Carl Zeidler emerges from a voting booth in 1940. Zeidler, who would resign the office and was later killed in World War II, is the last person to defeat an elected incumbent mayor in Milwaukee .
Tom Barrett’s recent victory over challenger Bob Donovan was really no surprise. Since 1914 when Milwaukee adopted the non-partisan runoff system (a primary followed a general election between the top two vote-getters), the races for mayor have mostly been incumbent-dominated snooze-fests. Taking a look back, however, a few interesting moments and trends emerge.
Even though his 46.2% of the primary vote was the lowest percentage for an elected incumbent since Dan Hoan pulled just 41.4% in 1936, Barrett could have been comforted by the fact that it has been nearly as long since an elected incumbent has been defeated. Hoan was going for his eighth term in 1940 when challenger Carl Zeidler topped him by over 12,000 votes. Since 1914, only Hoan and two-term Republican Gerhard Bading (who lost to Hoan in 1916) have been denied reelection.
Although Hoan won seven straight terms (three two-year and four four-year stints) and held office for 24 years, his Socialist administration was never overwhelmingly popular. Each of his first three wins came with slim margins – just a few thousand votes – and four of the five narrowest victories of the past century were his. Henry Maier, on the other hand, also won seven terms, but was virtually bulletproof on election day. His wins came with an average margin of victory of nearly 34 percentage points.
Henry Maier, seen here in 1970, was easily elected to seven terms as Milwaukee ’s mayor.
Maier endured perhaps the greatest political upset in recent city history when former state assemblyman Dennis Conta – who had been polling 24 points behind Maier – stunned the city by finishing ahead of the mayor the 1980 spring primary. Conta won by just five votes of over 83,000 cast, but managed to force the mayor into his first competitive election since he took office. As it turned out, Conta had merely awoken a sleeping political giant. In the general election, Maier triumphed by 31,000 votes. “We’ve had victories before,” Maier told an audience of supporters on election night. “But somehow, tonight is the sweetest.”
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1980 proved to be the narrowest of Maier’s victories, a margin 40 points closer than his 1976 walloping of Jan Olson, a factory security guard and former schoolteacher. The circumstances of Olson’s general election showdown with Maier that year drew national attention to Milwaukee and reveled an ugly side of the city electorate. Olson was backed during that year’s primary election by the Coalition of Organizations Against Nazism (COAN). The singular reason COAN had come into existence and backed the little-known Olson was that Maier’s most visible opponent was 28-year-old Arthur J. Jones, a professed member of National Socialist White People’s Party – formerly known as the American Nazi Party.
A Vietnam veteran, Jones was selected by the party to seek higher office. He felt that Milwaukee , where racial tensions were running high after a federal court order to end segregation in the city school system, would be receptive to his message. A radio ad the party sponsored encouraged votes for Jones to “give those jelly-headed judges a jolt of white power.”
Jones had no chance of defeating Maier, but the overall weakness of his primary opponents left open the very real possibility that he could finish second in the primary, setting up an embarrassing general election matchup between Maier and a man whose political awakening came from reading Mein Kampf. When a poll showed Jones leading the pack of challengers, it warranted mention on the NBC Evening News. On primary day, Jones finished a distant fourth, bringing in less than half of Olson’s total support. Many were relieved, but the 4,700 plus votes Jones did manage were an unwelcome indicator of the hidden and simmering hatreds in the city.
Indeed, diversity in the race for the city’s top post has been – and continues to be – very hard to come by. Donna Horowitz finished second to Maier in the 1984 primary, becoming the first (and still only) woman to advance to the mayoral general. In 1996, Sheriff Richard Artison became the first African-American to run in mayoral general. Both lost by about 30,000 votes. Marvin Pratt became the city’s first African American mayor when he assumed office in 2004 after Norquist resigned. He finished first in that February’s primary, but lost to Barrett in the general a month and a half later.
Mayor Frank Zeidler served 12 years at city hall, a mark recently surpassed by Barrett.
This past week, Barrett’s reign as mayor officially passed Frank Zeidler’s as the fourth-longest in city history. Should he complete his fourth term, he will pass John Norquist, leaving Hoan and Maier as the only men who have held the post longer. Barrett would need to be reelected three more times to have a chance at challenging Maier’s record. History suggests the odds just might be in his favor.
