In the political realm, conventional wisdom is being turned on its head this year. An unlikely indicator of defiant 2016, locally at least, was the election for the St. Pete City Council seat that opened up with the departure of Wengay Newton, who termed out. The race to represent a large swath of downtown and south St. Petersburg had a crowded primary, but was narrowed down to Newton’s brother, Will, and activist Lisa Wheeler-Bowman (then named Lisa Wheeler-Brown). Both were excellent candidates and had their own sets of strengths that suited them for representing the district. But Wheeler-Bowman won despite tons of money spent (not necessarily directly by Newton’s campaign, but by “friends,” shall we say) trashing her by way of mailers and a local pay-for-play blog. Some will say she won due to her position on the Tampa Bay Rays (let ‘em go if they wanna go), but we’d like to think she won because she busted her ass for it, and because we are all very tired of negative campaigning. —KB
This article appears in Best of The Bay 2016.
