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• A record $144.5 million was spent on Wisconsin’s 2025 Supreme Court election. That’s more than every state Supreme Court election in 2021-22 combined, and far more than the $45.6 million spent in 2000 on all state Supreme Court elections that caused court watchers to warn about “a new and ominous politics of judicial elections.”

• Wisconsin’s two major political parties are now the largest donors to judicial candidates. The state has also seen an unprecedented level of out-of-state spending in recent years.

• Wisconsin’s narrow political divide, hot-button political issues like abortion and collective bargaining, loose campaign finance laws, lax recusal rules for justices and even holding elections in the spring are all contributing to Wisconsin’s unique spending situation.

• Wisconsin is one of 22 states that initially elect justices. The majority of states appoint them with some adding retention elections. 

• Public financing of elections has failed twice here, and the public remains strongly in favor of elections. Other states have found ways to combine merit selection or some other form of appointment vetting with retention elections to ensure justices are beholden to the law, rather than interest groups or political whims.

A quarter-century ago, the total cost of every state Supreme Court race in the country reached an unprecedented $45.6 million, prompting the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University to warn “a new and ominous politics of judicial elections” posed a “threat to fair and impartial justice.”

Yet in 2025, spending on one Wisconsin Supreme Court seat reached $144.5 million, even more than the $100.8 million spent on 68 state high court contests in the nation in 2021 and 2022.

At the same time, this state’s two major political parties have become the largest donors to the candidates for an officially nonpartisan office. And the last two justices elected in Wisconsin received most of their individual campaign contributions from outside the state.

State Supreme Court races have become everything they were never meant to be — highly partisan, astronomically expensive national political battles in which candidate ideologies overshadow qualifications for an office requiring them to “administer justice … faithfully and impartially.”

Several factors are driving the massive spending in Wisconsin, one of 22 states that elect justices rather than appoint them. The factors include:

• Hot-button issues that turn on ideological control of the high court, such as abortion.
• Wisconsin’s narrowly divided electorate, state government and court composition.
• Campaign finance laws and federal court rulings that have loosened campaign finance limits.
• Lax recusal rules for justices in cases involving their major political donors.
• Electing justices in April, which grew out of an early desire for a nonpartisan judiciary.

Some of those factors have pushed up spending in high court races in other states into the eight-figure range, but only Wisconsin — the first to see nine-figure spending on a court contest — has them all.

“It’s the whole picture that makes us so obscene,” said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, which advocates for transparent and accountable government.

Voters could be in for more of the same, facing a high court election every spring for the next four years. And even if the 2026 race doesn’t break records, it’s shaping up to be another multimillion-dollar contest.

High costs for high courts

In Wisconsin, high court candidates in the 1990s typically spent around $250,000 each. The first million-dollar campaign featuring negative TV ads was in 1999, but the next year candidates pledged to run positive campaigns and it only cost $430,963.

Howard Schweber, professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called those earlier races “gentlemanly” and “low-key affairs.”

But such spending  exploded after Justice Louis Butler wrote a landmark 2005 product liability decision, holding that a lead paint poisoning victim could sue product manufacturers without proving which company was responsible.

Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce spent an estimated $2.2 million to elect conservative Annette Ziegler in 2007 and $1.8 million to help Michael Gableman unseat Butler the next year. Both races set state records at almost $6 million apiece.

Similar story lines have played out nationwide as big-money donors target court races to influence specific cases or issues, said Douglas Keith, deputy director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center. In the latest Wisconsin election, Elon Musk spent $55.9 million to boost conservative Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel, who lost to liberal Dane County Judge Susan Crawford. Musk’s Tesla Inc. was suing to overturn the state law prohibiting auto manufacturers from owning their dealerships, a key part of Tesla’s business model.

Big spenders are rarely transparent about their agendas, instead pouring their money into television advertising with lurid accusations about how candidates handled criminal cases that have little connection to what the Supreme Court does.

Big donors are reinforcing a growing feeling among voters that “the court is just one more institution to obtain the policies that we (the voters) want,” said conservative former Justice Dan Kelly, who lost multimillion-dollar races in 2020 and 2023.

The stakes range all the way up to control of the White House. In 2020, President Donald Trump contested more than 220,000 absentee ballots from Milwaukee and Dane County. The state Supreme Court ruled 4-3 to toss the suit.

The 2020 presidential election was part of a nationwide record five times in 24 years that Wisconsin was decided by less than one percentage point. The same swing-state energy pumps up both sides in high court races — even though only two of the last 12 contested court elections were that close.

And while conservatives ruled the court for 15 years after Gableman’s election, their majority was never more than five of seven seats, meaning that a change in ideological control could be just one or two elections away. That’s one of the most common factors driving big-spending court elections nationwide, Keith said.

Parties crash in with cash

Wisconsin has tried to keep partisan politics out of court elections since its founding. The first state constitution prohibited electing judges at the same time as most other state officials, aiming to discourage parties from nominating judicial candidates.

Wisconsin is one of only four states that hold judicial elections in the spring or summer. Candidates in other states running in the fall are competing for donations with many other high-profile races, Keith noted.

Another major factor that has supercharged spending in Wisconsin came in 2015, when a Republican campaign finance overhaul allowed unlimited donations to political parties and unlimited contributions from parties to candidates.

Donations from state and local Republican parties jumped more than fivefold, from $75,926 in 2016 to $423,615 in 2018. After fundraising powerhouse Ben Wikler took over as state Democratic Party chair in 2019, state, local and national Democratic parties gave their preferred candidates $1.4 million in 2020, $9.9 million in 2023 and $11.8 million in 2025.

Together, the two major parties spent $34.9 million on officially nonpartisan Supreme Court races from 2007 through 2025, almost all of it in the last three campaigns. Democrats outspent Republicans nearly 2 to 1.

In February, the Marquette Law School Poll found 61% of Wisconsin voters believe party contributions reduce judicial independence, compared with 38% who think partisan support gives voters useful information about candidates.

Party contributions represent less than one-quarter of the $161.5 million that special interests spent on the last 12 Supreme Court races. Conservative organizations and business interests spent $80.2 million supporting conservative candidates, while progressive groups and unions spent $46.4 million backing liberal candidates. 

For the entire 2007-2025 period, spending on so-called “issue ads” — which try to persuade voters without explicitly endorsing a candidate — totaled $40.2 million, $31.8 million for conservatives and $8.4 million for liberals.

Out-of-state donors didn’t play a major role in high court elections until relatively recently. From 2007 through 2018, most Supreme Court candidates received more than 90% of their individual donations from state residents, with Gableman being the biggest exception at 32%, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a campaign finance watchdog.

But the out-of-state cash exploded for liberals after 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed each state to regulate abortions.

Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz positioned herself as the abortion rights candidate and took in a record $3.6 million — 57% of individual contributions — from donors outside Wisconsin. Crawford, who had represented Planned Parenthood, received $14.6 million from out-of-state donors or 69% of her individual contributions.

Public financing fails

Wisconsin has tried and failed to stem the tide of judicial spending.

After the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1976 decision saying campaign spending limits violate the First Amendment, the Legislature enacted the nation’s most comprehensive public financing law. Taxpayers could check a box on their income tax returns to designate $1 of their taxes for public financing.

That system “worked extremely well for over a decade,” according to a 2002 analysis by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. However, in 1986 the Legislature stopped adjusting maximum campaign grants for inflation. Taxpayer participation waned from 19.7% in 1979 to 5% in 2002.

After the record-spending 2007 campaign, all seven justices called for “realistic, meaningful public financing for Supreme Court elections.”

But the system Democrats passed in 2009 lasted for just one Supreme Court campaign before Republicans repealed it in 2011. New Mexico is now the only state funding judicial campaigns with taxpayer dollars.

State Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, wants to revive the law, which she calls “really important to preserving judicial integrity.”

Roys, who is running for governor, said she’s considering amounts 10 times higher than what she called the “laughably low” original grants of $100,000 for primary candidates and $300,000 for general election candidates.

Conflict over conflicts of interest

Public financing doesn’t stop special interests from spending big on issue ads or through independent expenditures on ads that clearly state who they favor or oppose, but strict recusal rules for judges could disincentivize such expenditures.

After the 2007 and 2008 elections, justices fielded four petitions asking them to clarify recusal rules. The petitions from groups such as the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin urged the court to set thresholds for when donations or outside spending by a litigant or attorney would require a justice to recuse. Conversely, WMC and the Realtors Association called for rules that would not require justices to recuse based only on how much a litigant or attorney had spent supporting their campaigns.

The court voted 4-3 in 2010 to adopt verbatim the rules backed by WMC. Explaining the new rules, the court majority argued that disqualifying judges based on legal campaign donations “would create the impression that receipt of a contribution automatically impairs a judge’s integrity.”

By contrast, several states and the American Bar Association’s Model Code of Judicial Conduct “require judges to recuse when a party or a party’s lawyer have contributed more than a specific amount to a judge’s campaign.” A few other states call for recusal based on campaign contributions but don’t set a specific dollar limit.

In 2017, 54 retired judges petitioned the high court to toughen recusal rules. When the 2010 rules were adopted, the petition noted, the majority contended that direct donations were too small to influence justices because contributions were capped at $1,000 from individuals and political action committees. But the 2015 campaign finance law boosted the donation limits to $20,000 for individuals and $18,000 for PACs.

Similarly, the petition said, the 2010 majority had argued that judicial candidates couldn’t be held responsible for groups making independent expenditures and running issue ads because at the time they were legally barred from coordinating with those groups. But the 2015 law also loosened the coordination rules.

The retired judges wanted to require litigants and their attorneys to disclose their contributions to the judges hearing their cases at each level. Supreme Court justices would be required to recuse if they received contributions or benefited from outside spending of more than $10,000, with lower amounts for lower court judges.

But the Supreme Court rejected the petition on a 5-2 vote along ideological lines. Most of the conservative justices in the majority said they trusted judges to decide when to recuse.

The issue could be revived. Liberal Chief Justice Jill Karofsky said at a WisPolitics event in October she is committed to holding an “open” and “transparent” hearing about establishing new court recusal rules.

Alternatives to electing judges

In the current legal environment, holding down spending on Supreme Court campaigns could remain challenging as long as Wisconsin elects justices.

Not all of the other systems succeed in taking the politics out of choosing judges. The process of appointing federal judges is widely viewed as partisan, particularly for the U.S. Supreme Court. And even some retention elections have become multimillion-dollar contests, as activists try to change the ideological balance of state high courts.

However, 11 states have set up independent nonpartisan or bipartisan nominating commissions to choose justices by merit. Many other countries select judges through civil service systems. And 12 states use independent performance reviews of judges to help voters or appointing authorities decide whether judges should keep their jobs.

In 1940, Missouri voters approved an appointment system in which a nominating commission screens judicial applicants based on merit. The governor then chooses a judge from a list of potential nominees presented by the commission. Newly appointed judges typically serve a relatively short first term before facing voters in a yes-or-no retention election to keep their jobs for a longer second term.

Some form of commission-based gubernatorial appointment is now in place in 22 states.

Wisconsin is one of 10 states that don’t require their governors to consult a nominating commission or seek confirmation for a high court appointee.

Although 57% of all Wisconsin Supreme Court justices were first appointed by governors to fill vacancies, past efforts to switch to appointing justices faced pushback.

Former Justice Janine Geske said that she had long supported elections because they “made justices more human and someone who people can identify with.” But her perspective has changed.

“People are so sick of these terrible ads that relate to issues that the court doesn’t decide,” Geske said.

Geske said she leans toward appointment if nominees are screened by a bipartisan commission and if the governor must choose from the commission’s list.

Kelly, the former conservative justice, also said he supports appointment with Senate confirmation. Kelly said judges “must reject politics entirely” in their rulings, and appointment offers “much more protection against politics” than elections.

February’s Marquette poll found 90% support for continuing to elect justices, with relatively minor differences by party.

Nonpartisan or partisan elections?

Since 2000, all eight states with fully partisan elections have had million-dollar court contests, while only nine of the 13 states with nonpartisan elections — including Wisconsin — have had one.

In October, the Marquette poll found 56% of state voters thought high court races have become so partisan that candidates should run with party labels. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans backed the idea, with Democrats and independents almost evenly split.

After liberals won four of the last five Supreme Court races, Wisconsin Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden called for moving all spring elections to the fall of even-numbered years. 

Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, a GOP gubernatorial candidate, is calling for shifting only the statewide contests for Supreme Court and superintendent of public instruction to fall and moving primaries for fall races from August to April. 

Schoemann said he didn’t have a strong feeling about whether high court elections should remain nonpartisan, but he added, “Everybody acknowledges that they’re largely partisan races anyway. … Let’s be honest about what they are.”

To keep or not to keep

Most states with independent commissions skip the confirmation process and wait for voters to decide the justices’ future in retention elections. Altogether, 20 states use retention elections for at least some high court races.

As an alternative to incumbent justices facing voters the Brennan Center advocates for a single term of 14 to 18 years, and the State Bar of Wisconsin has called for a single 16-year term, compared with Wisconsin’s current 10-year terms.

Although no state restricts justices to a single long term, Rhode Island justices are appointed for life, like federal judges; Massachusetts and New Hampshire justices serve until mandatory retirement at 70; and Hawaii has an independent commission that decides whether to reappoint justices after an initial 10-year term.

Brennan Center data show four states with head-to-head judicial elections have escaped the national trend of high-spending races: Minnesota, Oregon, Idaho and North Dakota.

In Minnesota, candidates and their supporters spent just $637,011 to elect 10 justices from 2013 through 2022 — a period when Wisconsin candidates and their allies spent almost $33 million, according to the Brennan Center and the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. 

Both states share a history of nonpartisan elections, but unlike Wisconsin, Minnesota elects justices in the fall for six-year terms, with no restrictions on how many seats can be on the ballot in the same election.

Supreme Costs: A condensed version of our series on the ‘obscene’ spending on Wisconsin justices 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.

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Wisconsin refugee support organizations and food banks are preparing for the worst as regulators in other states implement new rules barring many refugees and people granted asylum from federal food assistance programs. 

But they haven’t yet seen the new restrictions take effect in Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services, which administers FoodShare — the state’s name for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — has continued to provide benefits to immigrants rendered ineligible under the new federal restrictions, support groups say. The agency has not said how long it will continue to do so. 

Refugees, asylees and other immigrants who entered the country through humanitarian programs had long been eligible for SNAP before securing legal permanent residency. But President Donald Trump’s “big” bill-turned law, signed in July, rewrote SNAP eligibility rules to exclude such immigrants who have yet to obtain green cards.  

The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave states until Nov. 1 to comply. 

Refugee assistance groups and food banks across Wisconsin have sounded the alarm about the ban. Nearly 8,000 refugees and asylees have settled in the state over the past decade, federal data show, and resettlement organizations note many rely on FoodShare as they find their footing.

 “SNAP is a lifeline for refugees and asylees as they rebuild their lives in the United States after traumatic and often dangerous circumstances,” said Matt King, CEO of Milwaukee food bank Hunger Task Force. “Food support is one of the first stabilizing resources they receive as they navigate an unfamiliar country and begin the process of resettlement.” 

Hunger Task Force helped more than 1,600 refugees access food assistance in 2024 alone, he added.

Anticipating a benefits cutoff, Wisconsin aid groups have geared up for a surge in demand for services.

 “We’ve already been proactive,” said Donna Ambrose, executive director of The Neighbor’s Place, the largest food bank in Marathon County – a longtime hub for refugee resettlement. Her organization is extending its hours and offering an “evening market” on Thursday nights to accommodate rising needs. 

In the Fox Valley, the nonprofit Casa Hispana recently received an anonymous donation to support food and fuel assistance. It plans to hold a giveaway in the coming weeks. CEO Carlos Salazar expects part will go to asylees from Latin America who stand to lose FoodShare benefits.

COMSA, a resource center for immigrants and refugees in Green Bay, faces a more difficult position. While the nonprofit will continue its core programs – job application support and English language classes, for instance – the center lacks resources to begin providing food assistance, Executive Director Said Hassan said.

Officials with refugee resettlement groups say their clients who lack green cards are still receiving FoodShare — for now. They haven’t heard details about what’s next. 

“We’re supposed to find out any day” about benefits, said Sean Gilligan, the refugee services manager with Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Green Bay. 

Last-minute guidance from the federal Agriculture Department adds to the uncertainty. The agency on Oct. 31 directed states to permanently block all immigrants who entered the U.S. through humanitarian pathways – including refugees and asylees – from receiving SNAP, even after obtaining green cards.

Wisconsin Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul and 21 other state attorneys general challenged the directive in a late-November lawsuit, arguing that the department’s instructions conflict with provisions of Trump’s new law. The lawsuit asserts refugees and asylees with green cards remain eligible for SNAP aid.

The attorneys general also argue that federal rules allow a 120-day grace period to implement latest guidance, meaning states shouldn’t immediately be held to its provisions. The Trump administration claims that period ended Nov. 1.

“Wisconsin and other states have already begun implementing the statutory changes enacted earlier this year, but USDA’s guidance now forces them to overhaul eligibility systems without sufficient time,” Kaul’s office said in a press release.

The state could face financial penalties if the Trump administration determines it is distributing aid to  immigrants who are ineligible for SNAP. A provision of Trump’s landmark law will strip some funding from states with high SNAP “error rates” – a measure of over- and under-payments to recipients – beginning in fiscal year 2028. Wisconsin is among few states with an error rate below the bar for penalties, but Kaul’s office said confusion over the new eligibility rules could push the state’s error rate over the penalty threshold. 

The new rules will “create widespread confusion for families, increase the risk of wrongful benefit terminations, erode public trust, and place states in an untenable situation where they must either violate federal law or accept severe financial liability,” Kaul’s office said in a press release.

The state health department declined to comment about its plans, and about what steps it has taken to implement the new eligibility requirements.

Refugee advocates brace for impact from federal limits on food aid 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.

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A November fundraising email paid for and sent by Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley’s Democratic campaign for governor included a message signed by “Team Taylor,” the campaign of Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor, who is running in the nonpartisan April race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. 

The note describes the power the next governor will have and how the court can be a “check” on the person in that office. It ends with an appeal: “Will you split a contribution of $10 between our campaign and David Crowley to help elect Judge Chris Taylor and protect a fair, independent Wisconsin Supreme Court?”

The fundraising message is one of potentially thousands of emails Wisconsinites may receive from campaigns seeking donations ahead of pivotal elections next year. But it also raises questions about why asks from nonpartisan campaigns can appear in a partisan candidate’s fundraising materials and whether a message, like the one from Crowley’s campaign featuring  Taylor’s team, can seem like an endorsement.

Taylor has not, in fact, endorsed Crowley, who is running in a crowded Democratic primary field for governor next August. Crowley has endorsed Taylor, a liberal who is running against conservative Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar in the April election. 

Though the joint fundraising belies Wisconsin’s nonpartisan-in-name — though increasingly partisan-in-practice — Supreme Court elections, the communication doesn’t raise ethical or legal issues, experts told Wisconsin Watch. Additionally, a fundraising email like this is not unusual in the context of Wisconsin’s recent Supreme Court elections, said Howard Schweber, a professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In fact, Wisconsin’s main political parties were the top donors to the campaigns of the liberal and conservative candidates in the record-breaking 2025 Supreme Court race, with Democrats giving $11.75 million to now-Justice Susan Crawford’s campaign and Republicans sending $9.76 million to the campaign of former Attorney General Brad Schimel.  

“This is just yet another data point, number 115, demonstrating that these are, in fact, partisan campaigns run … at least in some cases, by candidates who present themselves as representatives of a party,” Schweber said.

Since its founding, Wisconsin has tried to keep judicial races nonpartisan. Justices are supposed to interpret the law and constitution like a referee, not side with one team or the other. But over the past 20 years, as hot-button political issues have come before the court and spending from political interest groups has reached astronomical heights, that tradition has eroded.

Taylor and Lazar are the likely candidates in the court race in April and are on completely opposite ends of the political spectrum. Taylor is a former Dane County judge who served as a Democrat in the state Assembly and was a policy director for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin. Lazar is a former Waukesha County judge who was an assistant attorney general under a Republican administration.

Wisconsin prohibits judges and judicial candidates from endorsing partisan political candidates or directly soliciting campaign donations. During the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court race, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign filed an ethics complaint against Schimel after reports that he joked about buying knee pads to ask for campaign donations. 

The message sent by the Crowley campaign is a different scenario, as the text is signed by “Team Taylor,” not Taylor herself. Taylor has not endorsed any political candidates or directly solicited donations in her campaign for the Supreme Court, Sam Roecker, a spokesperson for Taylor’s campaign, told Wisconsin Watch.  

Messages Taylor’s campaign sends to its list of email subscribers can be shared by other political campaigns with their own fundraising lists, such as in the case of the Crowley email. 

“Other campaigns, regardless of party, who believe in electing a justice who will protect our fundamental rights and freedoms, are welcome to amplify our messages to their supporters,” said Roecker, the Taylor spokesperson. 

It’s not clear whether other Democrats running for governor may have shared fundraising messages from the Taylor campaign. Only Rep. Francesca Hong, D-Madison, responded to questions from Wisconsin Watch with a simple “nope.”

Lazar’s campaign has not sent fundraising messages with candidates running for partisan offices, a spokesperson said. 

Ahead of the 2025 court race, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany in a campaign email promoted Schimel’s candidacy. But the message was signed by Tiffany rather than anyone connected to Schimel’s campaign.

A spokesperson for Crowley’s campaign said Democrats believe it’s “critical” to elect Taylor to the high court — which was the reasoning behind the campaign message.

“The Crowley campaign sent a fundraising email to support her campaign and highlight the importance of this race, recognizing the natural overlap between the two candidates,” the spokesperson said. 

Political activities during a Wisconsin Supreme Court campaign can resurface once a candidate is elected. Earlier this year, Crawford was criticized for attending a briefing with Democratic donors with a discussion on putting two of Wisconsin’s U.S. House seats “in play.” 

In November the justice denied a request from Wisconsin’s Republican congressmen that she recuse herself from cases challenging the state’s congressional maps based on attending that meeting.

As fundraising email shows, line between nonpartisan and partisan Wisconsin elections continues to erode 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.

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A Wisconsin plant that President Donald Trump and Republicans championed during his first administration as the “8th Wonder of the World” is set to venture into building data centers with a new $569 million investment.

But members of Congress said the state should first address serious concerns from constituents about manufacturers’ energy and water use, which could strain existing infrastructure and leave consumers footing the bill.

“The average Wisconsinite should not have to subsidize the power or water for a commercial entity,” Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden said.

Foxconn, a Taiwanese company and one of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers, says it will create nearly 1,400 jobs in Racine County over the next four years, in exchange for up to $96 million in total performance-based tax credits. It’s the second amendment to the company’s contract with the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. after Foxconn dramatically rolled back its initial plan, proposed in 2017, to invest $10 billion and create as many as 13,000 jobs.

Foxconn had invested nearly $717 million by the end of last year, according to WEDC.

The company’s original multibillion-dollar deal with Wisconsin was heralded as an “America first” achievement, complete with a White House rollout attended by former Speaker Paul Ryan and former Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

“The construction of this facility represents the return of LCD electronics and electronics manufacturing to the United States,” Trump said at the announcement in 2017.

However, Foxconn’s new investment will take Wisconsin — where Meta and Microsoft in the last several months have announced deals to build data centers — further into the AI economy.

Five days before Foxconn pledged new investments in Wisconsin in November, OpenAI announced it would “share insight into emerging hardware needs across the AI industry to help inform Foxconn’s design and development efforts for hardware to be manufactured at Foxconn’s U.S. facilities.”

Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan, whose district includes 11 Madison-based data centers, said the state’s growing data sector should be a wake-up call to the Republican-led Congress.

“All the more reason Congress should get its act together because we need to do the proper regulation that’s good on all fronts related to AI, and I feel like we’re not even crawling at this point,” Pocan said.

The House reconciliation bill included a provision to halt AI regulation by states for 10 years, but the Senate cut the language.

The question of who will pay for the new data centers’ anticipated energy and water consumption is becoming a major concern for lawmakers and constituents alike.

“I think if you’re going to have this data center, you are either going to — business is not going to like this — you’re either going to help pay for those utility rates (that) are rising, or you’re going to self-power,” Van Orden said.

Some Wisconsin residents have spoken out against data centers’ environmental impacts, including at small protests in seven cities across the state in the first week of December.

Just two major data centers slated for development alone, including the Microsoft project, would require the energy of 4.3 million homes, according to Clean Wisconsin, an advocacy organization that has criticized rising resource demands from the state’s data centers.

“The issue is we only have 2.8 million homes in Wisconsin,” said Amy Barrilleaux, a spokesperson for the organization.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said that although the energy and water demands of data centers are ultimately a local permitting issue, constituents’ concerns are very real.

“I’d be concerned about that, as well,” Johnson said.

A petition to pause approvals of AI data centers until these issues are resolved got nearly 3,000 signatures since last week, Barrilleaux said, calling it a sign of the growing “frustration” from Wisconsinites over the state’s lack of transparency about how the centers will affect the energy system.

“If you’re in Wisconsin right now and probably a lot of states, you hear about a new AI data center development every couple of weeks. So it feels overwhelming,” Barrilleaux said. “It’s not just what’s happening on that Foxconn site.”

Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., pointed to public input processes taking place in local government.

“I want my constituents to get their questions answered before these projects move ahead,” Baldwin told NOTUS.

Reps. Glenn Grothman and Tony Wied declined to comment on the Foxconn plant. A spokesperson for Rep. Bryan Steil, whose district includes Racine County, did not immediately return a request for comment Thursday.

This story was produced and originally published by Wisconsin Watch and NOTUS, a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.

Foxconn, Trump’s ‘America first’ factory, is moving to AI. It’s giving lawmakers some pause. 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.

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SUPREME COSTS: This is the third in a series of articles about how Wisconsin chooses its judges.

Wisconsin is one of the only places on Earth that thrusts top judges into big-time politics.

Here Supreme Court candidates compete in officially nonpartisan statewide elections that have grown increasingly polarized and expensive, with campaigns now costing far more than those in any other state. This spring’s $144.5 million high court contest marked the first time that campaign spending approached that of recent races for governor and U.S. senator.

By contrast, the federal government and the majority of other states and countries appoint their judges. Some of those appointed judges eventually must face voters, but only in yes-or-no retention elections intended to avoid the political heat of head-to-head campaigns.

Not all of those other systems succeed in taking the politics out of choosing judges. The process of appointing federal judges is widely viewed as partisan, particularly for the U.S. Supreme Court. And even some retention elections have become multimillion-dollar contests, as activists try to change the ideological balance of state high courts.

However, 11 states have set up independent nonpartisan or bipartisan nominating commissions to ensure that Supreme Court justices are chosen by merit. Many other countries select judges through civil service systems. And 12 states use independent performance reviews of judges to help voters or appointing authorities decide whether judges should keep their jobs.

Although 57% of all Wisconsin Supreme Court justices were first appointed by governors to fill vacancies, past efforts to switch to appointing every justice faced strong political headwinds. No other state has dropped judicial elections in four decades.

Some Republicans are even pushing in the opposite direction, calling for Wisconsin to join the eight states that pick Supreme Court justices in fully partisan elections.

The trail to big-money campaigns

When Wisconsin became a state in 1848, electing judges was a new and controversial idea. Most judges had been appointed since their federal or state courts were created. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton argued for lifetime appointments to preserve federal judges’ independence against political pressures.

But some states started to embrace judicial elections in the populist wave that followed President Andrew Jackson’s 1828 election. That was partly a reaction to judicial appointments that were seen as political rewards, Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson said in 2009. Mississippi was the first to switch in 1832, followed by New York in 1846 — just before Wisconsin’s first constitutional convention. 

Walworth County delegate Charles Baker argued during the convention that electing judges was consistent with democratic principles, according to the State Law Library. That view was met with thunderous opposition from Racine County delegate Edward Ryan, a future chief justice, who asked of the judiciary, “Must its judgments represent the will of the people? No sir! No sir! God forever forbid it! … It represents the eternal principles of truth and justice.”

As a compromise, the new constitution banned electing judges at the same time as other state officials, in an attempt to discourage political parties from nominating judicial candidates. After parties didn’t take the hint, the Legislature outlawed party labels on judicial ballots in 1891.

Meanwhile, every state admitted between the Civil War and the 1950s decided to elect at least some of its judges. Those races were initially partisan, until 1873, when Chicago-centered Cook County, Illinois, pioneered nonpartisan judicial elections, a concept that spread during the Progressive Era. Of the 22 states that now elect high court justices, 13 (including Wisconsin) have fully nonpartisan elections, eight have fully partisan elections, and Michigan nominates justices at party conventions but doesn’t list partisan affiliations on general election ballots.

Yet nonpartisan elections haven’t kept big money and ideological divisions out of state Supreme Court races. As documented by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, many states’ high court campaigns have ballooned past $1 million in spending over the past 25 years, driven by special interests trying to influence rulings on social, political and economic issues that include hot-button topics like abortion and same-sex marriage.

Since 2000, nine of the 13 states with fully nonpartisan elections — including Wisconsin — have seen at least one $1 million-plus high court race. But every state with fully partisan elections has had million-dollar court contests, along with partly partisan Michigan. 

Taking the ‘non’ out of nonpartisan

Political parties have helped push up the price tag for Wisconsin’s formally nonpartisan elections, aided by a state law allowing unlimited donations to candidates. The last three Supreme Court races drew $34.1 million in party cash, with Democrats outspending Republicans more than 2-to-1.

Voters seem to have mixed feelings about the partisan involvement. On one hand, 61% of Marquette University Law School Poll respondents in February said they believe party contributions cut into judicial independence, while only 38% said partisan support gives voters useful information about candidates.

Yet the partisan passions ratcheted up by big spending and polarizing issues have dramatically transformed how closely Supreme Court results reflect the most recent presidential vote.

In 1978, county-level results showed almost no relationship between the two, according to calculations by Marquette Poll Director Charles Franklin. But the correlation has trended sharply upward, particularly after the start of multimillion-dollar races in 2007, Franklin found. Last spring, his calculations showed a 98.5% correlation between support for liberal now-Justice Susan Crawford and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and between backing for conservative Brad Schimel and GOP President Donald Trump.

“It’s a stunning change, but not a new change,” considering how the partisanship evolved over time, Franklin said.

Nationwide, however, nonpartisan elections may still affect how voters react to candidates, said Douglas Keith, deputy director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center. In nonpartisan races in Montana, Arkansas and Kentucky, “voters chose the candidate who ran the less overtly partisan campaign,” Keith said. 

By contrast, Keith said, voters seem more likely to treat partisan high court campaigns like other partisan races — including in Ohio, where the Republican-controlled Legislature switched from a variation on the Michigan method to fully partisan elections, starting in 2022.

Franklin, Keith and other experts also believe that Wisconsin’s spring elections, originally designed to deter partisanship, could have had the opposite effect, by taking high court races out of competition with other major contests where candidates are seeking donations and attention. Most other states hold judicial elections in the fall, regardless of whether they’re partisan or nonpartisan, with only Georgia and West Virginia joining Wisconsin in the spring.

In October, the Marquette poll found 56% of state voters thought high court races have become so partisan that candidates should run with party labels. That idea was backed by nearly two-thirds of Republicans, with Democrats and independents almost evenly split.

However, politicians’ support for switching to partisan judicial elections seems to depend on whether they think it will help their own side. Ohio Republicans figured they would benefit from fully partisan high court elections, and they have won every race since the 2022 change, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Similarly, Louisiana Republicans are changing Supreme Court justice nominations to regular partisan primaries, starting in 2026, instead of the state’s unique all-party primaries.

In 2009, after the conservative candidate won a brutal, record-spending Wisconsin high court race the previous year, Sen. Tim Carpenter, D-Milwaukee, and other Democrats introduced a constitutional amendment to abolish nonpartisan spring elections and elect all public officials in the fall. The measure died in committee in a Democratic-controlled Legislature.

That was when conservatives were more likely to vote in low-turnout contests, said Franklin and UW-Milwaukee Professor Emeritus Mordecai Lee, a former Democratic lawmaker. Now liberals have the edge in those races, Franklin and Lee said, and support for partisan elections has flipped. 

After liberals won four of the last five Supreme Court races, Wisconsin Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden called for moving all spring elections to the fall of even-numbered years. GOP state Rep. Dave Maxey, chair of the Assembly Campaigns and Elections Committee, and Van Orden’s Republican House colleague Tom Tiffany, who is running for governor, are open to discussing that idea, their spokespeople said.

Such a major change would cause numerous complications for thousands of currently nonpartisan local officials and lower court judges, as well as presidential primaries, said Wood County Clerk Trent Miner, president of the Wisconsin County Clerks Association.

Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, another GOP gubernatorial candidate, is calling for a more modest change: shifting only the statewide contests for Supreme Court and superintendent of public instruction to fall and moving primaries for fall races from August to April. 

In an interview, Schoemann said he didn’t have a strong feeling about whether high court elections should remain nonpartisan, but he added, “Everybody acknowledges that they’re largely partisan races anyway. … Let’s be honest about what they are.”

Both Schoemann and a Tiffany spokesperson said maximizing voter participation would be the main reason to reschedule elections.

Because constitutional amendments must be approved in two consecutive legislative sessions and then in a statewide referendum, any change would be at least a few years away.

Pointing back to appointment

By the 1920s, some states were growing disillusioned with judges’ involvement in electoral politics. Nowhere was this concern greater than in Missouri, where Democratic Party boss Tom Pendergast’s Kansas City machine regularly defeated state Supreme Court justices who ruled against its wishes, according to a 2014 report by the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS) at the University of Denver.

In 1940, Missouri voters approved a new method of appointing judges. Under that system, now called the Missouri Plan, a nominating commission screens judicial applicants based on merit. The governor then chooses a judge from a list of potential nominees presented by the commission. Newly appointed judges typically serve a relatively short first term before facing voters in a yes-or-no retention election to keep their jobs for a longer second term.

Kansas was next to adopt the Missouri Plan in 1958, after its governor resigned a few days before his term ended — and was promptly appointed to the state Supreme Court by the lieutenant governor who succeeded him. Some form of commission-based gubernatorial appointment is now in place in 22 states, including Iowa.

Merit selection is supposed to guard against the appearance of “cronyism, patronage and self-dealing” that can arise if a governor or president has no limits on nominating judges, according to a 2018 Brennan Center report.

“With merit selection, candidates move forward in the process based on their qualifications and

experience,” the 2014 IAALS report said. “In other systems, the amount of money spent in an election campaign, name recognition, and political or party connections can be the determinative factors.”

For example, Indiana law requires that state’s Judicial Nominating Commission to “consider each candidate’s legal education, legal writings, reputation in the practice of law, physical ability to do the job, financial interests (for conflict-of-interest purposes), public service activities, and any other pertinent information the commission feels is important to select the most qualified candidates.”

A 2021 paper in the Journal of Public Economics found that justices chosen in merit selection processes or nonpartisan elections produced better work — as measured by how often their rulings were favorably cited in other judges’ decisions — than justices chosen in partisan elections.

Missouri was the first state to create an independent commission and require the governor to choose from its list. In most of the 11 states with that approach, no single official or institution dominates commission appointments, and members may be appointed by various elected leaders, the state high court or the state bar association. Some states also call for geographic or demographic diversity among commissioners.

However, not all commissions are equally independent. In 11 of the 22 states where such commissions advise governors, the governor can either appoint a majority of commission members or choose a candidate who’s not on the commission’s list. In South Carolina, legislative leaders appoint a commission to screen candidates for election by lawmakers.

Four other states allow governors to nominate high court justices without consulting a commission, although some of those governors may create their own advisory panels and all of those appointees must be confirmed by lawmakers or other officials. 

Confirmation is also required in seven states with governor-controlled commissions and three states with independent commissions.

Virginia’s legislature elects justices without nominations from either the governor or a commission.

Contentious races build support for appointments

In 1999, after Wisconsin’s first million-dollar Supreme Court race, then-state Rep. Mary Hubler, D-Rice Lake, introduced a constitutional amendment to let the governor appoint high court justices with Senate confirmation, but without a nominating commission. The measure drew bipartisan support but died in committee in a Republican-controlled Assembly. After three even more expensive races, then-state Rep. Mark Gottlieb, R-Port Washington, introduced a 2009 amendment calling for appointment with confirmation and retention elections. It died in committee in a Democratic-controlled Assembly. 

Abrahamson, the state’s first female justice and the only one to win four contested elections, opposed a switch to appointment. “Elected judges are more apt to go and speak with the people about the judicial system and listen to their concerns,” the late justice said in 2009.

Former Justice Janine Geske said that she had long supported elections for the same reason: “It made justices more human and someone who people can identify with,” in contrast to more isolated federal judges. But Geske added, “I liked the elected judiciary until all this happened (with big-spending television-centered campaigns). People are so sick of these terrible ads that relate to issues that the court doesn’t decide,” mainly criminal cases in lower courts.

Now the moderate Geske said she leans toward appointment, but only if nominees are screened by a bipartisan commission and only if the governor must choose from the commission’s list.

Former Justice Dan Kelly, a conservative who lost back-to-back multimillion-dollar races in 2020 and 2023, said he also supports appointment, with Senate confirmation. Citing the Federalist Papers, Kelly said judges “must reject politics entirely” in their rulings, and appointment offers “much more protection against politics” than elections in which “campaigns have become explicitly political.”

However, Kelly — who was appointed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker to fill a vacancy — disagrees on one key point with Geske, an appointee of GOP Gov. Tommy Thompson. Kelly said the governor should be free to name someone outside a nominating commission’s list as a check on a panel that may have been “politically captured” by special interests.

Kelly’s comments echo a frequent conservative critique of the Missouri Plan — that nominating commissions may be controlled by liberal-leaning lawyers. Although some states specifically require non-lawyer representation on nominating panels, a 2019 study by the Brennan Center’s Keith found attorneys dominated most commissions, with corporate and plaintiff’s attorneys outnumbering prosecutors and public defenders. 

In Kansas — the only state where the bar association names a majority of the commission — the Republican-controlled legislature has endorsed a constitutional amendment to abolish the merit selection process and return to electing justices. If voters approve the amendment in August, lawmakers would decide whether the elections should be partisan or nonpartisan.

Although 13 states switched from elections to merit selection in the 1960s and 1970s, Utah was the last state to do so in 1985, while Rhode Island was the last state to convert its appointment process to merit selection in 1994, according to IAALS. Voters rejected merit selection of high court justices in Ohio in 1987 and in Nevada in 1972, 1988 and 2010.

Geske and Burden said it would be challenging to convince Wisconsin legislators and voters to drop judicial elections for merit selection. February’s Marquette poll found 90% support for continuing to elect justices, with relatively minor differences by party. And in 2018, voters resoundingly defeated a GOP-backed constitutional amendment to end elections for state treasurer.

“On the other hand, Republicans are having their heads handed to them in Supreme Court races, so there may be some interest” among GOP lawmakers in appointment, Burden said. Liberals have won four of the last five high court races by double-digit margins and now hold a 4-3 majority on the seven-member court. Conservatives are defending seats in 2026 and 2027 and won’t have a shot at regaining control until 2028 — or later if liberals boost their majority in April.

Governors have appointed 46 of the 81 justices who have served since statehood. Conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley, who is not seeking re-election in 2026, is the only current member of the court who was originally appointed.

Wisconsin is one of 10 states that don’t require their governors to consult a nominating commission or seek confirmation for a high court appointee. By contrast, 29 states require governors to use nominating commissions in filling vacancies, and 17 states require confirmation of justices appointed to fill vacancies. Lawmakers fill vacancies in South Carolina and Virginia, and sitting justices fill vacancies in Illinois and Louisiana.

In 2000, a Wisconsin state task force on judicial diversity endorsed the governor’s use of an advisory committee to screen candidates, but opposed writing the practice into the state constitution. It didn’t recommend creating a more independent commission or requiring the governor to choose only applicants recommended by the committee.

To keep or not to keep

Most states with independent commissions skip the confirmation process and wait for voters to decide the justices’ future in retention elections. 

Altogether, 20 states use retention elections for at least some high court races. California, Maryland and Tennessee combine confirmation and retention elections. In Illinois and Pennsylvania, justices initially chosen in partisan head-to-head elections must run in retention elections for subsequent terms. And in Montana and New Mexico, regular elections become retention elections if nobody files to challenge an elected incumbent.

“Because judges do not face opponents in retention elections, they usually do not need to raise money and conduct campaigns,” IAALS says on its website. “At the same time, special interest groups are not as active in retention elections as they are in contested elections, because a good judge’s performance speaks for itself” and even if they try to oust an incumbent, “they cannot select a replacement who fits their particular agenda.”

Nonetheless, special interests have targeted some retention elections, driving them into the multimillion-dollar range. According to the Brennan Center, that trend was accelerated by a $1 million race in 2010, when conservatives waged a successful campaign to defeat three Iowa Supreme Court justices after the seven-member court unanimously overturned the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. Retention election spending peaked at $9.9 million in 2020, when conservatives ousted a Democratic justice from the Illinois Supreme Court. 

As an alternative to incumbent justices facing voters in either head-to-head contests or retention elections, the Brennan Center advocates for a single term of 14 to 18 years, and the State Bar of Wisconsin has called for a single 16-year term, compared with Wisconsin’s current 10-year terms.

“Extensive evidence suggests that election pressures impact judicial decision-making in a wide array of cases, and that retiring justices rule differently than those seeking to keep their jobs,” the Brennan Center wrote in its 2018 report.

Among the 46 states where justices stay in office through elections or reappointment by elected officials, New York’s 14-year terms are the longest, followed by five states with 12-year terms.

Conversely, “15 years is a long time to go without any accountability to the public,” said Danielle Kalil, IAALS director of civil justice and the judiciary.

Although no state restricts justices to a single long term, the Brennan Center cited four states that found other ways to insulate them from political pressure:

• Rhode Island justices are appointed for life, like federal judges.
• Massachusetts and New Hampshire justices serve until mandatory retirement at 70. 
• Hawaii has an independent commission that decides whether to reappoint justices after an initial 10-year term.

Judging the judges

Working with former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, IAALS came up with a system for adding judicial performance reviews to the Missouri Plan, to help inform voters before retention elections. The institute now advocates for that modified plan, which it named after the late justice.

“Most Americans undergo job evaluations, and there is no reason why judges should not do the same,” IAALS says on its website. Such evaluations focus on “holding judges accountable to high quality job performance while maintaining judicial independence, by focusing on politically neutral qualities like impartiality, case administration, and clarity of communication rather than specific case outcomes.”

Alaska was the first state to use judicial performance reviews, starting in 1976. Now seven states release evaluations to voters before retention elections, five others use evaluations in reappointment decisions, and four share them only with judges. Hawaii and New Hampshire also release summaries that don’t identify specific judges. Republican-led legislatures ended evaluations in Kansas in 2011 and Tennessee in 2014.

IAALS recommends that evaluations be conducted by independent commissions, separate from nominating commissions. Kalil said evaluating commissions should survey attorneys and possibly others involved in the justice system and observe judges in courtrooms.

Cut-rate campaigns

Even if states elect high court justices, multimillion-dollar campaigns aren’t inevitable. Brennan Center data show four states with head-to-head judicial elections have escaped the national trend of high-spending races: Minnesota, Oregon, Idaho and North Dakota.

In Minnesota, candidates and their supporters spent just $637,011 to elect 10 justices in five contested and five uncontested races from 2013 through 2022 — a period when Wisconsin candidates and their allies spent almost $33 million to elect seven justices in six contested campaigns and one uncontested election, according to the Brennan Center and the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. 

Both states share a history of nonpartisan elections, but unlike Wisconsin, Minnesota elects justices in the fall for six-year terms, with no restrictions on how many seats can be on the ballot in the same election, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities research fellow Eric Ostermeier said.

Minnesota’s elections also have been far less competitive than Wisconsin’s, said Ostermeier, the author of the Smart Politics blog. Since 2000, the average margin of victory in Minnesota has been 23 percentage points across 20 contested elections, almost twice the 11-point average in 14 contested Wisconsin elections. Only one Minnesota race was decided by a single-digit margin, compared with five in Wisconsin.

Perhaps most telling, Minnesota’s incumbent justices never lost an election and the state never had a wide-open race for any seat in that time, while Wisconsin voters ousted two appointed incumbents and six elections lacked incumbents.

Regardless of whether states elect or appoint justices, “no system is perfect,” Kalil said.

Yet public sentiment could be shifting toward change, said Nick Ramos, executive director of the election watchdog Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

“People are becoming fed up and tired,” with the flood of attack ads, Ramos said. “People are becoming more receptive to doing something.”

Sick of those state Supreme Court campaign ads, Wisconsin? Here’s how other states avoid them 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.

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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will move its Milwaukee processing operations from a downtown building owned by the Milwaukee School of Engineering to a site on the Northwest Side, an ICE spokesperson said in an email to NNS.

ICE has been using the university-owned building at 310 E. Knapp St. as a processing center, a presence that has drawn weekly protests from students and community members since June. 

A spokesperson for the General Services Administration, the real estate arm of the federal government, said the GSA “remains focused on supporting this administration’s goal of optimizing the federal footprint, and providing the best workplaces for our federal agencies to meet their mission,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement to NNS.

Demonstrators have been calling on the university to cut ties with the agency.

MSOE officials say the university inherited the federal lease when it purchased the building in 2023 and does not have the legal authority to remove ICE.

Alan Madry, professor emeritus at Marquette University Law School, said there is no question the federal government has eminent domain authority in such situations. 

The federal government has the legal power to take or use property for public purposes even if a private landowner or local government objects.

A ‘phased’ transition

In a statement to NNS, ICE said the transition “will follow a phased approach to ensure a smooth and efficient process” and that the agency “remains committed to maintaining continuity of operations as the office becomes fully operational.”

Processing centers are typically used to conduct interviews and sometimes hold people for the short term rather than overnight detention. 

The ICE spokesperson did not provide a timeline for the move, but said the new location at 11925 W. Lake Park Drive will operate as a processing center, not a detention facility.

In a statement, Jeremy McGovern, spokesperson for the Milwaukee Department of Neighborhood Services, said the city has no additional inspections scheduled for the Lake Park Drive site and that the certificate of occupancy is already in place. 

Because the federal government is not subject to local zoning and permit requirements, McGovern said, the city cannot determine when the site becomes active and has limited knowledge about the federal timeline.

Protests continue

The university says it intends to use the Knapp Street building for academic purposes once ICE leaves. But Noah Dinan, a sophomore studying software engineering at the school, said the lack of clarity about the move raises troubling possibilities. 

The transition could take years, or ICE could expand its Milwaukee operations rather than relocate, said Dinan, who is a member of the university’s chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America.

The organization has circulated petitions, contacted alumni and joined the weekly Friday protests. 

Dinan also pointed to the financial incentives of leasing to ICE. 

According to the General Services Administration’s September 2025 lease inventory, the federal government is paying the university about $2.1 million per year to occupy the Knapp Street site through April 2028.

Despite the news that ICE has plans to transition from Knapp Street to its new property, Dinan said he and other students plan to continue protesting. 

“Our campaign is one of sanctuary,” Dinan said.

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Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.

ICE plans to leave Milwaukee School of Engineering facility 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.

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SUPREME COSTS: This is the second in a series of articles about how Wisconsin chooses its judges.

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court justices were concerned.

For the first time, a campaign for a high court seat had topped $5 million in spending, driven by negative television advertising that had rarely before been part of this state’s judicial races. They feared it could happen again.

That’s why all seven justices — conservatives as well as liberals — signed a 2007 letter to Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and the Legislature, calling for “realistic, meaningful public financing for Supreme Court elections” to protect the court’s reputation against “the risk … that the public may inaccurately perceive a justice as beholden to individuals or groups that contribute to his or her campaign.”

It took two tries — and two more big-spending high court elections — before a Democratic-led Legislature and Doyle enacted a public financing law in 2009. But it lasted for just one Supreme Court campaign before a Republican-controlled Legislature and GOP Gov. Scott Walker repealed it in 2011.

The justices still had their own chance to protect the court’s reputation, by strengthening the rules for when they would have to step aside from cases involving their financial backers. Instead, they adopted what might be one of the nation’s most lax recusal rules for campaign donations. 

Three of the conservative justices who had signed the 2007 letter were part of the 4-3 majority that enacted a 2010 recusal rule largely written by the major business organization that was pumping millions of dollars into conservative high court campaigns.

The stories behind that shift in recusal rules, the short-lived venture in public financing of high court races and the campaign finance laws that followed help explain how Wisconsin Supreme Court campaign spending exploded this spring to a national record of $114.2 million — almost 20 times the cost of that first big-money election 18 years earlier. That total doesn’t include billionaire Elon Musk’s controversial $30.3 million effort to hand out checks to conservative voters.

Yet the history of public financing and attempts to tighten recusal rules also offer hope for those still trying to stop the trend of ever more expensive judicial races.

Checking a box for reform

Public financing responds to a central concern that current and former justices and others voice about multimillion-dollar Supreme Court elections — the perception that big donors are buying justices who will rule in those donors’ favor when their cases reach the court.

“Why do people think this is a good use of their money? What do they think they are getting from this court?” Justice Brian Hagedorn asked about big donors in an August interview with Milwaukee’s WISN-TV. “It is in many respects a vote of no-confidence in this court — that this court is not going to be a place that’s just going to apply the law, at least all seven of us.”

Advocates of public financing believe voters and taxpayers should be a candidate’s biggest donors. Candidate campaigns receive grants from state or local governments while agreeing to limits on spending and on how much they accept from individual and organizational donors.

That wasn’t a new idea in Wisconsin in 2007. A public financing system already had been in effect for 30 years for candidates for all state offices, including Supreme Court justices. 

The Wisconsin Election Campaign Fund grew out of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, which held that limits on campaign spending violated the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech — unless candidates voluntarily agreed to limit their spending in exchange for public financing.

The Legislature responded by enacting the nation’s most comprehensive public financing law. Taxpayers decided how much the state campaign finance fund should receive each year, by checking a box on their income tax returns to designate $1 of their taxes for public financing.

That system “worked extremely well for over a decade,” according to a 2002 analysis by the nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. “The vast majority of candidates in both parties accepted public financing and ran campaigns under spending limits.”

However, the system declined for several reasons, the Democracy Campaign report found. In 1986, the Legislature stopped adjusting maximum campaign grants for inflation, leaving them frozen at that year’s levels. Also, even though the $1 checkoff didn’t increase any individual’s taxes, taxpayer interest waned, as participation fell from a peak of 19.7% in 1979 to 5% in 2002.

The third factor, according to the Democracy Campaign, was another side effect of Buckley v. Valeo, which ended limits on “issue ads” that aren’t coordinated with candidates and that don’t explicitly tell viewers to vote for or against a specific candidate. Such ads started popping up in Wisconsin elections as early as 1996. Candidates balked at spending limits when they knew they might have to respond to unlimited negative advertising by outside groups, the Democracy Campaign wrote.

Nonetheless, the 2000 Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates, then-Milwaukee County Judge Diane Sykes and then-Milwaukee Municipal Judge Louis Butler, still used public financing in their campaigns. After Sykes won, one of her advisers complained that the spending limits “killed the drama of a truly exciting matchup.” However, the candidates themselves attributed the drama-free race to their own commitment to civility, with Butler reflecting that “media coverage … didn’t come because we weren’t being nasty to one another.”

That would change after the conservative Sykes became a federal appeals court judge and Doyle appointed the liberal Butler to replace her. Incensed by a product liability decision written by Butler, the state’s largest business group, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, started spending millions of dollars to elect conservatives to the high court.

In the first WMC-funded campaign in 2007, now-Justice Annette Ziegler defeated liberal attorney Linda Clifford at a cost more than four times the previous record of $1.4 million. The high price tag and flood of negative advertising spurred calls for reform.

Doyle proposed more extensive public financing for Supreme Court campaigns. Ziegler and Butler joined the rest of their colleagues in backing the concept, without signing on to the specifics of Doyle’s proposal. The bill passed in the Democratic-led Senate but died in committee in the Republican-controlled Assembly.

Just as the justices feared, Butler’s 2008 bid for a full term sparked an even more expensive and mean-spirited contest than Ziegler’s 2007 race. Conservative Michael Gableman defeated Butler, the court’s first Black justice, in a $6 million campaign that drew accusations of racist and misleading advertising.

Diane Diel, then president of the State Bar of Wisconsin, warned lawmakers that “the infusion of such large amounts into a judicial campaign poses a threat to both judicial neutrality and public trust in the justice system.”

The Democratic-controlled Legislature passed a public financing bill, and Doyle signed it into law as the Impartial Justice Act in 2009. Abiding by the new law, both 2011 Supreme Court candidates, conservative Justice David Prosser and liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg, accepted state grants and held to spending limits.

But the candidates’ treasuries accounted for less than a quarter of the $5.9 million spent in a campaign supercharged by controversy over Republican legislation that stripped most public-sector workers of nearly all collective bargaining rights. Anticipating that legal challenges eventually would reach the high court, conservative interests outspent unions on issue ads, $2.7 million to $1.6 million, in a race so close that Prosser won only after a recount.

Prosser’s victory maintained the conservative court majority that later upheld the bargaining legislation known as Act 10. Meanwhile, the GOP-led Legislature and Walker repealed the Impartial Justice Act and dismantled the Wisconsin Election Campaign Fund shortly after the spring 2011 election.

Back to public cash?

State Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, is now drafting a bill to revive the Impartial Justice Act, which she calls “really important to preserving judicial integrity.”

Roys, who is running for governor, said one major difference in her proposal will be the size of the campaign grants. She’s considering amounts 10 times higher than what she called the “laughably low” original grants of $100,000 for primary candidates and $300,000 for general election candidates. Grants of $1 million in the primary and $3 million in the general election would exceed the campaign treasuries of any high court candidate before the 2023 race, which at the time set a national spending record of $50.4 million.

“It can’t be joke money or nobody will do it,” Roys said.

North Carolina’s first-in-the-nation system of paying for state supreme and appellate court campaigns met the same fate as Wisconsin’s original Impartial Justice Act in 2013, after Republicans won control of that state’s legislative and executive branches. That leaves New Mexico as the only state funding judicial campaigns with taxpayer dollars.

Instead of setting specific grant levels, New Mexico uses a formula based on the number of registered voters eligible to vote in each partisan primary or general election and on whether the election is contested or uncontested, with limited individual donations supplementing public grants. With no primary contests and four general election candidates for two contested seats, the state fund provided $1.1 million of the $1.2 million spent in 2022, up slightly from 2020, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Of the other 13 states that offer public campaign financing for at least some elections, 11 appoint high court justices; Michigan’s system applies only to gubernatorial races; and Minnesota’s system excludes Supreme Court candidates.

Both the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and the Brennan Center advocate for public financing.

Conflict over conflicts of interest

Public financing doesn’t stop special interests from spending big on “issue ads” or through independent expenditures on ads that clearly state who they favor or oppose.

That outside spending has exceeded the cash spent directly by the candidates in 10 of the last 12 contested Supreme Court campaigns — by ratios as high as 4 to 1 in 2008 and 3 to 1 in 2011.

The only exceptions were two elections in which liberal incumbents trounced conservative circuit judges: then-Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson in 2009 and then-Justice Ann Walsh Bradley in 2015.

In Wisconsin’s first two multimillion-dollar Supreme Court contests, WMC’s political action committee (PAC) spent $2.2 million on issue ads backing Ziegler in 2007 and $1.8 million on issue ads backing Gableman in 2008, according to Wisconsin Democracy Campaign estimates.

That triggered disputes over whether those two justices should step away from cases involving WMC. Ziegler refused to recuse herself from one 2007 case in which WMC had filed a friend-of-the-court brief, but a month later recused from another case brought partly by the Wisconsin Realtors Association, which had directly contributed the then-maximum $8,625 to her campaign.

Over the next two years, justices fielded four petitions asking them to clarify recusal rules. The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin and former Justice William Bablitch urged the court to set thresholds for when donations or outside spending by a litigant or attorney would require a justice to recuse. Conversely, WMC and the Realtors Association called for rules that would not require justices to recuse based only on how much a litigant or attorney had spent supporting their campaigns.

While the Wisconsin justices considered those petitions, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on a case in which coal company CEO Don Blankenship had spent $3 million supporting candidate Brent Benjamin’s 2004 West Virginia Supreme Court campaign — more than all of Benjamin’s other backers combined. Benjamin narrowly won and cast the deciding vote to overturn a $50 million judgment against Blankenship’s company after refusing to recuse himself.

In their 5-4 decision tossing the state court’s ruling, the federal justices held that the circumstances were so extreme that they created “a serious risk of actual bias” that required Benjamin to recuse. However, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s 2009 opinion added that few other cases would likely meet the same standard.

Against that background, the Wisconsin Supreme Court voted in 2010 to deny the LWV and Bablitch petitions and adopt verbatim the WMC and Realtors Association rules recommendations. Conservative Justices Patience Roggensack, Gableman, Prosser and Ziegler backed the new rules, while liberals Abrahamson and Bradley and moderate Justice Patrick Crooks dissented.

“Neither Justice Ziegler nor any other justice recused from this rulemaking process, despite the financial backing they had received from the parties requesting the rules,” the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative recounted in a report.

Explaining the new rules, the court majority argued that disqualifying judges based on legal campaign donations “would create the impression that receipt of a contribution automatically impairs a judge’s integrity.”

Also, because Supreme Court justices aren’t replaced when they recuse, the majority wrote, “involuntary recusal … has greater policy implications” than in lower courts because it changes how many and which justices are deciding a case. On Wisconsin’s closely divided seven-member high court, the withdrawal of a single justice from the majority bloc can often create a 3-3 deadlock.

Nonetheless, the State Democracy Research Initiative called the Wisconsin rules “unusual.” Former Justice Janine Geske agreed the change was a step backward.

By contrast, several states and the American Bar Association’s Model Code of Judicial Conduct “require judges to recuse when a party or a party’s lawyer have contributed more than a specific amount to a judge’s campaign,” according to the State Democracy Research Initiative. A few other states call for recusal based on campaign contributions but don’t set a specific dollar limit. And most states leave recusal up to judges but don’t exclude contributions as a reason to do so.

Both recusal rules and outside campaign spending were in the spotlight again in 2015.

A case before the high court turned on a state law barring independent expenditure groups and issue ad organizations from coordinating with candidates’ campaigns. Act 10 had triggered an unprecedented recall against Walker. After the Republican governor’s victory in that 2012 recall election, several district attorneys jointly opened what was supposed to be a secret John Doe investigation into whether his campaign had illegally coordinated with groups that funded issue ads supporting him.

Some of the same organizations under scrutiny had also spent millions on issue ads in support of four conservative justices. But Prosser and Gableman refused to recuse themselves from the case challenging the probe. 

Howard Schweber, professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called the conservative justices’ decision not to recuse “a truly shocking situation.” By contrast, Ann Walsh Bradley recused herself because her son worked with one of the attorneys involved.

With its four-member conservative majority intact, the high court ruled the prohibition on coordinating with issue ad groups was unconstitutional, ending the investigation of Walker. Legislative Republicans promptly wrote the court’s decision into a 2015 campaign finance law, which Walker signed.

At the time, Wisconsin and Florida were the only states that allowed issue ads to be coordinated with a candidate’s campaign, said Jay Heck, executive director of the government reform group Common Cause Wisconsin. Weak coordination rules like Wisconsin’s “effectively allow wealthy special interests to bankroll candidates,” sidestepping limits on direct donations to campaigns and opening the door to “corruption and the appearance of corruption,” said Elizabeth Shimek, senior legal counsel for campaign finance at the Campaign Legal Center.

Strike two for recusal reform

Concern about Wisconsin’s lax recusal standards would only grow. In 2017, 54 retired judges — including Geske and Butler — petitioned the high court to toughen recusal rules.

When the 2010 rules were adopted, the petition noted, the majority contended that direct donations were too small to influence justices because the 2009 Impartial Justice Act had sliced contribution caps from $10,000 for individuals and $8,650 for political action committees to $1,000 for each. But the 2015 campaign finance law boosted the donation limits to $20,000 for individuals and $18,000 for PACs.

Similarly, the petition said, the 2010 majority had argued that judicial candidates couldn’t be held responsible for groups making independent expenditures and running issue ads because at the time they were legally barred from coordinating with those groups. But the coordination rules for issue ads also had changed with the 2015 law and the John Doe decision that preceded it.

The retired judges asked for a rule that would require litigants and their attorneys to disclose their contributions to the judges hearing their cases at each level. Supreme Court justices would be required to recuse if they received contributions or benefited from outside spending of more than $10,000, with lower amounts for lower court judges.

And to address the high court majority’s concern about recusal leaving the bench short, the retired judges called for a constitutional amendment that would allow Court of Appeals judges to sit in for justices who recuse themselves.

But the Supreme Court rejected the petition on a 5-2 vote along ideological lines. Most of the conservative justices in the majority said they trusted judges to decide when to recuse, while Justice Rebecca Bradley argued that required recusal would disenfranchise the voters who elected a justice.

The issue could come up again now that liberal Jill Karofsky is chief justice. Speaking at a WisPolitics event in October, she said she is committed to holding an “open” and “transparent” hearing about establishing new recusal rules for the court.

State law sets recusal standards for some conflicts of interest, but not campaign contributions, according to the State Democracy Research Initiative.

The Brennan Center still advocates nationwide for the kind of recusal rules that the retired judges supported, said Douglas Keith, deputy director of the center’s judiciary program. However, Keith added that he wasn’t aware of any state that requires litigants to disclose contributions in court.

Another Brennan Center recommendation urges independent review of recusal motions. As of 2016, Wisconsin was one of 35 states that allow high court justices to decide whether to recuse themselves, while Michigan was among the 15 states where someone else rules on recusal, according to the center’s most recent report on that question.

Power shift prompts recusal reversal 

Efforts to redraw legislative and congressional districts in this decade have spurred new recusal controversies — and turned the tables on which party backs recusal.

When Republicans took full control of the executive and legislative branches after the 2010 elections, they drew maps that guaranteed their party a comfortable majority in both the Assembly and Senate, even if state voters were split 50-50, in what experts called one of the nation’s most extreme examples of gerrymandering.

A decade later, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers clashed with legislative Republicans over how to redraw the maps after the 2020 Census, throwing the issue into the courts. With virtually no legal precedent, justices voted 4-3 to accept the GOP argument that court-approved maps should change as little as possible from the 2011 gerrymander.

Liberal Janet Protasiewicz, then a Milwaukee County judge, called those 2021 maps “rigged” during her successful 2023 high court race. Shortly after Protasiewicz took office, flipping the court to a liberal majority, voting rights groups filed suit to overturn the legislative maps.

Citing Protasiewicz’s previous comments and her heavy Democratic financial support — which amounted to 59% of her campaign treasury — Republicans demanded that she recuse from the redistricting case. However, neither state law nor judicial rules require judges to recuse because of their statements, as long as they have not specifically promised to rule in a certain way, the State Democracy Research Initiative noted.

Also, the $9.9 million Democratic contribution to Protasiewicz was proportionately less than the $2.6 million that the conservative Alliance for Reform dropped on issue ads supporting Rebecca Bradley in 2016, the State Democracy Research Initiative’s report pointed out. Bradley didn’t recuse when an alliance leader was a party to the original redistricting litigation.

Protasiewicz didn’t recuse either when justices voted 4-3 along ideological lines to reverse the least-change doctrine and order new maps.

But Protasiewicz declined to participate in one of the liberal-led court’s three otherwise unanimous rulings rejecting challenges to the 2021 congressional maps. Two more challenges are still pending.

If the issue reaches the high court again, the panel will include new Justice Susan Crawford, whose campaign last spring received $11.8 million from Democrats while Republicans were pumping $9.7 million into her conservative opponent Brad Schimel’s race.

Shining light on dark money

Although donations to parties and party donations to candidates are unlimited under the 2015 campaign finance law, they are publicly disclosed, along with the parties’ donors’ names. Issue ad and independent expenditure groups also aren’t limited in how much they take in or spend. And issue ad groups don’t have to report either donations or spending, a practice known as “dark money” for its lack of transparency.

Roys and Rep. Amaad Rivera-Wagner, D-Green Bay, are working separately on campaign finance legislation that would set limits on donations to those organizations and require issue ad groups to disclose their donors, as parties and independent expenditure committees already do. Roys said her bill would focus specifically on judicial elections, while Rivera-Wagner’s bill would apply to all elections.

“Wisconsin is becoming the centerpiece for billionaires trying to influence elections,” Rivera-Wagner said. “This is just unacceptable.”

Both Roys and Rivera-Wagner said they would like to go further, but could be limited by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which removed limits on corporate and union spending on issue ads and independent expenditures, and by the GOP legislative majority’s support for Wisconsin’s 2015 campaign finance law. Another federal court case, SpeechNow.org v. FEC, struck down federal limits on donations to PACs.

In that legal environment, holding down spending on Supreme Court campaigns could remain challenging as long as Wisconsin remains among the 22 states that elect justices.

Next: Should Supreme Court justices be appointed?

Wisconsin Watch reporter Brittany Carloni contributed to this report.

Unlimited donations, weak recusal rules led to record Wisconsin Supreme Court spending 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.

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The Wisconsin Supreme Court has agreed to hear a lawsuit challenging five Wisconsin sheriffs’ practices of holding detainees in their jail for handoffs to ICE.

The ACLU filed the lawsuit in September on behalf of the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera. It names sheriff’s offices in Brown, Kenosha, Marathon, Sauk and Walworth counties as respondents. 

All five sheriffs’ offices honor ICE detainers —  nonbinding requests that a law enforcement agency assist ICE in taking custody of a person suspected of being in the country illegally by holding an inmate in a jail up to 48 hours past the person’s scheduled release. The local law enforcement agency can then pass the detainee directly to ICE officers.

The lawsuit argues that the detainers qualify as an arrest and that state statutes prohibit law enforcement agencies from making arrests based on ICE’s administrative warrants.

While most Wisconsin sheriffs’ offices honor ICE detainers, the lawsuit claims that five named offices received roughly a quarter of all detainers issued to Wisconsin sheriffs’ offices between January and July of this year. 

The sheriff’s offices have differing relationships with ICE. Brown and Sauk counties, for instance, also contract with ICE to hold immigrant detainees in their jails, meaning a person could remain in the same jail after entering ICE custody. Kenosha County has no such contract, but it does participate in a federal grant program that partially reimburses local law enforcement agencies for incarceration costs in exchange for data on undocumented inmates. 

ICE records list more than 130 arrests at county jails in Wisconsin between January and July of this year. Nearly 40% of those arrested were awaiting a ruling in their first criminal case.

In its initial petition, Voces de la Frontera urged the Supreme Court to immediately take up the case as a statewide concern. The court’s order, published on Wednesday afternoon, allows the plaintiffs to skip the lower courts entirely.

Liberal justices have a 4-3 majority on the court. At least four unnamed justices voted to immediately accept the case. Justices Annette Ziegler and Rebecca Bradley, both conservatives, dissented. Justice Brian Hagedorn, who often votes with conservatives, discussed the process in an opinion that did not specify his vote.

“When this court grants review in a case, we almost always let our grant order proceed without comment or dissent,” he wrote, later adding: “Even if some of my colleagues publicly record their dissent, as in this case, that does not necessarily reveal which justices voted for or against the petition in closed conference.”

Voces de la Frontera has 30 days to file a brief in the case. The court has not yet scheduled oral arguments in the case.

None of the five sheriffs’ offices named in the lawsuit immediately responded to requests for comment.

“We are reviewing the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s order and evaluating our next steps in this litigation,” Milwaukee attorney Sam Hall, who is representing all five sheriffs, wrote in an email Wednesday evening. “We are confident, however, that Wisconsin sheriffs who honor ICE detainers do so fully within the bounds of Wisconsin law and the federal legal framework governing immigration enforcement.”

Wisconsin Supreme Court to weigh sheriffs’ cooperation with ICE 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.

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The state of Wisconsin generally cannot consider U.S. citizenship or national origin in hiring for state jobs.

Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany of northern Wisconsin, who is running for governor in 2026, said Nov. 17 he would ensure state jobs “go to Americans.”

His congressional and campaign offices did not respond to requests for comment. 

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that states cannot restrict public employment to citizens.

Both public and private employers are generally barred by federal law from treating people differently based on national origin or ethnicity.

Wisconsin laws prohibit discrimination by public or private employers based on national origin or ancestry.

The state’s hiring handbook says the state can hire only people legally in the U.S., but “shall not refuse to hire aliens based on their foreign appearance, accent, language, name, national origin, citizenship, or intended U.S. citizenship.”

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

Sources

• FindLaw: Sugarman v. Dougall 413 U.S. 634 (1973)
• Cornell University Legal Information Institute: Amdt14.S1.5.3.2 Alienage Classification
• Wisconsin Statutes: State Employment Relations
• U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: National Origin Discrimination
• Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development: Discrimination because of Race, Color, National Origin, and Ancestry
• Wisconsin Personnel Management Division: Wisconsin Human Resources Handbook

Can Wisconsin require state jobs go only to Americans? 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.

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For decades, corn has reigned over American agriculture. It sprawls across 90 million acres — about the size of Montana — and goes into everything from livestock feed and processed foods to the ethanol blended into most of the nation’s gasoline. 

But a growing body of research reveals that America’s obsession with corn has a steep price: The fertilizer used to grow it is warming the planet and contaminating water.

Corn is essential to the rural economy and to the world’s food supply, and researchers say the problem isn’t the corn itself. It’s how we grow it. 

Corn farmers rely on heavy fertilizer use to sustain today’s high yields. And when that nitrogen breaks down in the soil, it releases nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Producing nitrogen fertilizer also emits large amounts of carbon dioxide, adding to its climate footprint.

Agriculture accounts for more than 10% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and corn uses more than two-thirds of all nitrogen fertilizer nationwide — making it the leading driver of agricultural nitrous oxide emissions, studies show.

The corn and ethanol industries insist that rapid growth in ethanol — which now consumes more than 40% of the U.S. corn crop —  is a net environmental benefit, and they strongly dispute research suggesting otherwise.

Since 2000, U.S. corn production has surged almost 50%, further adding to the crop’s climate impact. 

Yet the environmental costs of corn rarely make headlines or factor into political debates. Much of the dynamic traces back to federal policy — and to the powerful corn and ethanol lobby that helped shape it. 

The Renewable Fuel Standard, passed in the mid 2000s, required that gasoline be blended with ethanol, a biofuel that in the United States comes almost entirely from corn. That mandate drove up demand and prices for corn, spurring farmers to plant more of it. 

Many plant corn year after year on the same land. The practice, called “continuous corn,” demands massive amounts of nitrogen fertilizer and drives especially high nitrous oxide emissions. 

At the same time, federal subsidies make it more lucrative to grow corn than to diversify. Taxpayers have covered more than $50 billion in corn insurance premiums over the past 30 years, according to federal data compiled by the Environmental Working Group.

Researchers say proven conservation steps — such as planting rows of trees, shrubs and grasses in corn fields — could sharply reduce these emissions. But the Trump administration has eliminated many of the incentives that helped farmers try such practices. 

Experts say it all raises a larger question: If America’s most widely planted crop is worsening climate change, shouldn’t we begin growing it a different way?

How corn took over America

Corn has been a staple of U.S. agriculture for centuries, first domesticated by Native Americans and later used by European immigrants as a versatile crop for food and animal feed. Its production really took off in the 2000s after federal mandates and incentives helped turn much of America’s corn crop into ethanol.

Corn’s dominance — and the emissions that come with it — didn’t happen by accident. It was built through a high-dollar lobbying campaign that continues today.

In the late 1990s, America’s corn farmers were in trouble. Prices had cratered amid a global grain glut and the Asian financial crisis. A 1999 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis said crop prices had hit “rock bottom.”

In 2001 and 2002, the federal government gave corn farmers and ethanol producers a boost — first through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bioenergy Program, which paid ethanol producers to increase their use of farm commodities for fuel. Then the 2002 Farm Bill created programs that continue to support ethanol and other renewable energy.

Corn growers soon after mounted an all-out campaign in Washington. Their goal: persuade Congress to require gasoline to be blended with ethanol. State and national grower groups lobbied relentlessly, pitching ethanol as a way to cut greenhouse gasses, reduce oil dependence and revive rural economies.

“We got down to a couple of votes in Congress, and the corn growers were united like never before,” recalled Jon Doggett, then the industry’s chief lobbyist, in an article published by the National Corn Growers Association. “I started receiving calls from Capitol Hill saying, ‘Would you have your growers stop calling us? We are with you.’ I had not seen anything like it before and haven’t seen anything like it since.”

Their persistence paid off. In 2005, Congress created the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which requires that a certain amount of ethanol be blended into U.S. gasoline each year. Two years later, lawmakers expanded it further. The policy transformed the market: The amount of corn used for ethanol domestically has more than tripled in the past 20 years.

When demand for corn spiked as a result of the RFS, it pushed up prices worldwide, said Tim Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. The result, Searchinger said, is that more land around the world got cleared to grow corn. That, in turn, resulted in more emissions. 

That lobbying brought clout. “King Corn” became a political force, courted by presidential hopefuls and protected by both parties. Since 2010, national corn and ethanol trade groups have spent more than $55 million on lobbying and millions more on political donations, according to campaign finance records analyzed by Floodlight. 

In 2024 alone, those trade groups spent twice as much on lobbying as the National Rifle Association. Major industry players — Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill and ethanol giant POET among them — have poured even more into Washington, ensuring the sector’s voice remains one of the loudest in U.S. agriculture.

Now those same groups are pushing for the next big prize: expanding higher-ethanol gasoline blends and positioning ethanol-based jet fuel as aviation’s “low-carbon” future.

Research undercuts ethanol’s clean fuel claims

Corn and ethanol trade groups didn’t make their officials available for interviews.

But on their websites and in their literature, they have promoted corn ethanol as a climate-friendly fuel. 

The Renewable Fuels Association cites government and university research that finds burning ethanol reduces greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 40-50% compared with gasoline. The ethanol industry says the climate critics have it wrong — and that most of the corn used for fuel comes from better yields and smarter farming, not from plowing up new land. The amount of fertilizer required to produce a bushel of corn has dropped sharply in recent decades, they say.

“Ethanol reduces carbon emissions, removing the carbon equivalent of 12 million cars from the road each year,” according to the Renewable Fuels Association.

Growth Energy, a major ethanol trade group, said in a written statement that U.S. farmers and biofuel producers are “constantly finding new ways to make their operations more efficient and more environmentally beneficial,” using things like cover crops to reduce their carbon footprint.

But some research tells a different story.

A recent Environmental Working Group report finds that the way corn is grown in much of the Midwest — with the same fields planted in corn year after year — carries a heavy climate cost.

Research in 2022 by agricultural land use expert Tyler Lark and colleagues links the Renewable Fuel Standard to expanded corn cultivation, heavier fertilizer use, worsening water pollution and increased emissions. Scientists typically convert greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide and methane into their carbon dioxide equivalents — or carbon intensity — so their warming impacts can be compared on the same scale.

“The carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the RFS is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24% higher,” the authors concluded.

Lark’s research has been disputed by scientists at Argonne National Laboratory, Purdue University and the University of Illinois, who published a formal rebuttal arguing the study relied on “questionable assumptions” and faulty modeling — a charge Lark’s team has rejected.

A 2017 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the RFS was unlikely to meet its greenhouse gas goals because the U.S. relies predominantly on corn ethanol and produces relatively little of the cleaner, advanced biofuels made from waste. 

The problem isn’t just emissions, researchers say. Corn ethanol requires millions of acres that could instead be used for food crops or more efficient energy sources. One recent study found that solar panels can generate as much energy as corn ethanol on roughly 3% of the land. 

“It’s just a terrible use of land,” Searchinger, the Princeton researcher, said of ethanol. “And you can’t solve climate change if you’re going to make such terrible use of land.”

Most of the country’s top crop isn’t feeding people. More than 40% of U.S. corn goes to ethanol. A similar amount is used to feed livestock, and just 12% ends up as food or in other uses.

As corn production rises, so have emissions 

Globally, corn production doubled from 2000 to 2021. 

That growth has been fueled by fertilizer, which emits nitrous oxide that can linger in the atmosphere for more than a century. That eats away at the ozone layer, which blocks most of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation.

Global emissions have soared alongside corn production. Between 1980 and 2020, nitrous oxide emissions from human activity climbed 40%, the Global Carbon project found. 

In the United States, nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture in 2022 were equal to roughly 262 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to the EPA’s inventory of greenhouse gas emissions. That’s equivalent to putting almost 56 million passenger cars on the road.

The biggest increases are coming straight from the Corn Belt.

Ethanol’s climate footprint isn’t the only concern. The nitrogen used to grow corn and other crops is also a key source of drinking water pollution.

According to a new report by the Alliance for the Great Lakes and Clean Wisconsin, more than 90% of nitrate contamination in Wisconsin’s groundwater is linked to agricultural sources — mostly synthetic fertilizer and manure. 

The same analysis estimates that in 2022, farmers applied more than 16 million pounds of nitrogen beyond what crops needed, sending runoff into wells, streams and other water systems.

For families like Tyler Frye’s, that hits close to home. In 2022, Frye and his wife moved into a new home in the rural village of Casco, Wisconsin, about 20 miles east of Green Bay. A free test soon afterward found their well water had nitrate levels more than twice the EPA’s safe limit. “We were pretty shocked,” he said. 

Frye installed a reverse-osmosis system in the basement and still buys bottled water for his wife, who is breastfeeding their daughter, born in July.

One likely culprit, he suspects, are the cornfields less than 200 yards from his home. 

“Crops like corn require a lot of nitrogen,” he said. “A lot of that stuff, I assume, is getting into the well water and surface water.”

When he watches manure or fertilizer being spread on nearby fields, he said, one question nags him: “Where does that go?”

What cleaner corn could look like

Reducing corn’s climate footprint is possible — but the farmers trying to do it are swimming against the policy tide.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, backed by President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans, strips out the provisions of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that had rewarded farmers for climate-friendly practices.

And in April, Trump’s USDA canceled the $3 billion Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative, a grant program designed to promote farming and forestry practices to improve soil and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The agency said that the program’s administrative costs meant too little money was reaching farmers, while Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins dismissed it as part of the “green new scam.” 

University of Iowa professor Silvia Secchi said the rollback of the Climate-Smart program has already given farmers “cold feet” about adopting conservation practices. “The impact of this has been devastating,” said Secchi, a natural resources economist who teaches at the university’s School of Earth, Environment and Sustainability.

Research shows what’s possible if farmers had support. In its recent report, the Environmental Working Group found that four proven conservation practices — including planting trees, shrubs and hedgerows in corn fields — could make a measurable difference. 

Implementing those practices on just 4% of continuous corn acres across Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin would cut total greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of taking more than 850,000 gasoline cars off the road, EWG found.

Despite setbacks at the federal level, some farmers are already showing what a more climate-friendly Corn Belt could look like.

In northern Iowa, Wendy Johnson farms 1,200 acres of corn and soybeans with her father. On 130 of those acres, she’s trying something different: She’s planting fruit and nut trees, organic grains, shrubs and other plants that need little or no nitrogen fertilizer. 

“The more perennials we can have on the ground, the better it is for the climate,” she said. 

Across the rest of the farm, they enrich the soil by rotating crops and planting cover crops. They’ve also converted less productive parts of the fields into “prairie strips” — bands of prairie grass that store carbon and require no fertilizer. 

Under the now-canceled Climate-Smart grant program, they were supposed to receive technical assistance and about $20,000 a year to expand those practices. The grant program was terminated before they got any of the money.

“It’s hard to take risks on your own,” Johnson said. “That’s where federal support really helps. Because agriculture is a high-risk occupation.”

The economics still favor business as usual. Johnson knows that many Midwestern corn growers feel pressure to maximize yields, keeping them hooked on corn — and nitrogen fertilizer. 

“I think a lot of farmers around here are very allergic to trees,” she joked. 

In southeast Iowa, sixth-generation farmer Levi Lyle, who mixes organic and conventional methods across 290 acres, uses a three-year rotation, extensive cover crops and a technique called roller-crimping — flattening rye each spring to create a mulch that suppresses weeds, feeds the soil and reduces fertilizer needs. 

“The roller crimping of cover crops is a huge, huge opportunity to sequester more carbon, improve soil health, save money on chemicals and still get a similar yield,” he said.

But farmers get few government incentives to take such climate-friendly steps, Lyle said. “There is a lack of seriousness about supporting farmers to implement these new practices,” he said. 

And without federal programs to offset the risk, the innovations that Lyle and Johnson are trying remain exceptions — not the norm.

Many farmers still see prairie strips or patches of trees as a waste, said Luke Gran, whose company helps Iowa farmers establish perennials.

“My eyes do not lie,” Gran said. “I have not seen extensive change to cover cropping or tillage across the broad acreage of this state that I love.”

The next corn boom?

Despite mounting research about corn’s climate costs, industry groups are pushing for policies to boost ethanol demand. 

One big priority: pushing a bill to require that new cars are able to run on gas with more ethanol than what’s commonly sold today.

Corn and biofuel trade groups have also been pressing Democrats and Republicans in Congress for legislation to pave the way for ethanol-based jet fuel. While use of such “sustainable” aviation fuel is still in its early stages domestically, corn and biofuel associations have made developing a market for it a top policy priority. 

Secchi, the Iowa professor, says it’s easy to see why ethanol producers are trying to expand their market: The growth in electric vehicles threatens long-term gasoline sales.

Researchers warn that producing enough ethanol-based jet fuel could trigger major land use shifts. A 2024 World Resources Institute analysis found that meeting the federal goal of 35 billion gallons of ethanol jet fuel would require about 114 million acres of corn — roughly 20% more corn acreage than the U.S. already plants for all purposes. That surge in demand, the authors concluded, would push up food prices and worsen hunger.

Secchi calls that scenario a climate and land use “disaster.” Large-scale use of ethanol-based aviation fuel, she said, would mean clearing even more land and pouring on even more nitrogen fertilizer, driving up greenhouse gas emissions. 

“The result,” she said, “would be essentially to enshrine this dysfunctional system that we created.”

This story is from Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action. Sign up for Floodlight’s newsletter here.

Corn’s clean energy promise is clashing with its climate footprint 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.

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SUPREME COSTS: This is the first in a series of articles about how Wisconsin chooses its judges.

A quarter-century ago, the total cost of every state Supreme Court race in the country reached an unprecedented $45.6 million.That figure was so high that it prompted the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University to warn that “a new and ominous politics of judicial elections” posed a “threat to fair and impartial justice.”

Yet in 2025, spending on a single Wisconsin Supreme Court seat exceeded $114.2 million.

That doesn’t include a legally questionable $30.3 million voter giveaway by billionaire Elon Musk.

The $144.5 million spent on one seat in Wisconsin was even more than the $100.8 million spent on all other state high court contests in the nation in 2021 and 2022 combined.

At the same time, this state’s two major political parties have become the largest donors — and in some cases, the majority donors — to the candidates for an officially nonpartisan office.

And the last two justices elected to Wisconsin’s highest court received most of their individual campaign contributions from people who don’t live in Wisconsin.

State Supreme Court races have become everything they were never meant to be — highly partisan, astronomically expensive national political battles in which the candidates’ ideologies overshadow their qualifications for an office that requires them to swear an oath to “administer justice … faithfully and impartially.”

Several factors are driving the massive spending in Wisconsin, one of 22 states that elect justices rather than appoint them. Reducing the influence of those factors would require changing the state constitution, state law or judicial rules of conduct. The factors include:

• Hot-button issues that turn on ideological control of the high court, such as abortion and public employee collective bargaining rights.
• Wisconsin’s narrow political divide in its electorate, state government and the high court itself, plus its role as an Electoral College swing state.
• Campaign finance laws and federal court rulings that have loosened limits on money in politics.
• Lax rules for when justices must recuse themselves from cases involving people and organizations that have spent huge sums to elect them.
• Holding court elections in the spring, which grew out of the state’s earliest yearnings for a nonpartisan judiciary but now eliminates competition against campaigns for most other major offices for donations and the public’s attention.

Some of those factors have pushed high court races in other states into the seven- or even eight-figure range, but only Wisconsin — the first to see nine-figure spending on a court contest — has all of them.

“It’s the whole picture that makes us so obscene,” said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, which advocates for transparent and accountable government.

Wisconsin Watch estimates the final total was $114.2 million — more than double the previous national record of $50.4 million for high court races — also set in this state, only two years earlier.

And that total doesn’t include the largest and most controversial expenditures of the spring campaign: Musk’s payments of $100 each to Wisconsin voters who signed a petition against “activist judges,” plus $1 million checks to three signers. Add in that $30.3 million effort and the race’s price tag jumps to $144.5 million.

The 2025 Supreme Court election was the fourth-most expensive campaign for any office in Wisconsin history, behind only the 2022 and 2024 U.S. Senate contests and the 2022 governor’s race.

“As politics has grown more intense, more polarized and more expensive, high court election campaigns now resemble the worst of a presidential primary, complete with attack ads, dark money and presidential endorsements,” Brennan Center President Michael Waldman wrote in a March analysis. “All this hardly seems the best way to induce public trust in the courts.”

Since the era of multimillion-dollar Supreme Court campaigns came to Wisconsin in 2007, candidates and special-interest groups have spent $217.2 million on 12 contested races, with the 2023 and 2025 elections accounting for three-quarters of that total, excluding the petition spending, based on information compiled by the campaign finance watchdog Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. 

Voters could be in for more of the same, facing a high court election every spring for the next four years. And even if the 2026 race doesn’t break records, it’s guaranteed to be another multimillion-dollar contest.

The liberal candidate, Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor, reported in July that she had raised $583,933 in the first six weeks of her campaign, ahead of now-Justice Susan Crawford’s record-breaking 2025 pace. By late August, Taylor’s campaign manager said the former Democratic state legislator had taken in more than $1 million.

After conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley announced she wouldn’t seek a second 10-year term, Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar entered the race. Spending topped $1 million in the conservative Lazar’s successful 2022 bid to unseat incumbent Lori Kornblum. That was almost certainly Wisconsin’s second-most expensive appellate court race, behind a $1.6 million contest for another seat in the same southeastern district in 2021.

High costs for high courts

Although Wisconsin now outpaces every other state in Supreme Court campaign costs, it wasn’t an early leader in the national trend of divisive multimillion-dollar contests.

In its 2002 report, the Brennan Center called 2000 “a watershed year for fundraising and spending in state supreme court elections,” as the total raised by candidates nationwide leaped 61%, from $28.3 million in 1998 to $45.6 million in 2000, led by Alabama, Michigan, Ohio and Illinois.

Much of that money was spent on “television advertising — especially by political parties and interest groups — that has grown increasingly negative and controversial, and in some cases fallen far beneath the level of dignity most Americans associate with their judicial system,” the report said.

That kind of “strident, negative television advertising” characterized Wisconsin’s first million-dollar contest in 1999, then-Rep. Mary Hubler, D-Rice Lake, complained at the time. Liberal Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson won reelection against conservative challenger Sharren Rose in a race that cost $1.4 million.

Before then, high court candidates in the 1990s typically spent around $250,000 each, which “looks like a pittance” now, former Justice Janine Geske said in an interview. Howard Schweber, professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called those earlier races “gentlemanly” and “low-key affairs.”

The low-key tone returned for the 2000 high court race. Justice Diane Sykes, a conservative appointed by Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, and liberal challenger Louis Butler kept their pledges to run positive campaigns. Both scrupulously avoided commenting on any issues that might come before the court. They spent a total of $430,963, with both accepting public financing that limited their expenditures.

But that contest and the similarly civil 2003 race turned out to be only a temporary reprieve. After Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle appointed Butler to a vacant seat, Butler wrote a landmark 2005 product liability decision, holding that a lead paint poisoning victim could sue product manufacturers even if he couldn’t figure out which company was responsible.

That 4-2 ruling triggered a sharp reaction from Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, which spent an estimated $2.2 million to ensure conservative Annette Ziegler defeated liberal Linda Clifford in 2007. The race cost $5.8 million, with conservatives outspending liberals almost 2.5 to 1.

The following year’s contest promptly broke the new record as spending jumped to almost $6 million in conservative Michael Gableman’s successful bid to oust Butler. WMC dropped an estimated $1.8 million in support of Gableman as conservatives again outspent liberals, $3.2 million to $2.7 million.

Gableman’s victory created a solid conservative majority that controlled the court for the next 15 years. And after Republicans took control of the legislative and executive branches in 2011, they changed the product liability law to prevent future rulings like the 2005 lead paint case.

Similar story lines are playing out nationwide as big-money donors target court races to influence specific cases or issues, said Douglas Keith, deputy director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center. 

Musk is a prime example of that trend, said Nick Ramos, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. At the same time that Musk was spending $55.9 million to boost conservative Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel’s losing Supreme Court bid, the billionaire’s Tesla Inc. was suing to overturn the state law prohibiting auto manufacturers from owning their dealerships, a key part of Tesla’s business model. The Tesla case is pending in Milwaukee County Circuit Court and could reach the high court that Musk unsuccessfully tried to influence.

Big spenders are rarely transparent about their agendas on issues like auto sales or product liability, instead pouring their money into television advertising that luridly accuses one candidate or the other of mishandling criminal cases as a lower court judge or attorney. Special interests see crime as “just a visceral idea that they can use to get voters’ attention in an ad,” Keith told Wisconsin Watch. But as the UW Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative recently noted, “Only a tiny fraction of the state’s criminal cases ever get to the Supreme Court level, and in recent years such cases have made up only about a third of the court’s docket.”

Big donors are reflecting and reinforcing a growing feeling among voters that “the court is just one more institution to obtain the policies that we (the voters) want,” similar to the legislative and executive branches, said conservative former Justice Dan Kelly. And with frequent deadlocks between the GOP-controlled Legislature and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, both sides are relying more on lawsuits than lawmaking, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

The stakes range all the way up to control of the White House. In 2020, President Donald Trump’s campaign filed suit seeking to throw out more than 220,000 absentee ballots from the Democratic strongholds of Milwaukee and Dane County. The state Supreme Court tossed the suit, but only because Justice Brian Hagedorn broke ranks with fellow conservatives to join the body’s three liberals.

That razor-thin 2020 presidential election was part of a nationwide record five times in 24 years that Wisconsin’s electoral votes were decided by less than one percentage point. Schweber, Ramos and Heck said the same swing-state energy pumps up both sides in high court races — even though only two of the last 12 contested Supreme Court elections were that close.

And while conservatives ruled the court for 15 years, their majority was never more than five of seven seats, meaning that a change in ideological control could be just one or two elections away for most of those years. That’s one of the most common factors driving big-spending court elections nationwide, Keith said.

Spending on high court contests is rising nationwide, hitting $100.8 million for the 68 justice seats decided in the 2021-22 cycle, according to the Brennan Center’s most recent report on the politics of judicial elections.

Electing a single Wisconsin Supreme Court justice cost more this year than operating the entire seven-member court for three years.

The 16-member Court of Appeals costs $12.9 million per year.

The high court and other statewide court services, including the CCAP system for looking up cases online, cost $40.7 million.

The state share of circuit court costs in all 72 counties, including salaries and benefits for all 261 trial judges as well as reserve judges and court reporters, totals $132 million.

*Each circle represents $1 million.

Sources: Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and OpenSecrets

Graphic by Hongyu Liu

Parties crash in with cash

Efforts to keep partisan politics out of judicial campaigns date back to Wisconsin’s 1848 founding. In a provision that survives to this day, the first state constitution prohibited electing judges at the same time as most other state officials, a move that some constitutional convention delegates hoped would discourage parties from nominating judicial candidates. That proved to be a vain hope, but it laid the groundwork for formally nonpartisan spring elections to evolve by 1891, according to the State Law Library.

Wisconsin is one of only four states that hold judicial elections in the spring or summer.  Other states that elect judges hold those elections in the fall, regardless of whether they are partisan or nonpartisan. That means they’re competing for donations with many other high-profile races, while Wisconsin’s high court races are often the biggest spring contests outside presidential primaries, noted Burden, Keith and Marquette University Law School Poll Director Charles Franklin.

The spring timing took on national political significance this year, as the first major election in a battleground state after Trump’s November 2024 victory, Burden said. Musk “essentially connected the dots for voters” by turning the contest into a referendum on Trump’s policies, and by extension on Musk’s own role in slashing the federal government, Burden said. That strategy backfired so spectacularly that Musk said afterward he planned to cut back his future involvement in politics.

But it took more than a century for that partisan dynamic to evolve. Even as the total cost of high court campaigns soared into the millions, a relatively small percentage of the cash was coming from the parties, although the state Republican Party soon became the largest single donor to some conservative candidates.

The proportions started to change after 2015, when a campaign finance overhaul by the GOP-dominated Legislature allowed unlimited donations to political parties and unlimited contributions from parties to candidates. While wealthy donors can contribute no more than $20,000 directly to a Supreme Court candidate (up from $1,000), they now can give as much as they want to a party, and the party then can donate all of that money to the candidate.

Donations from state and local Republican parties jumped more than fivefold, from $75,926 to Bradley in the 2016 campaign (which was already under way when the new law took effect) to $423,615 to Sauk County Circuit Judge Michael Screnock in the next contested race in 2018. The GOP cash was more than 39% of the money raised by the conservative Screnock, who lost to liberal Rebecca Dallet.

Democrats still weren’t spending heavily on high court races until fundraising powerhouse Ben Wikler took over as state party chair in 2019. The state, local and national parties poured $1.4 million into Jill Karofsky’s 2020 campaign, $9.9 million into Janet Protasiewicz’s 2023 campaign and $11.8 million into Crawford’s 2025 campaign. The state party was the largest single donor to each justice, accounting for more than 59% of Protasiewicz’s treasury, just under half of Karofsky’s fundraising and more than one-third of Crawford’s cash.

That far outpaced Republican contributions of $328,586 to then-incumbent Kelly in 2020 and $900,461 to his unsuccessful comeback bid in 2023. The GOP didn’t start to catch up until this year, when it threw $9.7 million into Schimel’s losing campaign, representing more than 61% of the former attorney general’s war chest.

Together, the two major parties spent $34.9 million on officially nonpartisan Supreme Court races from 2007 through 2025, almost all of it in the last three campaigns. Democrats outspent Republicans by $23.2 million to $11.7 million, or nearly 2 to 1.

In February, the Marquette poll found 61% of Wisconsin voters believe party contributions reduce judicial independence, compared with 38% who think partisan support gives voters useful information about candidates.

State Democratic and Republican party leaders didn’t respond to interview requests. But some GOP activists blamed party chair Brian Schimming for the conservative losses in 2023 and 2025. That led to a study that called for an even greater party role in high court elections, while discouraging advertising by other outside groups like Musk’s PACs.

Special interests spend right and left

Party contributions represent less than one-quarter of the $161.5 million that special interests spent on the last 12 Supreme Court races. Nearly all of that spending fell along ideological lines. In addition to the parties, conservative organizations and business interests spent $80.2 million supporting conservative candidates, while progressive groups and unions spent $46.4 million backing liberal candidates. 

Of all the special-interest spending, only $38.3 million, or 24%, went into candidates’ campaign treasuries from 2007 through 2025, $25.8 million on the liberal side and $12.5 million on the conservative side. The rest was spent directly by outside groups, typically on advertising that is usually outside the candidates’ control. That money mainly fell into two categories: independent expenditures and “issue ads,” both operating under rules that were significantly loosened by the conservative-led U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision.

Campaign ads funded by independent expenditures clearly state which candidates they support or oppose. Like the campaigns themselves, political action committees making independent expenditures must file reports with the Wisconsin Ethics Commission, disclosing how much they received and spent and who their donors were. Unlike campaigns, they can take money from corporations and unions, and anyone can give them unlimited contributions.

By contrast, “issue ads” try to sway voters under the guise of expressing concern about a particular issue, but without using specific phrases like “vote for” or “vote against.” Issue ad groups aren’t required to reveal how much they spent or who gave them cash. Their funding is often called “dark money” because it’s hidden from the light of public disclosure.

Because of the way issue ad spending is reported, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign was unable to distinguish the exact amount spent on issue ads in the Supreme Court race from similar spending that targeted the simultaneous campaign for state superintendent of public instruction. Based on preliminary data from the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and the Brennan Center, Wisconsin Watch estimates $13.9 million was aimed at the Supreme Court contest.

Using that estimate and previous Wisconsin Democracy Campaign estimates, issue ads accounted for most of the special-interest spending in eight consecutive Supreme Court contests from 2007 through 2018. For the entire 2007-2025 period, issue ad spending totaled $40.2 million, $31.8 million for conservatives and $8.4 million for liberals. 

By contrast, most of the special-interest money went into independent expenditures in the last four high court campaigns. Liberal groups spent slightly more than conservative organizations in the 2019, 2020 and 2023 races, but this year, Schimel supporters outspent Crawford backers, $33.3 million to $18.1 million. From 2007 through 2025, independent expenditures totaled $83.5 million — $47.6 million for conservatives and $35.4 million for liberals, plus almost $450,000 on candidates eliminated in the 2023 primary.

Musk’s petition giveaways don’t fit neatly into either the independent expenditure or issue ad categories — and whether they fit into campaign finance law at all is a subject of litigation. The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign filed a civil suit against Musk, accusing him of violating Wisconsin’s election bribery law.

Donors change tune to 'Non-Wisconsin'

Out-of-state donors like Musk didn’t play a major role in high court elections until relatively recently. From 2007 through 2018, most Supreme Court candidates received more than 90% of their individual donations from state residents, Wisconsin Democracy Campaign figures show. During that time, the highest proportions of out-of-state donations were:

• Almost 32% to Gableman in 2008.
• More than 12% to Ziegler in 2007.
• Almost 12% to liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg, who narrowly lost to then-Justice David Prosser in 2011, after Republicans stripped nearly all collective bargaining rights from most public-sector employees.

Out-of-state donations to conservative candidates remained below 10% as out-of-state donations to liberals rose to about 23% each for Hagedorn’s opponent Lisa Neubauer in 2019 and Karofsky in 2020.

But the out-of-state cash exploded for liberals after 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and left each state to regulate abortions. The decision revived an 1849 Wisconsin law that was interpreted as banning all abortions except to save the life of the mother.

As Protasiewicz positioned herself as the abortion rights candidate, her 2023 campaign took in a record $3.6 million — 57% of individual contributions — from donors outside Wisconsin, while Kelly’s $340,405 in out-of-state money represented just one-eighth of his individual donations.

Similarly, Crawford, a Dane County judge who had represented Planned Parenthood as an attorney fighting a different abortion law, received $14.6 million from out-of-state donors for her 2025 campaign, hitting a likely unprecedented 69% of individual contributions.

Crawford took in more from individual out-of-state donors alone than all liberal candidates from 2007 through 2023 had received from all individual contributors combined. By contrast, Schimel’s $1.1 million from other states amounted to less than one-fifth of his individual donations.

In July, after Crawford was elected but before she took her seat, the liberal-controlled court voted 4-3 along ideological lines to overturn the 19th-century law. 

Over the last 12 campaigns, out-of-state donors contributed $20.7 million to Wisconsin Supreme Court races, all but about $1 million of that in the last two races. Liberal candidates took in almost $19 million from outside Wisconsin, more than 10 times the nearly $1.8 million that went to conservative candidates. In its review of the 2025 campaign, the state GOP called for a greater effort to attract out-of-state dollars for conservatives.

From the parties’ perspective, Democrats have beaten Republicans at their own game, triumphing under rules largely crafted by GOP lawmakers and conservative judges. Now Republicans hope to win back their advantage with more of the same.

But for reformers, the most pressing issue is how to stop the competition for ever-greater spending and reduce the influence of big money on the high court.

Next: Could new laws and recusal rules stem the tide of Supreme Court campaign spending?

Because of the use of scrolling graphics, the republication button is not available for this story. Reach out to Matthew DeFour at mdefour@wisconsinwatch.org if you would like to republish.

Wisconsin Supreme Court elections have drawn an ‘obscene’ amount of spending. Here’s why and what can be done about it. 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.

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Democrat Mandela Barnes, who served four years as Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor and narrowly lost a 2022 U.S. Senate bid, jumped into the battleground state’s open race for governor on Tuesday.

Given his prominent name recognition and statewide funding network, Barnes enters the 2026 race as the presumptive front-runner in a crowded primary of lesser known candidates who have no built-in network of support.

Wisconsin is a politically divided state that elected President Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024 and President Joe Biden in 2020. All three elections were decided by less than a percentage point.

The message in Barnes’ campaign launch video will likely appeal to many Democratic primary voters. He highlights his father’s union background and attacks Trump, saying the Republican has focused on “distraction and chaos to avoid accountability.” He says Trump is focusing on “lower taxes for billionaires, higher prices for working people.”

But with an eye toward independent and swing voters, who will be key in the general election, Barnes pitches a moderate stance focused on the economy.

“It isn’t about left or right, it isn’t about who can yell the loudest. It’s about whether people can afford to live in the state they call home,” Barnes says in the video.

Barnes has met with some opposition among Democrats who have publicly expressed worries about him running after he lost the Senate race to Republican incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson three years ago. If he wins next year, he would become Wisconsin’s first Black governor.

“Mandela had his opportunity. He didn’t close. And that means it’s time for a new chapter,” the Black-owned Milwaukee Courier newspaper wrote in an Oct. 25 editorial. “We need a candidate who can unite this state — and win. Mandela Barnes already showed us he can’t.”

Barnes lost to Johnson by 1 percentage point, which amounts to just under 27,000 votes. He does not mention the Senate race in his campaign launch video.

After the defeat, he formed a voter turnout group called Power to the Polls, which he says has strengthened his position heading into the governor’s race. He also has a political action committee.

Barnes joins a crowded field in the open race for governor that already includes the current lieutenant governor, two state lawmakers, the highest elected official in the Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee County and a former state economic development director.

Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, a staunch Trump supporter, is the highest-profile GOP candidate. He faces a challenge from Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann.

Tiffany called Barnes a “dangerous far-left extremist” and said voters “rejected him in 2022, and they will do it again in 2026.”

It will be Wisconsin’s highest-profile race next year, as Democrats angle to take control of the Legislature thanks to redrawn election maps that are friendlier to the party. They are targeting two congressional districts, as Democrats nationwide try to retake the House.

The governor’s race is open because current Democratic Gov. Tony Evers decided against seeking a second term. Barnes, a former state representative, won the primary for lieutenant governor in 2018 and served in that position during Evers’ first term.

The current lieutenant governor, Sara Rodriguez, was the first Democrat to get into the governor’s race this year. Others running include Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley; state Sen. Kelda Roys; state Rep. Francesca Hong; and former state economic development director Missy Hughes.

An August primary will narrow the field ahead of the November election.

The last open race for governor in Wisconsin was in 2010, when Democratic incumbent Jim Doyle, similar to Evers, opted not to seek a third term. Republican Scott Walker won that year and served two terms before Evers defeated him in 2018.

Evers won his first race by just over 1 percentage point in 2018. He won reelection by just over 3 points in 2022.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup. This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.

Democrat Mandela Barnes enters the Wisconsin governor’s race 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.

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• Wisconsin leaders want more high school students to have the opportunity to take college-level courses, called dual enrollment. 

• However, teachers need the same qualifications as college instructors, and those teachers are in short supply. 

• For many, teaching dual enrollment would require them to enroll in graduate school, even if they already have a master’s degree. 

• The state offers graduate credit reimbursement to educators interested in teaching dual enrollment classes, but school leaders say it’s a hard sell.

It’s fourth period in the auto lab at Madison’s Vel Phillips Memorial High School, and a dozen students maneuver between nearly as many cars. 

At one bay, a junior adjusts the valves of an oxygen-acetylene torch and holds the flame to a suspended Subaru’s front axle to loosen its rusty bolts. Steps away, two classmates tease each other in Spanish as they finish replacing the brakes on a red Saab. Teacher Miles Tokheim moves calmly through the shop, checking students’ work and offering pointers.

After extensive renovations, the lab reopened last year with more room and tools for young mechanics-in-training. What visitors can’t see is the class recently got an upgrade, too: college credit. 

Through a process called dual enrollment, high schoolers who pass the course now earn five Madison College credits for free and skip the class if they later enroll. Classes like these are increasingly common in Wisconsin and across the country. That’s allowed more high schoolers to earn college credit, reducing their education costs and giving them a head start on their career goals. 

Wisconsin lawmakers and education officials want more high schoolers to have this opportunity. But these classes need teachers with the qualifications of college instructors, and those teachers are in short supply. 

That leaves many students — disproportionately, those in less-affluent areas — without classes that make a college education more attainable. 

“What’s at stake is access to opportunity, especially for high school students at Title I, lower-income high schools, rural high schools … It’s really been an on-ramp for so many students,” said John Fink, who studies dual enrollment at Columbia University’s Community College Research Center. “But we also know that many students are left behind.” 

To teach the auto class, Tokheim had to apply to become a Madison College instructor. As a certified auto service technician with a master’s degree, the veteran teacher met the college’s requirements for the course. 

But for many teachers, teaching dual enrollment would require enrolling in graduate school, even if they already have a master’s degree. 

That, school leaders say, is a hard sell, despite the state offering to reimburse districts for the cost. Teachers in Wisconsin often don’t make much more money teaching advanced courses the way they do in some other states, and adding these courses doesn’t raise a school’s state rating.

“You’re asking people who are well educated to begin with to go back to school, which takes time and effort, and their reward for that is they get to teach a dual credit class,” said Mark McQuade, Appleton Area School District’s assistant superintendent of assessment, curriculum and instruction. 

High standards, short supply

Nationwide, the number of high schoolers earning college credit has skyrocketed in recent years. In Wisconsin, the tally has more than doubled, with students notching experience in subjects ranging from manufacturing to business. 

Most earn credit from their local technical college without leaving their high school campus. In the 2023-24 school year, 1 in 3 community college students in the state was a high schooler.

Education and state leaders have welcomed the trend, pointing to the potential benefits: Students who take dual enrollment classes are more likely to enroll in college after high school. They can save hundreds or thousands of dollars on college tuition and fees. If they do enroll in college, they spend less time completing a degree.

“It also proves to the kids — to some of our kids that are first-generation — that they can do college work,” McQuade said.

But not all students get these advantages. Many Wisconsin schools offer very few dual enrollment courses, or none at all. A July Wisconsin Policy Forum analysis showed small, urban or high-poverty schools are least likely to offer the classes.

Wisconsin Watch talked to leaders in five school districts. All said the shortage of qualified teachers was one of the biggest barriers to growing their dual enrollment programs. 

In 2015, the Higher Learning Commission — which oversees and evaluates the state’s technical colleges — released new guidelines about instructor qualifications. The new policy required many of Wisconsin’s dual enrollment teachers to have a master’s degree and at least 18 graduate credits in the subject they teach, just like college instructors. 

In 2023, the Commission walked back the new policy.

By then, colleges across the state had already adopted the higher standard.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin schools have struggled to hire and retain teachers, even without college credit involved. Four in 10 new teachers stop teaching or leave the state within six years, a 2024 Department of Public Instruction analysis shows.

The subject-specific prerequisite is much different from the graduate education K-12 teachers have historically sought: the kind that would help them become principals or administrators, said Eric Conn, Green Bay Area Public Schools’ director of curricular pathways and post-secondary partnerships.

“To advance in education, it wasn’t about getting a master’s in a subject area. It was getting a master’s in education to develop into educational administration or educational technology,” Conn said. For teachers who already have a master’s degree, he said, going back to school just to teach one or two new classes is “a large ask.” 

Funding tempts few 

When the Higher Learning Commission announced the heightened requirements in 2015, leaders of the Wisconsin Technical College System sounded the alarm. They warned 85% of the instructors currently teaching these classes could be disqualified, whittling students’ college credit opportunities.

Wisconsin education leaders called on the Legislature to allocate millions of dollars to help teachers get the training they’d need — and they agreed. In 2017, lawmakers created a grant program to reimburse school districts for teachers’ graduate tuition. 

But of the $500,000 available every year, hundreds of thousands go unused.

“Nobody’s ever, ever requested this funding and been denied because of a funding shortage,” said Tammie DeVooght Blaney, executive secretary of the Higher Educational Aids Board, which manages the grant.

Tuition and fees for a single graduate credit at a Universities of Wisconsin school can cost over $800, putting the total cost of 18 graduate credits around $15,000. For teachers who don’t already have a master’s degree, the cost is even steeper. The state grant requires teachers or districts to front the cost and apply for reimbursement yearly, with no guarantee they’ll get it.

A handful of Green Bay teachers have used the grant, Conn said, but many just aren’t interested in returning to school, even if it’s free.

The district offers 50 dual enrollment courses, but he’d like to offer classes in more core subjects, which help students meet college general education requirements. There just aren’t enough teachers qualified to teach college sciences and math to offer the same options across the district’s four high schools. 

Teachers are busy, and not just in the classroom, said Jon Shelton, president of AFT-Wisconsin, one of the state’s teachers unions. Many already spend extra hours coaching, grading or leading after-school activities. Those who do go back to school typically enroll in one class at a time, he said, meaning they could be studying for several years.

Pros and cons

The financial perks for teachers returning to school for dual enrollment credentials are dubious at best. 

Some teachers get a salary bump for obtaining a master’s degree, and some earn modest bonuses for teaching dual enrollment. But many teachers make no more than they would have without the extra training. 

“There’s no incentive,” said Tokheim, the Madison auto instructor, who receives a $50 yearly stipend for teaching the college course. In contrast to his standard classes, his dual enrollment class required him to attend two kinds of training.

There’s little incentive for schools either. They receive no extra state funding to offer college-level courses. Plus, the classes don’t factor into their state report card score, which measures students’ standardized test performance and graduation preparation, among other things.

Leaders at Sheboygan’s Central High School wish it did. At that school, where the majority of  students are Latino and almost all are low-income, 1 in 3 students took dual enrollment courses in the 2023-24 school year. Still, the state gave the school a failing grade. 

“It’s an afterthought in our report card, and it’s always the thing that we can celebrate,” Principal Joshua Kestell said. 

So why would a teacher take on the added schooling? 

“It’s good for kids,” Tokheim said. “That’s why they get us teachers, because we care too much.” 

Other potential draws: the challenge of teaching more rigorous courses or the opportunity to collaborate with college instructors. 

Heather Fellner-Spetz retired two years ago from teaching English at Sevastopol High School in Sturgeon Bay. She taught college-level oral communication classes for 10 years before she retired. When the Higher Learning Commission set the heightened requirements, she was allowed to continue teaching dual enrollment while she studied for more graduate credits.

“There wasn’t much I didn’t enjoy about teaching it. It was just fabulous,” Fellner-Spetz said. 

She especially liked having a college professor observe her class, and she said it was good for the students, too. “When they had other people come into the room and watch the lesson or watch them perform, it just ups the ante on pressure.”

Rules remain controversial

Meanwhile, the jury is still out on whether it’s necessary for dual enrollment teachers to have the same credentials as college professors.

“Folks running these programs generally would say that teaching a quality college course to a high school student requires a unique skill set that blends high school and college teaching, and that is not necessarily captured by the traditional (graduate coursework) standard,” Fink said.

Wisconsin educators are divided on that question. Fox Valley Technical College has kept the higher standard, limiting the number of Appleton teachers who qualify. McQuade, the Appleton leader, questions those “restrictions,” saying he believes his teachers are well qualified to teach college-level courses. A different standard tied to student performance, for example, could let his district offer more classes across each of its schools. 

Schauna Rasmussen, dean of early college and workforce strategy at Madison College, said the answer isn’t to lower the standard, but to help more teachers reach it. 

In October, a group of Republican Wisconsin lawmakers introduced a bill aimed at making it easier for students to find dual enrollment opportunities. It would create a portal for families to view options and streamline application deadlines, among other changes. 

It doesn’t address the shortage of qualified teachers.

“Separate legislation would likely have to be introduced addressing expanding the pool of teachers for those programs,” Chris Gonzalez, communications director for lead author state Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, R-Appleton, wrote in an email.

As of Monday no such legislation has been introduced.

Correction: This story has been corrected to note that the Higher Learning Commission revised its policy on faculty qualifications in 2023. The current policy requires that colleges have “reasonable policies and procedures to determine that faculty are qualified” but it states colleges can consider “a variety of factors, including academic credentials, progress towards academic credentials, equivalent experience, or some combination thereof.” Wisconsin Watch regrets the error.

Miranda Dunlap reports on pathways to success in northeast Wisconsin, and Natalie Yahr reports on pathways to success statewide. They work in partnership with Open Campus.

Wisconsin high schools want to offer more college classes. First, teachers must go back to school. 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.

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Former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, a Milwaukee Democrat, announced Tuesday he’s running for governor in 2026.

Barnes served as lieutenant governor under Gov. Tony Evers from 2019 to 2023, the first African American to hold the position. He previously served in the state Assembly from 2013 to 2017.

Barnes’ entry into the race has long been anticipated, especially after a poll in early October showed him with the most support (16%) among a wide open field of Democratic contenders.

Wisconsin Watch has checked several claims related to Barnes during his unsuccessful 2022 campaign against Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson. Here’s what we found:

Defunding police: Barnes did not say that he supported defunding police, though in 2020 he backed reduced spending for Milwaukee police.

Gun rights: Barnes did say in a 2013 social media post he “could not care less about a 2nd Amendment ‘right.’ Bear arms all you wish, but you should pay for your mishandling.” In 2022, he said “we can respect the Second Amendment” while increasing “common-sense” gun control measures.

Immigration: Barnes did not say that he wanted to open U.S. borders. He backed a policy that “secures the border and also includes a path for citizenship.”

Abortion: Barnes did oppose the government legislating a limit on abortion, though a spokesperson at the time told Wisconsin Watch he didn’t support “abortion up until birth,” noting the standard before Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022 allowed limits on abortion after viability. He emphasized the abortion decision should be between a woman and her doctor.

Taxes: Barnes did not support raising taxes on the middle class, but rather backed middle-class tax cuts.

Criminal justice: As a state Assembly member in 2015, Barnes did vote against a law that expanded penalties for battery and threats against public officials.

Climate: Barnes did support the Green New Deal in 2021. During the 2022 campaign, he supported elements of the federal proposal to fight climate change while not referring to it by name.

Former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes is running for governor. Here are 7 related claims we checked … and the facts 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.

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Was the cost of the Thanksgiving meal less this year than last, despite most grocery prices being higher? 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.

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In 2018, a mobile home park owner in Stevens Point lost his operator’s license after submitting falsified drinking water samples to the state, purportedly leaving longtime residents of the park at risk of consuming excess iron and manganese. He appealed.

In 2022, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources authorized the spreading of human waste on farmland in Vilas County. A nearby Indigenous tribe contested the permit when it became apparent the state hadn’t included sufficient setbacks from tribal land.

And in 2021, a wildlife rehabilitator in Frederic, Wisconsin, who also served as a local police chief, lost her rehabilitation license after a raccoon in her care — Gimpy — bit an employee. The rehabilitator appealed.

These cases, all of which went to administrative hearings, pit state regulatory authority against individual residents. That’s why I was interested in reading them in my role as an investigative reporter. But I learned vital information in these and other cases, nearly always the parties’ names and places of work, is missing. 

Wisconsin’s Division of Hearings and Appeals, the agency that oversees administrative hearings for several state departments, has taken to posting only heavily redacted records on its website. That means readers will often see black bars drawn through the names of people and businesses, state employees who evaluate permits and licenses, attorneys who represent parties and even newspapers that publish notices related to the cases.

Division Administrator Brian Hayes told me that last year’s passage of a state law prompted the DHA to evaluate how it posts personally identifying information on its website. That law enables judges to request that their personal information, including addresses and telephone numbers, be removed from public view. 

The DHA, Hayes said, extended this protection to witnesses and petitioners, saying disclosing this information “needlessly opens up litigants to scams and stalkers.”

Hayes noted, however, that personally identifying information likely would have to be released to someone who submitted a records request for unaltered documents.

So I submitted one.

It took two months and the assistance of an attorney to wrestle the name of Gimpy’s owner from the agency. (Gimpy, however, was named.) The employees I encountered in this process offered a moving target of justifications.

First, DHA’s records custodian said she can provide unredacted documents only to parties to a case and suggested that I request the redacted version. I pointed out that the law requires her to either release the requested record or offer a legal justification for withholding it.

Another employee cited Wisconsin’s 1980 victims’ rights law, which provides a bill of rights for witnesses and victims of crime. The problem with this excuse is that the protections are situated in Wisconsin criminal code, not licensing.

In the end, I received unredacted records in the raccoon case and an apology from DHA for the difficulties I encountered in obtaining this information. But I still am moved to question the will to secrecy at the heart of this matter.

In fact, many of these cases involve public hearings. Anyone who attended could presumably observe witnesses and evidence — or see the names of parties on public notices state agencies post to announce hearing schedules.

When protective laws are zealously applied to contexts for which they were not intended, it can cause its own form of harm. The public is circuitously deprived of information related to potentially unscrupulous activity on the part of both individuals and government.

It shouldn’t take an attorney to pry open the gates for administrative decisions, even if the state means well.

Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (wisfoic.org), a nonprofit, nonpartisan group dedicated to open government. Bennet Goldstein is an investigative reporter with Wisconsin Watch.

Your Right to Know: The problem with the will to secrecy 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.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Edith Butler is dealing with a real-world math problem: Her housing costs keep rising while a tax credit intended to help keeps shrinking. 

The widow and retired nurse, 68, lives by herself in a two-bedroom Eau Claire home. She paid $9,000 in rent over the course of last year, eating up more than 60% of her Social Security paycheck — her primary source of income. Her utility costs are also expected to hike next year.

She received $708 last year from claiming a homestead tax credit, which is meant to help lower-income homeowners and renters recoup some property tax costs. That was down from the $900 credit she received five years ago after paying just $6,600 in rent. 

In the past, the homestead credit has paid to fill her propane tank for about three months during winter and offset some other costs. But it’s dwindling each year because the state rarely updates eligibility guidelines and credit calculations for inflation. Butler’s credit shrinks whenever the federal government increases her Social Security payment to account for the rising costs of living. 

She’s not alone. Statewide homestead credit claims dropped from an average of $523 per recipient in 2013 to $486 in 2025, with thousands fewer claimants as fewer people remained eligible.

“These things have never adjusted. But we’ve paid into these programs all our lives. I paid taxes for 50 years, (and) my Social Security is my benefit that I paid in,” Butler said. “You work hard and you pay into programs, and then when you need them in your older years like this, they’re not there for you.”

The Legislature has not substantially updated the homestead credit for 25 years, causing its value to erode. Recent Democratic proposals to update program guidelines have failed to gain Republican support.  

A tax credit’s history

By the 1960s, many in Wisconsin acknowledged the regressive nature of property taxes — that lower-income residents pay higher shares of their income than richer households do,  John Stark, then-Assistant Chief Counsel in the Legislative Reference Bureau, wrote in a 1991 history of property tax relief in Wisconsin. But the state Constitution’s “uniformity clause” restricted what type of tax relief lawmakers can enact. 

Against that backdrop, a State Commission on Aging in 1962 held hearings around the state in which older adults expressed concerns about health care and property taxes. The Legislature responded in 1963 with the homestead credit. Residents 65 and older could claim up to $225 (the equivalent of $2,380 today), with the precise calculation based on income, property taxes paid through ownership or rent.

The Legislature expanded eligibility over the years, notably in 1973, when it lowered the age minimum to 18. That dramatically boosted total claimants and payouts. By 1988, more than 250,000 people received a collective $100 million (roughly $270 million today) in credits.

The trend has since reversed. 

Fewer than 67,000 residents claimed a collective $32.6 million in credits last year — a precipitous plunge, Department of Revenue data show.

The program’s income cap today — $24,680 — has barely budged since 2000. The nearly identical cap of $24,500 in 2000 is the equivalent of $45,812 today when adjusted for inflation.

Meanwhile, the program’s “phaseout income” of $8,060, under which homeowners or renters can recoup the maximum 80% of property taxes paid, has increased by only $60 since the 1989 tax year.

Today’s maximum credit a household can claim ($1,168) is just $8 higher than the 1990 level.

Diane Hanson, Butler’s tax agent, said her clients are receiving smaller credits each year or becoming ineligible as inflation pushes wages or Social Security payments above the static income limit. 

Still, Hanson suspects many who remain eligible don’t realize it.

The homestead credit helped Hanson through her most challenging times. After learning about it at her local library, she claimed the credit for several years while raising her two children during a divorce, one of them with disabilities. 

After becoming a tax agent in 2019, she began to educate clients facing similar circumstances. They include Renata Braatz, who raises her 12-year-old son and spends about 30% of her monthly income on rent through the Section 8 voucher program. She claimed about $600 through the homestead program last year. She spent it on groceries and other expenses for her son.

“I never knew about it. I lived here for six years, and I just started doing it two years ago,” Braatz said. 

But asking questions paid off. 

“Renata was proactive, reaching out, phoning us, and asking if there could be any credits for her. I think that is more than some folks know to do,” Hanson said. “Before I was a tax professional, I myself didn’t know how much the federal earned income credit can help out parents.”

Democrats call for credit’s expansion 

Senate and Assembly Democrats earlier this year introduced identical bills to expand the homestead credit — allowing households earning up to $35,000 to claim it and indexing the maximum annual income, phaseout income and maximum credit to inflation. The proposal would have reduced state revenue by an estimated $36.7 million, $43 million and $48.8 million over the next three fiscal years.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers also proposed a homestead credit expansion in his last two-year budget. 

Neither  proposal advanced in the Republican-controlled Legislature. 

Sen. Mark Spreitzer, D-Beloit, authored the Senate version of the bill with colleagues. His district borders Illinois, which offers a range of more generous homestead tax incentives. Several constituents who previously lived in Illinois asked him why Wisconsin doesn’t offer what Illinois does, inspiring the legislation.

The Wisconsin Constitution’s uniformity clause prohibits lawmakers from enacting Illinois-like tax exemptions for older adults or other low-income residents, Spreitzer said, but the credit offers a legal work-around.

“There’s not really another credit that takes the place of this,” he said. “That’s why the homestead credit is so important.”

Spreitzer said he plans to reintroduce an expansion bill, and he encourages residents to share their perspectives with their representatives.

“If we want to do something about affordability, this is a very direct thing we can do,” Spreitzer said. “We’re not creating a new credit here. This already exists. We’re just talking about increasing who qualifies and how much money they would get back, and that’s money that they would directly be able to get back on their taxes and then spend to put food on the plate for their families.”

Hanson sees a path for bipartisan support for an update. 

“The alternative is to see it dwindle,” Hanson said. “It hurts the segment of people that actually need it, the people who just don’t get much help anywhere. They’re still working hard to be independent.”

As living costs soar, tax relief shrinks for low-income Wisconsin residents 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.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

As red sand filled the cracks along the sidewalks in front of the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus, community members stood in quiet solidarity as drums beat. 

The pouring of red sand marked another year of remembrance and healing for missing and murdered Indigenous women and relatives, referred to as MMIWR.

The symbolic act of pouring sand was part of the HIR Wellness Institute’s ninth annual Community Activated Medicine & Red Sand Events on Nov. 14.

HIR Wellness, located at 3136 W. Kilbourn Ave., was founded in 2017 by Leah Denny, who serves as CEO. The organization provides a range of free mental health, wellness services and additional programming for the Indigenous community. The Electa Quinney Institute, where the event was held, was founded in 2010 to support the Native American community on campus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Started in 2017, the event has provided a sacred space for community grief and collective healing in honor of MMIWR through art, storytelling and community care.

Each year, the HIR Wellness Institute collaborates with the Red Sand Project to host the event. The Red Sand Project was designed to raise public awareness about human trafficking and modern slavery, using the red sand to represent those who have fallen through systemic cracks. 

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Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.

A sacred space for healing: Event honors missing and murdered Indigenous women and relatives 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.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Tim Scott was shocked when he was laid off in May as the executive director of Nearby Nature, an organization that works to reconnect Black people to nature by offering nature education classes and introducing residents to new outdoor experiences. 

Instead of letting the sudden change deter him, he doubled down on his commitment to help Milwaukee residents experience the outdoors. 

Scott is opening Urban Nature Connection, a community-based nonprofit dedicated to reconnecting Black and Brown communities with nature. 

The organization’s mission is to promote the physical, spiritual and mental health of outdoor activities such as birding, gardening, biking, hiking and fishing.

Finding a new purpose

According to Scott’s wife, Theresa Scott, he has always been an outdoorsman. 

“He has always enjoyed walking or spending time in the park or outdoors,” Theresa Scott said. 

Tim Scott spent most of his career in construction work. 

He’s also done some coaching and marriage counseling but said he found a new purpose when he took the role at Nearby Nature. 

“This is my passion, this is my healer, I owe nature my life to tell you the truth,” Scott said.

His wife agrees. 

“I think this is a great second career for him,” she said. “It’s better for his mind and his body.” 

Scott said he now knows the importance of pushing nature as a healing mechanism, especially for those who don’t have access to mental health services. 

“We all experience trauma in different ways,” Scott said. “But we don’t all have access to the same mental health services. Being out in nature really saved me when I was experiencing my own crisis.” 

By connecting people with nature, Scott hopes to help others find their own healing. 

In addition to outdoor activities, the organization will focus on indoor gardening, programming and advocacy of green space.

Over the next few months, the focus will be on getting people outside even during the colder months.

“A lot of our work will be advocacy,” he said. “So, we will center advocacy through every season.”

Scott says he plans to partner with other agencies to host wellness events, community discussions and group walks.

To keep up with Urban Nature Connection, you can follow its Facebook page here.

“What he wants to do here is truly a movement,” Theresa Scott said.

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Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.

‘I owe nature my life’: Milwaukee nonprofit aims to connect Black and Brown people to nature 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.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

This week, we are reflecting on what we’re thankful for. One of the things we’re thankful for is you – our readers and supporters. Some of you have sent us tips, others have given us constructive feedback on our reporting, and many of you have helped us reach more people by sharing our reporting with your friends, family and neighbors. 

In the spirit of gratitude and giving, we want to share five stories that remind us of the power of community and how ordinary people can spark extraordinary impact. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we enjoyed reporting them. 

“When we show up, when we speak up, we can make a positive difference” 

Portage, Sauk, St. Croix and Lincoln counties – Public nursing homes tend to be better staffed, have higher quality of care and draw fewer complaints than facilities owned by for-profits and nonprofits. As counties across Wisconsin look to sell off their nursing homes, grassroots campaigns are working to keep the homes in public hands – and some of them appear to be succeeding. 

“It kind of feels like I’m more connected to the stories … instead of just being behind my phone” 

Brown, Oconto and Shawano counties – For more than eight decades, Pulaski High School’s student newspaper has been the community’s newspaper of record, as the only news outlet consistently covering the rural village. Along the way, the paper has secured a level of community buy-in that might feel foreign to some news organizations today, as trust in news declines. 

“I don’t know just exactly how to say this, but my perspective for people has changed” 

Milwaukee and Dane counties – When Larry Jones arrived at the Wisconsin State Capitol on March 12, he didn’t know what he was getting into — let alone that he would be a viral internet sensation the next day. The 85-year-old self-described conservative had been invited by his grandson to a public hearing on a Republican-authored bill that would ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth in the state. While he was there, he changed his mind. 

“We’re learning how to navigate conflict in community. We’re learning how to support people in distress” 

Brown and Outagamie counties – In downtown Appleton, a “community living room” aims to give northeast Wisconsinites ways to deeply connect with one another — and a free community space to do so — in hopes they can combat the social isolation many feel today. It also hosts “emotional CPR training” or ECPR to train professionals and community members in how to assist someone in crisis or emotional distress. 

“There are too many wrong doors in this system, and we want to be a right door” 

Dane County – Yahara House, part of the nonprofit Journey Mental Health Center, is a community mental health program focused on building relationships and job opportunities. It is one of just seven clubhouses in the state and just three with international accreditation. Experts and advocates say the clubhouse model reduces hospitalizations and boosts employment in adults with serious mental illnesses.

These 5 stories show people building connection, power and hope 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.