With less than a week left to go before Madison’s mayoral election, longtime incumbent Paul Soglin looks to convince voters he remains the right man for the job.
Soglin —who was first elected in 1973 — has been Madison’s mayor for more than 20 years in three non-consecutive stints, with the most recent stretch starting in 2011.
After initially committing to not run again, Soglin announced his reelection campaign last October. Months later, he came in first in the mayoral primary, with a slight edge over former alder Satya Rhodes-Conway, to advance to the general election.
In a crowded primary of six candidates, Soglin pulled in 28.6 percent of the votes, a winning number but less than he had received in his last two primary campaigns. Though his totals of 49 percent in the 2011 primary and 52 percent in 2015 were much higher than his vote share this year, Soglin said the differences came as a consequence of the crowded field and the negative campaigns run by his opponents.
“It was a bit different because in this primary, there were five candidates that were relentlessly pounding away at me,” he said. “So to finish first was a relief.”
The other candidates — District 10 Ald. Maurice Cheeks, River Alliance of Wisconsin Executive Director Raj Shukla, local comedian Nick Hart, City of Madison Racial Equity Coordinator Toriana Pettaway and Rhodes-Conway — all heavily criticized Soglin’s performance in their campaigns.
As a result, Soglin said the results of the primary were much more difficult to predict beforehand.
“It was very hard to tell because with five candidates constantly pounding at you, we didn’t know how well I would do and … we didn’t know which one of them would come through the primary,” he said. “We did analysis and basically came to the conclusion that any of those who were the top three finishers could have come in second.”
Most of the criticisms came in against Soglin’s record on homelessness and racial equity issues, but he said the critics were ignoring the positive progress he has made.
“The critics are a very small group of people who have made a career out of encouraging the homeless community to stay on the streets and have failed to construct affordable housing themselves,” he said. “You just start with [former Tenant Resource Center executive director] Brenda Konkel. She calls it my ‘war on the homeless.’ She absolutely refuses to recognize the enormous success we’ve had in terms of building affordable housing and getting people off the streets. Why? Because she wouldn’t have anything to do if there were no homeless in Madison.”
Soglin said he made homelessness a main focus, highlighted by the creation of the city’s affordable housing fund, which has been more successful than intended. Originally with a goal of creating 1,000 units of affordable housing, Soglin said the fund had created closer to 1,300 units. He also cited 150 homeless veterans his administration had helped put into homes, in addition to a number of chronically homeless families.
Affordable housing has been one of the key issues of the campaign; nearly every candidate offered a proposal to expand the city’s efforts to facilitate its creation. Soglin agreed affordable housing is important to the city but said his administration’s improvements have been largely overlooked.
“One of the biggest areas of improvement is what we’ve done in regards to housing,” he said. “So-called ‘progressive’ leaders in Madison had totally failed in the previous decade to build either market housing or affordable housing.”
In response to criticisms against him on growing racial inequity, Soglin said the economic standing of African-Americans in Madison massively improved during his time in office. He noted unemployment in the African-American community dropped from more than 25 percent to less than 7 percent.
“We’ve seen significant improvements in unemployment and in African-American incomes. Previously, two-thirds of all African-American kids were in households under the poverty line, now it’s only one-third,” he said. “We’re on the right track there … but now we not only have to continue that but we have to enter other areas, specifically entrepreneurship and wealth accumulation.”
Soglin cited a study by the Brookings Institute that out of the 100 biggest American cities, Madison was only one of 11 to have economic growth that covered all racial and ethnic groups, which he considered an “exceptional record.”
Despite all the negativity from his competitors, Soglin said he was ready to convince Madison voters everything they have heard about him is not true.
“[I’m going to] try to get them to look at the record, to look at what I’ve done in regards to housing and recognize that in terms of homelessness, that Madison has a mayor that gets it and has been successful in finding the financing and getting affordable housing built,” he said.
When he initially announced in July he would not run for reelection, Soglin offered his support to Rhodes-Conway, calling her “eminently qualified.” He declined to say if he stood by his comment.
“I’m going to focus on what I’m capable of doing, which is really unmatched here in Madison and by others,” he said. “I’m only going to talk about my own candidacy and the fact that the success I’ve had is really unmatched.”
Though his decision to backtrack on his non-candidacy announcement has drawn considerable amounts of criticism from his opponents, Soglin stands by it.
He said he changed his mind after realizing then-candidate Tony Evers had a legitimate chance to unseat Scott Walker as governor, citing the opportunity to work with a progressive governor as a cause for optimism. He also said people of all backgrounds, including those in the African-American and business communities, urged him to change his mind and seek another term.
As the longest-serving mayor in city history, Soglin has been through multiple primaries and elections. However, he has never lost a race while in the mayor’s office. His last general election in 2015 was a landslide victory for Soglin, where he received more than 70 percent of the vote.
Though his long record of successful elections may make him seem untouchable, Soglin recognized he will have a tough battle with Rhodes-Conway when Madison voters go to the polls on April 2.
“This is going to be a very close election,” he said. “There’s no question about that.”
