Or, the apparent total-absence of coordination between progressive candidates in “nonpartisan” elections

by Rick Kisséll

I spent this past Election Day (4/3/07) at the Westlawn housing project on 60th and Silver Spring, going door-to-door with MPS School Board candidate Wendell Harris. I chose to work with Harris because my own neighborhood on the south side didn’t have a district race for School Board, and I wanted to help multiple candidates simultaneously. However, when I connected with Wendell, I learned that he didn’t have any literature to distribute for any of the other candidates– not even for Bama Grice-Brown, the citywide candidate for School Board. So, we stopped by the nearest poll, and I grabbed a large stack of sample ballots, which I marked with red ink the candidates I was supporting. Many Westlawn residents didn’t know that it was Election Day, and when I offered them a sample ballot, they were universally glad to get it.

My assumption is that, even in elections that are officially “nonpartisan”, there are de facto slates, especially for candidates for the Milwaukee School Board, which has been openly divided into factions for years. Beyond that, many of the supposedly nonpartisan judicial races feature fairly obvious right/left ideological divisions, such as the Supreme Court race between Linda Clifford and Annette Ziegler and Asst. District Attorney Chris Liegel’s challenge to Judge Bill Pocan.

So, why is there apparently no coordination between these campaigns? At least at the School Board level, I would have expected some attempts at coordination between the various candidates endorsed by the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association: shared lit drops, etc. But according to Bama Grice-Brown, there wasn’t any. Why?

Ditto for the Supreme Court and circuit court races. Am I wrong in assuming that if you voted for Linda Clifford (despite her typically Democrat campaign: top-down and unwilling to challenge the Right’s “soft-on-crime” rhetoric), you’d probably also vote to retain Judge Pocan, and for the pro-MPS slate for the School Board?

To me, it also seems obvious that the logical group to organize such coordination would be organized labor, which has a long history of endorsing candidates in both partisan and “nonpartisan” elections. However, the largest teachers’ unions (WEAC and the MTEA) have never been affiliated to the AFL-CIO, and the unions have their own problem: fewer and fewer of their members and staff actually live in the City of Milwaukee any more. That is especially true for union officers and staff. Take a look at the movement of union offices over the past few decades: typically, they move from the city to the suburbs, often as far out as Waukesha County.

Perhaps the state AFL-CIO and WEAC could take the lead in creating a body to coordinate such efforts in Supreme Court races, with the Milwaukee County Labor Council and the MTEA setting up a parallel body for “nonpartisan” offices in Milwaukee County. In Milwaukee County, the MCLC and MTEA should reach out to groups like the NAACP to ensure that the endorsement process includes Milwaukee residents of all races in proportion to their presence in the city or county. (Another approach would be to modify the candidate endorsement processes of the MCLC and MTEA to make sure that the endorsements of candidates in the city and county of Milwaukee have the support of a majority of union members who reside in the city or county.)

However it’s structured, I’d like to see it result in the mass distribution of full-size sample ballots about a week before “nonpartisan” elections, with the arrows next to the progressive candidates’ names marked in red ink, with a clear and brief explanation on the back explaining the reasons why candidates were endorsed — the central issues and the candidates’ stands on those issues. That means a return to the days when organized labor had its own program and platform.

Rick Kissell, guest columnist for WatchdogMilwaukee, is a longtime progressive activist in Milwaukee. This essay has been published here with permission.