsettled; a few potential candidates decided or made their interest known this week. State Sen. Jeff Yarbro and Nashville Metro Councilor At-Large Sharon Hurt kicked off campaigns this week (though Hurt had been public with her intent to run for months.) Former Mayor Megan Barry, who resigned midway through her first term in 2018 after revelations of an extramarital affair with the head of her security detail, announced she wouldn’t run for her old job.
Jeff Yarbro is the most powerful Democrat in Tennessee politics, though that superlative is quite relative. After spending over a decade working behind the scenes in Tennessee politics, including running field for Senate candidate Harold Ford in 2006, Yarbro finally found an opportunity to make it to the legislature in 2014, running and winning the Democratic primary on a platform of working with Republicans instead of against them. Yarbro hasn’t gone into detail on policy proposals, but it’s safe to assume that, while he won’t be quite as much of a business-owned centrist as the current mayor, he isn’t going to be particularly progressive. Hurt, meanwhile, came to politics late in life from the nonprofit sphere. Her ideological positioning is a bit to Yarbro’s left, and was even endorsed by Our Revolution in her last election; Hurt still wouldn’t be as progressive as Odessa Kelly, if the latter runs.
Philadelphia Mayor
The Philadelphia Building & Construction Trades Council is a powerful force in establishment Philadelphia politics. They are a major component in what’s left of the old-school machine, and an impactful force in their own right. Their endorsement helped pick the current mayor of Philadelphia, and everyone’s been wondering who they’ll throw their weight behind for the next. The answer appears to be Philadelphia City Councilmember Cherelle Parker. It’s an odd choice, but not entirely out of left-field. Parker isn’t one of the front-runners currently, but there’s no reason to think she couldn’t be doing a lot better with more money and resources. More importantly, of the current frontrunners, one doesn't have a great relationship with labor (Allan Domb), and a second is too progressive to get the building trades (Helen Gym). Still, most of the more establishment unions have sided with rich guy Jeff Brown instead of Parker, or any other candidate for that matter. If the building trades manage to elevate Parker into the top rung of candidates, and they very likely could, then this election will be as messy as Chicago’s.