As Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul and Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney face off again this year in a rematch of their 2022 race, the issues shaping the campaigns are different than they were four years ago. 

Kaul, a Democrat, is running for his third term as attorney general after two years in which he joined other state attorneys general in suing the administration of President Donald Trump more than 70 times. Those lawsuits have included challenges to Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenship, restrict healthcare access for transgender youth, freeze federal funding and make last-minute changes to federal voting rules. 

“Unfortunately we’re in a place where protecting the freedoms of Wisconsinites, in significant part, means standing up to the federal government,” Kaul told the Cap Times.

In comments on the campaign trail, Kaul has said standing up to overreach from the White House is one of the most important roles he can fill at the moment. 

“We have consistently fought back, and we have won case after case, and what that has meant is that those funds either are not illegally conditioned or they’re not frozen or ultimately cut,” Kaul said of Trump administration changes to federally funded programs. “Instead they can come to our communities and support critical programs in Wisconsin.”

Toney has argued that Kaul has been distracted from his job as top lawyer for the state by federal fights with the president and accuses Kaul of being too partisan for constantly challenging Trump. 

“Unfortunately, what we’ve seen from the attorney general is it depends on who is in the White House, who’s in the governor’s office when he makes those types of decisions,” about joining federal lawsuits, Toney said when the two debated on WISN’s UpFront earlier this month.

Toney has pointed out that when Kaul first came into office, he was critical of former Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel’s lawsuits against the Obama administration. 

“He campaigned against all of the political lawsuits when he first ran, and now that’s effectively what he’s running his entire campaign on is those lawsuits where he’s putting politics over public safety,” Toney said.

But in an election cycle in which Trump’s record low popularity is threatening to kneecap Republican chances, Kaul has countered by saying Toney wouldn’t do anything to protect Wisconsinites from Trump’s actions. 

During the debate, Toney was pressed on what, if any, lawsuits he would have joined. Toney said he would have signed on to a lawsuit against West Virginia’s ban on transgender girls playing sports. 

“One of the federal lawsuits I would have joined was out of West Virginia to protect women and girls sports that the attorney general failed to stand up and protect,” Toney said.

Kaul said Toney was “ducking saying if he’ll stand up to Donald Trump.”

In 2022, the two men ran shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and abortion was a major issue. Kaul had brought a lawsuit seeking to overturn the state’s 1849 abortion ban. In the years since, the Wisconsin Supreme Court sided with Kaul in that lawsuit, restoring abortion access for Wisconsinites. Toney argued in the 2022 race that Kaul’s lawsuit was a “stunt” but has said he wouldn’t try to change the state’s abortion policy if elected. 

Toney has previously said he supports the state’s current 20-week limit on abortions and tied the issue to Republican efforts to restrict access to gender-affirming care for transgender people and limit the ability of trans kids to play sports. In an interview with Wisconsin Watch, he tied his beliefs on abortion to a fight over trans locker room access in the New Richmond school district that has become a frequent GOP campaign reference this year. 

“We have five-month, or 20-week, protections in the law right now,” Toney said. “I’m not advocating for any changes to that, and if there is going to be any change, that needs to be something that’s voted on by the people and not decided on by politicians in Madison. We know how difficult this decision can be for women and girls and their families, and we need to make sure here in Wisconsin that we’re creating a supportive environment for women and girls that I hope life may be the choice that they decide to make. And that support has to extend beyond that as well and making sure that we’re protecting women and girls’ private spaces, bathrooms, locker rooms and sports. And we’ve seen the attorney general has failed to stand up in New Richmond, Wisconsin, where we’ve seen the school district allowing biological boys in the girls bathrooms.”

The 2022 race was also much closer to the racial justice protests of 2020, the pandemic-era increase in crime rates and the subsequent backlash against proposals to reassess police authority. Toney is running with the support of county sheriffs and police unions from across the state, but with crime at its lowest level in more than a decade, and the George Floyd protests six years in the past, the issue is not as much of a flashpoint statewide. 

This year, Toney has criticized Kaul for an increase in homicides since he first took office in 2019.  

“If we want to talk about crime data we’re seeing under this attorney general’s watch since he’s taken over, homicides are up over 30% in Wisconsin. We’ve seen on his watch record drug deaths,” Toney said.

Meanwhile, Kaul has blamed Toney for a recent increase in violent crime in Fond du Lac County. 

“We’ve been making important progress on crime statewide,” Kaul said. “Crime overall is at its lowest number in decades, and violent crime is the lowest number since 2011, but we also have more work to do.

Under the Trump administration, the White House has often focused heavily on allegations of election fraud and aggressively stepping up immigration enforcement — including in Wisconsin where the federal government has sought to obtain the private information of Wisconsin voters and Immigration and Customs Enforcement has made record numbers of arrests. 

Toney has previously supported both efforts. 

In an interview with Wisconsin Watch, he said the state needs to do more to root out non-citizens who are registered to vote — an issue that Republicans have repeatedly raised without much evidence. 

“We need to have a similar process that reviews noncitizens that could be on our voter rolls,” he said. “We have people that are lawfully in the country that are noncitizens, whether it’s for work or school, that may get a driver’s license or an ID card, and we don’t know what that problem could be because there’s no process in place to review it. And that’s where I’d like to see a similar process that we use for felons for that noncitizen process, just to make sure that people have confidence in those results. And if somebody is doing that, that they’re being prosecuted.” 

He has also testified before Congress to argue for stepped up immigration enforcement. 

Toney has focused on delays in testing at the state’s crime laboratories, which the attorney general is responsible for managing. Crime lab backlogs have often been a major issue in Wisconsin’s attorney general races. Kaul was first elected in 2018 after a controversy over a backlog of untested sexual assault kits. 

Toney has pointed to data that shows it’s taking longer for the state labs to test DNA evidence and blamed Kaul for the slowdown, saying he’s “passing the buck” on his responsibilities. 

Kaul has blamed the Republican-led Legislature for failing to provide proper funding to fully staff the labs. In the 2023-25 state budget, Kaul requested 16 additional crime lab positions while the final budget granted him three. In the most recent budget signed into law last summer, Kaul requested 19 additional crime lab staffers and received none.

Throughout the year, the criminal justice issue drawing the most public attention has been the increased scrutiny of law enforcement’s use of Flock license plate reading cameras. The AI-powered cameras are able to track the movement of people and vehicles through communities, drawing complaints that their use is an invasion of privacy and a violation of people’s rights. 

Both Kaul and Toney have said the cameras can be useful, but that there need to be guardrails on their use. 

“It’s clear that we need more action from the Legislature and the governor’s office, and until then local municipalities are the ones that are having to make these decisions with local sheriffs and chiefs that are having to maintain that public trust,” Toney said, pointing to a homicide case he’s working on in which the cameras were used to identify a suspect. 

Kaul said the cameras have been helpful in finding missing persons, but the technology should not be misused. 

“I want to make sure there’s a limit on the disclosure of data, so it’s being limited by law enforcement. I don’t want to see this going to private entities. And then there should be regular auditing in place and punishments if folks are misusing the technology,” Kaul said.

Every four years, the race for attorney general is largely overshadowed by the race for governor. In most cycles, the party that wins the governor’s race also wins the attorney general’s race. 

The last time the two races diverged was in 2006 when Wisconsin elected Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen. 

In 2022, Toney performed better than Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels, earning about 30,000 more votes, but still losing narrowly. 

“I’m running my own race from when I got into this back in October of 2025,” Toney told PBS Wisconsin. “I talked about the forensic testing failures, the fentanyl epidemic and how partisan our attorney general has become. I mean, we have driven home issues that affect people in all 72 counties. And that’s what I’ve been focused on, is what our Department of Justice can do to help protect everybody in Wisconsin by putting public safety over politics.”

Kaul acknowledges he’s been elected by thin margins in two nail-biter elections, but is confident his record will be enough to carry him to victory again. 

“The results tend to be fairly close, but in Wisconsin we have a lot of close elections, and so sometimes those small differences can make a big difference in the outcome,” Kaul told PBS. “But I’m running based on my record and my time as AG, and the focus can be different. My top priority as attorney general has been public safety, and we’ve made significant progress on really important public safety issues.”

As candidates debate public safety ahead of the midterm elections, a new assessment of the nation’s historic homicide decline suggests there is no single explanation for the drop — and that some widely discussed enforcement strategies may have played little role.

A survey of nearly 50 crime scholars convened by the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice found the strongest support that the top contributing factors to the drop in homicide rates have been community violence intervention programs, the easing of pandemic-related disruptions, and focused deterrence strategies that pair law enforcement with social services.

The findings come amid a historic national decline in homicide. In 2025, the estimated U.S. murder and nonnegligent manslaughter rate fell 18.1% compared with 2024, which equates to about 4 killings per 100,000 people. It tied the lowest rate recorded since national estimates began. The FBI recorded the same rate in 1955 and 1956. 

But a national decline does not mean every community has experienced the same drop.

The decline has unfolded in cities with different public safety strategies, economic conditions and political leadership, complicating efforts to credit any one approach, according to the council’s report.

The researchers rated 48 potential explanations for the decline between 2022 and 2026. Six factors received support from more than two-thirds of respondents as contributing either substantially or to a limited degree:

• Expanded community violence intervention programs, which work directly with people at highest risk of violence, were rated as either a major or a limited contributor contributing by 91% of researchers. 
• The pandemic recovery was rated as a major or a limited contributor by 83% of respondents. It was the only factor that a majority of respondents, 57%, rated as a major contributor.
• Eighty-three percent of the crime scholars gave credit to the increased use of focused deterrence, an approach that targets high-risk individuals and groups directly with a carrot-and-stick approach through social support and law enforcement.
• Researchers also pointed to increased local government capacity to provide social services, with 75% rating it either a major or limited contributor.
• Greater public safety and support resources relative to demand earned a rating of 68%.
• And more proactive policing was likewise named as a major or limited factor by 68% of the scholars.

Researchers largely dismissed more than half of the potential explanations, including National Guard deployments, increased immigration enforcement and increased pretrial detention. 

Other factors thought to have contributed little included homeless encampment removals, improved housing stability, electronic monitoring, GLP-1 medications, declining cash use, presidential public safety signals, DNA databases, neighborhood crime alerts and increased incarceration.

The findings do not establish that any one strategy caused homicide to fall. The ratings reflect researchers’ professional judgments, not definitive findings, and multiple factors may have overlapped or reinforced one another, according to the council’s report. 

The council also cautioned that a factor judged to have contributed little to the recent decline could still help reduce violence in the future.

But understanding what drove the decline could help policymakers determine how to sustain the progress, according to the council’s report. 

“Theories and claims abound, and sorting among them is essential if we’re going to sustain the progress. This diverse array of researchers took the challenge seriously, testing competing explanations, debating the evidence, and making tough judgments,” Adam Gelb, the president and CEO of the council, said in a news release. “Their effort leaves the country with a much clearer picture of what likely contributed, what probably did not, and what we still need to learn.” 

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.