Tommy Washbush
The results of the February primary for Madison mayor were the most lopsided in two decades.
Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway won by a 50-point margin across most of the isthmus. Young voters at a polling place on campus delivered the mayor her largest margin of victory. From Cherokee Marsh on the north side to the city’s southern border near Fitchburg, voters seem to think Rhodes-Conway deserves a second term. She beat out second-place finisher Gloria Reyes, a former Madison police officer and school board president, in the outlying wards on the far east and west sides, too. In total, Rhodes-Conway won 138 out of the city’s 140 voting wards. Even in the two wards Rhodes-Conway lost — District 25 by the Dane County Airport and District 132 just south of Olin-Turville Park — Reyes won by only a handful of votes (five and seven to be exact.)
Heading into the April 4 general election, Rhodes-Conway may be in the strongest position of any incumbent mayor in recent history. In the four-way primary race (including a declared write-in candidate), a majority of voters supported Rhodes-Conway in 86 percent of the city’s precincts. With a steep electoral hill to climb, Reyes has less than a month to turn the tables.
What’s Reyes’ game plan in the final weeks of the race?
“I will win this election by running a hardworking, grassroots campaign that reaches all Madisonians over the course of the next month. The midterm elections taught me that I need to expand my circle and continue to knock doors, send texts, and speak in areas that I had not yet reached,” Reyes tells Isthmus via email. “As a leader, I lead with pragmatism and heart, not with ideology. To do this, I must get out in the community and share my vision to build a more equitable Madison.”
Reyes does have a track record as a successful underdog. In her 2018 race for Madison school board, she beat incumbent Anna Moffit who outspent Reyes and had the endorsement of the Madison teacher’s union and several sitting school board members.
But Reyes’ mayoral campaign lacks the outward signs of a campaign trying to pull off an upset. Since the primary and as of press time Rhodes-Conway’s campaign has sent out ninefundraising emails; Reyes’ campaign has sent out three. The mayor has also held two campaign events since the primary with more scheduled. Reyes has held no events and none are scheduled.
Reyes’ most prominent supporter — and Rhodes-Conway’s most vocal critic, particularly on social media — is former longtime Mayor Paul Soglin.
“[Reyes] needs to get higher name recognition and she has to demonstrate that if the city wants a progressive agenda, that she’s the only candidate who knows how to achieve that,” Soglin tells Isthmus. “When I look at Madison, five years from now, in terms of the city government having financial stability, to address the concerns of equity, Gloria will take us in the right direction, which we have already veered away from.”
When asked whether there’s an element of sour grapes behind his comments, given his defeat by Rhodes-Conway in 2019, Soglin responds, “Gloria is going to be a really good mayor.”
Both candidates self-identify as politically progressive. However, the results of the recent state Supreme Court primary provide a way to gauge the political leanings of voters in the race for mayor. The two liberal-backed judges — Everett Mitchell and Janet Protasiewicz — received an eye-popping 99 percent of the vote in Ward 19, which used Olbrich Gardens on Atwood Avenue as its polling place. Rhodes-Conway won 67 percent of the vote in that ward to Reyes’ 27 percent.
One reason Reyes may be struggling to get her message out is resources. The last campaign finance reports show what the candidates raised and spent from Jan. 1-Feb. 6 — two weeks prior to the primary. Those numbers are lopsided, too. Rhodes-Conway started the year with $16,900 in the bank and raised $39,200. That includes a $5,000 donation from LPAC, a national political action committee that, according to its website, supports “LGBTQ+ women candidates running for political office,” and $2,000 from the HNTB Holdings PAC, a Missouri-based group that represents companies that work on public infrastructure projects.
Reyes started the campaign with $15,800 and raised $17,500 in 2023. In a Feb. 16 fundraising email to supporters, Reyes touted her “grassroots campaign to bring common-sense solutions back to Madison” while criticizing Rhodes-Conway for receiving money from outside Madison.
“Over half the money she has raised has come from outside the Madison area,” Reyes says in the email. “Her campaign is being funded by people in New York, Washington, D.C., and California...Not by the people she’s looking to serve.”
Rhodes-Conway responded to that criticism during a March 6 interview with the City Cast Madison podcast (the writer of this article is a producer of the program).
“I have family on both coasts, a lot of friends spread out all across the country that are supporting me. That’s been true in every campaign I’ve run. People were shocked in my first alder campaign that I was pulling money from New York and California. Well, my mom lives in New York, and my dad lives in California. So yeah, they wrote checks to me,” Rhodes-Conway said. “I have a strong network and I do what every candidate is told to do, which is if you’re going to run for office you ask everybody to contribute to your campaign.”
The mayor has so far spent 10 times more than her opponent: $47,700 compared to Reyes’ $4,600. However, as of early February, Rhodes-Conway had $8,400 in the bank while Reyes had $28,000. The next batch of candidate finance reports won’t be released until the final week of the campaign.
In addition to Soglin, Reyes has the backing of Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett and former Madison police chiefs Noble Wray and David Couper. Christina Gomez Schmidt and Ananda Mirilli, who served on the Madison school board with Reyes, are backing the challenger in this year’s mayoral race.
Far more local elected officials are supporting Rhodes-Conway’s bid for a second term. She has the support of Congressman Mark Pocan, five state lawmakers from the Madison area, Dane County Executive Joe Parisi and Dane County Board Chair Patrick Miles, as well as 13 current city council members. Rhodes-Conway also has the endorsement of three Madison school board members — Savion Castro, Nicki Vander Meulen and Ali Muldrow — who served with Reyes while she was school board president in 2020.
Ald. Sabrina Madison, who runs the Progress Center for Black Women, says she’s backing the mayor because “she’s true to her word.”
“I like [Rhodes-Conway] because she’s actually getting things done, big things. People need an affordable place to live, a transit system that actually gets them to where they need to go without it taking all day,” says Madison. “We talked about a guaranteed income program before she was mayor. Now, we have a pilot program up and running. The mayor is more than just talk.”
Dylan Brogan
At the first post-primary debate, Reyes, left and Rhodes-Conway answered questions from Jason Stein, right, of the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
In her first term and not without opposition, Rhodes-Conway has laid the groundwork for major policy changes. Her administration has marshaled millions in federal funds to implement a bus rapid transit system; overhauled the entire Madison Metro network in preparation for BRT; drafted zoning law changes aimed at making it easier to build housing; and increased the city’s fleet of electric vehicles. The mayor’s campaign has focused on her record and she’s asking voters to give her another term to continue to enact her ambitious agenda for the city.
Reyes has made it clear that she is not impressed with Rhodes-Conway’s record and says the mayor is so focused on policymaking that she forgets about the people the policies are supposed to serve.
“I think the big difference between me and the current mayor is that she’s very policy driven,” Reyes said in a March 7 interview with the City Cast Madison podcast. “[If I were] mayor for the past four years, what I would have done is really understand and have the experience to not only implement policies, but also bring people along and engage the residents to ensure that we are implementing policies that do not have unintended consequences for our community.”
At the first post-primary candidate debate, hosted by the Wisconsin Policy Forum at the Central Library on Feb. 27, the candidates laid out their plans for how they would lead if elected.
Reyes defined herself as the candidate with deep ties to Madison who would listen to the community. She also said she was the “practical” choice for mayor.
“One of the things I really want to accomplish, really focus on, is our fiscal deficit that we’re going to be encountering in the next couple of years. We’re going to be in a $32 million budget deficit. That’s going to be my number one priority,” Reyes said. “Safety, of course, is a challenge in our city. I think that the mayor keeps talking about [crime statistics] trending in the right direction. Meanwhile, we keep losing young people to violence,” said Reyes.
Rhodes-Conway stuck by her record.
“I ran four years ago because I saw…our city was missing opportunities and if we didn’t intervene, we were going to end up in a place that I didn’t think we wanted to be,” she said. “We were headed down the road of too much traffic congestion, too little affordable housing, and too much impact from climate change. I wanted to step up and be the change.”
The two diverged on some issues related to policing. Reyes supports outfitting the entire police force with body cameras; Rhodes-Conway says she is looking forward to the results of a body camera pilot program the city launched in her first term. She’s not convinced the technology will increase trust with law enforcement and the community.
She’s also offering no promises to hire more officers.
“I think that the larger question for us is, what can we as a community, as a city, as a police department do to prevent police misconduct and to prevent police violence in our community and make sure that that never happens in Madison, again,” Rhodes-Conway said. “I don’t think that body cameras are the answer to that.”
Reyes says the city needs to give the police department the tools they need to keep up with demand. “If we are building housing across the city and [with] a growing population, we have to increase [the number of] officers.”
During the debate Reyes frequently threw cold water on what the mayor cites as accomplishments, including bus rapid transit and the streamlined Metro route changes coming in June. She is not opposed to the concept of bus rapid transit but does question whether it will be equitable and worth the cost.
“The way we’re building the bus rapid transit system, it’s not available for everybody. So when we are implementing practices and policies that are inequitable, it concerns me, because we are building a bus rapid transit system to support high-density areas,” said Reyes, who accurately noted that buses may come more frequently under Rhodes-Conway current plan but riders might have to walk two or three blocks farther to reach a stop. “So it’s [going to] impact our disability community or senior community and people of color on the north side, on the south side, and far west side. And so as mayor, I want to take a look at it and really move us to do an equity analysis.”
Rhodes-Conway countered that redesigning the Metro system to be more efficient will get “more people of color and more low-income households” to work and around the city: “It’s an 80% increase for low-income households, and over 100% increase for households of color to access the places that they want to [get to].”
While Metro ridership has been slow to return to pre-pandemic levels, Rhodes-Conway also defended the sweeping changes underway in the city’s transit system.
“This community has been talking about rapid transit for 30 years. Multiple mayors have had the opportunity to act on it. We’ve never acted on it until now. And this year we broke ground on a rapid transit system. Finally. I’m proud of that,” said Rhodes-Conway. “Our traffic volumes — which dropped dramatically during the pandemic — are almost all entirely back to normal. So congestion is coming for us. If we don’t have a transit option, it’s only going to get worse.”
Reyes said her plan for increasing affordable housing would be to assemble a “mayor’s housing advisory team with developers, realtors, neighborhood associations, and residents of diverse communities.” She said the mayor’s successful push for zoning law changes that encourage increased density won’t pan out as promised.
“Right now, we’re just putting policies out there hoping for the best. And it’s having a significant impact on our single family homes in our city,” said Reyes, without elaborating. “We have to really move forward and more strategically about moving Black and brown people into homeownership. So they can start building generational wealth.”
Rhodes-Conway defended her housing strategy as mayor and touted the record number of new housing permits issued in her first term.
“Madison’s boundaries are set. We know how far out we can grow. And so yes, we do need to get more dense if we are going to add more people and more housing. When we adopted the last comprehensive plan, our community said pretty clearly that infill development was preferable to greenfield development,” said Rhodes-Conway. “That does mean that everywhere in our community does need to get more dense. It doesn’t mean 15-story buildings everywhere. It just means incremental density everywhere. And I’ll say, change is not always bad. Look at the changes on East Washington over the last decade. And tell me that that’s not a good thing.”
Things got a little heated when Reyes accused the mayor of not doing enough to combat homelessness in Madison.
“I speak from my heart on this because I feel that we as a city have not done our due diligence in supporting our homeless populations,” said Reyes, who said she will have a “housing first” strategy if elected. “During COVID, when we put the homeless [people] in Reindahl Park, it was devastating. It broke my heart. Because we don’t treat people like that.” (In spring 2020, in response to the need for social distancing in shelters due to COVID-19, the city created a mechanism for allowing temporary camping in Reindahl Park and a few other locations.)
Rhodes-Conway fired back, proclaiming that her administration has “transformed the way that the city of Madison deals with homelessness over the past four years.”
“For decades, the way the city of Madison treated homeless people was to warehouse them in church basements. And to kick them off the Capitol Square. And to watch them on camera. When the pandemic hit, we knew that that was not a sustainable or acceptable option,” said Rhodes-Conway. “First, we transformed a community center into a shelter. And then we transformed the old fleet facility into a shelter. And then we bought a building and transformed it into an even better temporary shelter. And now we are on track to build Wisconsin’s first purpose built men’s homeless shelter that will serve this community with the resources that it deserves. And we did all of that during the global pandemic.”
