From Inside the War Room

The General Election Bissen Is Praying For

Ballots for the August 8 primary are days away. Inside the La Costa campaign, one question drives everything: which challenger hands Richard Bissen his escape route — and which one takes it away? We’re publishing our answer.

La Costa News Center • Strategy Memo • Maui Mayor’s Race

Let’s start where we agree.

You’re reading this because you think Richard Bissen has had his chance. You’re not alone. Sixty-two percent of Maui voters say the county is on the wrong track. Sixty-three percent disapprove of how Bissen has handled the cost of living. Half don’t buy his answers on corruption. And those numbers aren’t ours — they come from a Tulchin Research poll of 400 voters posted by the carpenters-linked super PAC. When the other side’s own survey reads like that, believe it. Three years after the fire, the recovery is still measured in families waiting, not homes rebuilt. Kīhei’s $200 million drainage plan was finalized in 2022. Its first-phase flood basins: still unbuilt. This March, the main road through Kīhei cratered.

Bissen cannot win a referendum on Bissen. He ran the other side of this play himself when he took out Victorino — so assume he knows the manual: change the question. Stop the election from being about his record and make it about his opponent’s. Expect that to be the whole campaign — because it’s the only one he’s got.

So the real question on August 8 isn’t “who do you like.” It’s: which challenger hands him the subject change — and which one takes it away?

Run the tape forward

Picture the general: Bissen vs. Sugimura. Three months. A former judge on one side of the stage. A ten-year council incumbent and Budget Chair on the other.

She attacks him on the recovery. He answers: your committee held the county’s purse strings the whole time. Where was the Budget Chair?

She attacks him on the cost of living. He answers with her own brand: you chair Budget and Finance. Your website calls it “fiscal guardianship.” These budgets came through your committee. Own them.

She attacks him on trust. He tells a story instead — every line of it from public files. Last October, her campaign bought a $250 ticket to Sylvia Luke’s Maui fundraiser. Disclosed, routine, perfectly legal. Nearly nine months later, the state Campaign Spending Commission referred a complaint against Luke’s campaign to the Attorney General for possible criminal investigation — a referral, not a charge or a finding, and one that names Sugimura nowhere. But the filings show more: 28 contributor names appear in both her council campaigns and Luke’s — $118,903.52 in combined giving to the two, roughly a quarter of Sugimura’s itemized council money. All of it disclosed; none of it alleged here to be unlawful. But campaigns don’t run on charges — they run on questions, and “why does your donor world overlap a campaign under criminal referral?” is a question that eats October. Every day she spends answering for her donors is a day she isn’t prosecuting his record.

And on Bill 9 — the issue voters feel most — her position is a maze. She voted no on Bill 9. Then yes on Bill 88 — a measure that rezones nothing by itself and leaves every affected property to its own discretionary approval, passed over the opposition of all three county planning commissions. As of this writing, we can find no public statement in which she commits to repeal. And catch the punchline: Bill 88 is Bissen’s bill. He testified first in its favor; she voted for it. On the defining issue of this election, they ended up on the same side — three months of “debate” between the man who proposed it and the woman who ratified it. A former judge will spend those months cross-examining her maze. That’s the general election Bissen is praying for.

Now run it again

Bissen vs. La Costa — and count how many of those punches he loses.

The recovery? She’s a West Maui candidate whose community he left waiting. The cost of living? She’s the Cost Cutter — a published rollback plan her campaign prices at roughly $1,200 a year for a typical Maui household — against the administration that proposed every one of those budgets. The money? She can put his maxed-out resort and developer checks — Blacksand, Ledcor — on the table all day. What does he read back? She has never cast a council vote in her life. Bill 9? He proposed it and signed it the afternoon it passed — then testified first in favor of Bill 88, which reopens the door for roughly 4,500 of those units. The supporters who packed the chamber for Bill 9 mostly didn’t return for 88; one told the council it could “kill the morale of our whole community.” She’s had one answer since day one: repeal it, and build homes instead.

“But she wasn’t born here.” “But she’s a Realtor.”

You’ve heard both. They’re coming either way — so take them head on.

She wasn’t born on Maui. She chose it — and spent nearly four decades proving the choice: Habitat for Humanity builds, a nonprofit she founded, parish ministry, a Mana Wahine of the Year award. That’s not a résumé assembled to run for office; it’s a life, witnessed by the people she served long before she ever asked for a vote. And ask what the birthplace argument is actually for: the people who ran Maui their entire lives shelved the flood plan and left Lahaina waiting. “Where were you born” is what an establishment reaches for when it can’t defend what it did.

And yes — she’s a Realtor. Now read her opponent’s résumé — it’s posted on Sugimura’s own campaign website: staffer in a Maui mayor’s administration. Field representative for U.S. Senators Akaka and Hirono. Coordinator for Senator Inouye’s office. Vice chair of the Maui County Democratic Party. Ten years on the council — now asking for the next office. Even the events business she ran along the way grew out of a county job. Her own site says she’s spent decades in government. That’s not a career that included politics. Politics is the career.

So if “Realtor” gives anyone pause, be honest about which occupation people trust less — the one that sells houses, or the one that’s spent decades selling promises. You know exactly how P. Denise La Costa earns her living. It’s on her business card, disclosed the way state law requires — and it’s why she understands housing better than the people who legislated it into a crisis. Meanwhile, it took a spreadsheet of state campaign-finance records to learn whose money funds the professional politicians in this race. One candidate’s interests are printed on a card. The others’ are in a database. We read it.

The part where we’re honest

La Costa has real vulnerabilities. They’re just different in kind from a decade of recorded votes.

And yes — Sugimura has more money and a bigger name after ten years in office: $335,423 raised to Bissen’s $292,647 in the latest filings, $114,239 banked, the Hawaii Regional Council of Carpenters endorsement. For A Better Tomorrow — the super PAC that spent more than $290,000 backing her council allies in 2024 — reported $12.46 million on hand entering this year; it has announced nothing in this race and by law cannot coordinate with her. Here’s why none of that is the whole story. Her problem was never that voters don’t know her name. It’s that a two-way race forces a candidate to say what she stands for — and ten years of votes won’t let her. Money buys reach, not a message. And the last time a carpenters-linked committee tried to buy a statewide race — Be Change Now, against Sylvia Luke in 2022 — it lost.

Is any of this a guarantee? No. The public polls in this race test two names and skip the other eight — nobody has measured the full field, and anyone selling you a November number is guessing. What we can show you is the structure: which challenger gives a wounded incumbent his escape route, and which one closes it. That’s not a prediction. It’s the tape. You just watched it.

Take away the subject change. Send him the one whose record he can’t read back to her. The one with a straight answer on Bill 9 and nearly four decades of receipts in this community.

Don’t send him the opponent he’s praying for.

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Every claim above is sourced to state campaign-finance filings, official council actions, and named published reporting.
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— The Mayor La Costa 2026 War Room