The Madison mayoral spring primary had a higher turnout than past in years, up 59 percent from 2015, with incumbent mayor Paul Soglin set to face off against Satya Rhodes-Conway in the coming general election April 2.
Soglin, running for re-election to his third consecutive term, faced a more competitive race than in 2015 when he ran against former Ald. Scott Resnick. This election he received 1,085 less votes at 28.6 percent of the vote percentage, a 24 percent drop from 2015, but still narrowly edged out Satya Rhodes-Conway’s 27.7 percent. Rhodes-Conway collected 5,000 more votes than second-place Resnick did in 2015, putting her nearly even with Soglin’s current total.
The primary has not been this close since Soglin’s 2011 run against the then-incumbent mayor Dave Cieslewicz, with Soglin bringing in 49.49 percent of the votes to Cieslewicz’s 46.33 percent.
The 2011 and 2015 elections only had two dominant candidates but this year, four of the five candidates scored above 15 percent. District 10 Ald. Mo Cheeks came in third with 23.3 percent of the votes and candidate Raj Shukla came in forth with 18.4 percent.
Voting wards in downtown Madison and areas predominantly filled with students voted overwhelmingly against Soglin, whose support mostly came from the suburbs on either end of the Madison isthmus.
