Soothsaying Nomination Signatures
The deadline for nomination signature collection passed on June 1st. We now know who is officially running for office this fall. This year, weird infighting between Wisconsin’s sycophants for Trump and Wisconsin’s brutally conservative Assembly Speaker Robin Vos led to interesting new rules around signature collection. This is the first year when signatures need to be collected and certified only by Wisconsin residents. The WEC also created a website where, rather than needing to file a records request, anyone can set up an account and simply download nomination sheets. Here at Milwaukee Beagle, we’re always looking for more reliable indicators of candidate success than polling or punditry. We’ve broken down finance reports to compare in-state to out of state support, and total number of donors as indicators of which candidates have enthusiasm and broad support. How nomination signatures were collected could be another indicator.
If a candidate’s signatures are all collected by just a handful of certifiers, that shows a low level of support, especially if those certifiers are paid staff. Candidates with scant ground game or volunteer enthusiasm will use expensive ways to make up for their deficiency. Some hire canvassers. Some mail a signature sheet and a self addressed stamped envelope to constituents, asking them to sign, certify, and mail it back.
Thoroughly and precisely calculating thousands of nomination signatures and pages is beyond the scope of my attention to detail, but I did scroll through a handful of candidates of interest and can share some interesting takeaways. Some degree of this is guesswork, but it might be more reliable than polls, pundit vibes, or counting yard signs (especially this year).
Francesca Hong is leading the Governor’s race
As with the finance reports, polls, online presence, anecdotal evidence, and frequency of attempted attacksagainst her, Francesca Hong’s nomination signatures suggest much broader, more enthusiastic support than any other Governor candidate. From my scanning, Hong had more than 29 volunteers certifying more than one sheet, and 18 of them did more than 5. One of the four people who certified more than 20 sheets is on Fran’s staff, collecting signatures at the many events Fran does around the state. Being a Hong volunteer myself, I was able to ask around and verify that the other 3 were all just enthusiastic volunteers. Meanwhile, the other poll leader, Mandela Barnes seems to have relied heavily on staff to collect his signatures. Elise Grossfeld, his digital director, certified more than 50 sheets. Shelby Foster and Darby O’Connor did more than 35 sheets each. I couldn’t verify that they are working for him, but I did find evidence that Foster has been a paid staffer on other Democratic campaigns, and O’Connor used to work for his Long Run PAC, and is now working for the Wisco Project. Barnes also flopped in the WISDEMS convention straw poll, where name recognition matters less because respondents are well informed about the candidates. When we get the July finance reports we’ll hopefully be better able to assess how astroturfed Barnes’ campaign is.
Signature sheets for the “most electable” (according to liberal racists) candidate, Joel Brennan, have a mix of low-support tactics. First, his staffers Matias Rodriguez and Dane Hudson collected more than 30 sheets between them, and Joel certified 20 himself. Second about 70 of his sheets were signed by only the certifier and 1-3 other people with the same address or last name, suggesting the expensive mail method described above. Third, and most revealing, over 100 of the sheets were certified by a single person, Thomas Barrett, Milwaukee’s former Mayor.
The top fundraiser in the race, David Crowley also has signs of astroturfing. More than 20 of his sheets appear to be done by the mailing method, and more than half of his sheets (207 of 383) were collected by just 4 certifiers. I couldn’t find whether they were paid or not, but 30-80 sheets is a lot for a volunteer to do.
Congressional Races
Quite a bit has changed since our Congressional primer article. The election commission’s tracking documents let us know who dropped out and who got enough signatures to get on the ballot. There have been a few interesting developments statewide, and I’m planning on a follow up article, but today I’m going to focus on two new challengers in Milwaukee.
The first is a Milwaukee politician who is going federal with Wisconsin’s penchant for carpetbagging by running in CD 1, where he does not live. Alderperson Peter Burgelis loves shoveling money at police, and it seems he really wants to get into Congress, but lacks the courage to challenge the local incumbent Gwen Moore. Burgelis’ certified 58 of his own signature pages, and relied heavily on his campaign manager Ben Garrigus, a resident of Madison, who certified 43 pages. Burgelis has 3 more people who certified more than 5 pages each: Rob Miller of Milwaukee, Alexander Lux of Brown Deer, and Bryan Queddeng, whose pages were thrown out under the new law because he lives in Washington DC.
So many of his signatures papers being collected by nonresidents suggest that Burgelis, unsurprisingly, lacks support in the district he is running for. In addition, residents of CD1 do not need another Democratic candidate. I wrote a little about Mitchell Berman and Miguel Aranda back in February, since then, Lorenzo Santos, a community organizer from Racine, has joined the race. Any of these three should be able to defeat Trump sycophant Bryan Steil who had to cancel his public events last year because locals were shouting him down and running him out.
The local development we are most excited about is that, unlike Burgelis, there is a Milwaukeean with the courage to challenge our long incumbent Congressperson. Even better, Amy Donahue’s convictions contrast with Moore in the right ways. Donahue is running on Medicare for all, ending arms sales to Israel, taxing the rich, and moving resources away from punishment bureaucracy and into true public safety. These are all issues Moore has turned her back on, and that have earned Donahue the endorsement of the Wisconsin Electoral Socialists.
The nomination signatures further illustrate the contrast between these candidates. More than half of Gwen Moore's 469 pages are signed by the certifier and a couple other people, often with the same last name or address, suggesting heavy reliance on the expensive mail method. She also certified zero of her own pages. Just looking at these signatures, they could have been collected without Moore herself stepping foot in CD4 (though we know she did visit for at least one event during the signature collection period). Meanwhile, Donahue certified more than 20 pages themself, and mobilized more than twenty volunteers, mostly anti-war and antiracist activists, to help collect signatures. Their 1700 valid signatures were on 216 sheets (average of 8 per sheet) while Moore’s heavy reliance on the mail method left her with an average of only 4 signatures per sheet.
Other races
We’re running up against my word count for this article, but we will be digging into other Congressional races and state legislature races in the future. When we do, we’ll check the nomination signatures for any insights. If there are any races you're particularly interested in, you can set up an account at Badger Voters, do the research, and send us an article draft. We’re always excited to receive new submissions
