Once the underdog, Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway dominates in primary race

She will face Gloria Reyes in April 4 general election

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Supporters greeted Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway with cheers and applause as she arrived at her election night party at the Argus Bar less than an hour after polls closed Tuesday night. Results from the mayoral primary were showing Rhodes-Conway winning in a landslide, but the cheers were more workmanlike than the raucous ones that greeted the mayor at her 2019 primary night party at the Harmony Bar & Grill.

Back then, Rhodes-Conway was an underdog, outspent in a five-way primary and preaching change while working her way to a narrow second-place finish just behind Paul Soglin, a former three-time mayor of Madison with major name recognition. This time, she had the advantages of incumbency: name recognition and fundraising.

The results were clear soon after polls closed: Rhodes-Conway dominated, winning 59.5 percent of the vote. Also advancing to the general election was Gloria Reyes, a former police officer and Madison school board president, who won 28 percent. Scott Kerr was eliminated with 12 percent. 

Rhodes-Conway’s total was the largest share of the vote of any mayoral primary candidate since at least 1999, when Sue Baumann didn’t face a primary and beat her only opponent with 80 percent of the vote in the general election. Rhodes-Conway won every ward in the city except three. Reyes took the ward containing Sandburg Elementary school on the city’s east side and another small ward on the south side. A miniscule ward on the far east side also split its two votes evenly: one for Kerr and one for Rhodes-Conway.

“The results for us are positive obviously, and that shows that Madison is pleased with the work that we’ve done over the past four years,” Rhodes-Conway tells Isthmus. “I felt like I was getting really good feedback out in the community, so from that perspective it’s not a total surprise, but you never go into a campaign thinking you’re going to walk away with it. You gotta go in thinking you gotta fight, and that’s what we did, and it showed.”

The Reyes camp, which did not host a public primary night gathering, was quick to point out that this vote won’t be Madison’s final say in the mayor’s race. “Four years ago, the incumbent won the primary, but lost the general,” says Chandra Chouhan, Reyes campaign manager, in an interview. 

Chouhan says the general election will be an opportunity for Reyes to spotlight priority issues for Madison. She says their campaign will focus attention on fixing budget gaps that were filled with one-time COVID relief money, supporting body cameras for Madison police officers, and resisting changes to zoning in areas with single-family housing.

“Transparency, pragmatism and heart. That’s what the city needs,” says Chouhan.

Just as Rhodes-Conway’s election party migrated downtown this year, so did her base of support. She posted huge totals downtown and on the isthmus, racking up 50-point margins in many of those wards. In 2019, downtown was a source of strength for her opponent.

Reyes posted her best totals in the outlying areas of Madison, including on the far-east side near I-90/94, the north side near Warner Park, and the south side near Fitchburg.

One element that didn’t change much from four years ago was Rhodes-Conway’s fundraising. She raised about $32,000 in the run up to the primary, similar to the $30,000 she raised in 2019. She spent about $48,000, similar to her 2019 total, but dwarfing what Reyes spent, less than $5,000 on the primary. 

That has left Reyes with a bigger war chest going into the general election, with about $29,000 cash on hand compared to Rhodes-Conway’s $8,400. But that imbalance could be erased quickly — in 2019, Rhodes-Conway spent more than $100,000 on the general election.

Kerr campaigned on not raising money, so he fell below the fundraising threshold that requires public reporting. He certainly won the dollars-per-vote contest, spending less than $100 to win about 8,500 votes. 

Huge turnout — by spring primary standards — of more than 36 percent of registered voters pushed all the candidates’ vote totals higher. Reyes finished with about 20,000 votes, which would have been enough to run away with first place in the 2019 mayoral primary. But Rhodes-Conway finished with more than 40,000 votes, more than all votes cast in the 2019 primary combined and nearly as many as she won in the 2019 general election, when typically about twice as many people vote. Turnout was boosted by a high-profile Supreme Court race that could decide the ideological balance of the court. The mayoral race will share a general election ballot with the Supreme Court contest on April 4.

“We’re not going to take anything for granted. We’re going to keep working hard,” says Rhodes-Conway of her campaign’s approach to the general election. She says the issues she has heard most about from Madisonians during the campaign season are affordable housing and traffic safety.

“I’m not going to say it’s good to be hearing about either of those things, because it’s not a good problem to have, but it’s good in the sense that we’re already working on both of those things,” says Rhodes-Conway. Her campaign has focused on touting her record in office and will continue to do so in the remaining six weeks of election season.

“I’ve been very consistent in telling people what I’m going to work on and then working on it. Folks know that when I say I’m going to work on something they can trust that I will.”