In a field consisting mostly of current or former elected officials, Missy Hughes says her background — private sector experience in an agricultural co-op, then serving as the top economic advisor to Gov. Tony Evers — gives her a distinctive edge in the contest to be the Democratic nominee for governor.

For six years Hughes served as the secretary and CEO of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., a state agency tasked with helping Wisconsin’s economy grow and expand employment. Before that she was chief legal counsel at Organic Valley, a farmer-owned cooperative specializing in dairy products.

Hughes announced her campaign to seek the governor’s office in September, about two months after Evers announced he wouldn’t seek a third term.

“When Gov. Evers decided not to run and we were a few months into the Trump administration, I realized that my skills could really help the state during this really unpredictable time,” Hughes told a small gathering of Columbia County Democrats at the local party headquarters in Portage in mid-May.

As she has elsewhere, Hughes on that day cast herself as “a Democrat who understands the economy, who understands how to build the economy, who understands how Wisconsin’s economy works — whether it’s dairy or agriculture or manufacturing.”

She’s led with the economic argument at each of nearly a half-dozen forums over the last six months, using it not just as a big-picture case for her campaign but as the frame through which to address specific topics.

At a June 2 event organized by a coalition of unions, Hughes concurred with the rest of the Democrats on the stage in supporting an increase in the state government’s share of the cost of public schools to  two-thirds, taking the burden off local property taxpayers. Then came the moderator’s follow-up question about top education priorities and how the forum participants would navigate lobbies supporting the state’s private school voucher system and “an adversarial Legislature” to achieve their goals.

“The concern I have about the conversations we’ve had about public school funding, about healthcare — all of this costs a tremendous amount of money,” Hughes replied. “And we have to grow our economy. Communities are struggling because they don’t have economic opportunity.”

With manufacturing jobs declining and farmers struggling, “We have to recognize that the reality is we need more resources in this state. We have to grow,” Hughes observed.

“That’s what I want to bring back to this state,” she said. “Manufacturing and strong agriculture, those are the keys to our economy. They make up our economy. You all work in that economy. We all do and we have to build that. That’s how we pay for our public schools. And that’s how we make our public schools again the No. 1 place — the only place where Wisconsin parents want to send their children.”

Art, law and organic farming

Born Melissa Larkin, Hughes grew up in New York City’s northern suburbs. Her parents were doctors and her brother is a cardiologist. She graduated from Georgetown University in 1990 with a double major in political science and fine art. Drawing and sewing were her media, “but really drawing,” she says, and she still practices today.

Hughes got a law degree from the University of Wyoming in 1997. She wasn’t sure what kind of law she was going to practice — only that she wanted to be in the courtroom.

“I was going to be a courtroom litigator,” Hughes says. “And when I went to court the very first time in Gillette, Wyoming, I left saying, ‘I’m never doing that again.’”

Hughes didn’t like the combative nature of the work. “I’ve since said, ‘nothing ever good happens in court,’” she says. “I’d rather work outside to try to find solutions and move things forward than being in a court room.”

Hughes came to Wisconsin in 2002 and joined Organic Valley. The cooperative, headquartered in the Vernon County village of La Farge, was started in 1988 by a group of organic dairy farmers seeking alternative channels of distribution for their products. When Hughes arrived, about 500 farmers belonged and the co-op had “a couple of hundred employees, but it was on a rocket ship of growth,” Hughes told the Portage Democrats.

“I would sit at the table with farmers who were faced with losing their farms” in the face of unstable milk prices and rising costs. “They really had no stability and no future for how they can manage their farm and make a living and pass it on to the next generation,” she said.

Hughes’ job included handling government relations in Washington for the co-op and leading the Organic Food Association. By the time she left to join the Evers administration in 2019, she was general counsel and had the title of “Chief Mission Officer.” The co-op had grown to represent more than 1,500 farmers in states across the country and have 900 employees.

“It was incredibly fulfilling work,” Hughes says, “but it wasn’t easy, because we were fighting Big Ag, we were teaching consumers about good food.”

In her tenure at WEDC, Hughes became the face of Wisconsin’s economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. And in the years that followed, she and the agency were at the forefront of a series of Evers administration gains, including corporate expansions and a federal grant to strengthen Wisconsin’s biohealth sector.

Cleaning up Foxconn

When Evers named her to the post, she says, he told her that he wanted her for her knowledge of rural communities and agriculture.

On her first day, she told the Portage audience, “they sat me down and said, ‘Great. Now you have to clean up Foxconn.’”

WEDC was created after former Gov. Scott Walker took office in 2011, replacing the Wisconsin Department of Commerce. The new public-private corporation included a board with business executives as well as lawmakers and had been created to deliver on Walker’s claim he would foster the creation of 250,000 new jobs — a goal his administration never reached.

Both the agency and its most prominent Walker-era project — a promised flatscreen manufacturing plant in Racine County that would be built by the Taiwan tech giant Foxconn in return for up to $2.85 billion in tax credits for the creation of 13,000 jobs — had become politically polarizing.

Scornful of the Foxconn deal that had been touted by Walker and President Donald Trump, then in his first term, Evers during his 2018 campaign talked of abolishing WEDC or at least rewriting the agreement with the company. Just before leaving office at the end of that year, Walker signed Republican lame-duck legislation curtailing the incoming Democratic governor’s powers, including a bill that blocked Evers from changing WEDC’s leadership until eight months into his term. Hughes took office when the restriction expired.

The Foxconn renegotiation took “a lot of time,” Hughes told the Portage group. In April 2021 — with Foxconn’s plans repeatedly changing and its flatscreen plant long abandoned — Evers and Hughes announced a new deal. In the end the company qualified for $80 million in tax credits.

WEDC’s most prominent role in its first eight years had been to encourage major business investments, whether by outside companies or expanding companies already in the state, and to negotiate incentives such as tax credits in return.

That continued under Evers and Hughes. But the COVID-19 pandemic that landed in March 2020 and walloped small businesses — especially the hospitality industry — also demanded a pivot at the economic development corporation.

Expanding to small business assistance

Early on, WEDC took the role of offering guidance for employers and enhancing workplace safety when the primary defenses against the virus were frequent handwashing and social distancing. After the federal government began sending pandemic relief funds to Wisconsin, WEDC became the primary vehicle for distributing them.

A second, larger round of relief, enacted in 2021 at the start of President Joe Biden’s administration, helped fund more business grant programs in Wisconsin. National researchers singled out Wisconsin as the leading state for funding small business with its pandemic relief funds.

WEDC also kept its attention on big business, with high-profile expansion projects for companies including Eli Lilly, Milwaukee Tool and Kikkoman, and a Microsoft data center on the land originally developed for Foxconn.

Small business and local economic development were always in theory part of WEDC’s portfolio — but overshadowed, Hughes says.

“We were always saying we can walk and chew gum at the same time — we can help small businesses and we can help big businesses, and we need to do both,” she says. But the small business support wasn’t emphasized, she adds. “It wasn’t measured. It was kind of pushed off to the side.”

Hughes says with WEDC’s decision to invest more deeply in local economic development work, the agency began to examine local tax data. “And when we did that, we saw there is great impact from the programs, so let’s keep doing it and do more of it.”

She brings a similar focus to her policy agenda, which includes proposals for healthcare, childcare and small business. Economic growth informs those concerns “because you can’t grow the economy without those things,” she says.

Embracing ‘progressive,’ backing the budget deal

At a Madison West High School forum organized by students earlier this year, Hughes was asked what people’s biggest misconception about her was.

Her focus on business and the economy “makes people think that I’m very center and very moderate,” Hughes replied.

“I’m reasonable, there’s no doubt about that,” she said. But having worked at Organic Valley reflects “true progressive values,” she added, because a cooperative “is a very, very radical kind of a company” with a culture of long-term thinking and sustainable operation.

Even so, on several points related to education, Hughes has broken ranks with the other leading Democrats in the contest for governor.

She criticized presumed Republican gubernatorial nominee Tom Tiffany for urging his party’s lawmakers to vote against the $1.8 billion deal Evers reached with GOP leaders in the Legislature that would have sent $300 to each taxpayer and $300 million in additional special education money to Wisconsin public schools.

But she also criticized Democrats who voted against the deal, charging in a statement she posted on social media May 14 that “certain self-serving Democratic candidates for governor … would rather boost their own personal political ambitions than serve our kids and taxpayers.”

In an interview with the Examiner later that same day, she defended the deal as an example that showed “compromises are never going to be perfect and everything that everybody wants.” But she also said that its collapse was “demonstrative of a whole broken system” in Wisconsin politics.

“We couldn’t find ways to work together in public, and to me that just shows that we have a lot of work to do in Wisconsin around building the policymaking muscle, and that’s really been diminished in the last two decades,” Hughes said. “We always had that as a strength, but we’ve lost that and we have to rebuild that.”

At the union forum June 2, Hughes was one of three Democrats who said they wouldn’t favor immediately ending Wisconsin’s taxpayer-funded private school voucher programs.

“As governor, I would be really, really realistic about what we can get done and what fights we pick,” Hughes said. “I don’t want to pick the voucher fight. I want to pick the fully funding public schools fight. I want to have a singular focus on making sure that when parents are choosing schools, they absolutely are choosing Wisconsin public schools because they are the best schools for their children.”

Hughes also issued a statement last week saying she would accept a federal voucher tax credit enacted last year, although the deadline for states to accept it will pass before a new governor takes office. Evers vetoed legislation that would have enabled Wisconsin to take part in the credit. 

Navigating talk about Trump

Lingering in the background behind the race for governor has been the Trump administration’s policies and the way they’ve upended the political and social atmosphere. Over the course of the campaign, Hughes has shifted, to some extent, to her own navigation of that subject.

From the start she has targeted Trump, particularly on the subject of tariffs, for driving up the price of household goods. At the same time, earlier in the campaign she turned attention back to Wisconsin.

Asked in an interview after a forum in Milwaukee in January about navigating how much to focus on criticism of Trump, Hughes said, “The key for a governor is, you can control what you can control, and you can’t control what’s happening in Washington right now.”

In that vein, she suggested then, the role of the state, the governor — and by implication one who aspires to be governor — is to step in and help businesses hurt by economic disruption coming from the White House. “Reacting to everything that’s happening, you’ll drive yourself crazy,” Hughes said that evening.

Four months later, she’s become more outspoken in criticizing Trump as well as Tiffany, whose endorsement by Trump led other GOP candidates to cede the field to the four-term Republican congressman.

She name-checked the president several times in talking to the Portage Democrats in mid-May, including criticizing Trump’s unfounded claims of stolen elections as well as the administration’s cancellation of clean energy projects that the state had received support for under the Biden administration.

Ahead of the president’s visit to the Chippewa Valley on June 5, Hughes publicly announced her participation in a protest in Eau Claire. And this week, in a social media post that began, “Enough with Trump’s corruption already,” she attacked Trump and tied Tiffany to the president.

Asked about the shift, she points to the fatal shootings of two people in Minneapolis during the surge of immigration officers there this winter along with the invasion of Venezuela and the war with Iran.

“At some point you kind of got to call it for what it is and start to say, ‘OK, this has just gone too far,’” Hughes says. “When you start to have lives on the line, when you start to really endanger the United States, when you start to endanger soldiers, you know, now you’re really — it’s time to say something.”

Even under those circumstances, however, Hughes says she wants to be circumspect in her language.

“I don’t say things like ‘fascist’ or ‘authoritarian,’”  she says. “You can still call out this bad behavior.”

She says she wants to be able to talk to anyone who might be persuadable.

“I live on this couple-mile-long dirt road, and I have a bunch of neighbors, and I don’t know how they voted,” Hughes says — but she guesses that they’re like the rest of Wisconsin, meaning that there’s a 50% chance they voted for Trump.

“I want to be able to talk to them about why I’m running for governor. And if I call names or if I say, ‘You were wrong for voting for Donald Trump,’ they’re not going to listen to what I have to say.”

Most Wisconsin residents “want to be closer to the center and are closer to the center,” Hughes says. “I want to keep people open and having the conversation.”

Editor’s note: The Examiner is running periodic profiles of the contenders in the Aug. 11, 2026 gubernatorial primary as well as the candidates in the general election Nov. 3. 

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Wisconsin Republican Gov. Lee Dreyfus signed a law that banned discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, the first of its kind in the country.

David Clarenbach, an LGBTQ activist and Democrat in the state Assembly, spearheaded the bill. Despite conservatives’ last-minute efforts pushing Dreyfus to veto the bill, he approved it in February 1982.

Dreyfus, described as a fiscal conservative and social moderate in a 2008 obituary, cited a right to privacy and support from “a wide-ranging group of religious leaders” when signing the bill.

The law made it illegal for the state or private businesses to discriminate based on sexual orientation in employment, housing and public accommodations.

No other states adopted a similar law until nine years later, according to a Milwaukee Public Library post.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

• Wisconsin State Legislature: 1981 Wisconsin Act 112
• Wisconsin LGBTQ History Project: David E. Clarenbach
• Milwaukee Public Library: First in the Nation – Wisconsin’s Gay Rights Law
• Pioneer Press: Wisconsin’s red-vested former governor, Lee Dreyfus, dies.

Did a Wisconsin Republican governor sign the nation’s first LGBTQ rights law? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission has denied Minocqua Brewing Co. owner Kirk Bangstad a spot on the ballot for the upcoming primary in the governor’s race. 

The post Controversial liberal Kirk Bangstad denied ballot access in bid for Wisconsin governor appeared first on WPR.

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The state’s most devoted Democrats are scheduled to gather in Madison this weekend for the party’s annual convention where the seven-way race for the Democratic nomination for governor is likely to take center stage. 

Democratic caucus and county party leaders told Wisconsin Watch they are hopeful the convention could be a clarifying moment in the primary campaign on who has enough support to make it to the August primary. None of the main contenders dropped out ahead of last week’s filing deadline, so seven names will appear on the Aug. 11 Democratic primary ballot.

When Democrats convene at the Monona Terrace Convention Center on Saturday, there will be less than 45 days until early voting starts in late July.

“If their message does not ring true to the delegates at the convention, they better listen to the applause because people will be honest with them,” said Susan Chandler, the 1st Congressional District chair and vice chair of the Walworth County Democrats. “Everybody who goes to the convention is a highly engaged Democrat, and for every one of those highly engaged, we all know 10 people who are not. We’re bringing a lot of background to that convention and critically listening to these candidates.” 

After Democratic Gov. Tony Evers decided not to run for a third term, seven Democratic candidates submitted the signatures to make the ballot. They include former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, former Department of Administration Secretary Joel Brennan, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, Madison state Rep. Francesca Hong, former Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. Secretary Missy Hughes, Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez and Madison Sen. Kelda Roys. 

Meanwhile, Wisconsin Republicans have coalesced around U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, who received the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s endorsement at their annual convention in May and was endorsed by President Donald Trump in January. Tiffany has just one primary opponent, Andy Manske, a 27-year-old medical service technician.

“We want to know who is best situated to make bold sweeping change here in Wisconsin to provide a better life for Wisconsinites, and who is best situated to beat Tom Tiffany in a head-to-head,” said Brett Timmerman, the chair of the Milwaukee County Democratic Party. “I think that people are going to the convention looking for somebody to stand out in a meaningful way to deliver that message of why they think they are the best person to carry the torch forward.”

The closest comparison to this year’s field is the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary when 10 candidates ran for the opportunity to unseat then-Republican Gov. Scott Walker. Two dropped out in June before the primary that year. 

Evers, who had statewide election experience as the superintendent of public instruction, won the Democratic primary that year with 42% of the vote and later defeated Walker in the general election. Evers didn’t win a majority of primary voters, but his closest opponent only mustered 16.4% of the vote. 

A large primary, like the one in 2018, forces candidates to explain why voters should support their campaign, said Martha Laning, who served as the chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin during the 2018 election cycle.

At the 2018 state Democratic convention, the candidates all had the opportunity to make a three-minute pitch to party die-hards on what they would do for Wisconsin, Laning said. A spokesperson for the state party said all seven of the Democrats who made the ballot will also have a chance to speak this weekend. 

“I think it’s great to put all of the candidates up there and to just let people know what their options are,” Laning said. “Again, any of them will be better than Tom Tiffany, so the more people talking about how they would do things and how they would improve people’s lives in Wisconsin is a good thing for us.”

Negativity and consolidation

It’s been a quiet primary among the slew of Democratic candidates over the last six months, with few events that set the campaigns apart. Hong led the field with 14% in the most recent Marquette University Law School Poll in March. The poll also found that 65% of voters were undecided on who to vote for in the primary.

It’s worth watching if the convention is a place where candidates take negative swipes at each other with the August primary on the horizon, said Anthony Chergosky, an associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. 

“This has been a remarkably chill campaign, and I’m wondering if we’re going to see things heat up a little bit,” Chergosky said. 

Hints of discord are emerging in the primary. Hughes last month was the only candidate to publicly support the failed $1.8 billion bipartisan surplus deal negotiated between Evers and Republican legislative leaders. After the deal failed in the Senate, Hughes posted unnamed criticism of “certain self-serving Democratic candidates for governor who would rather boost their own personal political ambitions than serve our kids and taxpayers.” 

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last week reported that Hong was sued in May by Capital One for nearly $30,000 in credit card debt, which her campaign said had already been paid. Hong in a video posted on social media said the story showed her “opponents are scrambling.” 

“They are scared of what we’ve built, our platform that’s resonating with working class people all across the state who feel left behind, our organizing infrastructure that’s being built stronger every day,” Hong said. “They want to pull me off track and how dare they.” 

The convention could also serve as a milestone for consolidation in the race in the coming weeks, Chergosky said. A fractured field means one of the candidates could win with just 30% of the vote, but the math changes if someone drops out, he noted. 

For Gloria Hochstein, the chair of the party’s Rural Caucus, the circumstances of a large field of candidates make her wish ranked-choice voting was an option for this primary.

“The problem is that there are some really good people running, and the thoughtful voter is really going to have to decide where his or her vote should be,” Hochstein said. 

But the convention could “turn the tide” for some candidates who might drop out if they see they don’t have the statewide reach among the party’s most faithful, she said. 

“I think that’s the realization, some of the candidates, I hope they come to sooner rather than later,” Hochstein said.

The Democratic field for Wisconsin governor has been static for months. That could all change this week. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin State Rep. Francesca Hong (D-Madison), one of the leading candidates in the Democratic primary for governor, is being sued by Capital One Bank over nearly $30,000 in credit card debt, court records show. 

The lawsuit was filed May 26 in Dane County Circuit Court by the bank due to Hong “failing to make the minimum payment” on her Discover credit card — which the records show she’s had since September of 2011. The suit alleges breach of contract and account stated, meaning Hong was notified of the total balance due of $29,344.48 and did not object. 

Hong’s campaign manager Becky Cooper said in a statement that the campaign “will have a letter shortly confirming this debt is paid in full.” 

Since she entered the race last year, Hong, a member of the Legislature’s Socialist Caucus, has emerged as a surprise contender. With two and half months until the Aug. 11 primary, she’s been leading or at the top of a number of polls, picking up early support and energy through an active social media campaign and non-traditional events across the state. 

Hong has centered her campaign on issues of affordability and income inequality, focusing especially on increasing taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents and protecting people from rising utility bills caused by the proliferation of hyperscale data centers in Wisconsin. A chef and former restaurant owner, she was first elected to the Legislature in 2020 after highlighting the toll the COVID-19 pandemic took on working class people. 

Cooper said Hong’s debt is emblematic of the struggles many Wisconsin residents have faced recently. 

“Like 80% of Americans, Rep. Hong has debt, specifically from business expenses that rose astronomically during the pandemic,” Cooper said. “She leads from a place of knowing the endless struggles with bills and the stress that places on families every day. Her policies will help Wisconsin residents develop greater economic stability and success.”

Republican leaders at the state party's annual convention repeatedly called for grassroots activists to stop infighting and unify behind Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany's campaign for governor.

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Former Gov. Tommy Thompson has endorsed Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany's bid for governor, officially ending any speculation that he might challenge Tiffany in a GOP primary.

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The high-profile beer brand owner and political fundraiser Kirk Bangstad is entering the race for Wisconsin governor — a move he hinted at last year before putting it off.

Bangstad, who has been an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump and state Republican politicians, announced his intention to seek the Democratic nomination over the weekend at a rally outside his Minocqua craft beer brewery.

In an email newsletter Sunday from a Substack account he operates, Bangstad told subscribers he was running “because I believe Wisconsin needs a battle-hardened fighter to join the rest of America to save our Democracy from Trump’s regime, and that person doesn’t exist in the crowded field of Democrats currently running in Wisconsin’s Gubernatorial primary.”

The newsletter included a screenshot from the Wisconsin Ethics Commission’s website showing an account registered for his campaign for governor. The account was not visible at the commission’s website Monday. Commission administrator Daniel Carlton Jr. said in an email message that campaign accounts do not become publicly visible until they have been reviewed by the commission’s staff.

Bangstad, who ran for Congress in 2016, has sold a variety of beers bearing politically themed names honoring Gov. Tony Evers, Sen. Tammy Baldwin and others. He’s also promoted a promise of free beer when Trump dies.

He operates a SuperPAC that has funded advertising promoting Democratic candidates and attacking Republicans, as well lawsuits against Wisconsin’s school choice program and accusing congressional Republicans of enabling the Jan. 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol attack that delayed certification of the 2020 presidential election that Joe Biden won. He also sued unsuccessfully to keep Trump off of the Wisconsin ballot in 2024.

Bangstad said in his newsletter that Democrats already running didn’t take seriously his demand for “an election protection plan, because I believed deep in my heart that Trump’s regime would unleash an ‘October surprise’ that would try to steal elections across the country and keep his goons in control of Congress.”

The Saturday rally was initially billed as a free speech event in response to Bangstad’s interview by Secret Service and FBI agents Thursday.

The interview followed a  social media post Bangstad made on April 25, shortly after the shooting upstairs from the White House correspondents dinner that Trump attended. Cole Tomas Allen, accused of crashing a security checkpoint with a shotgun, is being held on charges that included attempting to assassinate Trump. On Facebook that night, Bangstad declared, “Well, we almost got #freebeerday. Either a brother or sister in the Resistance needs to work on their marksmanship or he faked another assassination to get a positive news cycle.”

Republican campaigns jumped on the post, accusing Bangstad of calling for Trump’s assassination. The Democratic Party of Wisconsin issued a statement condemning the comment as well.

In a newsletter May 1 promoting his rally, Bangstad described the post as “satirical” and suggested federal authorities targeted him for “wondering publicly whether Trump’s assassination attempt was staged.”

In October, Bangstad floated the possibility of running for governor. He argued that “fascism is already here in America and must be stopped” in an Oct. 12 Substack post. “I’ve not heard a single candidate talk about what he or she will do to protect us.”

Bangstad wrote then that he was tempted to run on his history of battling conservative Republicans in court. “But that’s just narcissism rearing its ugly head,” he added. He vowed instead to compile a list of “most egregious votes” in Congress by U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the expected Republican nominee in the governor’s race, and spend money from his Super PAC on ads about “all the lies he’s told in service to Trump, and the harm he’s done to Wisconsinites.”

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In the contest for the Democratic nomination for governor, “affordability” might be the most frequently used campaign watchword. Side-by-side with it is another word: Healthcare.

Healthcare “is one of the most broken systems in the whole of government,” says former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes. It’s “working as it was designed to,” says state Rep. Francesca Hong — in what is decidedly not a compliment to the system.

Among voters, it is “a top issue if not the top issue,” says Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley. Former Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. CEO Missy Hughes calls healthcare one of the “foundational pieces of our economy” — but one that is under strain and not working well.

For Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, it’s “a complicated system” in which she made a career as an  emergency room nurse, a CDC infectious disease officer and finally a health system executive — “which means that I know the levers that we can pull to try to reduce costs across the state of Wisconsin.”

Former Department of Administration Secretary Joel Brennan considers healthcare a leading Wisconsin asset, innovator and employer, but one that’s been hobbled by “the healthcare management that we are allowing to go on in this county — and it’s not helping.”

State Sen. Kelda Roys describes the healthcare system  as imbued with “the worst aspects of capitalism in that we’ve injected profits before patients at every step, but none of the benefits of capitalism — there’s no free market, there’s no real competition.”

Those remarks come from three forums in April at which the seven leading Democratic hopefuls fielded questions about their healthcare policies and priorities.

Four of them — Rodriguez, Barnes, Roys and Hong — took part in a forum hosted by HealthWatch Wisconsin that focused entirely on healthcare issues. (All seven were invited, according to HealthWatch, which is affiliated with the nonprofit public interest law firm ABC for Health).

All seven joined a Wisconsin Health News event focused entirely on healthcare as well as a Wisconsin Citizen Action online forum, where healthcare led off a discussion that covered a cross-section of other issues as well.

Many of the Democratic Party rivals’ policies and priorities overlap. They all agree that healthcare costs and access are among the most important priorities for the state.

All of them say they favor a public option for health insurance — a plan that would be available for people to purchase health coverage on the Affordable Care Act health insurance marketplace if they don’t have coverage through work and their incomes are too high to qualify them for Medicaid.

All but one of the seven propose to expand Medicaid, referred to as BadgerCare in Wisconsin, under the Affordable Care Act. Expansion would open the health insurance plan for low-income Wisconsinites with incomes above the current limit (100% of the federal poverty guideline) up to 138% of the guideline.

Roys is the exception, arguing that Medicaid expansion is no longer feasible in Wisconsin because of federal changes enacted after President Donald Trump took office.

Instead, Roys proposes a public option that would allow the public to buy into the state health insurance plan for public employees. Brennan also proposes using the public employees’ plan as a public option, but he favors Medicaid expansion as well.

Four of the other five Democrats would tie the public option to Medicaid expansion, making it possible for people whose incomes don’t qualify them for BadgerCare to pay a monthly health insurance premium for BadgerCare coverage. Rodriguez proposes a public option plan called “BadgerChoice,” which would be a state-based insurance plan but would not be connected to BadgerCare, according to her campaign. 

Four years after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a national right to abortion, all seven Democrats have vowed to protect reproductive healthcare and to firmly back abortion rights in Wisconsin.

All of them speak of the importance of ensuring that mental health is treated on a par with physical health. And all of them at least nod to the need to improve healthcare access in rural Wisconsin.

At the same time, each candidate’s proposals differ, sometimes in fine details, sometimes in broad priorities, and sometimes mostly rhetorically.

Federal relations

Another point of general agreement is on the need for stronger support for public health measures. All of the Democratic candidates have criticized the Trump administration and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for undermining longstanding support for vaccination against communicable diseases.

But they take different directions in their expectations for federal-state relations in healthcare. Roys, for example, writes off federal assistance during the current administration, which is why she considers expanding Medicaid a dead issue for now. Crowley’s Medicaid expansion proposal explicitly refers to federal matching funds to cover some of the costs.

None have laid out the level of detail that will be required for turning their ideas into legislation or incorporating them into the next state budget.

This report has been updated to clarify that the “BadgerChoice” proposal from Sara Rodriguez is not connected with Medicaid Expansion. 

In the gallery below, click on the caption of each candidate’s picture to read a summary of what that candidate has said and published about their approach to healthcare policy and links to relevant pages on the candidate’s campaign website. 

During a forum framed as vetting Wisconsin's next governor who will "blunt the authoritarian thrust of the Trump regime," the seven Democrats vying for their party's nomination called for more state regulations on AI data centers and a pivot to 100 percent renewable energy.

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