Candles, flowers, crosses and plenty of television cameras have accented the Madison cityscape following a shooting at Abundant Life Christian School that wounded six and killed three, including the 15-year-old shooter. 

Here’s what it looked like this week as community members gathered to support traumatized families and memorialize lives lost.

Police and first responders lined Buckeye Road as investigations continued.

Abundant Life remains closed to students. The United Way of Dane County has established an Abundant Life Christian School Emergency and Recovery Fund, with all proceeds going to those affected by the shooting, according to the school’s website. Supporters can donate online or text help4ALCS to the number 40403.

By Tuesday morning, news media vehicles swarmed where parents would have dropped off their children on normal school days. Reporters conducted interviews along Buckeye Road, lining sidewalks and street parking spaces.

Police tape surrounded the school and neighboring City Church. Flowers and candles lined the sidewalk.

On a chilly Tuesday evening, hundreds mourned at a candlelit vigil at the Wisconsin Capitol.

Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Joe Gothard and Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway called on the community to support those affected. 

“That is where our focus is right now — caring for everyone who has been impacted,” Rhodes-Conway said. “Let us be a community that takes care of each other.”

She highlighted resources available through the Wisconsin Department of Justice’s Office of School Safety and Office of Crime Victim Services, available 24-7 at 1-800-697-8761 or schoolsafety@doj.state.wi.us.

Vigil attendees sang and held their hands near their candles, protecting flames from gusts of wind. They wrote messages on crosses representing the dead.

“We will fight for change so this can’t happen again,” read one message.

Calls to end gun violence have echoed throughout Madison, including a plea from the Wisconsin State Journal’s editorial board to “break America’s curse of gunfire in schools.”

Photos: Madison mourns after Abundant Life Christian School shooting 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.

Every year Wisconsin Watch produces some of the best investigative journalism in Wisconsin, and this year was no exception. We exposed a judge abusing his power to benefit a coworker, revealed how AI is helping the state catch illegal manure spreading, catalogued every book ban request in all 421 school districts and found state prisons hiring doctors with disciplinary histories.

But what made this year particularly special was the introduction of the Forward newsletter. Each week the Wisconsin Watch state team produces shorter stories about what we expect to be the big news and trends in the days, weeks and months ahead. It’s something our local media partners asked for and our state team reporters delivered.

As the year winds down, we gave each state team reporter the assignment of picking a favorite story written by another member of the team (Secret Santa style!). Here were their picks:

Conservative talk radio continues to be a powerful political tool in Wisconsin

To some, radio is a source of entertainment and information from a bygone era. They’re mistaken. Hallie Claflin’s deeply reported, authoritative story illustrates the immense and continuing influence of talk radio — especially conservative talk radio — in Wisconsin politics. The rise of former Gov. Scott Walker, the toppling of a Democratic mayor in Wausau and the deaths of certain bills in the Legislature can all be tied, at least in part, to advocacy or opposition from conservative talk radio hosts. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the state’s most powerful Republican, makes regular appearances on broadcasts and described talk radio as being “as powerful as it’s ever been.” This story is worth your time as you look ahead to 2025.

— Jack Kelly

Why we investigated Wisconsin Pastor Matthew Trewhella

Phoebe Petrovic’s profile of militant, anti-abortion Pastor Matthew Trewhella, her first investigation as Wisconsin’s first ProPublica local reporting network fellow, was an engaging read. But I especially liked the companion piece she wrote. It’s a reader service to do this kind of story when we do a large takeout on a person or subject unfamiliar to most readers. It also might drive readers to the main story when they learn more about why we did it. It puts the readers behind the scenes a bit and has the potential to make readers feel more connected to Wisconsin Watch.

— Tom Kertscher

Here are some claims you might hear during tonight’s presidential debate — and the facts

Tom Kertscher does an amazing job with all of his fact briefs, but my favorite has to be a compilation that fact-checked presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump right before their September debate. Over the past few races, presidential campaigns have been full of misinformation. Debates are a vital time to show the reality of candidates and their beliefs. Tom’s story made sure people could accurately judge the claims both candidates were making. I learned about many new and important topics across party lines like Trump’s for-profit college, Harris’ claim about tracking miscarriages and accurate deportation statistics.

— Khushboo Rathore

DataWatch: Wisconsin incarcerates more people than its prisons were designed to hold

Khushboo Rathore’s DataWatch report detailing that the state’s prison population was at nearly 130% capacity stood out as one of my favorite pieces this year. Not only did this short story shed light on severe deficiencies in Wisconsin’s prison system, it also presented the findings in a digestible format that helped readers understand overcrowding in prisons through striking data. It’s one thing to report that Wisconsin prisons are overwhelmed, and it’s another to have the numbers that show it. This piece has the power to reshape future conversations about statewide prison reform, which is what our work here at Wisconsin Watch is all about! 

— Hallie Claflin

Wisconsin Supreme Court will hear high-profile abortion rights case, draft order shows

Jack Kelly has some of the best sourcing this newsroom has ever seen. He’s such an affable people-person, and it enables him to get coffee with anyone and everyone and build legitimate relationships that result in wild scoops, like this one. It’s a testament to his brilliance as a reporter.

— Phoebe Petrovic

Forward: Our picks for favorite politics stories of the year is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch seeks a pathways to success reporter who will expand our coverage of issues surrounding postsecondary education and workforce training. The right candidate will be a curious, collaborative, deep listener who can understand bureaucracies and economic trends that affect peoples’ lives. 

Wisconsin Watch provides trustworthy reporting that investigates problems, explores solutions and serves the public. We aim to strengthen the quality of community life and self-government in Wisconsin by providing people with the knowledge they need to navigate their lives, drive forward solutions and hold those with power accountable. We pursue the truth through accurate, fair, independent, rigorous, nonpartisan reporting. 

Click here to apply to this job.

Why pathways to success? 

Funding cuts and other financial pressures have forced higher education institutions to rely more heavily on tuition — increasing affordability challenges for students and affecting the quality of education. Meanwhile, Wisconsin faces a shortage of skilled workers, including in manufacturing, construction, health care, agriculture and information technology. This shortage is exacerbated by an aging workforce, particularly in rural areas, and a gap between the skills employers need and those job seekers have. 

Reporting on this beat will help policymakers and civic leaders understand how to expand pathways to jobs. It will also help Wisconsin residents learn the skills needed to build thriving careers. We’re taking a different approach to higher education coverage than news outlets traditionally do. Rather than prioritizing breaking news or scandals at major universities, we’re centering the experiences of learners, families, and employers to better understand how the state’s broader postsecondary landscape meets their needs. That includes paying close attention to technical colleges and trades programs. 

Job duties

The reporter will: 

• Work with the Wisconsin Watch managing editor and other colleagues to frame, report and write news stories. These stories will appear on Wisconsin Watch platforms and be distributed to news outlets across Wisconsin and the country.
• Listen to those struggling to find family supporting jobs and to those unable to fill positions to find disconnects between workforce recruitment, development and training and those who are underemployed. Find evidence-based best practices to address this challenge.
• Develop sources in secondary and postsecondary education, industries struggling to fill jobs, workforce development, labor and the general public to identify breakdowns in systems, information gaps and success stories that could inform pathways to success.
• Research the jobs that will be in high demand for years to come to inform reporting on effective programs for gaining the necessary skills to perform these jobs, from jobs in nursing and health care, where demographics show increasing demand, to developing technologies, such as those in artificial intelligence and robotics.
• Work with the Wisconsin Watch audience team to make sure this reporting reaches the people who most need the information.
• Cultivate collegial and productive relationships with collaborating news organizations to gather and analyze data, research best practices and maximize impact on stories with national scope. This includes Open Campus, a national news network aiming to improve higher education coverage.

At Wisconsin Watch we make sure that we are producing quality journalism and give our reporters the time they need to make sure the job is done well.

Required qualifications

The ideal candidate will bring a public service mindset and  a demonstrated commitment to nonpartisan journalism ethics, including a commitment to abide by Wisconsin Watch’s ethics policies. More specifically, we’re looking for a reporter who: 

• Has researched, reported and written original published news stories and/or features on deadline.
• Has demonstrated the ability to formulate compelling story pitches to editors. 
• Aches to report stories that explore solutions to challenges residents face. 
• Has experience with or ideas about the many different ways newsrooms can inform the public — from narrative investigations and features, to Q&As and ‘how-to’ explainers or visual stories.
• Has experience working with others. Wisconsin Watch is a deeply collaborative organization. Our journalists frequently team up with each other or with colleagues at other news outlets to maximize the potential impact of our reporting. 

Bonus Skills:

• Be able to analyze and visually present data. 
• Familiarity with Wisconsin, its history and its politics. 
• Multimedia skills including photography, audio and video.
• Spanish-language proficiency.

Don’t check off every box in the requirements listed above? Please apply anyway! 

Wisconsin Watch is dedicated to building an inclusive, diverse, equitable, and accessible workplace that fosters a sense of belonging – so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to still consider submitting an application. You may be just the right candidate for this role or another one of our openings!

Location

 The pathways to success reporter should be located in Wisconsin. Wisconsin Watch is a statewide news organization with staff based in Madison, Milwaukee and Green Bay.  

Salary and benefits 

The salary range is $45,500-$64,500. Final offer amounts will carefully consider multiple factors and higher compensation may be available for someone with advanced skills and/or experience. Wisconsin Watch offers competitive benefits, including generous vacation (five weeks), a retirement fund contribution, paid sick days, paid family and caregiver leave, subsidized medical and dental premiums, vision coverage, and more.

Deadline

Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. For best consideration, apply by Jan. 10, 2025.

To apply

Please submit a PDF of your resume and answer some brief questions in this application form, and send links or PDFs of four published writing samples to Managing Editor Jim Malewitz at jmalewitz@wisconsinwatch.org. Contact Jim if you’d like to chat about the job before applying.

Wisconsin Watch is dedicated to improving our newsroom by better reflecting the people we cover. We are committed to diversity and building an inclusive environment for people of all backgrounds and ages. We especially encourage members of traditionally underrepresented communities to apply, including women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and people with disabilities. We are an equal-opportunity employer and prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind. All employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, age, or any other status protected under applicable law.

Wisconsin Watch seeks a pathways to success reporter is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

The Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) is a national organization whose mission is to ensure that people in every community have access to trustworthy news and reliable information about issues that affect them. Today, it supports more than 475 independent newsrooms across the country to leverage their collective power – helping them raise funds, grow their audiences, and learn from each other. 

Wisconsin Watch is a founding member of INN, and we are honored to be one of several local news organizations featured in INN’s 15th Anniversary video released today, explaining why independent newsrooms are so vital, and the role they play in the communities they serve. 

One of the key ways that INN supports community-focused newsrooms like ours is through its annual Newsmatch campaign, which awards matching funds to member news organizations that set and reach certain goals in their end-of-year fundraising campaigns. 

This year, Wisconsin Watch has a goal of getting 100 new donors between Nov 1 and Dec 31. We are nearly there, and if you aren’t already a donor, your support could make all the difference to our newsroom. 

Click here to donate now. 

Or, if you prefer to give by check, you can do so by mailing your gift to Wisconsin Watch, P.O. Box 5079, Milwaukee, WI 53205. 

Video: Institute for Nonprofit News features Wisconsin Watch is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is seeking an intern to report on information and accountability gaps in rural Wisconsin communities that lack robust news coverage, telling stories that explore solutions to broken systems and center the voices of community members.

This internship is available through a Scripps Howard Fund/Institute for Nonprofit News partnership, which in 2025 is supporting 13 paid internships for journalism students in newsrooms across the country. 

Applications for the INN/Fund internships close on Jan. 31. Apply here.

The Wisconsin Watch reporter will:

• Work with the Wisconsin Watch managing editor and other colleagues to frame, report and write news stories that fill information and accountability gaps and seek solutions to challenges faced by rural Wisconsin residents. These stories will appear on Wisconsin Watch platforms and be distributed to news outlets across Wisconsin.
• Cultivate collegial and productive relationships with collaborating news organizations. This could include sharing bylines on high-impact stories.

At Wisconsin Watch we make sure that we are producing quality journalism and give our reporters the time they need to make sure the job is done well. Stories could take anywhere from one week to one to two months to report and write, depending on the complexity and timeliness of the issue and access to data. 

This intern will be expected to work approximately 40 hours per week throughout the reporter’s time at Wisconsin Watch. No additional benefits are included.

Location

This reporter must live in Wisconsin (the exact location is negotiable) and would have opportunities to work within Wisconsin Watch’s Madison and Milwaukee newsrooms. Wisconsin Watch is a hybrid workplace, meaning work on some days can be performed remotely. But the intern would be expected to conduct some of the reporting in person, depending on the story, and would work with the managing editor to map out a schedule for occasional work from the newsroom. 

Duration

This is a temporary position, with the expectation of work full time (40 hours/week) over 10 weeks.

Compensation 

The reporter will earn $15 per hour. 

Once selected, an intern can apply to the Fund for an additional grant to help with housing, relocation and other expenses to support the ability to accept an internship. Those applications will open in the spring. 

About Wisconsin Watch 

Wisconsin Watch is a nonpartisan, independent nonprofit with offices in Madison and Milwaukee.

Our mission is “to increase the quality, quantity and understanding of investigative journalism to foster an informed citizenry and strengthen democracy.” Our multimedia journalism digs into undercovered issues, documents inequitable and failing systems, puts findings into regional and national contexts and explores potential solutions. We aim to generate impact that improves people’s lives and holds power to account. Wisconsin Watch also trains diverse groups of current and future investigative journalists and entrepreneurs through workshops, internships and fellowships, mentoring and collaborations with journalism classes and news organizations. And we share information about journalistic practices, ethics and impact with the public.

Wisconsin Watch embraces diversity and inclusiveness in our journalism, training activities, hiring practices and workplace operations. The complex issues we face as a society require respect for different viewpoints. Race, class, generation, sexual orientation, gender, disability and geography all affect point of view. Reflecting these differences in our reporting leads to better, more nuanced stories and a better-informed community.

We especially encourage members of traditionally underrepresented communities to apply, including Black, Indigenous and other people of color, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities.

Wisconsin Watch seeks reporting intern to serve rural Wisconsin communities 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.

Arlene Meyer is a busy woman. 

The 86-year-old starts each morning by watching the news in her room at Pine Crest Nursing Home in Merrill, Wisconsin. Then it’s off to the dining hall for breakfast so she can “BS with everybody out there.” She never skips her daily walk and devours books delivered by the public library each week — anything except romance or science fiction. 

The event calendar in Meyer’s room lists a smorgasbord of other options: manicures and mimosas, chair Zumba, trivia, Packers watch parties and beer pong. Meyer spent a recent Friday at an exercise class in an area of Pine Crest that later hosted a happy hour with live music. 

“The concept of old people, it’s out,” Meyer said, adding that “the days go by so fast” — an observation that surprises outsiders with duller expectations for nursing home life.

Meyer moved to Pine Crest in 2023 to recover from pneumonia. She liked it so much she stayed permanently. The nursing home’s social media posts show her holding a lizard, relaxing during a spa treatment and singing a Willie Nelson song at karaoke — photos that brought joy to those who know her.

“Sassy Arlene! Love it!” one person commented on a photo. “Happy you haven’t changed Arlene,” wrote another. 

Lincoln County owns Pine Crest, one of 36 county-owned nursing homes in Wisconsin. They tend to be better staffed, have higher quality of care and draw fewer complaints than facilities owned by for-profits and nonprofits, a WPR/Wisconsin Watch analysis of U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services data shows. 

Wisconsin has more county-owned nursing homes than any state but Indiana. But perhaps not for long. 

Over more than three decades, residents in 22 Wisconsin counties lost public nursing homes to sales or closures. This year alone at least five counties — including Lincoln — considered selling, started the sales process or sold.

County leaders say they have only two options while facing financial pressures and staffing shortages: sell or close the homes. Local organizers disagree, arguing counties should continue providing high-quality care for low-income older people and disabled adults. 

Lincoln County’s board voted to sell Pine Crest to a for-profit at the start of this year. After that buyer backed out, the board is planning to find a new one.

Meyer worries about potential disruptions at Pine Crest.

“I love it here,” she said. “I sincerely do.”

A flurry of nursing home sales and closures

Meyer, a former Lincoln County Board supervisor, doesn’t own a phone, but she stays up to date on local happenings. It didn’t take long before she heard rumblings about selling Pine Crest. 

“I was teed off about it because of some of these SOBs,” Meyer said. “They said, ‘well, the cost factor.’ Now I think about what jerks were running this.”

Running a nursing home is expensive, and counties aren’t required to do so — something officials often realize during recessions and inflationary periods.

The financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 was Wisconsin’s busiest stretch for nursing home sales, with four counties selling.

Since inflation started surging in 2021, at least five counties outside of Lincoln have sold or considered selling: 

• Iowa County closed its nursing home in 2022 after failing to find a buyer.
• A private nursing home chain took over Washington County’s nursing home in July. 
• The St. Croix County Board considered selling before voting against it.
• Sauk County’s board this year approved a sale to a for-profit that still requires state health department approval. 
• Portage County heard interest from one prospective buyer but chose not to sell following public pushback. It will decide later this month whether to look for a different buyer.

Meanwhile, dozens of for-profit nursing homes have closed in recent years. 

Lincoln County started debating Pine Crest’s future in 2022 while the board sought budget cuts. Then-board chair Don Friske noticed Pine Crest had for years run substantial annual deficits.

That’s been the case since the 1980s for county-run nursing homes nationwide, said Anne Zahradnik, an associate professor of health administration at Marist College.

Those remaining “are a holdover from an orientation toward government solving problems,” she added. 

From ‘poor farms’ to nursing homes

Wisconsin’s county governments have a long history of housing vulnerable populations. 

Many ran “poor farms” or “poor houses” for residents experiencing poverty starting in the 1800s. Most states eventually created centralized nursing homes to serve older people and those with disabilities from across the state, while Wisconsin prioritized keeping people close to home. A Wisconsin network of local nursing homes and converted poor farms started receiving federal Medicaid funding in 1974, according to a Legislative Audit Bureau report.

Nursing homes for decades were the only long-term care option for populations they served, and people who relied on government assistance had few choices outside of county homes. 

That is changing as people increasingly age at home or in assisted living facilities that offer more independence at a lower cost. Wisconsin’s assisted living options hold more than double the beds of its nursing homes. 

But assisted living, unlike nursing homes, can’t care for people who need regular medical attention. Nor do they offer the same protections against evictions for residents who rely on Medicaid, the joint state and federal aid program to help low-income residents afford care. 

More than a quarter of nursing home beds, on average, at for-profit and county-owned nursing homes sit empty, according to federal Medicaid data.

Almost 40 of Pine Crest’s 120 beds are vacant, but Wisconsin can’t afford to lose them. 

Without nursing homes, hospitals struggle to find housing for their sickest patients, Zahradnik said. The Wisconsin Counties Association projects a need for roughly 10,000 new skilled nursing beds by 2035 as state demographics trend older. 

To keep Pine Crest running, Lincoln County’s board debated converting part of it into assisted living or even knocking it down to build a smaller nursing home with lower operation costs. Both options would require up-front money the county lacks, Friske said. 

The only remaining option the board sees: selling.

Counties struggle to keep up

Medicaid policy is complicated and frequently changes. The program is also how most nursing home residents pay for care. 

Lincoln County’s board lacks expertise on nursing home management, making it hard to keep up, Friske said, echoing officials in other counties.

“We’re horrible at it,” he said.

As the board discussed exiting the nursing home business, it learned the county was short more than $1 million in expected revenue to cover one year’s costs.  

The state has traditionally subsidized county-owned nursing homes, and it started increasing Medicaid reimbursements in 2022. The change shrunk ongoing county deficits to provide care, wrote Elizabeth Goodsitt, a spokesperson for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, which distributes the nursing home supplements. 

That was positive. But shrinking those deficits meant counties would get smaller lump sum subsidies for operating nursing homes – something officials in multiple county governments didn’t anticipate, leading to budget shortfalls.

“Just when you think you’re one step ahead, you’re two steps back,” Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann said.

He described the unexpected loss of the subsidies as “just another brick in the wall” for a nursing home the county ultimately sold to a for-profit this year.

Lincoln County used federal pandemic funds to cover the unexpected subsidy loss — a short-lived option.

Despite supporting county-owned nursing homes, state officials don’t always effectively communicate with counties, said Rene Eastman, vice president of financial and regulatory services at LeadingAge Wisconsin, an advocacy group for older adults. 

Still, Eastman said, the recent Medicaid rate reimbursement hikes could ease financial pressures over time.

“If counties hung on for a little bit longer, they would really see the effects of that funding infusion, and they would see the increased need in their communities,” she said.

St. Croix County commits to nursing home

St. Croix County Board Vice Chair Bob Feidler said his colleagues didn’t seriously consider selling its nursing home. But a discussion about that possibility prompted opponents to flood an August board meeting. 

The board voted against selling, deciding that nursing home revenue would likely grow, aided by higher Medicaid rates and a federal grant to open a dementia wing. 

“All of a sudden, we went from what had been a negative revenue to barely a positive revenue, to a more solid projection,” Feidler said.

Many Lincoln County residents hope their board will reach the same conclusion. But increased Medicaid rates alone won’t cover needed costs outside of care, like renovating Pine Crest’s  building, Friske said. That would likely require a property tax increase.

“You can’t just go on a whim, ‘Hey, yeah, we’re going to throw this extra money on the property tax,’ ” Friske said. “People are struggling.”

County leaders have historically asked voters to support nursing homes through ballot measures.

Voters in Green County, for instance, approved an April ballot measure to continue funding their nursing home. 

Portage County voters approved one referendum in 2018 and a $20 million referendum four years later for the construction of a new nursing home — renovations that still haven’t started. Rising construction costs since the delay mean millions more are needed to fund the project, according to county board members who have blocked calls for a fresh referendum.

In Lincoln County, more than 80% of respondents to a 2023 Merrill Foto News and Tomahawk Leader online survey opposed selling Pine Crest.

But the board blocked two efforts to put Pine Crest’s future on the ballot.  

How private homes profit: Cutting staff, benefits 

Friske had gotten unsolicited calls from brokers even before putting Pine Crest on the market, as have officials in other counties. 

Why buy a money-losing nursing home?

For-profits can’t simply build new facilities. The state determines the need for nursing home beds in different communities — requiring newcomers to typically buy a license from an entity already operating a facility. 

Deficits under government ownership don’t mean private companies can’t turn a profit.  

They might find savings by rejecting applicants with behavioral issues who require costlier care. Counties that own a nursing home typically send higher-needs residents there. Counties that don’t own a nursing home still pay to send such residents to another facility that will accept them. 

Private owners frequently reduce staffing and benefits upon purchasing county-owned facilities, Eastman said. Lower staffing correlates with poorer care. 

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rates nursing home staff on a 1 to 5 scale, considering time they spent with residents and turnover. 

The median staff rating at Wisconsin’s county-owned nursing homes is 5, the highest possible, according to WPR and Wisconsin Watch’s analysis. That’s compared with a median rating of 3 at for-profit facilities in the state.

A sign outside of the Portage County Health Care Center touts its 5-star rating. Grace Skibicki, a resident of 13 years and a former care center nurse, recognizes that as impressive. 

She expects care to decline if a chain with a lower rating purchases it. She wouldn’t plan to stick around. 

“It’s really scary because you don’t know what’s going to happen to you,” Skibicki said.

Staff are also waiting to see what their future holds.

Nursing home work can be grueling with modest pay, accounting for significant staff turnover across the industry. But county-owned nursing homes employ public workers who earn county benefits and access to one of the country’s best-funded retirement systems. That may explain why median turnover trends at Wisconsin’s county-owned homes (41%) are lower than they are at for-profits (51%), WPR and Wisconsin Watch found. 

Wisconsin’s for-profit nursing homes drew a median of three substantiated complaints over the last three years, compared to a median of zero at county-owned facilities, which also fared better than for-profits and nonprofits in health inspection and overall quality ratings.

Nursing homes owned by Lincoln, Portage and Sauk counties all rate above average, but county officials believe private owners could run them better.  

Counties struggle to make quick decisions the fast-changing industry requires, Friske said.

Potential buyers named in Lincoln, Portage and Sauk counties all own multiple facilities across the state. Two own facilities in other states. That setup makes it easier for them to fund repairs or convert rooms to assisted living quickly without repeatedly asking taxpayers. 

Care & Rehab Company, which initially sought to buy Pine Crest, owns six facilities in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Two share Pine Crest’s “much above average” federal rating, but two others received “below average” ratings.  

People for Pine Crest

Dora Gorski kept her husband Ken at home for as long as possible. 

Ken, a father, veteran, martial arts instructor and first responder, was often too proud to admit to falling — even when Dora woke up to find him on the ground.

She initially got help from neighbors and home health aides who warned her about his worsening dementia. Ken eventually ended up hospitalized and in need of a wheelchair. 

When Dora realized she’d have no way to get him into their house upon their return, Pine Crest was her first call.

The woman in admissions knew Ken, who had taught her children aikido. Once he moved in, a maintenance worker recognized Ken as his former martial arts teacher. A caretaker told Dora she knew Ken, too — having worked with him as a phlebotomist. 

It turned out that Arlene Meyer, a fellow first responder who had long known Ken, lived down the hall.

“It was people who not just knew him as a doddering old man who is barely able to talk,” Dora said. “They knew him as a respected instructor.”

Two weeks before Ken’s death in December 2023, Pine Crest hosted his 90th birthday party. His children, former students and friends, including Meyer, packed a community room. 

“That meant a lot to Ken,” said Dora, who still participates in a group called “People For Pine Crest,” which opposes a sale.

“We own it. It’s our place. We all take pride in it being here,” she said.

The group spent 2023 urging the Lincoln County Board to keep the nursing home. Their flurry of petitions, yard signs, T-shirts, public testimonies, phone calls and emails didn’t work. The board voted to sell to Care & Rehab.

But an attorney and ally on the county board noticed a language problem in the sale agreement and sued the county to halt the sale.

Care & Rehab backed out before the case could move forward, offering People For Pine Crest a reprieve. 

But Friske, who lost reelection this spring, sees a ticking clock. He expects Pine Crest will face a fiscal crisis that will force a closure unless it sells. 

He resents any suggestion that his board colleagues don’t care about those who depend on Pine Crest.

“The county board is not a congressman from Missouri, Arkansas and Texas, telling Wisconsin how to live,” Friske said. “What’s happening here is friends and neighbors who are elected to the county board. They live here, their families are here, we’re all here.”

Lincoln County has just two other nursing homes, both in Tomahawk and with lower federal ratings.

Dora Gorski, who lives 20 minutes from Pine Crest, said the short distance allowed her to eat breakfast with Ken most mornings. That routine would have been tough to maintain — doubling the length of her drive — had he lived in one of Lincoln County’s two private facilities or the state veterans home in King, Wisconsin.

The county hopes to keep some nursing home beds in Merrill, said current Lincoln County chair Jesse Boyd, but they won’t be county-owned. He agrees with Friske’s financial outlook. 

“Right now, we’re drowning,” he said. 

The county now has lined up a couple of potential buyers for Pine Crest.

If a sale proceeds? Pine Crest won’t be the same, Gorski expects. For now it’s “full of neighbors and friends and people from our community, people who love us and know us,” she said.  

“You don’t find that in some big city, and you don’t find that in a private, for-profit nursing home.”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

‘We own it. It’s our place.’ Worsened care feared as counties privatize their nursing homes 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.

Two lawyers and a former Trump campaign aide are scheduled to make their initial appearances in court Thursday, each facing 11 felony charges for their roles in a scheme that generated documents falsely claiming Donald Trump won Wisconsin’s 2020 election.

Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul in June initially charged Michael Roman and attorneys Jim Troupis and Kenneth Chesebro with “uttering as genuine a forged writing or object,” a felony that can result in up to a $10,000 fine and imprisonment of up to 6 years. The charges stem from their efforts to craft a slate of false electors for Donald Trump in 2020 after he narrowly lost Wisconsin and other key swing states to Joe Biden.

On Tuesday, the state Department of Justice added 10 additional charges for each defendant, arguing Chesebro, Roman and Troupis defrauded the 10 Republicans who falsely posed as electors for Trump. All 10 new charges are felonies and they can each result in up to  a $10,000 fine and imprisonment of up to 6 years.

The defendants are set to appear in Dane County Circuit Court almost four years to the day after a group of Republicans met at the State Capitol in Madison to create the documents.

Trump appears to have avoided legal consequences for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, largely due to his election victory last month. Thursday’s hearing offers a reminder that others involved in the plot are still being prosecuted.

Kaul’s office declined to answer a question about why he believes it’s important to continue the prosecutions into 2025. But Kaul spokesperson Gillian Drummond reiterated that the Department of Justice’s approach “has been focused on following the facts where they lead and making decisions based on the facts, the law and the best interests of justice.”

The case’s original 47-page criminal complaint details how Chesebro, Troupis and Roman helped craft a “Certificate of the Votes of the 2020 Electors from Wisconsin” that falsely said Trump won Wisconsin’s 10 Electoral College votes at the time — tactics replicated in six other swing states. The complaint also outlines efforts to deliver the paperwork to then-Vice President Mike Pence.

A majority of the 10 Republicans who acted as the false Trump electors told investigators that they did not believe their signatures would be sent to Washington, according to new details in Tuesday’s amended complaint. A majority of the false electors also said they did not consent to their signatures being presented as Wisconsin’s electoral votes without a court ruling handing the state to Trump.

Chesebro and Roman have faced charges in Georgia, where Chesebro is seeking to invalidate an earlier deal in which he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit filing false documents.

Of the trio charged in Wisconsin, Troupis is the only one who has filed motions to dismiss ahead of Thursday’s hearing.

One motion, which was filed before the additional charges were handed down, argues the DOJ failed to allege a criminal offense. 

The Wisconsin Supreme Court just two hours before the alternative electors met ruled against Trump’s efforts to throw out more than 220,000 Dane and Milwaukee county votes and to reverse his loss. But an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was still in the works, Troupis’ motion notes. The Republican electors cast their illegitimate ballots for Trump, the motion adds, as Troupis worked to protect his client’s rights in case the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Wisconsin’s election results.

“That practice of having both sets of electors meet and vote during an on-going legal challenge or recount is over a century old,” Troupis argues in his brief. He points to the 1876 presidential election, when three states sent competing slates of electors to Washington, and the 1960 race, when Hawaii featured competing electors due to an ongoing recount that eventually flipped three electoral votes from Richard Nixon to John F. Kennedy. Historians have identified key differences between those cases and 2020.

“Having the Republican electors meet and cast their ballot was not criminal or even untoward and the ballot was not a forgery,” Troupis argues.

A separate motion argues the criminal complaint omits information that pokes holes in the DOJ’s allegations. 

Troupis’ attorney points to a 2022 memo from the DOJ solicited by the Wisconsin Elections Commission as it investigated a complaint filed against the Trump electors. 

That complaint argued the Trump electors “met in a concerted effort to ensure that they would be mistaken, as a result of their deliberate forgery and fraud, for Wisconsin’s legitimate Presidential Electors.” But the DOJ concluded in its memo that the “record does not support this allegation” and that the Trump electors even before the Dec. 14 meeting “publicly stated, including in court pleadings, that they were meeting to preserve legal options while litigation was pending.” 

Troupis’ legal team claims that conclusion — omitted from the criminal complaint —shows “it was proper and necessary for the alternate electors to meet and vote on December 14.” 

In another motion, Troupis argues election-related prosecutions can unfold only if the elections commission determines probable cause and refers the case to a county district attorney — not the attorney general. 

Troupis’ legal team argues his motions to dismiss must be heard before Troupis makes his initial appearance. Dane County Circuit Court Judge John Hyland declined on Friday to hear the motions before the initial appearance.

Trump could not pardon his former aides upon his return to office. Presidential pardon power extends only to federal offenses. These are state charges. 

The hearing is scheduled for 10:30 a.m at the Dane County Courthouse.

Forward is a look ahead at the week in Wisconsin government and politics from the Wisconsin Watch statehouse team.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

UPDATE: New charges filed in 2020 ‘fake electors’ scheme is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin budgets nearly $463,000 a year to incarcerate each child at the state’s beleaguered juvenile prison complex in the North Woods, a figure that has ballooned over a decade as enrollment has plummeted.

A new Department of Corrections budget request would nearly double that figure to about $862,000 a year — 58 times what taxpayers spend on the average K-12 public school student.

It comes as efforts to close the Lincoln County complex — home to Lincoln Hills School for boys and Copper Lake School for girls — and build a new youth prison in Milwaukee have slowed to a crawl.  

Six years after the Legislature approved the closure plan, Republican lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers are blaming each other during funding and policy disagreements that have delayed the closure. 

A 2018 legal settlement restricted how guards could discipline youth. That followed a series of scandals involving allegations of inhumane conditions, such as frequent use of pepper spray, strip searches and mechanical restraints and solitary confinement. 

Republicans earlier this year pushed to lift pepper spray restrictions after a 16-year-old incarcerated at Lincoln Hills struck a counselor in the face, resulting in his death. A judge denied requests to alter the settlement in a dispute that has added to closure delays, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

Meanwhile, the facility’s population is dwindling. As of late November, it served just 41 boys and 18 girls on a campus designed for more than 500 youth.  

Wisconsin Watch and Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service spoke to judges, lawmakers, former prison staff and researchers about the eye-popping price tag to incarcerate fewer young people. They attributed the trends to demographic changes, a paradigm shift from large youth prisons to smaller regional facilities and scandals on the campus that made judges hesitant to send teens to Lincoln Hills. 

“No judge wants to send a kid to Lincoln Hills,” said Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Laura Crivello, who has presided over juvenile cases. “You feel like you’re damning the kid. And if you look at the recidivism rates that come out of Lincoln Hills, you pretty much are damning a kid.” 

Here’s a closer look at the numbers. 

Who sets budgets for youth prisons? 

Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake schools are the state’s only youth prisons, but they are among four main state facilities for young people convicted of serious juvenile offenses. The others are Mendota Mental Health Institute, a psychiatric hospital in Madison that treats youth involved in the juvenile justice system, and Grow Academy, a residential incarceration-alternative program outside of Madison.

The Legislature sets uniform daily rates that counties pay to send youth to any of the locations — spreading costs across all facilities. 

In 2015, lawmakers approved a daily rate of $284 per juvenile across all four facilities, or nearly $104,000 a year. This year’s rate is $1,268 a day, or nearly $463,000 annually. 

The annual per-student rate would jump to about $841,000 in 2025 and nearly $862,000 in 2026 if the Legislature approves the latest Department of Corrections funding request. 

By contrast, Wisconsin spent an annual average of $14,882 per student in K-12 public schools in 2023, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum. 

Why have costs ballooned? 

A campus built for more than 500 is mostly underused as enrollment declines, but taxpayers must still pay to maintain the same large space. It affects county budgets since they pay for youth they send to state juvenile correctional facilities.

Fixed infrastructure and staffing costs account for the largest share of expenses, said department spokesperson Beth Hardtke. Spreading the costs among fewer juveniles inflates the per capita price tag.

But taxpayers haven’t seen overall savings from the steep drop in enrollment either. The state in 2015 budgeted about $25.9 million for the Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake complex. That number climbed to about $31.3 million by 2023 with the addition of staff — a cost increase nearly in line with inflation during that period. 

Driving requests to further hike rates: The Department of Corrections seeks $19.4 million in 2026 and $19.8 million in 2027 to expand Mendota Mental Health Institute’s capacity from 29 beds for boys to 93 beds serving girls or boys — an expansion required by state law. 

The expansion requires adding 123 positions at the facility. Such additions affect calculations for the rates of all state facilities for incarcerated juveniles, including Lincoln Hills.  

Why are there fewer incarcerated students? 

The trends driving high costs at Lincoln Hills started more than 20 years ago, said Jason Stein, president of the Wisconsin Policy Forum.

First, Wisconsin is home to increasingly fewer young people. 

The state’s population of youth under 18 has been shrinking. The state saw a 3.2% dip between 2012 and 2021 — from 1,317,004 juveniles to 1,274,605 juveniles, according to a  Legislative Fiscal Bureau report.

Juvenile arrests in Wisconsin dropped by 66% during the same period.  

Meanwhile, judges became reluctant to sentence juveniles to Lincoln Hills —  even before abuse allegations escalated and prompted authorities to raid the campus in 2015.     

“I was the presiding judge at Children’s Court, when we blew open the fact that kids weren’t getting an education and they were having their arms broken,” said Mary Triggiano, an adjunct professor at Marquette University Law School and former District 1 Circuit Court chief judge.

“But we knew before that there were problems with Lincoln Hills because we watched the recidivism rates. We would bring in DOC and say: ‘Tell me what kind of services you’re going to give. Tell me why they’re not in school. Tell me why you’re keeping them in segregation for hours and hours and hours’ — when we know that’s awful for kids who experience trauma.”

Enrollment dropped and costs increased, but outcomes didn’t improve. 

More than 61% of the 131 boys who left Lincoln Hills in 2018 committed a new offense within three years, while about 47% of the 15 girls who left Copper Lake reoffended. The recidivism rate for boys during that period was roughly the same as it was for those released in 2014. The rate for girls was worse than the nearly 42% it was four years earlier. 

Stein compared Lincoln Hills to a restaurant that tries to compensate for lost customers by raising meal prices. If prices keep rising, customers will look for a different restaurant, he said. 

“That, in a nutshell, is how you get into this spiral where you’re seeing fewer residents, higher rates, and greater costs for counties,” Stein said. “Then it’s just rinse and repeat.”

How much do other states spend to incarcerate youth?  

Wisconsin is not the only state spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per juvenile it incarcerates. 

A 2020 Justice Policy Institute report showed Wisconsin spent less than the national average in 2020. But Wisconsin’s per-juvenile costs have since more than tripled as Lincoln Hills remains open and incarcerates fewer young people.  

Incarcerating juveniles is generally more expensive than it is for adults, said Ryan King, director of research and policy at Justice Policy Institute. Rehabilitation plays a bigger role in juvenile corrections, and those programs cost more. Incarcerated children typically access more  counseling, education and case management programs. 

States nationwide are rethinking their approach to youth incarceration as crime rates fall and more research shows how prison damages children, King said. 

“There was an acknowledgement that locking kids up was not only failing to make communities safer, but it was making kids worse, and really just putting them in a position where they were more likely to end up in the adult system,” he said.  

How is Wisconsin trying to reshape juvenile justice? 

In 2018, then-Gov. Scott Walker signed Act 185, designed to restructure the state’s juvenile justice system. The law kicked off plans for a new state youth prison in Milwaukee and authorized counties to build their own secure, residential care centers.

Milwaukee and Racine counties are moving forward on such plans to build these centers. The centers function similarly to county jails: County officials operate them under Department of Corrections oversight. Officials hope keeping youth closer to home will help them maintain family connections. 

“We have always pushed smaller is better. You can’t warehouse young people like you do adults,” said Sharlen Moore, a Milwaukee alderwoman and co-founder of Youth Justice Milwaukee. “Their brain just doesn’t comprehend things in that way.”

The law aimed to close troubled Lincoln Hills and give judges more options at sentencing while balancing the needs of juvenile offenders and the public. But those options have yet to fully develop. 

Today’s alternative programs typically have limited space and extensive waitlists. That won’t be fixed until more regional facilities go online. 

How else could Wisconsin spend on troubled youth? 

Triggiano, now director of the Marquette Law School’s Andrew Center for Restorative Justice, was astounded to learn youth incarceration costs could nearly double next year. 

“You just want to drop to your knees because if I had that money, we had that money, what could we do differently?” she said. 

She quickly offered ideas: programs that recognize how traumatic experiences shape behavior, violence prevention outreach in schools, community mentorship programs — evidence-based practices shown to help children and teens. Milwaukee County had worked to create some of those programs before funding was pulled, Triggiano said.

“It all got blown up in a variety of ways at every juncture,” she said. “Now there’s going to be an attachment to the secure detention facility because that’s all people could muster up after being slammed down every time we tried to do something that we thought was going to work.”

State Rep. Darrin Madison, D-Milwaukee, echoed Triggiano and offered additional spending suggestions, such as housing resources, mental health support and summer jobs programs. 

“The cost of sending one young person to Lincoln Hills would be enough to pay several young people working jobs over summer or the span of the school year,” Madison said.  

Wisconsin’s disproportionate spending on incarcerating its young people runs counter to the Wisconsin Idea, its historical commitment to education, he added. 

“We’re so committed to incarcerating people that we’re willing to eat the cost of doing so, as opposed to making investments in deterrence and getting at the root cause of the problems.” 

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

One child, $463,000 per year: Ballooning costs of troubled Lincoln Hills youth prison 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.

In an era of endless social media feeds, push alerts and newsletters competing for your attention, we appreciate the time you spend with our reporting. 

We work hard to produce stories with a long shelf life — those with actionable information that make you think for weeks or months after reading them. That’s why we get excited when we learn that particular stories are resonating. 

As we look back on 2024, we’re highlighting the stories that seemed to most interest you, at least according to the time readers on average spent on their web pages. If you missed them earlier, perhaps that’s enough endorsement to give them a read.

If you have feedback on our work, we always want to hear it. Let us know how by emailing me at jmalewitz@wisconsinwatch.org.

The businessman: Pig farm developer gains little trust in Wisconsin town. He doesn’t particularly care.

We published this story at the end of 2023, but folks were reading it well into 2024 and devoting more time on average than they did for any other story this year. 

Reporter Bennet Goldstein illustrated how a pig farm developer failed to earn the trust of Trade Lake, Wisconsin, residents as the community learned of their vulnerability to potential environmental harms from agricultural operations. This was part of the three-part series Hogtied, which examined the political, regulatory and economic forces shaping a proposal to build Wisconsin’s largest pig farm.

The Gospel of Matthew Trewhella: How a militant anti-abortion activist is influencing Republican politics

ProPublica Local Reporting Network investigative reporter Phoebe Petrovic told the story of how a Waukesha County anti-abortion extremist went from political pariah to ideological influencer. Matthew Trewhella regained favor among some Republicans by exhorting local government officials to reject state and federal laws that don’t conform with God’s laws based on an obscure 16th-century theory known as “the doctrine of the lesser magistrates.”

In a separate first-person essay Petrovic explained why the story is important, and she later more broadly detailed how the religious right came to influence the 2024 election. That was another story that readers spent more time with compared to most others. 

These doctors were censured. Wisconsin’s prisons hired them anyway. 

Wisconsin Watch’s Mario Koran, in collaboration with The New York Times, investigated the checkered disciplinary records of Wisconsin prison doctors.

He found that nearly a third of the 60 staff physicians employed over the last decade were censured by a state medical board for an error or breach of ethics. Many doctors went on to face lawsuits from inmates saying that they made errors that led to serious harm, leading to hundreds of thousands of dollars in payouts. Many of the physicians would likely struggle to get hired at hospitals and in other settings because of those histories, a former state Medical Examining Board chairman told Koran. 

Review of Wisconsin talk radio finds stark divides, misinformation

This was part of a six-part series, Change is on the Air, produced by Wisconsin Watch and investigative journalism students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison about the changing state of talk radio in Wisconsin. 

In fact-checking six radio hosts across the political spectrum, the students found a disturbing reality that spoke to our current political moment: The shows spreading the most misinformation had the largest audience and most advertising. Readers also spent more time on the page of the series overview story than most other 2024 stories. 

‘A shoot can be legal. That doesn’t mean it was necessary.’ Fatal police encounters rise in Wisconsin

In his final story for Wisconsin Watch as a Report for America fellow, Jacob Resneck dug into the disturbing rise in police-involved deaths in Wisconsin over the past two years. The attorney general and the largest police union said the increase was due to more incidents involving armed and dangerous individuals. That’s despite the fact that violent crime is down, and such incidents make up a smaller share of incidents here than in neighboring states. Wisconsin at the time saw more fatal encounters than Illinois, despite having only half the population.

How Milwaukee’s SDC unraveled: weak controls, little oversight

Addie Costello of Wisconsin Watch and WPR traced the backstory of what happened to Milwaukee’s Social Development Commission, which shuttered and laid off its entire staff in April. State and local agencies awarded the intergovernmental commission big contracts even after SDC eliminated internal auditing mechanisms. She found that SDC was created by governments but functioned outside of them. Government officials told her they largely focused on how SDC executes contracts with their individual offices — rather than broader operations issues.

Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service reporter Meredith Melland contributed reporting to the investigation. She has closely chronicled other twists and turns at SDC, which provided a range of services such as emergency furnace installation, tax support, career advancement, senior companionship and rent assistance for low-income Milwaukee residents.

How Hmong women in Wisconsin are tackling domestic violence in their communities 

Reporter Zhen Wang wrote about a group of Hmong women who are pushing back against attitudes that prevent women from reporting abuse and leaving violent relationships. That includes offering safe housing, counseling and more representation in mediation processes that typically precede a divorce sanctioned by Hmong leaders. The women are also speaking out in an ongoing debate about the role patriarchal attitudes play in shaping scenarios that can prove deadly.

Relatedly, Wang reported on the promise Wisconsin officials see in “housing first” support of domestic violence survivors.

Wisconsin seniors face housing upheaval as assisted living homes reject Medicaid 

Assisted living can offer residents more independence and a less institutionalized setting than in traditional nursing homes. But Addie Costello of Wisconsin Watch and WPR found that assisted living residents have fewer protections for residents transitioning to Medicaid. At least four Wisconsin assisted living facilities involuntarily discharged residents who required Medicaid assistance between 2022 and 2023.

Meanwhile, Medicaid reimbursements lag far behind the cost of care, prompting some facilities to refuse to accept anything but private pay. 

Poopspotting: How AI and satellites can detect illegal manure spreading in Wisconsin

Reporter Bennet Goldstein last year received a cryptic Excel spreadsheet through a public records request. Although he didn’t understand it at the time, the document contained a list of potential illegal manure spreading incidents that were noticed by satellites orbiting the Earth.

That information led to this engaging story on how Stanford University researchers have used aerial photographs — snapped by satellites — to teach computers to recognize winter spreading. This all matters because applying manure atop snow or frozen soil heightens the risk of runoff, which can contaminate water, spread pathogens, seed algae blooms and kill fish.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Revisit the Wisconsin Watch stories that resonated in 2024 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.

As rays of setting sun striped the hill at Madison’s James Madison Park, Arthur Kohl-Riggs practiced handstands on his favorite tree. 

“I never really planned on handstanding but it’s proven very meditative,” he said. 

Kohl-Riggs, 36, a native of Madison’s west side, said he initially started exercising at the park to regain strength in his shoulder following an injury. Now it’s his “third space” — a familiar spot to connect with others. 

“The idea of being a regular at a park is nice,” he said. “There’s no cost, you don’t have to buy a drink an hour, it’s just a free space to be.” 

As fellow park-goers walked by, some stopped to watch as Kohl-Riggs wrapped his hands around the old oak’s branch, brought his feet near his hands, hooked the branch with his feet, then dropped his arms to the ground, dangling upside down.

“I’ve been trying to find ways to reintegrate intentionally into the community,” Kohl-Riggs said.

Routines developed earlier in the pandemic kept him cooped inside for months at a time, he said. But now, between using his friend’s laundry machine in exchange for handyman work and attending karaoke nights at the Gamma Ray Bar just off the Capitol Square, Kohl-Riggs said he’s forcing himself into community — resisting the forces of complacency to avoid reisolation.

Kohl-Riggs has lived eclectically.

As an activist and citizen journalist in 2012, he ran a protest campaign against Scott Walker in the Republican primary for governor, touting the values of Republicans like Robert La Follette and Abraham Lincoln and growing a Lincoln-like beard. He received nearly 20,000 votes, 3% of the tally, despite spending less than $2,000. Over the next five years, he and a friend produced a tongue-in-cheek YouTube travel series about Dane County called Dane & Dash. He said he now works as a legal investigator for a private law firm that works on public defense overflow cases, helping to “ease the congested public defender rolls,” he said.

Kohl-Riggs said he feels optimistic about the state’s future, despite a range of challenges people face — from housing and financial instability to a lack of health care.  

“Despair only hinders progress,” he said. “We’re more capable now than we were before of seeing more of the faults in a lot of the systems that have always existed. It’s harder to be complacent when everything’s obviously not working how it’s supposed to work.” 

“People are motivated to make their communities better and to protect from potential threats to the people in their communities and around them,” Kohl-Riggs added. “That energy is contagious… we can build strong, resilient local strategies to combat national threats.”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Arthur Kohl-Riggs finds comfort in Madison’s ‘third spaces’ 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.

Today we’re launching Public Square, an occasional photography series introducing your neighbors from across Wisconsin. 

The project aims to highlight the roles people play in their communities throughout the state. In one story, we might profile residents finding solutions to issues facing their cities and towns. In another, we may share someone’s unique perspective on where they fit into their community. 

Throughout the project, we’ll ask people the same questions and make photographs in a similar style — taking something of an informal visual census of the state. We’ll ask:

• What do you love about Wisconsin, and what might you want to fix? 
• What issues do you care about, and how do they impact your life? 
• Where do you find community, and how do you feel about the future? 

Finally, we’ll ask who else we should talk to and where we should next travel so our project can continue fostering connections across the state. At Wisconsin Watch, we want to do more than tell stories of people facing challenges. We want to share your everyday moments of joy, reflection and curiosity. It’s what makes this state great.

Meet your first neighbor here: Arthur Kohl-Riggs, an optimistic practitioner of handstands who works as a legal investigator and once earned thousands of votes as a protest candidate for governor. 

If you know of anyone in your community who we should feature in this visual project, please email me at jtimmerman@wisconsinwatch.org.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Public Square: Portraits of your neighbors from across Wisconsin 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.

In 2022, the percent of Wisconsin residents who had fluoridated water dropped sharply. According to data from the state’s Department of Health Services, 86.9% of residents had fluoridated water in 2021. A year later, that had dropped to 84.9%. Combining data from the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency shows that, in 2024, about 83.6% of the state’s residents have fluoridated water.

The Wisconsin State Journal reported that multiple communities are removing fluoride from their water systems. Opponents of fluoridated water cited a report on fluoride being harmful to children. However, the CDC named fluoridated water systems as one of the greatest health achievements of the 1900s. The CDC recommends 0.7 milligrams of water per liter, or about three drops of fluoride per 55 gallons of water.

This isn’t just a Wisconsin problem. Across the country, fluoride in water is becoming a controversial topic. Coverage from the Associated Press indicated that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s push for removing fluoride from water systems is one of the inciting factors to the controversy. Kennedy is now President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the federal Department of Health and Human Services. 

According to a 2018 publication by the American Dental Association, having fluoride in water systems prevents 25% of tooth decay in children and adults. It can also help reverse tooth decay and lower dental costs for the average consumer. Annually, fluoridated water can lower the cost of dental care by over $32 per person. 

The Fluoride Action Network, an organization dedicated to ending water fluoridation, argues that fluoride is an unnecessary, toxic and dangerous chemical that should not be added to water systems. It cites a 2024 report by the HHS’s National Toxicology Program that says having twice the CDC-recommended amount of fluoride in water systems correlates with lower IQs in children. The study was not conducted with any data from the United States and does not specify that fluoride causes a lower IQ.

DataWatch: Fight against fluoride is expanding on the local and national stage is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin politics were shaken up this year with the signing of new legislative maps that ended over a decade of extreme and effective Republican gerrymandering.

It was the first time in Wisconsin history a Legislature and a governor of different parties agreed on legislative redistricting, the Legislative Reference Bureau told Wisconsin Watch.

In a good Republican year across the country, Wisconsin Democrats flipped 14 seats in the Legislature — largely because of those new maps. It wasn’t enough to win a majority in the Assembly or the Senate, but the resulting 54-45 and 18-15 splits better reflect Wisconsin’s swing-state status.

Wisconsin’s congressional maps were not redrawn. Republicans kept six of the state’s eight congressional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The state’s current congressional maps were drawn by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and approved by the then-conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2022. The last time a governor of one party and a Legislature of another agreed on congressional maps was in 1991.

Evers’ maps were slightly more favorable to Democrats than the previous decade’s maps, but they didn’t change that much because the court established a “least change” rule when deciding which maps it would approve. That meant they would largely conform to the Republican maps that had been in place since 2011.

In March, the now-liberal high court denied a request to reconsider the state’s congressional maps before this year’s elections without stating a reason. Evers had asked for changes to the congressional maps soon after he signed the new legislative maps into law in February. Those maps were approved by the GOP-controlled Legislature.

Elias Law Group filed a motion in January asking the court to revise the congressional boundaries ahead of the 2024 election. The Democratic law firm argued that new maps were justified after the court abandoned the “least change” approach when deciding on the legislative map challenge last year. In that case, the state Supreme Court said it would no longer favor maps that present minimal changes to existing boundaries.

Democrats argued that Evers’ congressional boundaries drawn in 2022 were decided under the “least change” restrictions later thrown out by the court in the legislative redistricting case.

Republicans pushed back, arguing that newly elected liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz prejudged the case during her 2023 campaign. They requested she recuse herself from the case. But Protasiewicz said she decided not to vote on the motion to reconsider the congressional maps because she wasn’t on the court when the underlying case was decided.

Republican Party of Wisconsin chair Brian Schimming in a statement called the court’s decision “the demise of Governor Evers’ latest attempt to throw out his own hand-drawn congressional maps.”

Republicans have retained control of six of Wisconsin’s eight House seats, with Democratic Reps. Mark Pocan and Gwen Moore safely controlling the two districts that cover Madison and Milwaukee. In comparison, Democrats held five of the eight seats in 2010 — the year before Republicans redrew the maps.

The 1st and 3rd districts are currently the only competitive congressional districts in Wisconsin, represented by Republican Reps. Bryan Steil and Derrick Van Orden respectively. Steil won his race this month with 54% of the vote, and Van Orden won with 51.4% of the vote.

Conservative Chief Justice Annette Ziegler and Justice Rebecca Bradley in their concurrence wrote the new majority’s “reckless abandonment of settled legal precedent” in the legislative redistricting case “incentivizes litigants to bring politically divisive cases to this court regardless of their legal merit.”

Representatives of Elias Law Group did not respond to Wisconsin Watch when asked if they anticipate another legal challenge to the congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

“I remain very interested between now and 2030 in trying to find a way to get the court to … tell us whether partisan gerrymandering violates the Wisconsin Constitution. I believe it does,” Jeff Mandell, founder of the liberal legal group Law Forward, told Wisconsin Watch. “I believe the court will say it does when we present the right case.”

But Mandell said nothing has been drafted, and his group won’t bring a case to the Supreme Court unless it has “got the goods.”

Wisconsin Watch readers have submitted questions to our statehouse team, and we’ll answer them in our series, Ask Wisconsin Watch. Have a question about state government? Ask it here.

Why were state legislative districts redrawn for 2024, but congressional districts remain unchanged? 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.

As President-elect Donald Trump stocks his Cabinet with some of his most loyal followers, we’ve already checked some of their surprising and dubious claims.

Here’s a look at a few of them:

No, 40% of children in the U.S. are not taking antidepressants.

Robert Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for health and human services secretary, made that claim while campaigning for Trump in Milwaukee.

The latest evidence we found was for 2022:

Two million adolescents ages 12-17 filled at least one antidepressant prescription, according to a 2024 University of Michigan-led study. That’s 7.9%.

Antidepressants were obtained for 2.7% of children 17 and under, according to a federal agency.

Check out our video version of this fact brief here and please share!

No, Obamacare did not cause health insurance premiums to increase 100%.

Kennedy, who still needs Senate confirmation, made that claim at a forum sponsored by U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.

Average annual health insurance premiums have increased 67% to 75% since Obamacare became law in 2010 — less than what they increased before the law.

No, deportations under Trump were not “the highest ever”.

That statement was made at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee by Thomas Homan, former head of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He is Trump’s pick for border czar and does not require Senate confirmation.

Such removals were highest during Bill Clinton’s second term as president, averaging 1.7 million annually from 1997 through 2000. 

Trump’s highest was 600,000 in 2020.

Check out the video version of this fact brief here.

Yes, Kamala Harris supported taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgery for inmates and detainees

The vice president has supported the rare occurrence of taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgery for prison inmates and detained undocumented immigrants.

That supports a claim made on Wisconsin radio by former U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican who was Trump’s pick for attorney general. Last week Gaetz withdrew himself from consideration amid reports he had paid women for sex and also had sex with an underage teen. Trump has since announced he plans to nominate former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to be the nation’s top law enforcement officer instead.

Wisconsin Watch and its partners have also fact-checked claims about (but so far not by) Elon Musk, Trump’s selection to co-lead a government efficiency effort.

We found that Musk was not the founder of Tesla (it was founded by two other entrepreneurs); and that, as of 2022, he was not the richest person in history.

Go here to see all of our fact briefs.

Here are some claims made by Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks — 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.

Marquette University’s John Johnson analyzed voting data for Wisconsin’s 2024 U.S. Senate and presidential elections. “Our electorate is increasingly polarized by education,” Johnson writes.

The youngest voters in Wisconsin shifted slightly toward Republicans in both races while other age groups shifted Democratic in the Senate race and Republican in the presidential. The poorest and richest areas in Wisconsin more often vote Democratic, while the middle class areas have leaned Republican.

Wisconsin has one of highest percentages of tipped workers in the US

The Tax Policy Center’s August 2024 analysis showed that about 5% of workers in the state of Wisconsin work “tipped” jobs. The data analysis classifies tipped employees as dining room staff and the majority of people working in personal care or service jobs (nail technicians, hair stylists, etc.). In July 2024, Wisconsin’s state minimum wage for tipped workers was slightly higher than the federal standard of $2.13 per hour.

Chronic absenteeism has improved among students, but remains high

Wisconsin Policy Forum’s October 2024 analysis showed that students of all ages are chronically absent, defined as missing more than 10% of school days in a year under any circumstances.

The issue is most common at the high school level, where nearly one in four students is chronically absent. Chronic absenteeism reached a peak following the pandemic, and while the 2023 rates are lower than the 2022 rates, they have not returned to pre-pandemic norms.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

DataWatch: Rightward election shift was weaker in Wisconsin than other states 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.

On Nov. 5, Wisconsin voters approved nearly 78% of the 138 school district referendums across the state.

That’s higher than the 60% passage rate this past spring, but the percentage of K-12 referendums approved statewide has been declining since 2018, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum.

The 70% approval rate of all school referendums this year was a 10 percentage-point decrease from 2022 and was the lowest passage rate in a midterm or presidential election year in the last decade.

But more and more districts are going to referendum as state aid has fallen far behind inflation over the last 15 years. A total of 241 questions were posed in 2024, the most ever held in a single year, according to the Policy Forum.

Almost half of Wisconsin’s 421 school districts went to referendum this year, asking for a record total of nearly $6 billion from taxpayers — up from a previous record of $3.3 billion in 2022. Voters ultimately approved $4.4 billion in additional taxes.

School districts are increasingly holding operational referendums, asking residents to take on a recurring tax hike just to cover everyday costs like utilities, routine maintenance and staff salaries. Capital referendums are one-time asks for big projects like a new school.

This year, 66% of operational referendums passed statewide, while 76% of capital referendums passed. There were 148 operating referendums held, the most on record, according to the Policy Forum.

The reliance on school referendums comes amid a heavy debate over state-imposed revenue limits and funding for public education.

Revenue limits were created in the early 1990s to keep in check school property tax increases. In 2009, the state Legislature decoupled per-pupil revenue limits from inflation, and districts have had to manage tighter budgets ever since, especially as inflation in recent years has exceeded revenue limit increases.

Wisconsin’s per-pupil K-12 spending increased at a lower rate than every other state in the nation besides Indiana and Idaho between 2002 and 2020, according to the Policy Forum.

School districts across the state are also grappling with declining enrollment, mainly caused by a drop in birth rates.

“Schools are funded based on the number of students we have, so as we have fewer students, our budget shrinks,” Kenosha Unified School District Superintendent Jeffrey Weiss told Wisconsin Watch.

When costs exceed the per-pupil revenue available to the district, state law allows them to go to referendum to ask their voters to authorize their district to exceed their revenue caps at the expense of property taxpayers.

State revenue limits have fallen more than $2,300 behind inflation per student behind inflation  even in smaller school districts like Hudson, generating millions in lost revenue.

The 2023-25 state budget included a yearly increase of $325 per student to the state-imposed revenue limits. But that increase still lags behind inflation, Wauwatosa School District Superintendent Demond Means told Wisconsin Watch. 

“Are they providing more money to schools? Yes, but they’re still behind. They’ve dug a hole for themselves,” Means said. “They have to come to grips with the fact that they have created an obstacle and a gap that they have to fill.” 

Schools are still reeling from a freeze in revenue caps in the 2021-2023 budget, Means said, in which the Legislature provided zero increases to public school funding immediately following the pandemic. Wisconsin ended its 2024 fiscal year with a $4.6 billion budget surplus.

Republican lawmakers tout the $1 billion they added to the budget for public schools last year, emphasizing that education is the largest portion of the state budget. The increase was part of a deal struck between the GOP-controlled Legislature and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers to simultaneously increase funding for private school vouchers. 

Democrats argue the state has fallen so far behind, $1 billion isn’t nearly enough. 

“Those are just red herrings,” state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly told Wisconsin Watch. “They’re trying to distract because public education has always been one of the most expensive components of our state budget. It just is. It’s a labor-intensive operation, and labor costs money.”

Underly recently called for a $4 billion increase in public school funding in the Department of Public Instruction’s state budget request. It includes a proposal to tie revenue limits to inflation again.

“The fact that we’ve gone to referendum now three different times in the last six years is a sign that state funding is really becoming a challenge,” Means said. “A community like Wauwatosa does not take going to a referendum lightly.”

The district just passed operational and capital referendums totaling $124.4 million. That translates to a $630 annual tax increase on a $300,000 home, according to district calculations.

While passage rates are typically higher in a presidential or midterm election year due to voter turnout, some referendums still failed. School districts like Hudson, serving many rural, conservative townships, are now faced with a choice: cut programs and staff or push to referendum again in April. Its $5 million operational referendum was voted down on Nov. 5.

The referendum would have increased property taxes annually by $5 on a $500,000 home, according to district calculations. 

“These are recurring expenses. This is literally to make ends meet,” Hudson School District Superintendent Nick Ouellette told Wisconsin Watch.

State lawmakers like Rep. Shannon Zimmerman, a Republican who represents the city of Hudson, have suggested that schools need to close and consolidate in light of declining enrollment. Ouellette said it’s not that simple. 

The district is receiving less per-pupil funding from the state due to a steady drop in students. But enrollment is not declining at a fast enough rate to immediately close and consolidate schools and classrooms, Ouellette said. 

“You lose the revenue, but you don’t lose the expense,” Ouellette said. “You have to allow things to drop enough before you can cut.”

Ouellette said blame is often directed at the school districts with claims that they are mismanaging their budgets or not “living within their means.” 

“State lawmakers are well aware that if they continue to not fund schools, it will force local school districts to ask their property tax payers to pay more,” Ouellette said. “So they understand they are raising taxes.”

In Hudson, 54% of the school district’s budget is paid by local taxes, 39% is covered by state aid and 3% comes from federal aid, according to the Policy Forum. A decade ago more than half of the district’s operating revenue came from state aid.

“They’re placing school systems in a very precarious position,” Means said. “Local communities are, in essence, bailing out the Legislature, and that has to stop.”

Forward is a look ahead at the week in Wisconsin government and politics from the Wisconsin Watch statehouse team.

Record-high number of school referendums held this year, but approval rates are declining is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Monday will hear oral arguments in a high-profile case that could, at least partially, determine the future of abortion rights in the state.

The case was filed by Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul and Gov. Tony Evers in the days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade in 2022. It challenges the state’s 1849 abortion ban, which was believed for almost 18 months to ban most abortions in Wisconsin. 

The case is perhaps the most high-profile litigation to reach the state Supreme Court since a redistricting case that resulted in the court’s now-liberal majority throwing out Republican-gerrymandered legislative districts. New districts implemented after that decision resulted last week in 10 additional Assembly seats and four additional state Senate seats for Democrats, though Republicans maintain majorities in both houses.

The arguments will focus on two issues: First, whether the 1849 law applies to consensual abortions. Second, whether the 1849 ban was “impliedly repealed” when the Legislature passed additional laws — while Roe was in effect — regulating abortion after fetal viability. 

A Dane County judge ruled in late 2023 that the 1849 statute applied to feticide, not consensual abortions. That decision was appealed, resulting in Monday’s high court hearing.

Attorneys for Sheboygan County District Attorney Joel Urmanski, who is one of the prosecutors named in the case and has said he would prosecute violations of the 1849 law, argued in briefs submitted to the court that Dane County Circuit Court Judge Diane Schlipper’s interpretation of the law was incorrect.

They argued the “plain meaning (of the law) prohibits consensual abortion.” The statute, in part, provides: “Any person, other than the mother, who intentionally destroys the life of an unborn child is guilty of a Class H felony.”

Accordingly, attorneys for Urmanski argued, the law should apply to consensual abortions for three reasons.

• “First, a doctor who performs an abortion is a person other than the mother of an unborn child,” they wrote.
• “Second, ‘unborn child’ is defined in (the statute) as ‘a human being from the time of conception until it is born alive.’”
• “Finally, a consensual abortion involves the intentional destruction of the life of the unborn child,” Urmanski’s lawyers continued.

“There really should be no dispute that a consensual abortion falls within the scope of the prohibition of (the 1849 ban),” they argued.

Lawyers for Urmanski also argued that the 1849 law was not repealed because it does not conflict with more recent abortion statutes and those laws did not “clearly indicate a legislative intent to repeal (the 1849 law).”

Attorneys for the state Department of Justice — and the district court’s ruling — relied heavily on a 1994 Wisconsin Supreme Court decision. In that case, a man was charged under a portion of the 1849 law “for destroying the life of his unborn quick child by violently assaulting his wife five days prior to her anticipated delivery date.” The man argued the statute applied to abortion, not feticide, but the state Supreme Court disagreed.

In that case, the court concluded that at least portions of the 19th-century law “is not an abortion statute. It makes no mention of an abortive type procedure. Rather, it proscribes the intentional criminal act of feticide: the intentional destruction of an unborn quick child presumably without the consent of the mother.”

“It is a feticide statute only,” the court wrote.

The precedent established in the 1994 case means the 1849 law cannot be applied to consensual abortions, attorneys for the state argued.

On the issue of whether the ban was “impliedly repealed,” the state points to two other cases, both from 1971. A “later-enacted law impliedly repeals an earlier law where an ‘irreconcilable’ conflict exists between the two laws — where the later-enacted statute ‘contains provisions so contrary to or irreconcilable with those of the earlier law that only one of the two statutes can stand in force,’” attorneys from DOJ argued, citing one of the two cases.

Additionally, a law is implied repealed “by the enactment of subsequent comprehensive legislation establishing elaborate inclusions and exclusions of the persons, things and relationships ordinarily associated with the subject,” the attorneys wrote, citing the second case.

Monday’s arguments mark the first of two high-profile abortion cases the court will hear this term. The second, filed by Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, asks the court to declare that abortion access is a right protected by the state constitution.

The court has not scheduled oral arguments in the second case.

Forward is a look ahead at the week in Wisconsin government and politics from the Wisconsin Watch statehouse team.

Wisconsin Supreme Court takes up challenge to 1849 abortion law is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Republicans held on to the state Legislature in Tuesday’s election, but the flipping of 14 Senate and Assembly seats from red to blue provided the clearest evidence yet that the 2011 partisan gerrymander was real and is now dead.

Republicans will maintain majorities in both the Assembly and Senate — though at much slimmer margins than during the most recent legislative session. The math sets up a chance for the Democrats to retake at least one chamber in 2026, especially if Republicans face the usual midterm headwinds that check a new president.

Senate Republicans lost four seats, going from a supermajority that could override Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ vetoes to an 18-15 majority. The four Democratic pickups resulted from new voting maps legislative Republicans and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers agreed to after the newly liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out GOP-gerrymandered districts last year.

The Democratic gains in an election environment favoring Republicans provided further evidence that Wisconsin’s Republican governor and Legislature in 2011 designed maps to allow their party to keep legislative control no matter how much statewide sentiment might change. The party re-upped those maps after the 2020 Census with help from the then-conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court.

The results show that “when people have a real choice at the ballot box, that they’re going to choose the person that best represents their values and the policies they want to see going forward,” Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein, D-Middleton, told Wisconsin Watch in an interview.

Entering the next election cycle, state Senate Democrats will hold 10 guaranteed seats (they were elected Tuesday) and be favored in six of the 17 seats up for election in 2026. That’s according to an analysis of past voting patterns in state Senate districts that does not yet include 2024 results. By comparison, Republicans will hold just six guaranteed seats while being favored in nine districts up for election in 2026.

That will leave both sides battling for two toss-up districts — currently held by GOP Sens. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, and Rob Hutton, R-Brookfield — to determine control of the chamber. On Tuesday, Democrats won two of the three Assembly seats in Hutton’s district.

In the state Assembly, where Democrats hoped new maps would help them win a majority, Republicans won 54 seats, according to unofficial returns, while Democrats captured 45 seats. That marks a 10-seat swing from the previous legislative session, when Assembly Republicans were just shy of the votes needed to override a gubernatorial veto.

That’s a remarkable outcome given Republican candidates almost across the board performed better than the historical GOP candidate averages in their districts. By comparison, Democrats performed worse in relation to the historical partisan makeup in 68 of the state’s 99 Assembly districts, according to a Wisconsin Watch analysis of past voting patterns and unofficial results. On average Republican candidates in competitive races ran 3.6 points ahead of the historical GOP average, while Democrats ran 2.3 points behind.

Incumbency also helped. Though Democrats unseated three Assembly incumbents, Republican incumbents outperformed the past voting trend of their new district by an average of 4.27 points, compared with 3.14 points of those who had never held office. Lawmakers with three or more terms under their belts like Reps. Tony Kurtz, Todd Novak, Travis Tranel and Nancy Vandermeer outperformed their district averages by more than 8 points.

Still, Democrats projected optimism that business in the Capitol wouldn’t proceed as usual this year.

“Things are going to change in the Legislature,” Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer, D-Racine, said in a Wednesday statement. “Fair maps have allowed voters to hold legislators accountable, and this will change how policy is written and what bills move through the Legislature.”

Some Republicans on Wednesday downplayed the Democratic gains.

“(Democrats) spent weeks and months talking up trying to take over at least the Assembly and they didn’t, frankly, come close to doing it, including losing some of the key races,” said Republican Party of Wisconsin Chair Brian Schimming. “The truth of the matter is, they had their one moment when they had a huge turnout to take over this year, and they failed in both houses.”

“Majorities matter in the Legislature,” he added.

Speaking to reporters at the Capitol, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, declared Republicans would not compromise with Democrats if it meant “expanding welfare, having boys play girls sports and all the craziness that the national Democratic Party stands for,” WisPolitics.com reported.

Republicans will also have a chance to pick up seats in two years, Vos said.

Assembly Democrats lost five races on Tuesday in districts with a Democratic edge, including Novak’s in southwest Wisconsin that carries a 13-point Democratic advantage based on past election results. Republicans won all districts in which they have an edge. Among the 14 toss-up districts, those with less than a 10-point spread based on past election results, Democrats won five and Republicans won nine.

Sheboygan Democrat defeats GOP incumbent in reunited city 

In Sheboygan, local Democrats celebrated on Election Night as the majority blue city elected a local Democratic candidate to state office for the first time in over a decade. 

Former Sheboygan Area School District superintendent Joe Sheehan defeated freshman Rep. Amy Binsfeld, R-Sheboygan, under new legislative maps that reunited the 26th Assembly District after the 2011 redistricting process blatantly split the city in half, extending to surrounding rural areas to secure two Republican seats. Sheehan, whose campaign slogan was “together again,” led Binsfeld by less than 900 votes, according to unofficial results. 

“Some people were choosing not to vote because they just didn’t feel, for a decade, that their vote made any difference,” Sheboygan County Democratic Party co-chair Maeve Quinn said. “It got to the point where nobody wanted to run for the office either.”  

But fair maps meant the candidates actually had to get out and earn the vote, Sheboygan Mayor Ryan Sorenson told Wisconsin Watch, saying it strengthened the democratic process in their “light blue city” where the seat wasn’t completely safe.

“We realized the cards were really stacked against us when we had local representation because of the city being cut in half,” Sorenson said. “Sheboygan is the urban center for the county. When you loop us in with small, rural communities that are 45 minutes away, it really dilutes our voice.” 

Sheboygan County Democratic Party co-chair Mary Lynne Donohue, who ran for the district in 2020 as a “sacrificial lamb,” told Wisconsin Watch the new maps had been a “rallying cry.” Both Quinn and Donohue noted their office saw far more volunteers, distributed signs and campaign surrogates this cycle than in previous election years, with over 40 door-knocking volunteers stopping in on both Saturday and Sunday before Election Day, they said. 

“This place was like a ghost town in 2022,” Donohue said. 

The heightened energy is a sign of revival after 13 years of gerrymandering dampened the democratic process in places like Sheboygan all across the state.

Get-out-the-vote volunteers continued to filter into the office on Election Day, including Bryan Cones and Mike Schoen, who came from Chicago to knock on doors in Sheboygan for Democrats up and down the ballot. Cones, originally from Tennessee where Republicans have gerrymandered districts around Nashville, understands how skewed maps make people feel like their vote doesn’t count. 

Another volunteer, Patrice Worel-Olson, said she had never before volunteered with the party but did so this year because of the new maps. “We have a chance,” she said.

Donohue was one of the original plaintiffs in a federal redistricting case that challenged the Republican gerrymander of the state Assembly. The U.S. Supreme Court threw out the case on a technical issue. In a more recent legal challenge, a liberal-majority Wisconsin Supreme Court tossed out the state’s Republican-friendly 2020 maps, leading to lawmakers in both parties to approve today’s more balanced maps. 

Sheehan’s campaign raised nearly $1.3 million to Binsfeld’s $330,000, with the Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee and the Republican Assembly Campaign Committee investing heavily in each race. 

Binsfeld had a falling out with the Sheboygan County GOP earlier this year after she distanced herself from its anti-abortion stance and member concerns about election integrity, according to party chair Russ Otten. The GOP refused to distribute her campaign signs, and Otten predicted she would fall short in the race without local party support. 

In stark contrast with Donohue’s ill-fated 2020 campaign, which raised $75,000, Sheehan told Wisconsin Watch he knocked on over 4,000 doors in the district, where voters shared their enthusiasm for his chances.

“That’s incredible that we got a voice, and now we can talk about some of the issues that really affect Sheboygan, which gerrymandering did not allow,” Sheehan said in an interview. 

End note: The polls were right

Republicans celebrated the continued legislative majorities alongside Trump’s victory in the state and nationally. Democrats breathed a sigh of relief as Sen. Tammy Baldwin eked out a win to secure a third term.

The results also brought relief to Marquette University Law School poll director Charles Franklin. The final Marquette poll had both races in a statistical tie with Kamala Harris up by a point and Baldwin up by two. Trump in fact won by 0.8 points and Baldwin won by 0.9 points — well within the poll’s margin of error. 

“We missed the president by 1.9 points and the Senate by 1.1 points, better than our 2.2 average error,” Franklin told Wisconsin Watch in an email. “SO I get to keep my job.”

The final RealClearPolitics polling average had Harris up 0.4 points and Baldwin up 1.8 points. FiveThirtyEight had Harris up by 1 point and Baldwin up 2.2 points.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Democrats flip 14 legislative seats, affirming GOP gerrymander is dead 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.

Election Day involves more than quickly marking a ballot and anxiously awaiting election returns.

Filing dispatches from across Wisconsin during Tuesday’s general election, our reporters examined how residents participated in the democratic process. Voters and election workers brought joy, angst and purpose to the polls. 

In some cases images told their stories more powerfully than words. 

Here is the best of Wisconsin Watch’s photography from Election Day, portraits of what we saw and who we met.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Photos: What Wisconsin’s democracy looked like on Election Day 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.

An impassive portrait of George Washington watched Tuesday’s Election Day proceedings from his perch above the entrance of Westfield Town Hall.

Washington’s expression offered no hint that the Marquette County, Wisconsin, town was recovering from political tumult: fierce divisions on a three-member board that culminated in September when voters ousted their town chair in a recall election. 

Westfield’s election inspector and chief election inspector soon resigned, along with its treasurer and a town supervisor. The same evening the board approved those resignations, the town clerk, that meeting’s notetaker, handed in her notice.

None of the resignees nor the former board chair, Sharon Galonski, responded to requests for comment for this story.

Several news outlets, including the Associated Press, reported the events, prompting questions about how the resignations might affect Westfield’s preparation for the general election. 

But interim Town Clerk Courtney Trimble said the media blew the situation out of proportion. Volunteers immediately stepped forward following the poll workers’ resignations. Trimble said she had a list of 12 who offered their names.

“I’m confident in their ability,” she said Tuesday. “These elections always feel — I don’t want to say ‘pressure’ — there’s more training that you put in.”

‘Hopefully, tomorrow the commercials will stop!’

Westfield’s polling place occupies its white clapboard-clad town hall, surrounded by cornfields and conifers. The converted one-room schoolhouse dates to the mid-1800s, and chalkboards line its interior walls. Scotch-Irish settlers, attracted by the area’s fertile soil and nearby springs, founded the community.

Here, voters trend conservative. During the 2020 election, they handily handed then-incumbent President Donald Trump 333 votes — nearly two-thirds of ballots cast.

Election greeter Chris Vander Velde stood at the hall’s entrance Tuesday, directing voters to wait in the foyer. They shuffled to the registration table, where poll workers Frank Traina and Susan Porfilio sat. Those caught in the day’s periodic downpours squeaked on the hall’s wooden floors.

Such orderly proceedings were unlike the tempest 2024 presidential cycle, marked by the unexpected withdrawal of President Joe Biden, two assassination attempts against Trump and the rapid ascent of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee.

“Hopefully, tomorrow the commercials will stop!” said one voter who arrived mid-morning in a white and black plaid shirt and sparkly flip-flops.

She and Vander Velde laughed.

Behind her librarian glasses, Porfilio instructed electors to sign the register before continuing to the four voting booths arranged along the room’s perimeter.

The morning hustle? Distinctly ordinary.

One voter forgot her photo identification but returned later with the card in tow. A smiling man’s registration incorrectly appended the suffix “Sr.” to his name.

“I have no idea why,” he told Porfilio.

Traina checked IDs and reminded people the ballot was double-sided with the school referendum on the back

“Thank you for working the polls,” a voter in a maroon windbreaker told him. 

“There’s nowhere else I’d rather be,” Traina said. With every flick of his arm, his “In God we trust” tattoo peeked out from under his Harley-Davidson T-shirt.

Residents of all ages flocked to the polls.

“No ID?” Traina jokingly asked a curly-haired kid, waiting, as their family signed in.

The child mumbled, hands in pockets.

Later, a young woman in a red raincoat and glasses stepped before Porfilio.

“Have you ever voted here before?” Susan asked.

“No, it’s my first time voting in general,” the woman said.

By 10:30 a.m., over half the town’s electorate had cast ballots, including absentee and early voters.

Porfilio chatted with a man in a Lake Michigan shirt. She checked his voter number.

“And I’ll give you your license back,” Porfilio said.

“You heard my house burnt down, right?” he said.

“No!” she said. “When was that? Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah,” he muttered.

‘Take our township back!’

Across the room, Chief Election Inspector Lacey Baumann supervised the Dominion ballot drop box, the last stop on the voters’ town hall circuit.

Baumann awoke at 3:30 a.m. to milk her 53 goats so she could be at the town hall by 6 a.m., an hour before the polls opened. What started as a COVID-19 pandemic pastime became a side hustle, where she and her family make soaps, lotions, laundry detergent, bath salts and lip balm.

“I just want to confirm that there are two initials on the backside box of your ballot,” she told a woman in sweatpants. “You’re gonna put it in the machine where the arrows are. When you hear the second ‘ding,’ you’ll be good to go.”

Lacey’s twin sister, Lindsay Baumann, won Westfield’s recall election in September. Her campaign pledged to “take our township back!” and she bested Galonski by 32 votes.

From the first meeting in 2023 when its members were sworn in, turmoil marked Westfield’s town board. Members sparred during meetings. Discussion routinely veered into accusations of malfeasance.

The recall petition charged Galonski with a litany of offenses, including initiating the termination of the volunteer fire department without considering citizen input and consulting the town board, spending taxpayer dollars in excess and denying a board supervisor access to town property.

At an August board meeting, Galonski defended her actions and rejected one attendee’s call to resign to spare the town the cost of a recall election.

“I haven’t done anything wrong — not a thing. Everything has been done according to the law and by vote of the board,” Galonski said. “The majority of the board has taken action on many of the things that you want to do a recall on.”

‘It’s our right. It’s our privilege’

Voters continued to stream into Westfield’s town hall for the rest of the day. The town reached another turnout milestone.

“That’s what it’s all about,” Vander Velde said. “It’s our right. It’s our privilege. It’s our responsibility.”

Vander Velde, who moved to Westfield more than three decades ago, enjoys chatting with fellow residents on Election Day, but another reason she enjoys working the polls is the chance to learn the rules and regulations. She calls herself a “law and order person.”

“Government is really of the people,” Vander Velde said. “The people in this township are really good, close people, and you expect your government to respond that way.”

As anxious Americans awaited news of the presidency’s fate, Baumann, the town’s newly elected chair, said she felt the political slugfest in her community was over. 

“It seems like there’s a lot more happier people,” she said. “We’re getting somewhere.”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

‘Nowhere else I’d rather be’: An ordinary Election Day follows town’s extraordinary turmoil 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.