La Costa Can Do What Sugimura Can’t: Beat Bissen in the General Election
Mayor La Costa 2026
La Costa News Center
Accountability • Research • Maui Issues
A Look at the Math
The Arithmetic of August 8: Why Only One Challenger Can Beat Bissen
Bissen’s floor is locked. Sixty-two percent of the county says Maui is on the wrong track. And three consecutive Maui mayors have been fired by the voters — every one of them beaten by the challenger who held the change vote together. The August 8 primary is deciding which challenger gets that chance. The record says only one of them can use it.
Ballots for the August 8 primary are arriving in mailboxes across Maui County, and the mayor’s race on them is usually described as a crowded contest. The arithmetic says otherwise. Two names will advance to November — and every publicly released poll has the incumbent, Richard Bissen, as one of them. Which means this primary is performing exactly one function: choosing his opponent.
Start with the incumbent’s position. Bissen’s base is locked — county-hall loyalists and the coalition that elected him in 2022. That floor does not move. It also does not need to grow. An incumbent with a locked floor needs only one thing to win a second term: a divided opposition.
The opposition, meanwhile, is a majority. A Tulchin Research survey of 400 Maui voters — posted publicly this cycle by a super PAC aligned with the carpenters’ union, not by the La Costa campaign — found that 62 percent of voters say the county is headed in the wrong direction. But a majority only decides an election when it consolidates behind one candidate. Maui’s own history makes the point: three consecutive mayors have lost re-election, and each was beaten by the challenger who gathered the change vote into one place.
Split that vote in August, and Bissen wins in November by default.
The contrast test
Among the challengers, the case against the incumbent is not in dispute: the fire response, the cost of living, the housing crisis, the fraud allegations now moving through 2nd Circuit Court. The question the primary is actually settling is which challenger can prosecute that case for three months on a general-election stage.
For Yuki Sugimura — a ten-year council incumbent who chairs the budget committee — every count of the indictment runs through votes she cast herself.
| The Case Against Bissen | Sugimura’s Own Record |
|---|---|
| Cost of living | She chairs the Budget Committee. The FY2026 budget passed unanimously — her committee, her budget, her yes vote — carrying a 9% sewer rate increase on top of the previous year’s hike. |
| Overtaxation | The GET surcharge enacted on her watch taxes every dollar of gross income Maui’s self-employed and small businesses earn — every commission, every contract, every invoice — and raises prices at every register, while assessments climbed 40–50% with no relief for working homeowners. |
| Insider self-dealing | Her own salary rose 32% — from $76,475 to $101,302 — while she held the county’s most powerful budget seat. |
| Bill 9 | She voted no, then accepted the result: “Any way that we can do the best with Bill 9, because it’s law, I’m there to do it.” She has never committed to repeal. |
| Housing | Her platform is “pipes, permits, pavement” — infrastructure management. It contains no funded housing plan. |
You cannot prosecute a record you co-signed.
This is the structural problem no amount of name recognition solves. Every attack she launches at the incumbent comes back stamped with her own yes vote — and a challenger who cannot attack gives a wounded incumbent exactly what he needs: a general election about nothing.
What the numbers show
The polling matches the structure. In the La Costa campaign’s own survey of engaged, high-propensity Maui voters — a campaign survey, disclosed as such — 55 percent disapproved of Sugimura’s record on the Council, and she was rated unfavorably by nearly two to one. La Costa was the only candidate in the race those voters viewed favorably, by better than three to one.
Change voters will not turn out for half a change.
Place Sugimura on the November ballot and the contrast collapses: the change majority scatters or stays home, and the incumbent’s locked floor carries him to a second term. That is not a prediction about her character. It is arithmetic about her record.
The money has already chosen
The special-interest money in this race has read the same record — and made its pick. On July 10, the Hawaiʻi REALTORS® PAC formally endorsed Sugimura for mayor. State campaign-finance records reported by Civil Beat this month show the Realtors’ PAC money in her column as well, alongside luxury property developers and out-of-state real estate companies. Her 2024 council re-election raised $59,350 across 89 donations — “most of it from the construction industry,” Civil Beat reported. And this week, the General Contractors Association of Hawaiʻi joined the list.
The endorsement’s punchline
P. Denise La Costa is a REALTOR® — a past president of the Realtors Association of Maui who once chaired the very PAC that just endorsed her opponent. This year, that machine passed over its own former leader to anoint a ten-year incumbent. Whatever else the endorsement signals, it settles one argument decisively: La Costa is not the industry’s candidate. The industry made its choice — and it chose the insider.
None of this alleges that any rule was broken. It does not need to. An endorsement measures who the insiders are comfortable with — not who can beat Bissen. The developers and the PACs are not investing in change. They are investing in access.
The 2016 parallel
There is a recent national precedent for what happens when insiders anoint the comfortable candidate over the electable one. In 2016, leaked emails showed Democratic Party insiders working to steer the nomination to the establishment favorite; the party chair resigned over it. The party got its anointed candidate. It also got the weaker general-election candidate: the voters who wanted change stayed home or walked away, and the man the insiders had sworn to stop took the oath of office.
The anointment worked. The election didn’t.
The same play is now visible on Maui: on July 10 the industry’s endorsement machinery anointed the ten-year incumbent, and per state filings, the money is flowing in the same direction. In 2016, the difference between an anointed candidate and an electable one decided the presidency. On August 8, it will decide who faces Richard Bissen.
The stakes on August 8
The case for La Costa as that challenger rests on what she does not carry and what she does. She has never cast a council vote — no budgets to explain, no yes votes to wear, nothing for the incumbent to read back to her. She is the only candidate in the field committed to full repeal of Bill 9, and the only one with a funded housing plan: Homes Together, built on down-payment assistance up to $80,000, mortgage rate buy-downs, and rental stabilization. And she ran the Maui Planning Commission — the insider knowledge without the insider debts.
Is any of this a guarantee? No. No public poll has measured the full field, and anyone selling a November number is guessing. What can be shown is the structure: a change majority that wins when it consolidates and loses when it splits — and one challenger whose record allows her to hold it together against Bissen for three straight months.
Ballots are out now, and voting ends Saturday, August 8. Two names advance. Every released poll has Bissen as one of them. In that arithmetic, a primary vote for Sugimura does not function as a message to the incumbent. It functions as a division of the only majority that can beat him.
Voters will decide on August 8 whether they find that arithmetic persuasive. But they deserve to make the decision with it in front of them. This is that arithmetic.