Double Trouble: Maui Mayor Race Problematic for “Mikes”

If your name is Mike and you’re running for Maui mayor, times are tough.  I’m referring, of course, to Mike Victorino and Mike Molina who, under normal circumstances, might be the two frontrunners in this year’s mayoral primary. But what’s been normal about 2022 (or ’21 or ’20, for that matter)?

This primary season, instead of the incumbent mayor getting a free ride, Victorino is facing monstrous competition on his end of the political spectrum from retired judge Richard Bissen. Maui County Council Member Mike Molina, considered to be a progressive-friendly/moderate candidate, just saw his campaign fully upended in the past few weeks by his Council colleague, the firmly progressive Kelly King, who entered the Maui mayor’s race at the last minute.

And those are just the top four names in a race that features four other contenders: Cullan Bell, Kim Brown, Alana Kay, and Jonah Lion. None of them, in my opinion, carry the serious political weight or name recognition needed to end up at the top of the ticket for the November 8 general election.

“This is a serious four-way race,” said Colin Moore, director of the Public Policy Center at the University of Hawaii, when I called to chat about Maui politics. “It’s extremely crowded when you have four competitive candidates with extensive political experience.”

Richard Bissen doesn’t necessarily have “extensive political experience,” but the extremely well-respected jurist made headlines when he announced his intention to enter the mayor’s race after his retirement last December as Chief Judge of the 2^nd Circuit Court. Since then, lawn signs supporting him have dominated Maui neighborhoods and chatter about him is ubiquitous.  He is running on a platform of “Kama ‘Aina Prosperity,” focused on housing, the environment and employment, and his “Bissen Listens” message seems to be resonating both with voters and donors.  He raised $176,465 between January 1 and April 25, according to the last report issued by the state’s Campaign Spending Commission.  It’s sure to be much more when the next batch of reports is released in July.

That’s three times the amount that Victorino raised, and he occupies roughly the same moderate/conservative political position as Bissen. The mayor managed only $56,655 in donations during the same time period.

To Moore, “It suggests that people are unhappy with the incumbent and that political insiders perceive him as vulnerable.”

Progressive Pivot

Meanwhile, on the more progressive end of the political spectrum, Mike Molina has been struggling.  Easily one of the nicest individuals in Maui County politics, Molina chairs the council’s GREAT committee (Government Relations, Ethics and Transparency).  He has presented himself in the past as a bridge between the moderates and progressives.  This election season, that bridge seems a shaky place to be.  Molina raised only $4,655 during the same donation reporting period, and his campaigning was so low-key as to be almost invisible. Although he was one of the top vote-getters in the last election, his vote for the hotel moratorium may have affected support from more tourism-minded community members.  His willingness to support business issues may have cost him a bit with progressives.

Fearing that the primary race might end up with no progressive candidate, well, progressing, a group of interested parties came up with an alternative plan.  They approached Maui County Council Member Kelly King in early June and suggested that she abandon her plan to run for the state legislative seat recently vacated by Tina Wildberger and file for the mayor’s race instead. King did, and filed her campaign papers just under the June 7^thdeadline.  According to her campaign, donations have poured in during the last few weeks and King yard signs started sprouting around the island last weekend.

King is a formidable candidate and, like Molina, also a top vote-getter in the last election. She has made headlines throughout the year for her work as chair of the council’s Climate Action, Resilience and Environment Committee (CARE) and was a delegate to the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference in Scotland. She introduced the successful bill to ban nonmineral sunscreens and most recently spearheaded the Council effort to garner funds to reduce Ma’alaea’s use of injection wells.

But to have both in the race raises concerns of a split progressive primary vote, just as Bissen v. Victorino raises a similar flag on the other end of the spectrum.

Among progressive insiders, it was hoped that Molina might just withdraw from the race before the filing deadline, but he firmly put that idea to rest when I spoke with him. He acknowledged that King’s sudden switch was a shocker: “It was sort of like getting punched in the jaw.” But, Molina added, “Kelly’s decision really spurred me and motivated me even more. My plan has always been to run a small grass-roots campaign for the everyday folks. I tell them ‘My priority is working for you, not fundraising.'”

“Remarkable Race”

The end result is what Moore considers to be “a remarkable race. It’s even more remarkable because you have an incumbent mayor.  Having one usually scares away a lot of the more established candidates, because it’s often so hard to beat an incumbent.”

For example, he mentioned Kauai’s extremely popular mayor Derek Kawakami, who is facing three opponents in his second mayoral campaign, but none are political peers.

Moore sees the divisions in the current mayor’s race as being between “the progressives and people who are more opposed to tourism—which seems like the central hot button issue there—and more business-oriented candidates. Of course, affordable housing is a huge issue, but who’s against affordable housing?”

Of the four, Moore says Bissen may face a different set of issues as he proceeds through his campaign. “Judges come from a totally different world, so they don’t usually have a lot of mastery of policy details.  They’re used to thinking about everything as a legal problem.”

However, he added, “When judges run, they can represent themselves as being above the fray. They have this status. People don’t think of them as being enmeshed in the dirty world of politics.”

So the race is on, and it will be an intense one. Said Moore, “None of these four candidates are running for the sake of running. They’re running because they think they can win.”