The Free Press
On July 20 in Omena, a small town in the “little finger” of northern Michigan, a crowd of about a hundred locals gathered in a church parking lot for the inauguration of their new mayor. A brass band played “The Stars and Stripes Forever” as Sally Viskochil, president of the local historical society, walked across the patriotically festooned stage to make the announcement.
“And our new mayor is. . . ” There was a collective intake of breath. “Lucky!”
There was a smattering of applause, but a few members of the audience looked stunned. Mike McKenzie, 53, an Illinoisan with a summer home in Omena, turned to me, befuddled.
“Boy,” he said. “I guess people really are fed up with the old two-species system.”
Lucky, after all, is a horse. He’s a cross between an American Quarter and an American Paint, to be precise, and the first equid to be elected mayor of Omena. Until now, this race has only ever been won by a dog—and, once, a cat. You could say Lucky was an underdog in securing the town’s highest office, except he beat twelve actual dogs, five cats, and a goat. Many of them were in attendance. The victor was not.
As the results sunk in, Rosie, the incumbent mayor, a Golden Labrador mix, wandered around the crowd, saying her goodbyes. The band broke into “Hail to the Chief” for her, and she paused, as if to listen.
Welcome to Omena’s triennial animal election. What began as a fundraising stunt for the local historical society in 2009 is now a source of heated political debate in this middle-of-nowhere Michigan village, population 355. As the crowd began to disperse, a small group of locals gathered under a tree to escape the sun, and to talk frankly.
“The horse isn’t even from here,” groused Cathy Stephenson, the campaign manager for Topsy & Turvy, domestic shorthair cats who ran on one ticket to be co-mayors.
“But isn’t he moving here?” another woman asked. “That’s what I heard.”
“Well, he should’ve waited to run till he lives here full time,” Stephenson said.
Lucky, who is 16, has lived 2,000 miles away in Cave Creek, Arizona, his entire life. He was conspicuously absent throughout the summer campaign season—but allowed to run because his human relatives have owned property in Omena for three generations and plan to relocate here in the fall.
This is the only election Omena locals have felt like talking about this summer, though there are a few parallels with another, human race. Over the last few weeks, I’ve watched voters argue about whether Schatzi Putnam, an Australian Shepherd mutt, would tone down his anti-immigration rhetoric. During the last election in 2021, he promised to “build a wall, a beautiful wall” to keep out the geese. (Or at least, his campaign manager promised on his behalf: not to overstate the obvious, but none of the animals write their own copy, though locals talk as if they do.) There’s also been an eerily familiar debate about whether eight-year-old Rosie is too old to run for a second term.
“It’s hard not to worry about the age question,” one woman told me with a furrowed brow.
“But doesn’t experience matter more?” another asked. “I want someone in office I can trust.”
“Even if all they do is nap?”
Just before the election I spoke to Debbie Disch, 77, Rosie’s campaign manager, at a campaign event. “It’s been an exhausting three-year term for her,” she told me, watching Rosie—whose platform includes “Let’s sleep all day, and wag all night”—retreat under a polling place folding table for a quick midday snooze. With her candidate out of earshot, Disch turned to me and whispered, “Just between us, I don’t think she’s going to win.”
“Most Omena mayors don’t make it past one term.”
In Omena, the mayoral position isn’t just for show. According to the Omena Historical Society’s own guidelines, the mayor “participates in all functions important to the village’s place in Leelanau County.” This includes community meetings, galas, and public functions. Rosie was in attendance at a recent museum exhibit opening, making the rounds as guests sipped on wine and nibbled on cheese.
Over the last few weeks, the species question has been the number one source of debate in town: Is a dog or cat better qualified for public office, or did they need a third-species candidate to come in and shake things up, or even drain the swamp?
“I mean, people are just sick of dogs,” McKenzie told me as we loitered outside the post office, one of just a few buildings in downtown. Tucker Joyce, the town’s first mayor, was a golden retriever, as was his son, the third mayor Parker Joyce. So, too, was Omena’s shortest-serving mayor, the three-legged Polly Loveless, who served just one year in 2015 before tragically dying from bone cancer while in office. The second mayor, Maya Deibel, bucked the breed trend—she was an English setter—but not the species trend.
“A cat can win if the dog vote is split,” said McKenzie, gaming it out. “You’ve got your Lab people, your terrier people. The cats just have to consolidate their base and get out the vote.”
The problem was, McKenzie mused, “Nobody really likes cats.” At first, they were thought to be “unelectable,” he added, mostly because cats aren’t as amenable to being groped by strangers. “You can’t get far in politics without getting out and meeting the electorate.”
But in 2018, the feline glass ceiling was broken by Sweet Tart, a calico Norwegian Forest cat. During her three-year term, she presided over a more inclusive cabinet, including a goat as press secretary and a chicken as “special assistant for fowl affairs.” To be fair, the cabinet is chosen by voters—on a sliding scale based on each animal’s popularity—so Sweet Tart didn’t so much as pick her diverse cabinet as get credit for it.
Still, she did make some efforts to promote diversity, or at least her owners did. “She was the first cat in Omena to ever participate in a dog parade,” said Kanda McKee, 74, who owns Sweet Tart. “We put her in a stroller and the dogs would come up and she’d hiss at them, but she was there!”
Omena’s first and only feline mayor took her role seriously. According to Harold McKee, Sweet Tart’s co-owner, she had a “paw print stamp, and she stamped all the agendas at the end of every meeting.”
Rosie the Lab mix, who just lost her position to Lucky the horse, had a less productive term, marred by a few scandals, including a violent encounter with a porcupine. But she’s cute. As one voter at the inauguration told me, “Rosie always lets me scratch her belly. But Sweet Tart. . . she could be kind of a bitch.”
Do dogs take the mayorship as seriously? Harold didn’t think so. “A dog will just kind of let things go. ‘Hey, everything’s fine. Let’s just keep everything the way it is.’ But a cat will shake up the status quo.”
He was kidding, of course. They’re all kidding. The entire thing is a joke, and the locals are very much in on it. But in some ways, the animal election feels like a tonic to the vitriol of real-world discourse. Nobody wants screaming matches where neighbors stop speaking to each other. This is a safer, and in some way saner, way to engage in their civic duty.
As McKenzie told me at one point, “All politics are stupid. But at least we’re having fun with it, and we’re still friends at the end of the day.”
Whether any of it echoes their actual opinions is hard to say; nobody here is interested in sharing their real views. Does the owner of the dog that opposes geese immigration, for instance, feel the same about human immigration? Her manager, Helen Bradley Putnam, doesn’t break.
“This isn’t about me,” Putnam told me. “This is his campaign.”
With all the talk about dogs versus cats, Lucky was—well—a dark horse. A few weeks before the election, when I spoke to McKenzie, the summer resident from Illinois, he dismissed signs of the Equine Wave. “If a pollster comes around and says, ‘Hey, who are you thinking?’ you might be like, ‘I kind of like that horse,’ but you’d never actually vote for it.”
It’s true that people are not sure exactly how a horse mayor would work. “Is a horse going to come to meetings?” Harold McKee asked. “They can’t let the horse in the building, can they? A dog or a cat, that’s no problem. But there’s only so many places a horse can go.”
Lucky won’t move to Omena until later this summer, but just after his victory, I spoke on Zoom to his owner and campaign manager, Kathryn Elizabeth Bosco, 61.
Bosco was as surprised as anyone by Lucky’s landslide victory—the organizers declined to share specific numbers—and she swore it had nothing to do with any covert campaign tactics on her part. I find this hard to believe. Bosco once worked in D.C. on the staff of infamous political pollster Patrick Caddell, who advised everyone from Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump.
“Horses are just very majestic and mystical,” she told me. “They connect with everybody.”
As proof that Lucky deserved her win, Bosco pointed to the horse’s left hip, which has a distinct pattern that resembles the Leelanau Peninsula, where Omena is located. “It’s destiny,” Bosco laughed.
But in my view, there’s something more prosaic behind the Equine Wave. Dogs have had a political stranglehold on this community for years. The canine deep state was bound to be cast out eventually. Even this year’s elected vice mayors—the second- and third-place winners, respectively—are cats: Porsche and Topsy & Turvy. Canines, who are reliable, sure, but not exactly fierce, have been thoroughly rejected by the electorate.
The next three years—the allotted term for an Omena mayor—could bring big changes to the community. Lucky could be the harbinger of a vastly different approach to leadership. “Horses are known to be very healing,” Bosco told me.
“There’s a history of veterans and abused children working with horses to get over PTSD. That’s part of what I want to do with Lucky—open the farm to the community and see what good we can do.”
It’s a tall order, but Lucky just might be up for the job. “At the very least, nobody will get scratched or hissed at by my horse,” Bosco assured me. “I can guarantee that much.”
Eric Spitznagel is an author and editor. Follow him on X @ericspitznagel, and visit his Substack Spitz Mix.
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Cheers for the fun loving citizens of Omena, Michigan, my home state.
Humor or not, might these loveable animals make more honest administrators?