“My campaign sent a fund raising letter to many residents who are active in our community, including the Weisers,” he emails. He acknowledges taking $500 from state GOP chair (and U-M regent) Ron Weiser, and the same amount from Weiser’s wife Eileen, a Republican member of the state board of education. Ranging from the release of campaign donation forms showing Eaton taking money from the chair of the Michigan Republican Party to the posting of Hayner’s inflammatory tweets and documents detailing Nelson’s impersonation of a city official, these were easily the nastiest races since 2010, when mayoral challenger Pat Lesko said she’d prefer Satan to Hieftje.Īsked about the tweets, which seemed critical of abortion and gun control, Hayner emails that “I am pro-choice, and I have written many times about the need for, and suggested paths to, better gun control measures.” Nelson emails that she has “no additional comment about my neighbors and what they did or didn’t do.”Įaton is more forthcoming.
Just as remarkable was the races’ ugliness.
The only clear victory was in Eaton’s Ward Four, where newcomer Elizabeth Nelson finished 1,069 votes ahead of incumbent Graydon Krapohl–even with the massive turnout, that worked out to a decisive 60-40 percent margin. The vote was close even in the Third Ward, Taylor and Hieftje’s base, where Liberson came within 372 votes of beating incumbent Julie Grand. None of the winners got more than 51 percent of the vote. In Ward One, Jeff Hayner finished 130 votes ahead of Ron Ginyard, and in Ward Five, 162 votes put challenger Ramlawi ahead of incumbent Chuck Warpehoski. The tightest was in Ward Two, where Kathy Griswold beat incumbent Kirk Westphal by just fifty-three votes. Most of those council contests were extremely close. A three-way gubernatorial primary, a four-way state senate contest, and competitive races in all five city wards added fuel to the fire. The Activists approved those projects–and Eaton and his allies opposed them.īoth mayoral candidates say opposition to Donald Trump’s presidency spurred more Democrats to vote.
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He took only three of the city’s fifty-three precincts–two in his home ward plus the First Ward’s Foxfire subdivision, which borders the new developments on the old Nixon farm. “Every council candidate that won did better in their ward than I did,” Eaton admits. I believe that aspirational message resonated.” In an interview at his downtown law office, Taylor says he thinks he won because “I am a positive person, and I expressed a positive vision for how we can make Ann Arbor better. “Reelecting the mayor shows the voters like the direction the city is going.” “If you turn around about three hundred votes, there’d be a different majority,” Hieftje notes. Instead, the town’s longest-serving mayor sees ambivalence in the razor-thin margins in three races and the closeness of a fourth. Jack might say that, but no more than the other side.” Taylor’s predecessor, John Hieftje, accepts Eaton’s disclaimer: “I don’t expect all the folks who were elected to vote lockstep with Jack,” he says. And much of the challengers’ anti-incumbent rhetoric echoed his. He also walked doors with Alice Liberson, who nearly took Ward Three. Eaton endorsed Kathy Griswold and Ali Ramlawi, who won in Wards Two and Five. “Each one of the candidates that beat an incumbent ran as being independent of anybody.” “I will admit that the change on council means the mayor doesn’t have an automatic majority, but I’m not sure that anybody does,” the three-term councilmember says in an interview at a park near his southwest-side home. That would seem to make Eaton and his allies–we call them the Back-to-Basics caucus–the new power on council. Following November’s general election, they’ll be down to a four-vote minority. That faction–the Observer calls them the Activist Coalition–has controlled the city almost uninterrupted for eighteen years.
Yet those same voters rejected four of the five city council candidates Taylor supported. Taylor beat Ward 4 councilmember Jack Eaton by a convincing 59 to 41 percent. That was more than all the votes cast in 2014’s four-way mayoral primary–the previous record turnout. Of those, 16,867 were for Christopher Taylor. A record 28,608 Ann Arborites cast votes in the August 7 Democratic mayoral primary.
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