Candidates are making their final pitches to voters ahead of Tuesday’s municipal primary elections to decide who will be on the ballot for mayor, City Council and School Board in the general election in April.
Residents across Madison will have their choice of five candidates for mayor on the ballot: incumbent mayor Paul Soglin, District 10 Ald. Mo Cheeks, managing director for the Mayors Innovation Project Satya Rhodes-Conway, River Alliance of Wisconsin executive director Raj Shukla and local comedian Nick Hart.
One candidate, however, will not be on the ballot Tuesday. City of Madison Racial Equity Coordinator Toriana Pettaway is running as a write-in candidate after the City Clerk’s Office invalidated a number of signatures on her nomination papers, dropping her below the threshold.
Most of the candidates have focused their campaigns around similar issues — namely affordable housing, racial equity and green energy.
Soglin has focused his campaign largely around his achievements as mayor during his three tenures as mayor, spanning more than 20 years. Recently, he has responded to attacks of growing racial inequality by citing a 2018 study by the Brooking Institute that found Madison to be one of 11 American cities to achieve equitable economic growth. According to his campaign website, he is the “longest serving - and most effective - mayor in Madison’s history.”
Cheeks, a six-year veteran of the City Council, boasts endorsements from Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne, seven current or former alders, six state representatives, two state senators and former Madison mayor Joe Sensenbrenner. He has publicly criticized Soglin’s performance as mayor and has advanced proposals in the council to increase the city’s stock of affordable housing. If elected, he would be the first African-American mayor in the city’s history.
Rhodes-Conway, a former alder, is the only candidate so far to secure the endorsement of a 2020 presidential candidate, claiming the support of South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg. She has pledged to improve the city’s stormwater system to prevent more devastating floods like the ones in late summer 2018. She has also advocated improving the city’s transportation infrastructure, including implementing Bus Rapid Transit, a faster system of bus travel also popular with other candidates. She would be the city’s first openly gay mayor if elected.
Shukla has largely focused his campaign around ecological issues, drawing on his experience as an environmental executive and chair of the city’s Sustainable Madison Committee. He has released a plan for a Green Growth Agenda, outlining his ideas for 100 percent renewable energy for all of Madison by 2045 and reforming the city’s zoning laws to make room for affordable housing initiatives. If elected, Shukla would be the first Indian-American mayor of a top-100 American city.
Hart, a local comedian who has appeared on Conan, is no stranger to municipal elections, having lost the 2011 mayoral primary with less than 2 percent of the vote. His website makes it clear he does not expect to win, but is running to raise awareness of municipal politics.
Though she must run as a write-in candidate, Pettaway has not lost hope. She has continued to vigorously campaign and has attended numerous mayoral forums. Her campaign is largely based around issues of racial equity and diversity, including proposals to move toward “anti-racist policing,” a fairer criminal justice system and a future where communities of color are not disproportionately affected by climate change. She has also claimed to be the only candidate beside Hart not to receive campaign donations from special interests. Like Cheeks, she would be Madison’s first African-American mayor if elected.
Madison voters have already shown a huge interest in the election, with early voting numbers easily surpassing the number of early votes from the last two mayoral primaries, according to the city clerk’s Twitter page. In 2011 and 2015 combined, in-person early primary votes totaled 971. This year’s total was more than four times that amount, coming in at 4,204.
This total continues the recent trend of large voter turnout in Madison, as the 2018 midterm elections saw record-shattering turnout in both early voting and election day voting.
