How the 2016 election year transformed Milwaukee’s generational leadership and political representation

Lee Matz, Milwaukee Independent

David Crowley won a seat in the state Assembly in November. Earlier that spring, Cavalier Johnson won his election to the Milwaukee Common Council, and Marcelia Nicholson-Bovell won a seat on the Milwaukee County Board.

All three were young, all were Black, and all emerged from North Side neighborhoods more often defined by outside observers through disinvestment than by their long record of organizing, civic leadership, and political ambition.

The pattern of that year mattered as much as the results. The trio did not arrive in isolation. They belonged to a cohort that included Mandela Barnes, who that same year had mounted an unsuccessful but closely watched primary challenge to state Senator Lena Taylor, losing roughly 60 percent to 40 percent.

Barnes’s defeat and the others’ victories formed two halves of the same story. It was a generation raised largely within ZIP code 53206 — a stretch of the city long cited for Black male incarceration rates, but also shaped by sustained organizing against criminalization and political neglect — that was done waiting its turn, and the city’s political establishment was beginning, unevenly, to make room.

What made the moment historic was clear at the time, but the passage of years has added context and perspective to both what preceded it and followed.

Milwaukee’s Black residents had held executive power before, but never by election and never for long. Marvin Pratt served three months as acting mayor in 2004 after John Norquist resigned, then ran for the office in his own right under a campaign message of racial destiny — “It’s Time” — and lost.

Lee Holloway and Pratt each later filled brief stints as acting County Executive around 2010 and 2011. The ledger was otherwise unbroken. Since the office of Milwaukee’s Mayor was established in 1846 and the office of County Executive in 1960, only White men had been elected to run the city or the county.

The 2016 cohort was not simply a fresh set of faces. It was the first group positioned to challenge the region’s historical statistics rather than merely exist as a footnote.

Beneath the candidacies sat a demographic transformation that gave the shift substance. The White share of Milwaukee’s adult population fell from 54 percent in 2000 to roughly 39 percent by the early 2020s, steadily enlarging the Black electorate’s weight in local races.

Just as consequential, analysts observed, was a change in voting behavior among the White electorate itself. There was a growing willingness to cast ballots for Black candidates in executive contests, the offices where crossover support had historically been hardest to win.

Continue reading.

More breaking Black news.