A record that put Green Bay before labels

Green Bay's mayoral office is elected through a local contest without party labels printed beside the candidates on the ballot.

That structure does not mean residents or candidates have no political views. It means the formal office is municipal and the ballot does not assign the mayoral candidates a party designation.

Wisconsin also does not have voter registration by political party. That makes one line from a 2008 WBEZ interview easy to misunderstand if it is removed from context.

During that interview, I said that I was “not registered with either party.” The accurate legal context is that Wisconsin voters do not register as members of a party. The statement is evidence of how I described my political posture at the time, not proof of a formal registration status that Wisconsin does not offer.

The interview occurred during a presidential-election year when national campaigns were focused heavily on Green Bay-area swing voters. WBEZ discussed the region's mix of Democratic, Republican, independent, and persuadable voters. My comments were part of that broader discussion.

Ten years later, when I announced that I would not seek another term as mayor, I said my goal had been to do what was best for Green Bay. WBAY's coverage also recorded comments from local figures who had not always agreed with me, including Eric Genrich and Patrick Buckley, about my dedication to the city.

Those comments were made at the end of my mayoral tenure. They were not endorsements of a later campaign, and they should not be described that way. They document the public tone of a specific 2018 event and the recognition that municipal work often crosses political disagreement.

The historical record includes disagreements, alliances, mistakes, and decisions that different voters will interpret differently. A statement about putting Green Bay first does not resolve those debates. It describes the standard I said I was using.

The sources allow three narrow conclusions. Green Bay mayoral ballots are nonpartisan in form. Wisconsin does not register voters by party. In public interviews, I described myself outside formal party alignment and said that my mayoral decisions were centered on Green Bay.

Residents can then judge the individual decisions in the public record rather than treating a label as the answer.

That approach requires precision. It would be inaccurate to claim that local government is free from politics. It would also be inaccurate to imply that Wisconsin maintains party-registration records showing I was unaffiliated.

The more defensible statement is the factual one: the mayoral office is nonpartisan on the ballot, Wisconsin has no party registration, and my publicly stated position was that Green Bay's local interests came before a partisan label.