Candidates in Madison’s upcoming municipal elections are making final campaign pushes before voters hit the polls Tuesday to decide the city’s next mayor, alders and school board members.
The most anticipated race of the election is the mayoral contest between longtime incumbent Paul Soglin and former alder Satya Rhodes-Conway. Soglin pulled ahead of Rhodes-Conway by 323 votes in February’s primary. Candidates in the primary largely criticized Soglin and received three-fourths of the vote, making it appear likely Rhodes-Conway will unseat the mayor.
Soglin, who has served as mayor for 22 non-consecutive years, has never lost a general election while an incumbent, though he admitted this year’s could be “very close.” He has focused his campaign around his experience as mayor and his ability to overcome the city’s pressing issues, like affordable housing and racial inequity.
Soglin initially pledged not to run while competing for the Democratic nomination for governor last summer but changed his mind after placing seventh. However, he called Rhodes-Conway “eminently qualified” before entering the race.
Rhodes-Conway sat on Madison’s city council from 2007 to 2013. She made affordable housing a key feature of her campaign, along with transportation issues and the impacts of climate change. If elected, she would be Madison’s first openly gay mayor.
Also on the ballot will be 20 aldermanic seats on Madison’s city council. Nearly half of the current members will not be returning, as nine alders announced intentions not to run for reelection. Only two of the alders running for reelection, City Council President Samba Baldeh and District 19 Ald. Keith Furman, will face challengers for their seats.
Baldeh’s opponent, James Creighton Mitchell Jr., is a Navy veteran who attempted to run for president of the United States in both 2008 and 2016 as a Republican and independent, respectively. Though running to represent parts of Madison’s East Side, Mitchell lives in Lindenhurst, Illinois but will be able to hold office if he lives in the district he is running to represent for 10 days prior to the election. On his website advertising his 2016 campaign for president, Mitchell criticized modern America, especially the loss of “Judeo Christian values” and the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage.
When the council swears in its new members April 16, one of them will be a UW-Madison freshman. Ald. Zach Wood, who was first elected in 2015 while also a student at the university, announced he would leave his position at the end of his term to allow “new, young leaders in our community to step up.”
Avra Reddy and Matthew Mitnick stepped up. Both are first-year students advocating for affordable housing, campus-area public safety, better public transit and sustainability. Both gained support from local politicians, though Reddy received Wood’s endorsement.
In addition to mayoral and aldermanic elections, Madison voters will decide three members of the Madison Metropolitan School Board. Three of the seven seats are up for election, with seats 3 and 4 open after the incumbents opted not to run for another term.
Seat 3 will be contested between Cristiana Carusi, a communications professional in the UW-Madison College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and Kaleem Caire, the CEO of a local charter elementary school. Though Carusi won the primary by a convincing margin of more than 1,700 votes, she will still face a tough challenge in Caire, who managed to pull in 43.6 percent of the primary votes.
Running for Seat 4 are Ali Muldrow, Co-Executive Director of Gay Straight Alliance for Safe Schools, and David Blaska, a former Dane County Supervisor. The Seat 4 race has largely revolved around the presence of police officers in the city’s schools, a controversial issue that boiled over at school board meetings with protestors chanting over the board members.
Blaska has steadfastly defended police presence, writing on his website that Madison students are “hijacking cars at daycare centers, robbing fast food stores, shooting up school buses.” Muldrow won the primary election with 55.7 percent of the vote, more than double Blaska’s total.
The only board member running for reelection, TJ Mertz, came in a distant second in the Seat 5 primary to Latino Education Council President Ananda Mirilli. Though both received endorsements from current school board members and the Madison teacher's union, Mirilli has the backing of Soglin. Mirilli won the primary with nearly 5,000 votes more than Mertz.
