Crash and Burn

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the blogger and city hall critic.

Hieftje, who got 10,058 votes, calls the results a repudiation of Lesko politically. For over a year she'd excoriated local politicians on her blog, A2Politico, most famously saying that she'd vote for Satan before supporting Hieftje again. "The opposition's central argument was the sky is falling; the city is in bad shape and grossly mismanaged if not corrupt," the mayor says. "But the sky is not falling, nor is city government mismanaged or corrupt--and voters understood this."

Though Lesko moderated her tone as election day neared, she still polled barely half the 30 percent that one city hall insider says a candidate gets just for running. Two candidates who ran with Lesko as an informal slate got about that: Fourth Ward challenger Jack Eaton got 31 percent to incumbent Margie Teall's 69 percent, while Fifth Ward challenger Lou Glorie got 28 percent to Carsten Hohnke's 72 percent. The only challenger to do well was the First Ward's Sumi Kailasapathy, who got 45 percent of the vote to Sandi Smith's 55 percent--and she put the biggest distance between herself and Lesko both thematically and operationally.

Lesko didn't reply to an email asking why she lost, but the candidates who ran with her did. In Eaton's view, "a majority of voters decided that electing any of the challengers posed a greater threat to the city than the growing municipal debt, the crumbling infrastructure, the unfunded retiree liability, the diminishing public safety staffing, and the structural budget problems."