Wisconsin’s nonpartisan primary is tomorrow. Like most February elections, it will be incredibly quiet. According to the Madison City Clerk, just 9,000 people have voted absentee in Madison so far (last November, for comparison, some 5,000 people voted each day of early voting). This is no surprise. February primaries always see a dramatic decline in turnout. And, of course, there is barely anything on the ballot. The Supreme Court candidates managed to prevent a primary, avoiding a repetition of the 2023 race that risked catastrophe for both parties. The Superintendent of Public Instruction race, with three candidates on the ballot, will be the only statewide primary. Reviewing ballots for every Wisconsin city over 25,000 people at the local level, I found that only 1 in 9 city council and mayoral elections across Wisconsin cities will require a primary (a number consistent with my analysis of primaries over the last decade).
Despite the lack of drama expected tomorrow, it is worth pausing to ask what the state of Wisconsin’s nonpartisan primary tells us about the health of our local politics, the potential for nonpartisanship, and the risk of polarization and conflict.
First, it is important to remember that the primary election was the critical reform to ensure nonpartisan local government in the early 20th century. In the first decade of the 1900s, popular primary elections were Gov. LaFollette’s key pet project. Taking the selection of candidates out of the clutches of party leaders and placing them in the hands of the people was crucial to his vision of breaking political machines, fighting corruption, and ensuring a good, clean government. A few years later, abandoning separate party primaries and replacing them with one primary where the top two candidates advance was essential to establishing a nonpartisan local government. Today, reform proposals like the Final Five Voting still seek to use primaries to mitigate polarization, conflict, and unequal representation. All of these reforms share a hope that giving voters the ability to construct their choices on the ballot will produce moderation, better representation, and a cleaner, more accountable politics.
But what if nobody runs? Can nonpartisan politics live up to its promise if there are rarely any primaries?
This year’s SCOWIS race perfectly shows how parties can capture the process and fend off primaries. Both parties stepped into the race remarkably early, selected their preferred candidates, and successfully prevented anyone else from running. This is precisely the politics that reformers feared: some unknown, unaccountable group of party activists defined the choices for all of us. Through some combination of political persuasion, campaign contributions, the ability to mobilize partisan interest groups, and negotiation with other potential candidates, the parties could bypass the nonpartisan primary altogether. The result is an election in April that will look almost identical to a partisan campaign. Whether or not a partisan Supreme Court race is desirable is a different question, but the nonpartisan primary is not functioning in this race.
City council and mayoral elections illustrate a different way nonpartisan primaries can break down. Nearly half of all city council elections are uncontested, and only 11% trigger a primary. This a crisis of disengagement. The choices in local elections depend entirely on the happenstance of who decides to run. In most races, the only barrier to being a general election candidate is the 20-40 signatures required to get on the ballot. That means there is no check on candidate quality, nothing pushing candidates to the center, and no mechanism to ensure that the field of candidates reflects the politics of their constituents. Easy ballot access is essential; it should prevent domination by powerful interests and the marginalization of underrepresented communities. However, the fact that so few people take advantage of this ballot access suggests that it may not achieve the goal of opening political opportunities. Without robust competition in primaries, if a party or interest group decides they want to run a candidate for local office, they are almost certainly guaranteed a place on the ballot and a good shot to win. This happens from time to time in cities across Wisconsin but rarely endures meaningfully. The lack of primaries across offices and cities represents a real threat to constructing and safeguarding meaningful nonpartisan politics.
There are, of course, still some contested primaries. There are three candidates in the statewide race for Superintendent of Public Instruction. A handful of contested city council primaries will face voters in Madison, Racine, La Crosse, Appleton, and elsewhere. And the La Crosse mayoral primary will feature 5 candidates (this is actually down significantly from 2021 when 10 people ran for the open seat). These primaries can cause their own set of challenges for nonpartisan politics. The state superintendent race features significant disagreement and conflict over who represents which interests, with allegations that some candidates have misrepresented their support from teachers’ unions or ties to political parties. Other races are simply confusing, providing voters with few cues to make informed decisions among the field of candidates.
The same problem leads to too few primaries and primaries that confuse and alienate voters. It is what I think of as the nonpartisanship of civic decline. Local organizations, parties, and media are neither robust enough to get many candidates to run nor to explain the dynamics of those primaries that do happen. The end result is that the key piece of Progressive Era reform meant to ensure nonpartisanship and create thriving, independent local governments is fundamentally broken. There may be some communities and some years where robust, enduring, competitive local democracy is possible. But unless something changes, most places will vacillate between near-total disengagement and brief moments of capture by a particular party or interest.
Benny Witkovsky 
Leave a comment