Common council District 3 Update!

The most recent campaign finance reports came out this week.  It covers all contributions and expenses made since the new year and gives us some new insights on where the race stands. Let’s take a look and see what the numbers are telling us.

Dan Bauman

First, the unsurprising facts, Dan Bauman continues to be the front-runner and establishment candidate of the campaign, raising $17,386 (including a $10,000 loan to himself) and spending only $804.68 this cycle. Having the endorsement of Milwaukee’s current Republican-in-all-but-name Mayor Cavalier Johnson gets you a lot of free publicity. Bauman currently has $24,221.92 in the bank which he is most likely saving for the general election.

Given his position in this race, we thought we’d look a little deeper at Bauman’s donors. With a cursory google search of the 17 people who donated $500 or more to his campaign, we found that more than half of them don’t live in Milwaukee. Ten of them are founders, owners, or executives at different companies, including multiple real estate developers. Bauman himself is a founder of Prospect414, LLC, a vaguely defined consulting firm for non-profits and commercial organizations. 

On his website and debate statements, Bauman talks about growing up in the Sherman Park neighborhood and seeing it decline after being “starved of investment”. He is also a student of Urban Planning at UW-Milwaukee. So his campaign focuses on housing, but in all the wrong ways. He was a staff assistant to Mayor Johnson, and will surely be an ally. Johnson’s disastrous housing policy neglects Milwaukee’s most vulnerable people while benefiting rich developers like those donating to Bauman’s campaign. 

Nas Musa

During this period Musa only raised $3,932 in contributions, but spent $10,718 (with over $6,000 of this going to a New York based consulting Malbert Media). Musa is clearly just throwing money at the election but failing to connect with people. Despite seeming like  a vanity campaign, we had thought that by spending a lot, Musa would be making a bigger impact. Thankfully, donors seem to recognize the hollowness of Musa’s candidacy, especially given he only cast three ballots in the last 10 years. Given the state of these numbers, it no longer seems likely that Musa will make it out of the primary.

Alexander Kostal & Alex Brower

On Jan. 29th, Milwaukee Beagle published our Campaign Spotlight: Common Council District 3. The big takeaway from the article was that of all the candidates running, we believed only three of the candidates really had a chance of winning the primary: Daniel Bauman, Alexander Kostal, and Nas Musa. It looks like we may have made the wrong call on this one.

Lagging enthusiasm for Musa improves chances for other candidates. More importantly, Alex Brower has exceeded our expectations. We had written him off as a protest vote with little chance of winning, but he out-raised everyone this period, bringing in $16,036.77. Meanwhile, Kostal only received $5,396.50 in donations. Kostal did receive $754.00 with his MTEA endorsement, the only union endorsement in the race. They also sent out a mailer supporting his campaign this week.  But this endorsement seems to be doing little to increase his donations.

Notably, Brower reached this number through primarily small donations, as opposed to Bauman who had on average few donors but for larger amounts. Brower has also been spending a lot of his donations, having a paid campaign manager and investing heavily in printing literature, yard signs, etc… Overall he spent $10,150.24 while Kostal only spent $4,259.41. This leads us to believe that, even though he only has one endorsement, Milwaukee DSA,  something about Brower’s campaign is resonating with folks and motivating many of them to donate to his campaign.

While we stand by our initial concerns of him being a power hungry carpetbagger for desperately running every time an office is up for election in Milwaukee, we can also recognize that Brower has a much higher chance of advancing to the general election than we had initially thought.

This competition between Brower and Kostal is a classic example of an eternal problem: leftist infighting clearing the way for the establishment. While certainly not all Kostal voters would support Brower and vice versa, they are both the leftist candidates in the race who have an actual chance of winning. This means that they are siphoning votes from each other. Votes that, if combined, could hopefully lead to defeating the establishment candidate, Dan Bauman. Whatever happens on Tuesday,  if either Brower or Kostal make it out of the primary, we need to all be laser focused on the real battle here, beating back the establishment and winning a seat on the Common Council for the left.