I wasn’t too surprised that Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway decided not to run for re-election after all. But I was shocked and saddened by her reason.

The mayor announced her bid for a third term in July, but her heart didn’t seem to be in it. She never filed the official declaration of candidacy and she didn’t do what serious candidates do: work the phones to raise money.

So, I thought she might not run because her early announcement did not scare off contenders. There are several of them. But the reason she gave for retiring had nothing to do with that. She revealed that she, her family and her staff have been on the receiving end of personal harassment and even what are apparently credible death threats.

She wasn’t specific about where those are coming from, but we know that her home was strewn with yard signs and pamphlets following the police shooting of Corey Ruiz on Willy Street in late July, about a week after she announced her reelection bid. And we also know that the council meeting which resulted in the firing of interim Independent Police Monitor Aeiramique Glass was among the most uncivil and raw in recent memory. Rhodes-Conway announced her decision to pull the plug on her campaign less than two days after that meeting.

The mayor correctly pointed out a number of significant accomplishments during her two terms. These include bus rapid transit, a new men’s homeless shelter, new teams of mental health professionals to respond to some calls that might otherwise go to police, and progress on green energy. My own view is that her greatest accomplishment was an aggressive pro-development agenda that has resulted in some 20,000 new housing units in the city since she took office.

And, in fact, that has been another source of controversy for the mayor, though I’m not aware that it has resulted in the kind of harassment she called out in her statement. For decades we’ve talked in general terms about the need for “infill” housing. Virtually all of us agree that it is better to grow up than out into some of the richest farmland in the world. But when infill actually happens a lot of neighbors want to clarify their support for it: the building they support was supposed to take place in someone else’s backyard. Rhodes-Conway took the heat and stayed the course. In fact, BRT and its related zoning overlays are designed to create even more density in the future. She has put the city on the right track for our future, but she was paying the short-term political price for it.

Like all mayors, Rhodes-Conway learned that you get it from both sides. In the case of the Ruiz shooting, police reform activists blamed her for not coming down on their side while residents and businesses in the Willy Street neighborhood said she waited too long to move on the protest encampment at the site of the incident. 

In the case of the police monitor she had a management mess on her hands that she had little direct control over thanks to the odd way in which the ordinance was constructed. Unlike every other city manager she had virtually no control over this position.

So, much of what she has experienced is par for the course. But in my eight years on the job, from 2003 to 2011, I had all of one death threat. The police made contact with the guy and concluded he wasn’t credible and that was the end of it. Sure, I had my share of angry people, I took my share of vitriol and the personal attack from time to time, but I never once felt physically unsafe. Nobody ever harassed my family or my staff or protested at my house.

What brought Rhodes-Conway to this decision is only a reflection of what’s happened to our politics in the last decade and a half. We can blame much of this on Donald Trump and how he has crushed every standard of human decency imaginable. But we can’t forget that over 70 million of our fellow Americans voted for him. Three times. And all the while knowing the kind of man he is. What really concerns me is that, beyond the MAGA hard core, there are so many of us who see who this man is and do not find his character (or lack of it) disqualifying.

I don’t blame the mayor for deciding it’s time to find another way to make a contribution. The message she has sent us on her way out is something we need to take to heart. We may not have a big MAGA problem in Madison, but we’ve got our own forms of rampant hostility. We can’t go on like this.

Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.