The infection of a farm worker in Wisconsin with avian flu has been confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (Stephen Ausmus | Agricultural Research Service, USDA)

A Barron County farm worker has been confirmed to have been infected with avian influenza, the state health department reported Friday. The confirmation was made by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

With the CDC analysis in hand, “the case will now be reported as a confirmed human case” of the highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) announced. It is the first reported case of the virus in a human in Wisconsin. 

The presumed infection was first reported Wednesday in a farm worker who was one of 19 people exposed to a poultry flock in Barron County where the avian flu virus was detected. The flock has been destroyed to prevent the spread of the virus. 

The individual has been treated with antiviral drugs and is recovering, according to DHS. 

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Gov. Tony Evers signs legislation in March 2024 funding a new UW-Madison engineering building. On Wednesday, the State Building Commission divided on party lines, blocking a plan to transfer unspent money for other projects, including the engineering building. (Screenshot via @GovEvers Twitter page)

The on-again, off-again plan for a new engineering building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has hit a new roadblock, with Republican lawmakers questioning how the state was constructing its building project bids and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers accusing  them of last-minute political gamesmanship.

The four Republicans on the eight-member commission voted against a proposal Wedmesday that would have provided $29 million for the UW-Madison engineering building from unspent funds.

The engineering building has been a political football over the last two years since Republican lawmakers sought to use the project as leverage to force the UW system to reduce or eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

After the Republican majority excluded the engineering building funding from the 2023-25 state budget, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos pressured the University of Wisconsin Regents to accept an agreement that reframed diversity initiatives. In return, the Legislature passed and Evers signed in March legislation transferring $423 million to the state’s capital improvement fund for UW projects, including $197 million for the engineering building.

At Wednesday’s State Building Commission meeting, the Evers administration proposed taking $70 million from projects at the UW Eau Claire for which bids came in under budget. The proposal called for redirecting the unspent funds to other projects already approved by the building commission.

In addition to the $29 million for the engineering building, the redirected funds were proposed to go to projects at UW-Whitewater ($10.5 million), UW-Stout ($5.4 million) and assorted university repair and maintenance projects ($25 million).

While blocking the transfer, the commission approved $81 million in projects across the state.

In a statement issued after the commission votes, Evers called the approved projects “critical to our communities” and condemned the vote blocking the transfer, calling it “partisan obstruction” to the UW.

“I am deeply disappointed that Republican lawmakers are once again pulling the rug out from under UW in the eleventh hour and putting politics ahead of doing what’s best for our kids, our workforce and economy, and our state,” Evers said.

In statements released after they voted against the transfer, GOP lawmakers on the commission complained that, among other things, the engineering building project’s design had been expanded beyond what had been previously proposed.

“I have advocated for the Engineering Building, it is important to UW-Madison but the scope of this project has drastically changed and we were not made aware all the changes until it was time for the vote,” said state Rep. Robert Wittke (R-Racine).

Sen. Andre Jacque (R-DePere) cited a news report that the UW-Madison planned to add an additional floor to proposed engineering building and criticized the university for not consulting the Legislature or the building commission about the change. Jacque also questioned why the original estimate for the Eau Claire projects had exceeded the costs based on the final bids.

The commission’s next regularly scheduled meeting is in February, but Evers said his administration will bring the transfer proposal back to the body in January.

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Bird flu was found in a Kenosha flock of chickens and ducks, which will be destroyed to prevent the spread of the highly contagious virus. (Photo by Stephen Ausmus | Animal Research Services, USDA)

A farm worker in Barron County has tested positive for avian influenza after being exposed to a poultry flock infected with the virus, Wisconsin health officials said Wednesday. The woman is the first person identified with the infection in Wisconsin.

At the other end of the state, a case of the highly contagious disease has turned up in a Kenosha County poultry flock, according to the state agriculture department. The flock has been isolated and will be destroyed.

The risk of illness for the general public remains low, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS), while people working with infected animals or who might be otherwise exposed to them are at higher risk.

Also Wednesday, the federal government reported the first severe case of bird flu in a patient in Louisiana. That was believed to be associated with wild birds, not domestic poultry. 

The infected woman in Barron County was identified through a test at the Wisconsin State Lab of Hygiene. The diagnosis is pending confirmation at federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

She was exposed to the Barron County poultry flock where the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) identified an infection with highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI H5N1) last week. The flock was destroyed.

After the infected flock was identified, DHS and Barron County Health and Human Services began monitoring farm workers who may have been exposed to the birds, said Thomas Haupt, a DHS research scientist and epidemiologist, in an online news conference Wednesday.

The woman who tested positive was one of two people tested. 

“She had relatively mild symptoms but symptoms that would be consistent with influenza, including sore throat, slight fever, some fatigue, some eye discharge,” said Haupt. He said she was improving after being treated with an antiviral medication and was expected to make a full recovery.

Public health officials are monitoring another 17 people who were exposed.

State public health veterinarian Dr. Angie Maxted said when people are infected with a communicable disease, public health agencies contact family and other household members to test them for the illness and inform them about preventive measures.

The Kenosha flock where an H5N1 infection was reported Wednesday is a “backyard flock” — one that is raised for a family’s own use, with limited, local sales of eggs or other products, said Dr. Darlene Konkle, DATCP state veterinarian. The flock consisted of 88 chickens and five ducks.

Haupt said the Kenosha County residents who might have been exposed are being tested for the virus. There are no concerns that members of the general public were at risk, however. Maxted said that it appears only the flock’s owners were exposed to the birds.

According to DATCP, the birds from the flock where the infection was reported will not enter the food supply.

In addition, poultry within a 10 kilometer (6.2 mile) area of the Kenosha flock will be restricted from being moved on or off any premises, said DATCP, which establishes a control area around any premises where an infection is found.  

DATCP has a mapping tool that poultry producers and owners can consult to learn whether their poultry are in an active control area or surveillance zone.

Concern about the virus has been heightened for the last three years, with reports of infections in both wild and domestic birds in North America since December 2021.

Konkle said DATCP has been sending information to dairy, poultry and other livestock producers all year, encouraging them to improve biosecurity measures to prevent the spread of disease and protect their birds and animals.

The H5N1 HPAI virus is highly contagious and can be fatal to domestic poultry. The severity of the illness varies depending on its strain and on which species of animal it affects, according to DATCP.

The virus spreads by contact with infected birds, commingling with wild birds or their droppings, and through clothing or equipment used by people working with infected birds or animals.

DHS has a web page with guidance for Protective Actions for People. The department can provide a limited amount of surplus personal protective equipment for farm workers, businesses and processors from the department’s medical stockpile through its Office of Preparedness and Emergency Health Care.  

State law requires all Wisconsin livestock owners to register where their animals are kept, which helps health officials alert flock and herd owners.

Avian flu in domestic birds tends to increase late in the year, likely due to weather conditions and the flow of migrating birds through Wisconsin. “There’s more opportunity, when it’s circulating in these wild birds” for the virus to spread, Konkle said.

People who have contact with livestock and animals are at higher risk for exposure to the H5N1 avian flu virus and should avoid contact with sick or ill animals, said Maxted.

When they must be in contact, people should follow “common sense” precautions, washing their hands frequently and wearing protective clothing including gloves, respiratory protection and eye protection, she said, and clothing exposed to animals should be cleaned and disinfected.

Haupt said the DHS bureau of environmental and occupational health has been working with farmers and farm workers to inform them about the risks of avian influenza and precautions to protect themselves from the virus. The agency urges people who do get sick to take time off.

“If someone is sick, if you don’t have to work — don’t work,” Haupt said. “Stay home, give yourself time to heal.”

This report has been updated to correct the number of people in Barron County being monitored after avian flu exposure.

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Several hundred people gathered on the Capitol Square in Madison Tuesday evening for a vigil following a school shooting Monday that left three dead and injured six other people. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)

A day after a student killed two people, injured six others and took her own life at a Madison private school, public officials and community members mourned and processed their own trauma from the devastating violence.

“It is OK to ask for what you need to take care of your own mental health,” said Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway at a vigil on Madison’s Capitol Square Tuesday evening. “Please. Please. Let us be a community where it is okay to ask for help. Let us be a community where, when we see someone who needs help, that we are the first to extend our hands and to offer resources where they are needed. Let us be a community that takes care of each other. That is where our focus is right now — on caring for everyone who has been impacted by this gun violence.”

The vigil was organized by the Boys & Girls Club of Dane County. “We come together to begin the healing journey for our children and to support one another in this face of another school shooting that has hit our community,” said Michael Johnson, the organization’s president. “Let us remind each other that we are loved, that we are valued and we are not alone in this difficult time.”

“Violence in our community is preventable,” said state Rep. Sheila Stubbs (D-Madison). “We must not stand silent, but instead be moved to action.” She quoted Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights activist: “At the end of the day, we must go forward with hope and not backwards by fear and division.”

Elected officials have united in expressing grief at the shooting. Following through on his announcement Monday, Gov. Tony Evers signed an executive order Tuesday morning calling for the U.S. and Wisconsin flags to be flown at half staff on all state buildings through Sunday, Dec. 22, as well as on the date of each victim’s funeral.

In the well of the U.S. House Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, flanked by a bipartisan group of six of Wisconsin’s eight House members, led a moment of silence in recognition of those affected by the shooting. 

“These were innocent lives, innocent victims of senseless violence, and we mourn their loss with their families and loved ones and the entire Abundant Life Community,” Pocan said. He thanked law enforcement, first responders and health care workers who went to the scene or treated the victims. He emphasized as well that not just the dead and wounded, but the school community, its students, staff and parents, are all victims.

Pocan, like many Democratic lawmakers, has long been an outspoken advocate for tougher gun laws aimed at curbing gun violence. He alluded to that cause in his House speech, saying, “We must do better and we must turn these moments of silence into moments of action.”

But Pocan demurred from discussing specific policy talking points.

At a WisPolitics panel, Assembly Democratic leader Rep. Greta Neubauer cited direct policy changes that Democrats in the Legislature have tried in vain to pass over the last several years, only to be blocked by large Republican majorities: red flag laws that enable authorities to take guns from people perceived to be dangerous and universal background checks on all gun purchases. With a narrower GOP majority in both houses, she said, she hopes measures such as those could advance in the session starting in January.

Meanwhile, on the same panel, incoming Republican Senate President Mary Felzkowski highlighted concerns ranging from violent entertainment to social media — rather than firearms — as potential targets for regulation to reduce gun violence. 

In a television interview, Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg) told Emilee Fannon of TV station CBS 58 that he would support a request by Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul for $2.3 million in the state’s 2025-27 budget to continue permanent funding for the Office of School Safety in the Wisconsin Department of Justice. The office provides K-12 schools with resources to improve security measures and trains school staff on handling traumatic events and crisis prevention and response. It also runs a round-the-clock tip line.

The office became a partisan flashpoint in the Legislature’s 2023-25 budget deliberations after Republicans rejected funding and Democratic lawmakers attacked their decision. The state DOJ subsequently extended its operation by redirecting $1.3 million in federal pandemic relief funds.  

In the hours after the shooting, elected officials were unanimous in their expressions of grief while dividing along party lines in their policy responses.

 “Today’s tragedy is shocking, senseless and heartbreaking,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) said Monday. 

“My thoughts and prayers are with the students, parents and faculty who will have to live with the trauma and grief of this day for the rest of their lives,” he said. “There are no words to adequately express condolences to those who have lost loved ones or to express gratitude for the first responders who were on scene for this violence.”

The statement made no reference either for or against legislation to address gun violence. 

Democratic lawmakers weren’t so reticent. 

“Right now, it’s hard to think of a greater moral failing as a nation and society than our inaction and unwillingness to keep our children safe from gun violence,” said Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison). “We do not have to accept this as an ordinary part of life. No other country does. Indeed – guns are the number one cause of death for American children, and that is a policy choice.”

At a news conference hours after the shooting Monday, Rhodes-Conway largely kept her focus on trauma and healing. “I am on record that I think we need to do better in our country and our community to prevent gun violence,” she said, adding that solutions should be the work of the whole community. A little later, she added: “But first and foremost, what needs to be a priority for all of us is supporting our young people, and that is where our community’s attention needs to turn at this point in time.”

And at Tuesday night’s vigil, she kept the attention on those who had immediately responded to the crisis. “Our community showed up in a big way, and is still continuing to show up,” Rhodes-Conway said. “Ultimately, that’s what gives me hope.”

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From left, former Gov. Tommy Thompson and Republican Party of Wisconsin Chair Brian Schimming speak to reporters after casting their Electoral College votes for President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)

Wisconsin’s 10 Republican presidential electors — meeting officially Tuesday for the first time since 2016 — cast their votes shortly after 12 noon for President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance.

Afterward, state GOP Chair Brian Schimming and former Gov. Tommy Thompson cheerfully asserted their party was on a roll and declared that the Democratic Party of Wisconsin was in for a period of soul-searching after having been “completely captured by the left” and taken over by “elitists.”

“I don’t know if everybody realizes this as much as I do, but there’s been a complete transformation of the political parties — in the state of Wisconsin, across this country,” Thompson told a swarm of reporters who gathered in the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee meeting room on fourth floor of the state Capitol.

“The Republican Party is the party of the working man and woman,” Thompson said. “The Republican Party is the party of the downtrodden and the individuals that need help. The Democrat Party has become a party of elitists, and their policies show that. The Republican Party has been out there asking, what are the problems? What are the questions? Inflation, taxes, regulation. They’re also talking about how you can improve schools, education, and Republicans are there, front and center with ideas and answers, and the Democrats have been vacant. They’ve been vacuous in the last four years.”

The press gaggle followed a formal procedure in which each of the 10 electors signed six copies of the papers documenting Wisconsin’s Electoral College votes for Trump and Vance in 2024. The documents will be forwarded to Washington as part of the Congressional procedure in early January certifying the election results.  

In 2020, 10 Republicans also met in the Capitol and signed forms asserting that Trump, then the incumbent president, had  won Wisconsin’s electoral votes in that year’s presidential race. In fact, President Joe Biden had defeated Trump in Wisconsin by about 20,600 votes, and the state’s official electors were Democrats led by Gov. Tony Evers.

Legal ramifications of the Republicans’ 2020 false electors scheme are still playing out. In June, Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul filed felony forgery charges against three people accused of developing the 2020 plan to have false slates of electors vote for Trump. The defendants had their first court appearance Dec. 12.

Asked his reaction to those latest charges, Thompson said Tuesday  prosecutors and the country should move on.

“Isn’t it about time to turn the page?” Thompson said. “I mean, we can fight over the election of 2020 for the next four years. What does it get us? Isn’t about time to say, you know, we’ve had, we’ve had a lot of differences. This is time to start trying to mend ways in solving America’s problems, Wisconsin’s problems.”

“No one is above the law — not lawyers for former presidents or elected officials themselves,” said Democratic Party of Wisconsin Executive Director Sarah Abel in a statement responding to the GOP press conference. “We can’t move forward unless we learn from the mistakes of the past, and that includes holding accountable those who undermined our democracy and tried to overturn a free and fair election because they didn’t like the outcome.”

Schimming described the Republicans’ victories this year , in which they captured the White House, the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate, as evidence that the party connected with voters  outside as well as inside the GOP. And, he added, those voters remain enthusiastic supporters and volunteers who will power the party forward.

“As I travel across the state, the folks that we identified as Trump voters — not just Republicans, but a lot of people who were concerned about the direction of the country — are extremely motivated,” Schimming said.

“Donald Trump is the face of the Republican Party right now,” Thompson said. “We have control of the Congress and the presidency — we got to deliver to the American people,” he added. “It’s up to us now to show America that we’re going to be able to do it, and I’m confident we’re going to be able to do that without any doubt whatsoever.”

Abel pointed to the divided results in Wisconsin, in which Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin won reelection even as Trump was elected by a slim margin and Democrats picked up seats in the state Legislature, to reject the Republicans’ depiction of the outcome. 

“Let’s not pretend that the Republican Party has a monopoly over Wisconsin,” Abel said. “Neither party swept the state in 2024, and the GOP is grasping at straws as they see their grip on power here fading away. Wisconsin Democrats are built to last. We have a progressive identity that exists separately from the leader of our party — and Republicans can’t say the same.”

Thompson, who headed the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush, also stood by his previous endorsement of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s choice to head the agency.

Kennedy has been widely criticized for anti-vaccine positions. On Dec. 9, dozens of Nobel laureates released a letter opposing Kennedy’s nomination because of his opposition to vaccines as well as to other public health measures.

Thompson said the suggestion that Kennedy harbored hostility toward vaccines is “misreading what he said,” adding, “I’m hoping what he said is not correct.” Kennedy’s past criticisms of vaccines included the “implied” question, “is that based upon science?” Thompson argued. “I think everything has got to be based on science.”

Thompson said he supported Kennedy because the nominee’s stated goals include improving Americans’ health, ensuring foods are healthier, “trying to make sure that all medicines are based upon science — who’s against that?” and that he favors speeding up the process of approving new drugs. “I’m in favor of all of those,” Thompson said, “and that’s why I support him.”

Asked about Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Ben Wikler’s campaign to head the national party, Thompson joked, “I’m going to contribute to it,” then later said Wikler “is a very good politician” whom he wished well.

Schimming called Wikler “obviously a talented guy,” but asserted that the party needed more dramatic change. “The Democratic Party has been completely captured by the left, and they can’t seem to figure out that that’s part of their problem,” he said. “And if they continue not figuring it out, that’s fine.”

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The Healthcare.gov website, where people can sign up for health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Sunday, Dec. 15, is the deadline to enroll for people who want coverage to start Jan. 1. (Screenshot | Healthcare.gov website)

People who want to sign up for health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act in 2025 must do so by the end of the day Sunday, Dec. 15, if they want coverage to start on New Year’s Day.

“For accidents or injuries or when illness strikes, the last thing that anyone should have to worry about is how they’re going to pay for that, or whether they’re going to fall into some sort of medical debt,” said Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley during an online press conference Friday to draw attention to the Sunday deadline.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) imposed new consumer protection provisions for health insurance plans, among them a requirement that people cannot be denied coverage or charged higher premiums because of their personal health history.

The act also led to the creation of a federal health care marketplace Healthcare.gov, where people can purchase individual health insurance plans if they don’t have health coverage through an employer or some other group source, including Medicaid or Medicare. Healthcare.gov provides information about the plans available in a person’s geographic area.

The ACA open enrollment period for individual plans started Nov. 1. Whether people are enrolling for the first time — because they’ve lost their coverage through work, for example — or renewing their insurance after enrolling previously in 2023 or before, “you should take advantage of this time right now,” said Joe Zepecki of Protect Our Care, a national campaign to support and strengthen the ACA. Protect Our Care organized Friday’s news conference.

People who sign up for a plan at Healthcare.gov must do so by Sunday, Dec. 15, to get coverage that starts Jan. 1.  For people who enroll after Sunday, 2025 coverage won’t start until Feb. 1. The final deadline for enrolling is Jan. 15.

People can get guidance in assessing their choices of plans through the statewide health insurance navigator, Covering Wisconsin (coveringwi.org).  In addition to the website, Wisconsin residents can call 414-400-9489 in the Milwaukee area or 608-261-1455 in the Madison area to reach a navigator with the organization. Both telephone numbers are available to residents anywhere in the state.

As of Dec. 1, 88,189 Wisconsin residents have enrolled in coverage during the current open enrollment period, according to the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). That’s slightly short of the pace at the same time last year, when 99,950 people enrolled by Dec. 2, the Wisconsin Office of the Commissioner of Insurance reported.

Almost 250,000 Wisconsin residents — a record number — have been covered in 2024 under plans provided through the ACA website, Zepecki said Friday.

Expanded federal tax credit subsidies tied to the income of an applicant have reduced the cost of plans purchased through the ACA dramatically. Those subsidies have reduced the cost for about 61,000 Wisconsin residents, Zepecki said, and will remain in effect through 2025, making health plans much more affordable for people.

The enhanced insurance premium tax credit subsidies were first instituted with the enactment in 2021 of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) in the first year of President Joe Biden’s term, and they were extended in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

Zepecki said that for a 45-year-old Wisconsinite making $60,000 a year, the enhanced subsidy would save about $1,442 a year. For a 60-year-old couple with a combined income of $82,000 a year, “the difference in having the premium tax credits and losing them is more than $18,000 a year,” he added. And for a family of four with a household income of 125,000 a year, the premium tax credits would save more than $8,200.

“This helps almost everybody who’s in the [federal health insurance] marketplace,” Zepecki said.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) said making the subsidies permanent “will be at the top of my list as something that helps working families across Wisconsin and across the United States” in the 2025 Congress. She said they will be part of “a very robust debate” about the tax code as Republican lawmakers seek to extend tax cuts enacted in 2017 during Donald Trump’s first term as president.

“I know we have some folks who are more focused, sadly, on tax breaks for the wealthy and big corporations,” Baldwin said. “I’m going to be fighting for working Wisconsinites.”

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Photo by Getty Images

For employees of small businesses, health benefits cost more and cover less than they do for employees of large companies, according to a new report released Tuesday.

“Small-firm employees are paying more for their health insurance coverage but getting less financial protection in return,” according to the report, produced by The Commonwealth Fund.

Wisconsin is right in line with the national trend. In 2023, insurance premiums for family coverage cost Wisconsin small business employees just over $1,300 more each year compared with the cost for employees of large businesses, according to the report.

Wisconsin small business employees also absorbed higher health costs up front, paying nearly $1,400 more a year on their health insurance deductibles in 2023 than their big business counterparts.

Those are close to the national average, with a smaller disparity than some states have. According to the report, small-firm employees in some states pay as much as $10,000 more toward their annual health insurance premiums than their large-firm counterparts.

Most large employers provide health coverage, and smaller employers competing with them for workers are motivated to provide coverage as well, but find it a lot more difficult, the report finds.

“Small firm employers have generally been in a tough place because they have so much less leverage than a large firm,” Sara Collins, a coauthor of the report, told the Wisconsin Examiner in an interview. “They have higher administrative costs per employee, and it’s a much more onerous benefit to provide.”

Because of those challenges, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), enacted in 2010, includes requirements for businesses with 50 or more employees to provide health coverage, but exempts smaller employers.

“While all firms face growing premiums, small employers may have less capacity to absorb these rising costs and may pass on greater portions of these costs to their employees,” the report states. “Half of participating small-business owners in a 2024 survey reported raising employee contributions in response to rising health care costs.”

For TJ Semanchin, who owns Wonderstate Coffee, the report’s analysis rings true.

Wonderstate operates a coffee roastery in Viroqua, Wisconsin, as well as three cafes: in Viroqua, Bayfield and Madison. The roastery employs about 30 people, and the three cafés about 20 people each.

“Our current health system is a major competitive disadvantage for small business,” said Semanchin. 

He would like to see a universal, single-payer health care plan. But since that’s not the current reality, “We want to be providing as best we can for our staff as a responsible employer, and we’re also competing for talent.”

The roastery and the cafés are structured as separate corporations and have different health plans.

On the café side, Wonderstate offers a supplemental policy for employees who don’t have health insurance or whose insurance has a high deductible; the policy covers needs such as emergency room visits and a telehealth service.

The business encourages employees to sign up for comprehensive coverage at Healthcare.gov under the Affordable Care Act, where they’re likely to qualify for enhanced tax-credit subsidies that have lowered the premium costs for people whose incomes qualify.

On the roastery side of the business, Wonderstate recently made a major switch after facing the prospect of an 18% increase in premium costs for employees.

“That is on top of years of double-digit increases,” Semanchin said. “That’s not sustainable at all.”

In response, Wonderstate switched to a level-funded plan for roastery division employees — similar to a self-funded plan, in which an employer covers health care costs directly from its revenues.

Wonderstate will pay a fixed amount each month from which the company managing the plan will pay for medical care as it’s needed. There’s company-wide catastrophic coverage if health care costs exceed the budget for the year.

Nationwide, according to the Commonwealth Fund report, about 40% of small-firm employees with health benefits are covered by self-funded or level-funded plans. Those plans are exempt from state insurance regulations and from protections provided by the Affordable Care Act, which prevents insurers from denying coverage or increasing premiums based on a person’s health history.

Semanchin said the provider reviewed the staff medical history before approving the business for the plan.  Wonderstate pays 80% of the premium for individual coverage and 50% of the family coverage premium.

“It’s allowed us to hold costs [down] for the first time in many years,” Semanchin said of the new plan. “If our staff has a bad year for medical bills, we might get kicked off” in future years.

That is not unusual, and the result can have “a very destabilizing effect on the small group market,” Collins said. “The markets function a lot better when everybody plays by the same rules.”

The report lists a number of policy options to help bolster the ability of small employers to provide health coverage for employees.

States that have expanded Medicaid under the ACA to cover people with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty guideline could require employers to inform workers who would qualify for Medicaid about the option — which has low or no premiums and limited cost-sharing requirements — if it would be more affordable than the employer’s plan.

For states that haven’t expanded Medicaid — including Wisconsin — the report suggests that Congress could create a federal fallback plan covering the same group of people expansion would cover. “This would enable lower-income people with unaffordable employer plans to enroll in Medicaid in those states,” the report states.

Another option the report suggests would be to make enhanced subsidies for low-income purchasers of insurance at Healthcare.gov permanent. The subsidies are now scheduled to end next year. The report also suggests making it easier for workers at small firms with unaffordable or low-quality health plans to become eligible for the subsidies.

Extending the subsidies is already shaping up to be a significant subject of debate in Congress next year. “People are going to see really big increases in their premiums if they aren’t extended,” Collins said. “That will be a real cost shock to families,” leading more people to return to the ranks of the uninsured.

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State Rep. Ryan Clancy (D-Milwaukee) takes a selfie at the 2024 conference of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in Washington, D.C. (Photo courtesy of Ryan Clancy)

Milwaukee State Rep. Ryan Clancy readily admits he was the odd one out last week at a Washington, D.C., meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

ALEC, a nonprofit that brings together  state lawmakers and corporations and drafts model legislation, describes its point of view as “dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism.” It has produced state policies  embraced almost solely by Republicans — drafted with input from  corporate members of the  organization.

Clancy is neither a Republican politician nor a corporate official. “To the best of my knowledge, I would be the only Democrat — and almost certainly the only socialist” at the States & Nation Policy Summit ALEC held Tuesday through Thursday, Clancy said in an interview. But as a state legislator, he was technically welcome at the event.

On the last day, however, Clancy was summarily kicked out and told his registration would be withdrawn and the fee refunded. While declining to explain how, an ALEC spokesman said Clancy was being “disruptive” — something Clancy categorically denies.

Attending an ALEC event was important to him, said Clancy, who is just wrapping up his first term in the Assembly after being elected in 2022. He wanted to see the process by which ALEC drafts model legislation and distributes bill proposals through its member lawmakers to statehouses around the country.

Clancy said that in his first term in Madison he has seen a lot of legislation circulate that originated in ALEC proposals. Those included more than a dozen bills putting restrictions on trans and nonbinary people, such as preventing gender affirming medical care for people under 18, he said.

“My oldest child is trans,” Clancy said in an interview. “It was just horrific to have to bring together the community to push back on those. But it was also good to know about them in advance.”

Clancy said the anti-trans legislation points to priorities that he believes ALEC has beyond the talking points it makes about individual liberty, free markets and limited government.

“Even more economic-seeming policy discussions were often peppered with anti-trans and anti-DEI comments behind the scenes,” Clancy said. 

While his attendance was cut short, he said, his time at the session offered a preview of ALEC-inspired legislation that he expects to see in the coming session of the state Legislature, and an opportunity for his fellow Democratic lawmakers to “figure out how we can push back on that.”

Democratic tradition

When Clancy joined ALEC and signed up to attend last week’s policy summit, he was following a tradition among Wisconsin Democrats in the state Legislature, who have long viewed the organization with suspicion. 

The first Democrat to decide to attend ALEC sessions was then-state Rep. Mark Pocan, who began attending the meetings two decades ago, before he became a member of Congress. He was succeeded by Democratic Rep. Chris Taylor, who has since left the Legislature when Gov. Tony Evers appointed her to Dane County circuit court, before her election to the Wisconsin Court of Appeals. 

Most recently in 2023, Reps. Kristina Shelton (D-Green Bay) and Francesca Hong (D-Madison) attended an ALEC annual meeting in Florida.

ALEC has its lawmaker members join two task forces, and Clancy, a former Milwaukee Public Schools teacher, chose education and the environment.

In the education task force, Clancy caught a discussion about legislation that would give families who home-school their children or enroll them in private schools a tax credit to offset the taxes they pay to support public schools.

“They were looking at it as fairness because [those families] shouldn’t have to pay for public schools and also pay for homeschooling or a private school as well,” he said.

As proposed, the tax credit would be non-refundable — meaning that a taxpayer would only collect up to the amount of their tax liability.

“What that means is if you are fairly well off, like middle class or rich, and you have a big tax liability at the end of the year, you’d get that back,” Clancy said. A lower-income family with a lower tax liability wouldn’t get as much, even if their school expenses were just as high.

He said another lawmaker suggested that in the name of fairness, the tax credit should be made refundable — paying the balance of the credit amount in cash to someone whose tax liability was less than the credit’s full value.

The lawmaker presenting the proposal rejected the suggestion, saying that “it was not supposed to be, quote, a wealth redistribution program,” Clancy said. The lawmaker called that “a bright line and she absolutely would never support that.”

Recycling — conservative or ‘woke’?

At the environmental task force session he attended, the principal topic was recycling — a subject that provoked conflicting opinions.

One participant advocating incentives for recycling disposable cans and bottles instead of sending them to landfills declared, “Conservation is conservative,” according to Clancy. “And then you have other people very angry about this saying no … recycling is ‘woke.’”

Still others countered in defense of recycling aluminum in particular, making the argument that “communist China is going to continue to get a leg up because we import aluminum from communist China all the time,” Clancy said.

Those arguments revolved around a model bill that  would establish a deposit-based recycling system operated by the beverage industry rather than the state, with the deposit funds that consumers don’t collect staying with the industry, offsetting the costs for recycling initiatives and for marketing the system to consumers. “This would be a handout to corporations,” Clancy said.

Clancy said that throughout the meetings he kept his own reactions to the proposals to himself and listened to other lawmakers as they discussed the issues. He took notes and photographed information slides with his phone, something that he said he saw many other participants doing.

But he said he never spoke up during any of the presentations, raised questions or publicly engaged presenters or other participants.

“The extent of my behavior in both the task forces and the workshops was sitting there taking notes, holding up the [phone] camera and getting pictures of what was going on, just like all of the other participants who were not told to leave for that same behavior,” Clancy said.

Kicked out of the meeting

In the midst of the last session he attended on Thursday, however, a hotel security staff member came to him and escorted him from the room. Outside he was told that his registration had been withdrawn.

Clancy, who recorded the exchange with the security staff member, asked why he was being thrown out. The security staffer deferred the answer to ALEC officials, but Clancy said he’s never been told what violations he was accused of.

When registering, Clancy said he was directed to a code of conduct that ALEC has posted directed to media covering the event, but that he has seen no other such list of rules for participants. In any event, he said, he took pains to not draw attention to himself.

“I have recordings of all the things that I was in, and you can hear me not asking questions,” Clancy said. “That’s really difficult for me,” he added. “I mean, to be in those spaces, to hear them saying those things, and not to say what the hell is wrong with you people was an act of will on my part, and I succeeded. I managed not to say any of the things that a reasonable person would say in that situation, because I didn’t want to be, you know, accused of disrupting or anything else.”

Clancy questioned an unnamed ALEC representative whether he was being thrown out because he’d been identified as a Democrat or a socialist. He suggested that in doing so the organization would be running afoul of its 501(c)(3) tax-exemption and IRS rules under which “they can’t give undue influence to inside members of their group and exclude people based on partisan things.”

In response to the Wisconsin Examiner’s inquiry, ALEC’s communications director, Lars Dalseide, replied in an email message.

“All are welcome at ALEC events, where all attendees are asked to abide by our long-standing code of conduct. One that ensures a welcoming and productive experience for everyone in attendance. Sadly, the individual in question failed to adhere to these guidelines. On the final day of the conference, after several complaints, he was asked to leave,” Dalseide said.

In a subsequent email, Dalseide declined to clarify what actions of Clancy’s constituted conduct violations.

“We don’t release those kinds of details to the press,” he said. “If we did, then every speaker, member, and guest wouldn’t feel comfortable speaking freely at our events.”

While Dalseide said that attendees were reminded of the code of conduct at each session, Clancy denied that. 

“They did not ever make reminders of any code of conduct at the beginning of any session, nor did I ever make a single comment or ask a question within any of them,” Clancy said. “I still don’t know what rules they’re accusing me of violating, or why speakers wouldn’t feel comfortable speaking if they knew the rules for attendees.”

Dalseide also relayed an additional statement from Leah Vukmir, a former Wisconsin state senator and former ALEC National Chair:

“The Wisconsin Socialist Party has been sending people to disrupt ALEC meetings for years, so it’s no surprise that the newest member of the Wisconsin Socialist Party would try to cause trouble at this year’s event. As a former National Chairman, I can attest to the fact that ALEC has always welcomed all views as long as individuals conduct themselves in a mature, professional manner.”

Clancy said he is a Democratic Party member and that, while he also identifies politically as a socialist, he is not a member of any Wisconsin Socialist Party, nor had he  heard of any past actions by socialist-aligned groups to disrupt ALEC events.

Rep. Pocan was reached through his Congressional office and asked if during his years of attending ALEC he recalled any socialist groups attending or engaging in disruptive behavior.

“Nope,” Pocan replied in a text message. 

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A 2011 photo shows an exhibit at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum that commemorated the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Social Security Act in August 2010. (FDR Presidential Library & Museum | via Flickr)

The chairman and CEO of Milwaukee-based FiServ said Thursday that he looks “forward to applying my experience to transform our social security system” as Commissioner of the Social Security Administration under President-elect Donald Trump.

Frank Bisignano made the statement in a press release from FiServ confirming his appointment to the post, which is subject to Senate confirmation. Trump first disclosed the Bisignano’s nomination on his social media platform Wednesday evening, The New York Times reported.

FiServ, founded in 1984 as a financial services data processing company, expanded into electronic billing and payments, providing mobile banking services for financial institutions and related technology based services for the financial industry.

Bisignano, who has spent most of his career in investment banking, has held the top spot at FiServ since 2020 after engineering the 2019 merger of the company he headed at the time, First Data Corp., with FiServ.

The Milwaukee Business Journal listed Bisignano as the highest-paid Wisconsin public company executive in the most recent fiscal year, with compensation totaling more than $27.9 million, 83% of that in stock awards.

At First Data, where he led the company in 2015 in a $2.6 billion initial public offering, he ranked as the second-highest paid U.S. executive in 2017, according to the Times — $102 million, 97% of that in stock awards. His total compensation that year was 2,000 times that of the average First Data employee, the Times reported.

In announcing his nomination, Trump listed Bisignano’s prior investment banking posts at Morgan Stanley, CitiGroup and JPMorgan Chase & Co. “He has a long career leading financial services institutions through great transformation,” the president-elect wrote.

Bisignano has contributed to both Democrats and Republicans over the course of the last two decades, according to Federal Elections Commissions records assembled by OpenSecrets.org, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that tracks political spending. Those include contributions to Trump.

In the last election cycle, however, his largest individual contributions include $15,000 to a PAC backing former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who mounted an early primary challenge to Trump’s 2024 bid, and $50,000 to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who also ran against the former president for the GOP nomination. 

Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works, was skeptical Thursday about Bisignano’s qualifications to operate the program, however.

“I don’t know that he has any background in Social Security or with a large government agency, or a program that sends benefits to 70 million Americans every month,” Altman said.

She suggested that the absence of evidence that he’s proposed drastic changes to Social Security makes it likely he can be confirmed. “But it’s a question who will come in with him who maybe won’t [need to be] confirmed, but will maybe be  calling the shots,” she added.

Social Security is designed so that payroll taxes from the current generation of workers fund the benefits of the previous, now retired, generation. Altman said that it should be viewed not as a kind of savings account but as a form of insurance.

Within the next decade, forecasters have predicted that Social Security’s revenue from payroll taxes will not be enough to fully fund recipients’ benefits, requiring changes to the program.

While that’s led some people — especially younger members of the workforce — to fear the program won’t be around for them when they retire, Altman said those fears have been stoked by opponents hoping to do away with Social Security entirely.

Altman said she’s confident that Congress will reach a solution, but that her organization and other advocates will watch closely and oppose a deal that cuts benefits, raises the retirement age or privatizes the system. Instead, Social Security Works is campaigning for an approach that includes raising the income levels subject to the payroll tax. 

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Protesters filled the Wisconsin Capitol in 2011 to protest the legislation that ultimately past as Wisconsin Act 10, eliminating most union rights for most public employees. (Photo by Emily Mills. Used by permission)

A Dane County judge on Monday struck down the core parts of the landmark state law that eviscerated most union rights for most public employees in Wisconsin.

Judge Jacob Frost ruled that Act 10, passed by the state Legislature’s Republican majority in 2011 and signed by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker in his first year in office, was unconstitutional in making some public safety workers exempt from the law’s limits on unions but excluding other workers with similar jobs from those protections.

The ruling essentially confirmed Frost’s ruling on July 3, 2024, when he rejected motions by the state Legislature’s Republican leaders to dismiss the 2023 lawsuit challenging Act 10.

In that ruling, Frost declared that state Capitol Police, University of Wisconsin Police, and state conservation wardens were “treated unequally with no rational basis for that difference” because they were not included in the exemption that Act 10 had created for other law enforcement and public safety employees.

For that reason, the law’s categories of general and public safety employees, and its public safety employee exemption, were unconstitutional, Frost wrote then.

Frost reiterated that ruling Monday. “Act 10 as written by the Legislature specifically and narrowly defines ‘public safety employee,’” Frost wrote. “It is that definition which is unconstitutional.”

In addition, the judge rejected the suggestion that Act 10 could remain in effect without the law’s public safety employee carve-out, and that either the courts or the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission could resolve a constitutionally acceptable definition in the future.

“The Legislature cites no precedent for this bold argument that I should simply strike the unlawful definition but leave it to an agency and the courts to later define as they see fit,” Frost wrote. “Interpreting ‘public safety employee’ after striking the legislated definition would be an exercise in the absurd.”

Advocates, lawmakers react

Opponents of the law, including plaintiffs in the lawsuit, cheered Monday’s ruling, while Act 10’s backers attacked it and vowed to see it through the appeals process.

The lawsuit was brought on behalf of a group of local and state unions and public employees by the progressive nonprofit law firm Law Forward along with Bredhoff & Kaiser.

“This historic decision means that teachers, nurses, librarians and other public-sector workers across the state will once again have a voice in the workplace,” said Jeff Mandell, Law Forward president and general counsel. “Every Wisconsin family deserves the chance to build a better future through democratic participation in a union. As an organization dedicated to protecting and strengthening democracy, Law Forward is proud to have been a part of this important case.”

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester), dismissed Monday’s ruling. Through its Republican leaders, the Legislature was among the defendants in the lawsuit.

“This lawsuit came more than a decade after Act 10 became law and after many courts rejected the same meritless legal challenges,” Vos said in a statement. “Act 10 has saved Wisconsin taxpayers more than $16 billion. We look forward to presenting our arguments on appeal.”

Gov. Tony Evers, who has sought to repeal Act 10 since he took office in 2019, applauded the ruling.

“This is great news,” Evers, a Democrat, said in a social media post on BlueSky and on X. “I’ve always believed workers should have a seat at the table in decisions that affect their daily lives and livelihoods. It’s about treating workers with dignity and respect and making sure no worker is treated differently because of their profession.”

Evers sought to repeal the law in each of the three state budgets he has submitted since taking office, but the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee Republicans stripped those provisions each time.

Ben Gruber, a conservation warden and union leader, called the ruling “personal for me and my coworkers.” Gruber is one of the named plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

“As a conservation warden, having full collective bargaining rights means we will again have a voice on the job to improve our workplace and make sure that Wisconsin is a safe place for everyone,” he said in a statement distributed by the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC).

Member local unions of WEAC were among the plaintiffs.

“The lawsuit was filed because of the dire situation that exists in Wisconsin’s public service institutions since workers’ freedoms were unconstitutionally taken away,” WEAC stated. “The state’s education workforce is in crisis as 40 percent of teachers leave the profession in the first six years because of low wages and unequal pay systems; the conservation warden program is fraught with unfair and disparate treatment of workers; and there is a 32 percent staff vacancy rate for corrections officers.”

Also joining in the lawsuit was the union representing University of Wisconsin  graduate students who work as teaching assistants, TAA Local 3220.

“Graduate workers look forward to claiming our seat at the table to ensure our teaching and research, which helps make UW-Madison a world-class university, are supported and compensated fairly,” said TAA’s co-president, Daniel Levitin. “The winds of change are blowing in our direction and we urge the university to take note and voluntarily recognize the TAA as the union of graduate workers and be prepared to meet us at the bargaining table.”

TAA is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers. “Workers must have the right to partner with their employer and negotiate fair wages, benefits, and working conditions,” said AFT-Wisconsin President Kim Kohlhaas.

Appeals expected

WEAC’s statement cautioned that the ruling’s impact would be delayed by appeals. “The plaintiffs acknowledge that while this decision is a major win for Wisconsin’s working families, it is likely that the case will remain in the courts for some time before a final victory is reached and pledge to continue fighting until the freedoms of all workers in Wisconsin are respected and protected,” the teachers union said.

Sen. Dianne Hesselbein (D-Middleton) was first elected to the Legislature the year after the law was passed and now leads the Democratic minority in the state Senate.

“This is a crucial step to recognize and restore the rights of hard-working public employees doing the people’s work in every corner of Wisconsin,” Hesselbein said in a statement. “There are likely further hurdles ahead and I applaud the resolve of those who have kept up the effort to restore the right to collectively bargain in the state.”

State Rep. Ryan Clancy (D-Milwaukee) was a Milwaukee Public Schools teacher when the law was enacted.

“I saw firsthand the negative impact that the lack of collective bargaining had not only on our profession of teaching but also the schools, students, and our communities,” Clancy said in a statement. He called Monday’s ruling “a crucial step to ensuring that every Wisconsin worker has access to fair and equitable working conditions.”

Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevera (R-Fox Crossing), was among the GOP lawmakers decrying the decision, declaring that the law had saved taxpayers $30 billion — nearly twice the figure Vos asserted.

“Today, an activist Dane County judge overstepped his role and unilaterally struck down Act 10 because it didn’t align with his politics,” she said in a statement. “One judge, appointed by the current governor, acting like a super-legislature is about to bankrupt local governments and school districts across Wisconsin.”

Kurt Bauer, president of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state’s largest business lobby and among the groups that had championed the legislation, called the ruling “wrong on its face and … inconsistent with the law” in a statement Monday that called Act 10 “a critical tool for policymakers and elected officials to balance budgets and find taxpayer savings.”

He said the business lobby’s members “hope this ruling will be appealed and that Act 10 will be reinstated as quickly as possible.”

This story has been updated with reactions to the ruling. 

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A red barn in rural Wisconsin. (Greg Conniff | For the Wisconsin Examiner)

In a purple corner of Wisconsin that reflects both the struggles and the promise of the state’s rural communities, a nonprofit group is trying to forge a path beyond isolation and political polarization.

River Valley Commons began six years ago with a lecture series to help residents of the village of Spring Green and the surrounding towns build community, expand critical thinking and foster hope and a sense of agency.

Today the organization connects disparate groups to address the concerns and needs of residents across a three-county area.

Stephanie “Stef” Morrill-Kerckhoff launched both the lecture series and River Valley Commons in 2019 after asking herself, “what can we do to increase the well-being of our area and the people who live in it?” she says. “And how can we do that collaboratively and in a way that brings in as many people, as many organizations, as we can?”

Stef and Joshua Morrill moved to the Wisconsin River valley area near Spring Green in 2013. Both were natives of western New York where the Chautauqua Institution, a nonprofit learning community and educational center, was founded 150 years ago and still operates.

The couple “felt like we would love to do something similar, where we could bring people together in a lovely natural space to learn and share information,” Stef Morrill-Kerckhoff says. They began organizing the first lecture series, working with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Continuing Studies program, when Joshua Morrill died suddenly in February 2019.

The lecture program, usually held at the Octagon Barn, a distinctive rustic-looking venue northwest of Spring Green, became a memorial to Josh Morrill. His widow decided not to stop there. Since they had first moved to the region, the couple perceived a gap between the interest of local residents in addressing community needs and the wherewithal to reach their goals.

“One of the things that we had always wanted to do is to help with that …  just getting people together to talk about things, trying to move forward with solving problems, whatever they were,” says Morrill-Kerckhoff, who has since remarried.

The organization set its boundaries as the River Valley School District, with 11,000 residents and covering more than 400 square miles. Within the district are four villages and portions of nearly a dozen towns.

“The communities are different, but if you look at the broader picture, we all need broadband, we all need housing, we all need child care,” says Joy Kirkpatrick, the board chair of River Valley Commons who works for the University of Wisconsin Extension.

The organization’s work is informed by a desire to address the general problem  social scientist Robert Putnam diagnosed in “Bowling Alone.” The book, first published in the year 2000, analyzes the erosion of communal and civic life as engagement has declined among neighbors and with public institutions over the last half-century, fraying the social fabric.

“Whatever the reason, the civic groups and the clubs and the bowling league and the churches, indeed, dwindled, and we’re more alone in our houses,” said the author Sarah Smarsh, citing Putnam’s book when she spoke in August as part of the Morrill Lecture Series.

In early November, the series showed the documentary “Join or Die,” based on Putnam’s work, about the importance of participating in clubs and organizations as a component of healthier living for individuals as well as communities.

The goal of River Valley Commons isn’t to replace existing civic organizations but to help connect them with one another and “lift them up,” Kirkpatrick adds, whether they’re service clubs, local libraries, individual local government bodies or other groups.

Pandemic launch

By the time River Valley Commons officially got off the ground, the COVID-19 pandemic was just setting in. That redirected the organization’s initial mission toward fundraising for food pantries, including from people who were donating their federal pandemic relief checks.

“That wasn’t how I expected to start, but it was a way that we were able to provide some value very quickly, in an unexpected thing we were able to help with,” Morrill-Kerckhoff says.

Since then, the organization has focused on “helping people and organizations with ideas they have that they want to implement, or problems that they perceive in the community that they want to work on.”

One such project started in Spring Green. The Sauk County village has grown into one of Wisconsin’s prime tourist destinations on the strength of the nationally renowned American Players Theatre along with the quirky House on the Rock and the Frank Lloyd Wright Taliesin studio.

When some visitors in 2021 stopped Spring Green resident Patti Peltier on the street and asked about a place to eat, “I couldn’t think of any place that was open to direct tourists too,” Peltier says. “I took this concern to Stef, and we started looking for what sort of things could serve as an economic engine for our community.”

The result was Savor the River Valley, bringing together restaurants, shops, small farmers and food processors to help support and promote each other.

Peltier, a retired corporate marketing professional, says that there are many such food entrepreneurs in the area. Savor the River Valley aims to connect tourists with those businesses, but also “to connect all those food businesses so they could help support each other, help solve common problems,” she says.

Savor the River Valley has grown to 40 members. Membership is free, Peltier says, and open to all food-related businesses in the region.

In the winter, a slow time for the industry, the group sponsors food classes and pop-up dinners to draw in off-season visitors. A farm-and-food tour in April brings in some shoulder-season traffic, and the network publishes a local food guide for the tourist season.

“We’ve got a very collaborative model,” Peltier says. “We’re trying to see how much we can do by working together.”

Community catalyst

Peltier sees Morrill-Kerckhoff and River Valley Commons as a community catalyst. “It created a focal point for gathering up ideas and concerns about what we need in our community, looking for ways to solve those problems and looking for people who are willing to work together on those problems,” she says.

River Valley Commons also offers practical support, providing administrative assistance and serving as the fiscal agent for Savor the River Valley. It has done the same for other local projects and institutions.

Stacey Feiner and her husband, Bill Meyer, operate My Fine Homestead, a small organic farming operation about a half-hour west of Spring Green. They distribute produce, eggs, meat and other wares using the community supported agriculture model — CSA for short — with consumers paying an annual subscription fee and receiving deliveries every week or every other week.

A community farmer’s market in Spring Green led by My Fine Homestead and other providers is now part of River Valley Commons, providing a legal structure and acting as the market’s fiscal agent. Savor the River Valley helps “bring people to the area and creates a buzz,” Feiner says.

She and her husband were both raised on Wisconsin dairy farms. At a Morrill Lecture event in October, Feiner told the audience the story of how the couple navigated the shift from the farm life they’d grown up in to the small-scale organic farming that they practice now.

The couple’s business model thrives on forging personal relationships with customers. After Feiner shared their story that evening, “people have come up to me who saw it or watched it on YouTube and said, ‘I just feel more connected to you,’” she says.

“There’s all these little community projects that are happening, and sometimes couldn’t get a foot off the ground to get going,” Feiner says. “River Valley Commons has provided an umbrella, a safety-net organizational structure,” bringing together people with diverse skills “to piggyback off each other.”

Broadband access and affordable housing

River Valley Commons has helped convene a broadband coalition of local governments and others interested in upgrading internet service in the area. That work was made easier as state and federal funds for broadband expansion became available, Morrill-Kerckhoff says. The coalition has sponsored regular monthly technology help sessions at area libraries.

The lack of affordable housing has been another issue for the region, one that it has in common with the rest of Wisconsin. The organization has assembled a group including architects, lenders, local government officials and employers, but housing has presented bigger challenges not so easily resolved.

In the meantime, the organization is continually evolving.

Morrill-Kerckhoff envisions convening what she has been calling “common ground tables” — “where we can bring together groups of people to talk about different issues from any perspective, all perspectives, to try to find some common ground within some of the bigger issues that maybe we are always talking about.”

As for the lecture series itself, Morrill-Kerckhoff says, “I’d like to try to find ways to engage different communities than we have so far.”

River Valley Commons is also working to ensure its stability for the long term. To that end, it recently joined Wisconsin Partners — a confederation of  nonprofits.

Wisconsin Partners’ executive director, Rachel Peller, says that organization also arose from the concerns highlighted in “Bowling Alone” — “the reality and the idea that membership in associations has declined, so we’re all more isolated than we were before.”

Isolation and polarization

Peller traces the heightened polarization of these times to that isolation as well. It’s not just political polarization, but a divide that is represented in the media people consume and in their social contexts. Those divisions can obscure the potential for common ground, she says.

“Our policy differences are actually not that sharp,” Peller contends. “If you look at what people want to happen, what people believe in and what some of those core values are, there’s actually more overlap than we think there is, and the big issue is the social perception of that divide.”

Rural voters and their discontents

That perception is made worse by the retreat from community life that “Bowling Alone” describes, she says, which also leaves people feeling powerless. “So the more isolated we are, the less we feel like we can make an impact in our communities.”

Wisconsin Partners’ member groups include AARP, the Wisconsin Council of Churches, organizations of public health workers and child care educators, and the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority.

Part of what animates the organization is “recognizing the connection between all these different sectors,” Peller says. “If we don’t have child care, then we don’t have health care, and if we don’t have health care, our seniors are struggling, and if our seniors are struggling, then so are our churches.”

Wisconsin Partners has started up local groups in Southwest Wisconsin, the Kickapoo Valley and the Fox Valley. River Valley Commons is the first such group to join after launching on its own.

Peller credits River Valley Commons with being “really creative and nimble and adaptive” in its efforts.

“The work that Stephanie and River Valley Commons does almost just speaks for itself,” Peller says. “It’s just very powerful to know that everyday people are working together to make a difference in their own community, and trying and trying and trying again because it matters to them.”

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A phamacy student in California administers a TDaP vaccine to prevent whooping cough. Wisconsin public health officials are recommending people check their immunity status and get a vaccine as pertussis cases surge. (Justin Sullivan | Getty Images)

Cases of pertussis — “whooping cough” — have surged in Wisconsin this year, prompting public health officials to reiterate the importance of vaccination and prompt attention to signs of illness.

Wisconsin has reported 1,887 confirmed cases of pertussis as of Nov. 22 this year, according to the state Department of Health Services (DHS) — compared with 51 for all of 2023, and more than three times the state’s last peak year in 2019.

“It’s not unusual to see a spike in cases in any given year, but this is a significant jump,” DHS spokesperson Jennifer Miller said Tuesday in an email message. “We are encouraging people to get pertussis vaccines and to use good hygiene habits to avoid catching and spreading the illness.”

Pertussis is a bacterial upper respiratory illness that spreads easily. It tends to start with a runny nose and a scratchy throat, but after about a week patients develop a persistent cough that can last for weeks.

Pertussis case counts often run in cycles, “so we’ll have years with high case counts and years with fairly low case counts,” Miller said.

In Dane County alone, there have been 281 cases through Monday, Nov. 25, Public Health Madison & Dane County (PHMDC) reported Tuesday. Since 2000, Dane County has reported two peak years for the respiratory illness, with 436 cases for all of 2004 and 302 cases for all of 2012.

By contrast, the county has had case counts as low as 7 for all of 2018, 13 for all of 2019, 0 for 2021 and 2022 and 4 for 2023, according to PHMDC records.

“With the holidays approaching, many families will be traveling and gathering with friends and family,” said Amanda Kita-Yarbro, the county health department’s public health epidemiologist. “This could increase the spread of all respiratory illness, including pertussis, which has been primarily impacting teenagers and college-aged people in recent months.”

Wisconsin’s last peak year for pertussis infections was 2019, when there were 535 cases reported across the state. This year both the state and the county first reported a sharply higher number of cases in July.

Ajay Sethi, faculty director of the Masters in Public Health program at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said Tuesday several factors underlie this year’s surge in cases.

One is lagging rates in pertussis vaccinations. “Under-immunization … was the main reason for our vulnerability for the outbreak we have had this year,” Sethi told the Wisconsin Examiner in an email message.

While pertussis vaccines are available and recommended for people of any age, in October, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a downturn in childhood vaccination nationwide and particularly in Wisconsin.

According to the report, the rate of childhood vaccination with the DtaP shot — providing combined protection from  diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis — was 85.7% for the 2023-24 school year in Wisconsin — second to lowest among all states. The CDC has set a target for vaccination rates of at least 95% for children entering kindergarten.

The CDC reported that 8% of Wisconsin kindergarteners were granted an exemption from the state’s vaccine requirements overall.

Sethi said the bacteria responsible for pertussis is highly contagious and difficult to stop from spreading. Adults who become infected “may think they just have a cold, so they don’t seek health care immediately, if at all, and spread it to other people (who are likely not up to date on their vaccination),” he added.

There isn’t a rapid test for pertussis, and test results take a couple of days to confirm a diagnosis, Sethi said. Physicians “may rightfully be hesitant to prescribe antibiotics without confirming the cause,” he added.

In July, Dr. James Conway, a UW Health specialist in childhood infectious diseases, told the Wisconsin Examiner that the signature “whoop” coughing sound that gives pertussis its nickname is generally confined to young children, who are also the most vulnerable to the illness.

People of any age can become infected, however, and public health specialists are advising people to take precautions to help prevent its spread, especially to children. Those precautions include getting vaccinated for pertussis, washing hands and covering coughs and sneezes.

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WisCovered.com is operated by the Wisconsin Office of Insurance (OCI) to inform consumers seeking health insurance about their options, including BadgerCare and the Affordable Care Act's health insurance marketplace (Screenshot | WIsCovered.com)

People are getting health coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) at a pace that approaches recent record-breaking years for the landmark federal health care law enacted 14 years ago.

In the first two weeks of November, when the annual open enrollment period to buy health insurance through the ACA’s platform Healthcare.gov began,  nearly half a million previously uninsured people in the U.S. signed up for coverage, according to the federal government. More than 2.5 million have renewed coverage that they purchased a year ago.

“We’re incredibly busy,” said Adam VanSpankeren, navigator program manager for Covering Wisconsin, a nonprofit that helps people looking for insurance. “There’s a lot of anxiety and people have concerns about the future of the ACA, but it’s not stopping them from getting coverage.”

Covering Wisconsin is federally funded and subcontracts with 44 navigator agencies across the state  — part of a program established under the ACA to guide people in assessing their options and choosing an appropriate health plan.

“Health insurance is really complicated,” VanSpankeren said in an interview. Navigators were included in the law to provide “people on the ground to explain to people how this works and how you sign up.”

To help spread awareness of coverage under the ACA, the Wisconsin Office of the Commissioner of Insurance (OCI) has been distributing information to community agencies, including local libraries and county health departments.

“Ensuring that everyone has access to high quality and affordable insurance on Healthcare.gov has been a priority of our office,” said OCI communications director Susan Smith. “Last year’s open enrollment period was the highest ever in Wisconsin, with over 254,000 people getting coverage.”

The open enrollment period to purchase health insurance for 2025 through the marketplace began Nov. 1. Through Nov. 16, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), 48,564 Wisconsin residents signed up.

While that’s lower than the same period a year ago, when nearly 59,000 people had enrolled, VanSpankeren doesn’t find that difference significant this early in the enrollment period.

People who enrolled last year are automatically renewed if they don’t change plans, and their enrollment numbers aren’t listed yet, he said. The full open enrollment period ends Jan. 15, 2025. For coverage starting Jan. 1, 2025, the deadline to enroll is Dec. 15.

Expanding health coverage

Enacted in 2010 and fully implemented four years later, the ACA instituted new standards for health insurance plans, including barring insurers from denying health insurance coverage or increasing premiums for people due to pre-existing health conditions.

The law required insurers to cover young people up to age 26 under their parents’ health plans, and required coverage for preventive care such as vaccines.

It also expanded the federal Medicaid program to cover families with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty guideline. Under a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2012, Medicaid expansion was made optional, with states deciding whether or not to take part. Wisconsin is one of 10 states that has not done so. 

Healthcare.gov, the health insurance marketplace, was a central element of the ACA, because uninsured Americans are mainly people who don’t get coverage from an employer or through programs such as Medicaid.

“Most people get insurance from their jobs, but there are still millions and millions of people who don’t,” VanSpankeren said. Those include self-employed people and people with multiple part-time jobs and no health coverage. They also include people whose employers don’t offer insurance or offer plans that require employees to pay more than they can afford for coverage.

Under the ACA, plans sold directly to individuals and families must cover a list of essential health benefits. The federal health care marketplace requires insurers who participate to offer plans meeting the federal standards.

Having a government marketplace that sets minimum standards protects consumers, VanSpankeren said.

“There’s a lot of bad actors with bad products” — insurance plans that don’t meet the ACA’s standards, he said. Without Healthcare.gov to vet participating plans, “you have kind of a Wild West scenario.”

Outside the marketplace, unscrupulous operators, often from out of state, misrepresent the plans they sell, sometimes even switching people’s coverage without their knowledge, said Smith of OCI. OCI and insurance regulators from other states are working with CMS to address what “is still a national challenge,” she said.

Safe in 2025; after that, uncertainty

VanSpankeren said people enrolling this year are asking Covering Wisconsin navigators about what they’ll have to pay in the new year. The recent election is also on the mind of many.

“They want to know if a change in administration means anything for their plan,” VanSpankeren said. Current provisions in the law remain in effect through 2025, so “we can reassure people everything they’re doing today for the next year is good.”

Those provisions include enhanced tax-credit subsidies based on a person’s income that lower the cost of their health insurance premiums purchased on the marketplace. Those increased subsidies were first introduced in 2021 and extended in 2022 through the end of 2025.

Beyond next year, however,  ACA advocates are worried about their future.

Republicans, who will hold majorities in both houses of Congress starting in January, and President-elect Donald Trump have been openly hostile to the health law and tried repeatedly in Trump’s first term to end it without success.

On Friday, Protect Our Care, a national campaign to support and strengthen the ACA, highlighted a series of analyses looking at the impact of ending the subsidies after 2025. Protect Our Care also cited the ambition of Congressional Republicans to block their renewal.

KFF, a nonprofit health policy research, polling, and news organization, reported in a study in July that 92% of people covered under the ACA were subsidy recipients.

In a study published Nov. 14, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities called for Congress to act by the spring of 2025 to give insurers time to set their rates for open enrollment a year from now.

“If Congress allows the improved tax credits to expire, nearly all marketplace enrollees, in every state, will face significantly higher premium costs,” the center stated.

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A shrinking share of income from Wisconsin residents and business goes to education and other public services, while corrections and police costs increase. (Getty Images)

Wisconsin residents and businesses pay less than 10% of their income on state and local taxes, according to a new report published Friday, continuing a trend that has been underway for more than two decades.

The report, produced by the Wisconsin Policy Forum, credited rising incomes, a 2021 state income tax cut and state limits on local property tax increases for helping to reduce Wisconsin’s state and local tax burden.

Wisconsin residents and businesses paid 9.9% of their income to cover state and local taxes in 2022, the report finds. That’s a drop from 10.3% in 2021 and from 12.5% in the year 2000.

The trend might not last, however. Initial information on collections suggest little change in the state and local tax burden for 2023, which could continue in 2024 and 2025, the report states. While income growth has been strong, “taxes have also grown in at least some areas.”

On average nationwide, state and local taxes amounted to 11.1% of individual and business income in 2022, according to the report — 1.2 percentage points more than Wisconsin. The share of Wisconsin income going to those taxes “has never been so far below that of the nation,” the report states.

The report reflects only state and local taxes, not federal taxes, which the Wisconsin Policy Forum analyzes separately.

While Wisconsin taxpayers are paying a little less, the state is also spending a smaller share of its income, particularly for education, the report finds.

Direct state and local spending grew by 7% in 2022, reaching $65.06 billion. But spending fell as a share of state income, to 18.3% in 2022 from 18.6% in 2021.

“Overall K-12 spending in Wisconsin rose 4.4% in 2022, but that was less than half of the 9.8% increase nationally,” the report states. Spending on K-12 education was 5.1% of state income in 2000 — the eighth highest among states. By 2021 it had dropped to 3.9%, and by 2022, to 3.8% — ranking 31st from the top.

“This represents a major shift in the single largest area of state and local spending,” the report states.

The report sets the stage for the top priority for lawmakers and Gov. Tony Evers in the coming year — drawing up Wisconsin’s 2025-27 state budget, with likely debates over school funding and the state’s projected surplus of about $4 billion.

A trend for two decades

In the year 2000, Wisconsin ranked third among the 50 states in the share of personal income going to state and local taxes, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum. By 2022, the state’s rank had dropped to 35, an all-time low.

Wisconsin’s ranking in taxes per capita has also fallen. In 2021, when the total annual state and local tax bill averaged $5,689 per capita, the state was in 24th place. In 2022, Wisconsin’s fell to 29th place, with an average bill of $5,966 per capita.

The single largest contributor to Wisconsin’s lower tax burden was a change in the state income tax brackets included in the 2021-23 state budget, reducing the third bracket from the bottom to 5.3% from 6.27% — reducing state tax revenue by $1 billion in 2022.

The report points out that its calculation “shows only a drop in Wisconsin’s average tax burden — some taxpayers here benefited less and others more.”

Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimates compiled when the change in the third bracket took effect “showed 98.9% of the total decrease was expected to go to tax filers with state Adjusted Gross Income of more than $40,000 and 74% of the total to filers with income of more than $100,000,” the report states.

In 2020, before the change took effect, Wisconsin ranked 13th among states for the share of personal income going to the state income tax. By 2022, with the tax cut in effect, the state’s rank fell to 30th.

Two other changes may have contributed to that shift, according to the report. One affected business owners who received Paycheck Protection Act pandemic relief loans, but then were allowed to keep the money instead of repaying it to the federal government. In 2021 Wisconsin enacted legislation waiving state income taxes on those funds.

In addition, Wisconsin revised its income tax tables for 2022, reducing the amount of tax money the state collected that would subsequently be refunded to taxpayers.

Corporate income and general sales tax revenues also grew more slowly in Wisconsin compared to nationally, the report said, also likely contributing to the state’s lower relative tax burden.

The report found that property taxes, which fund public schools and local and county government, grew 2.9% in 2022, keeping pace with the national average.

Wisconsin’s 2021-23 state budget included a freeze on per-pupil revenue caps to local school districts. That limited how much local districts could raise property taxes without getting  voters’ permission through a referendum, as well as how much state aid they could collect. As a result, the share of Wisconsin income paid to property taxes dropped to 3% in 2022 from 3.2% in 2021, “contributing a significant share of the overall decrease in the state’s tax burden,” the report states.

“The state’s higher than average property taxes — particularly on homes — remain the most salient tax for most state residents,” the report states. “That may keep some taxpayers from grasping the overall decrease in taxes that has taken place over the past two decades.”

Where costs are rising

Higher education spending has risen slightly in recent years, from 1.8% in 2021 to 1.9% in 2022, and Wisconsin’s rank has risen, too, to the 20th highest state on that measure.

Spending by state and local government on the prison system, jails and other corrections costs rose 11.3% in 2022, with Wisconsin ranking 9th among states in its corrections spending as a share of state income, according to the report.

Police spending in Wisconsin rose 5.8% in 2022 — ahead of the national average of 3.8%, and putting the state at 27th highest for police spending. Fire protection spending has fallen, however, both in the amount of money allocated and the state’s ranking for firefighter spending as a share of income.

Public social services spending, such as for Medicaid, increased 6.5% in 2022. Wisconsin ranks 21st nationally for that spending as a share of state income.

Looking ahead, the report suggests that the 2024 wave of successful referendum measures, primarily for public schools, will lead to property tax increases by the end of this year.

“These increases should also help to counteract at least somewhat the drop in K-12 spending levels as local school leaders try to rebuild their budgets after the two recent years of frozen revenue limits,” the report states.

But it also forecasts conflicts ahead between lawmakers who have continued to press for reducing Wisconsin taxes and the Evers administration as well as local taxpayers who approved school referendum questions and want to see increased financial support for public schools in the 2025-27 budget.

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Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz signs on neighboring lots in Wisconsin. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

Is Wisconsin — or the country — really as divided as the maps make it look?

On the spreadsheet of unofficial election totals posted by each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties following the election Nov. 5, a handful showed a clear majority for the Democratic presidential ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Many more counties were won by the winning Republican ticket of former President Donald Trump and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. Trump garnered enough votes to carry Wisconsin and enough states to return to the Oval Office in January.

A lot of those Trump-voting counties were rural ones, contributing to longstanding stereotypes about a monolithic body politic of deep blue cities and a bright red countryside.

But months before Election Day, on a mild August evening in a quaint round barn north of Spring Green, the writer Sarah Smarsh cautioned against oversimplifying the politics of rural voters — and against turning a blind eye to a part of the country that, she said, has too often been written off.

“I grew up on a fifth-generation wheat farm in south central Kansas,” Smarsh said that evening. It’s a place of “tall grass prairie, which happens to be the most endangered ecosystem … and simultaneously the least discussed or cared about or protected. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that that’s the ecosystem of the place and people that I also happen to believe have not been given fair attention and due consideration.”

Smarsh made her mark with the book “Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.” As a journalist and author she has straddled the community of her upbringing and the urbane, academic world that she entered when she became the first in her family to pursue higher education.

The child of a carpenter and a teen mom, Smarsh has explored the socioeconomic divide in the U.S., mapping it to the destruction of the working class, the demise of family farms and the dismantling of public services from health care to public schools. 

“I write about socioeconomic class and I write about rural issues, but that’s because I grew up in working poverty, and that’s because I grew up on a farm,” Smarsh said. And while those identities “are enormously consequential,” she added, she seeks to break down the assumptions that people carry about them. Her message: “You don’t know who my family is, and especially if what we assume is that they’re white trash, worthless.”

It’s a story that gives new context to the election results from 2016 on, and takes on new importance after the election of 2024. The residents of those places dismissed as “flyover country,” Smarsh said back in August, have many of the same concerns of urban and suburban voters, including reproductive rights, public schools, gun violence and other subjects. And understanding them in their diversity and complexity casts politics, especially national politics, in a more diffuse and complicated light.

Where ‘people don’t care about political affiliations’

Concern about climate change and a desire to live more sustainably led Tamara Dean and her partner to move to western Wisconsin’s Vernon County in the early 2000’s, where they built a homestead, grew their own food and became part of the local agricultural community.

Climate change followed them. In their county, extreme weather events became almost the norm, with a 500-year flood “happening every few years or every year,” Dean said in an interview.

“A rural community really coalesces when extreme situations happen and they help each other out,” Dean said. “And when we were cleaning up after a flood, helping our neighbors salvage their possessions or even getting people to safety, no one’s going to ask who you voted for, and people don’t care about political affiliations.”

Dean has written a collection of essays on the couple’s time in the Driftless region of Wisconsin, “Shelter and Storm,” to be published in April 2025 by the University of Minnesota Press.

Distrust of the federal government

Residents, she found, had something of an ambivalent relationship with the federal government. 

For all the complexity of agricultural economics, the U.S. Department of Agriculture programs that provide financial farm support were familiar and well-understood by longtime farmers and easily accessible to them, she said. But when the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) promised recovery assistance for flooding in 2018, “it just took forever to come, and it took a lot of bureaucracy to try to get it,” Dean said. For individual applicants, “getting any kind of assistance might be so daunting that they just wouldn’t think it’s worth it.”

For Dale Schultz, a former Republican state senator who has been thinking at length about politics and government in recent years, the election outcome has prompted contemplation.

Schultz left the Legislature a decade ago after splitting with Republican then-Gov. Scott Walker over legislation stripping public employees’ union rights and weakening Wisconsin’s mining laws.

Since then he has campaigned for redistricting reform and supported the overturning of Wisconsin Republicans’  gerrymandered legislative maps. In October he went public as a Republican supporting the Harris campaign for president.

In his part of the state, he saw a distinct contrast between the Democratic campaign and the Republican one.

“I saw an extremely good Democratic effort to talk to people face-to-face,” Schultz said in an interview. The GOP campaign along with allied outside groups such as American for Prosperity, however, appeared to him to focus almost entirely on mailings, phone calls and media.

“It became clear to me that politics is changing from the time I spent in office, being less people powered and more media powered,” Schultz said.

Ignored by both parties

Schultz said he’s observed a level of anger among some of his one-time constituents that has alarmed and surprised him, a product, he suggests, of having been ignored by both parties.

One target has been regulation, to the point where “they’ve lost track of why regulations are important and why they should support them,” he said. Yet he sees the direct answer to that question where he lives in Southwest Wisconsin.

“In the last 20 years there has been a renaissance in trout fishing, like I could not even have imagined 20 years ago,” Shultz said. He credits the Department of Natural Resources and its personnel for working with local communities to ensure conditions that would turn trout streams into suitable habitat to support a burgeoning population of fish. “That doesn’t happen without water quality and water quality regulations, and land use and land use regulations.”

Schultz has been  spending time in conversation with friends “who are like-minded and similarly curious,” he said. “And then you just watch and wait and see what happens, and try to voice concerns that are real and that need to be dealt with, and [that] we’re not going to be able to hide from as a country.”

He hopes for the return of a time when people like him,  who consider themselves “just to the right of center,” can again “talk to everyone and possibly craft a solution.”

Back in August, Sarah Smarsh offered a gentle warning about the coming election to her audience in the round barn north of Spring Green.

“Whatever happens in November, everybody else is still here — the other side is still here,” Smarsh said. “And so there’s going to be some caring to do, and that’s probably going to be for generations, because we didn’t arrive at this moment overnight.”

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Eric Hovde concedes the 2024 Wisconsin Senate race on social media Monday. (Screenshot | Hovde campaign X account)

Republican candidate Eric Hovde conceded Monday in the U.S. Senate race after losing to incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin, forgoing a recount while continuing to criticize the longstanding practice in which absentee ballots in Milwaukee were counted in the early morning hours after Election Day.

Hovde posted his concession speech in a video on social media.

Hovde conceded a few hours before the Wisconsin Elections Commission reported Monday that all 72 counties in Wisconsin had completed their election canvass, triggering a three-day window for Hovde to seek a recount in the race.

A developer and the owner of a West Coast bank, Hovde had declined to concede in the immediate aftermath of The Associated Press calling the race for Baldwin in the early morning hours of Wednesday, Nov. 6.

A week later, he posted a video in which he said he would await the completion of the canvass process while airing complaints about the vote count. His criticisms focused largely on the fact that about 108,000 absentee ballots that were not counted in Milwaukee until the early morning after Election Day changed the outcome of the election total.

Hovde’s remarks drew widespread criticism, with the Milwaukee Election Commission refuting implications of impropriety. Milwaukee’s absentee ballots are consolidated and delivered to the city’s central counting facility to be tabulated, and a bill to allow them to be processed starting the day before the election died after GOP leaders in the state Senate declined to put it on the calendar.

Republican analysts also said, both on Election Day and the next week, that the city’s late-night tabulation of the absentee ballots was standard practice and that its history of having a heavy tilt toward Democrats was predictable.

Nevertheless, Hovde reiterated his complaint Monday in the course of his concession speech.

“The results from election night were disappointing, particularly in light of the last-minute absentee ballots that were dropped in Milwaukee at 4 a.m., flipping the outcome,” he said. “There are many troubling issues around these absentee ballots and their timing, which I addressed in my last statement.”

Hovde said supporters had urged him “to challenge the election results,” but that “without a detailed review of all the ballots and their legitimacy, which will be difficult to obtain in the courts, a request for a recount would serve no purpose because you will just be recounting the same ballots regardless of their integrity.”

Hovde said he had decided instead to concede out of “my desire to not add to political strife through a contentious recount.”

Hovde also criticized Democrats’ support of two third-party candidates, one running on a platform of supporting Donald Trump and the other as a Libertarian, contending that without them he would have won the race.

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Flanked by Sam Liebert, left, and Scott Thompson, center, Nick Ramos of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign addresses reporters Thursday outside a Wisconsin state office building. The three criticized Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde for not conceding after vote tallies reported that Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin finished the election with 29,000 more votes than Hovde. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

Voting rights advocates joined the calls Thursday for Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde to back away from accusations he made earlier this week that something went wrong with vote-counting in the election Hovde lost to Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

“This is a direct attempt to cast doubt on our free and fair elections. And this is not only disappointing, it’s unnecessary,” said Sam Liebert, Wisconsin state director for All Voting is Local at a news conference Thursday morning. The nonpartisan, nonprofit organization advocates for policies to ensure voting access, particularly for voters of color and other marginalized groups.

“The rhetoric of questioning our democracy is more than just words, but it contributes to chaos and confusion, which undermines public trust in our elections and the officials who administer them,” Liebert said.

The news conference, held outside the state office building that houses the Wisconsin Elections Commission, was organized by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan voting rights and campaign finance reform advocacy group.

Speakers emphasized Wisconsin’s history of ticket-splitting and the near equal division of Republican and Democratic voters. For that reason, they said, victories last week by Republican Donald Trump in the presidential race and Baldwin, a Democrat, in the Senate race shouldn’t be viewed as remarkable or suspicious.

“Donald Trump won, Tammy Baldwin won, Kamala Harris lost, and Erik Hovde lost,” said Scott Thompson, an attorney with the nonprofit voting rights and democracy law firm Law Forward. “The people of Wisconsin know it, and I think Eric Hovde knows it too.”

“What you’re doing is creating divisions, and that cannot be accepted here in Wisconsin,” said Nick Ramos, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

During the campaign, Hovde “said all the right things — he talked about how he would honor the election results, talked about … there’s no time for us to continue these types of conspiracies and lies,” Ramos said. But since the election, he added, Hovde has shifted his attitude.

Hovde so far has declined to concede the U.S. Senate election, although The Associated Press called the race for Baldwin, the Democratic two-term incumbent, early Wednesday, Nov. 6. With 99% of the vote counted, Baldwin had a 29,000-vote lead over Hovde, a margin of slightly less than 1%. She declared victory after the AP call.

Hovde’s first public statement came a week after Election Day. In a video posted on social media Tuesday, he said he was waiting for the vote canvass to be completed before he would comment on the outcome.

“Once the final information is available and all options are reviewed, I will announce my decision on how I will proceed,” Hovde said.

Nevertheless, Hovde questioned the vote totals that were reported from Milwaukee’s central count facility, where the city’s absentee ballots are consolidated and tallied.

About 108,000 absentee and provisional ballots were counted in the early hours last Wednesday, with Baldwin garnering 82% of those votes, according to the Milwaukee Election Commission. In Milwaukee ballots cast in-person Tuesday, Baldwin won 75% of the vote.

Both Republican and Democratic analysts have pointed out that Democrats have disproportionately voted absentee over the last several elections and that the outcome Milwaukee reported last week was in line with those trends.

In his video, however, Hovde highlighted the late-counted ballots. He falsely called Baldwin’s lead in that tally “nearly 90%,” claiming that was “statistically improbable” in comparison with the in-person vote count.

Hovde said that because of “inconsistencies” in the data, “Many people have reached out and urged me to contest the election.”

Ramos pointed out Thursday that Wisconsin lawmakers had introduced a bill with bipartisan support that would have allowed election clerks to begin counting absentee ballots the day before Election Day — ending the late-night tally change  from absentee votes that have become a regular feature in Milwaukee.

The legislation passed the Assembly but died in the state Senate. “We have folks in the state Legislature that would rather play political games and would rather see moments like this than actually fix the problem,” Ramos said.

While Hovde spoke skeptically about the vote count in his video, in a talk radio interview after it was posted he described the election outcome as a “loss.”

Hovde is “talking out of both sides of his mouth right now,” Ramos said. “And so, on the one hand, we get to hear him say things like, you know, ‘It’s going to take me a while to get over this loss,’ and then we get to watch a video that gets broadly disseminated across X and Facebook and Instagram, where … he’s literally talking about how he does not believe what happened in Milwaukee and how the numbers shifted [in the ballot counting] aren’t accurate.”

In his video Hovde said that “asking for a recount is a serious decision that requires careful consideration.”

Counties must send their final vote canvass reports to the Wisconsin Elections Commission by Tuesday, Nov. 19. Candidates then have three days to make a recount request.

State law allows candidates to seek a recount if they lose by a margin of less than 1%, but it requires the candidate to pay the cost if the margin is more than 0.25%.

“He certainly can pursue a recount, although it looks like he’s going to have to pay for it himself,” said Thompson. “[But] Eric Hovde does not have the right to baselessly spread false claims and election lies.”

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Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Annette Ziegler addresses the Wisconsin Judicial Conference Wednesday. (Screenshot | WisEye)

A shortage of lawyers hampers access to the courts, especially for rural Wisconsin residents, the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s chief justice told a gathering of state judges Wednesday.

Chief Justice Annette Ziegler said that Wisconsin’s chief judges had urged her and the state’s court system to take action in response to a general shortage of attorneys — a problem that other states also experience.

The shortage “is particularly acute in our rural counties, where we often do not even have any available certified attorneys to take cases,” Ziegler said. “When we cannot provide members of the public, who are exercising their constitutional right to be represented by counsel, with an attorney, ‘access to justice’ is seriously compromised.”

Ziegler’s State of the Judiciary Address was delivered at the annual conference of Wisconsin judges and also broadcast on Wisconsin Eye. The conference runs through Friday.

Ziegler established an attorney recruitment and retention committee “to brainstorm potential solutions” to the shortage. The committee works with the state’s chief judges’ committee, the State Bar of Wisconsin and the deans of law schools at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Marquette University.

The committee has examined trends contributing to the lawyer shortage in rural areas and looked at other states’ responses, she said. The group has also discussed trends in law school enrollment and in the places law school graduates choose to work.

“Because most attorneys in Wisconsin are concentrated in urban metropolitan centers, there are legal deserts in many areas of the state, particularly in the northern counties,” Ziegler said.

Ziegler said the state bar association is undertaking a pilot project to create more rural clerkships — positions assisting judges that can provide entry-level opportunities for new law school graduates.

In the coming months the committee plans to look at recruitment and retention for public attorneys, she added, including efforts in other states to provide incentive programs to draw new lawyers to rural and underserved communities.

The lawyer shortage was one of three topics Ziegler highlighted in her address, which lasted just under 30 minutes.

Ziegler praised Wisconsin lawmakers who worked across party lines to pass three bills earlier this year aimed at improving security for judges — a concern arising from “dangerous acts of violence and threats against judicial officers,” she said. She recited a list of incidents from around the country, including the 2022 killing of retired Judge John Roemer by a man whom Roemer had sentenced to prison in 2005. The assailant died of a gunshot that investigators said was self-inflicted.

The laws include: Act 234, outlawing picketing or parading at the home of a judge “with the intent to interfere with, obstruct, or impede the administration of justice”; Act 236, which keeps judges’ security information and emergency response plans from public access; and Act 235, which takes effect April 1, 2025, protecting other information about judges, including the identities of  their immediate family members.

While praising the enactment of those laws, Ziegler said that there was “more work to do on this front,” but did not describe specifics.

Ziegler also lauded steps taken to address how the courts and the justice system approach mental health, including creating dedicated mental health courts in four counties.

The state court system is also testing other tools to help the courts deal with mental health matters. Those include pairing judges and psychiatrists to train the judiciary on mental health disorders and treatment best practices, she said, as well as possibly creating a state-level post in the court system to coordinate mental health responses.

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Eric Hovde speaks in a video posted on X Tuesday in which he questions how ballots were counted in his election loss to Sen. Tammy Baldwin. Hovde has not conceded despite the race having been called for Baldwin early Nov. 6. (Screenshot | Hovde campaign on X)

Breaking a six-day silence after unofficial returns showed him losing to Sen. Tammy Baldwin, whom AP declared the winner of the Wisconsin U.S. Senate race by less than 1 percentage point, Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde on Tuesday criticized the counting process and said he would wait to decide whether to seek a recount.

In a subsequent talk radio interview, however, Hovde appeared to acknowledge that he had lost the election.

“It’s the most painful loss I’ve ever experienced,” Hovde told Jessica McBride, the guest host on Mark Belling’s show on Milwaukee station WISN 1130. The remark was first reported by the Associated Press.

There has been no evidence of irregularities in the vote count for the Nov. 5 election, which Baldwin won by about 29,000 votes according to unofficial totals reported by Wisconsin’s 72 counties. Counties are currently reviewing the ballots and will submit their official results to the Wisconsin Elections Commission by Nov. 19. The commission completes its certification of the vote by Dec. 1.  

Prior to his talk show appearance Tuesday, Hovde posted a video on X, formerly Twitter, in which he said that he hadn’t spoken about the outcome since election night because “I believe it’s better not to comment until I have the facts.”

Supporters “have reached out and urged me to contest the election,” he said. “While I’m deeply concerned, asking for a recount is a serious decision that requires careful consideration.”

Hovde said differences between the count of registered voters and ballots cast in some Milwaukee wards raised questions, and he also questioned a batch of absentee ballots counted in the early hours Wednesday that heavily favored Baldwin.

Records of registered voters as of Election Day don’t include people who register at the polls, however. In addition, absentee ballots in Milwaukee often get counted later in the process and historically have included a large proportion of  Democratic voters.

Hovde also claimed the state has “almost 8 million registered voters on our voter rolls with only 3.5 million active voters.”

The Wisconsin Elections Commission website includes an explanation of the state’s voter registration database, which is separated into two sections, one for inactive voters and one for active voters.

Only active voters are included in the poll books that go to Wisconsin election clerks and poll workers.

The list of inactive voters, which the commission is required by state law to maintain, includes people who “die, move and register in another state, are convicted of a felony, are adjudicated incompetent to vote, or are made inactive through statutory voter list maintenance processes,” according to the elections commission. The inactive voter list is “a historical public record, and cannot be deleted.”

Democrats, Republicans join in pushing back

Hovde’s comments were met with a barrage of criticism.

“The Milwaukee Election Commission (MEC) unequivocally refutes Eric Hovde’s baseless claims regarding the integrity of our election process,” the commission said in a statement Tuesday, asserting that its operations were transparent and followed established laws and procedures. 

Because Wisconsin does not allow absentee ballots to be processed before Election Day, “large numbers of absentee ballots” are reported late at night. At the same time, according to the statement, with same-day registration, “this historic election saw record-breaking turnout as many newly registered voters exercised their right to support their preferred candidates.”

Criticism also came from Baldwin and Democrats as well as prominent GOP figures, nonpartisan analysts and a bipartisan pro-democracy organization.

“Eric Hovde is spreading lies from the darkest corners of the internet to undercut our free and fair elections,” Baldwin posted on her campaign account on X. “Wisconsin voters made their voices heard. It’s time for Hovde to stop this disgusting attack on our democracy and concede.”

“Mr. Hovde is well within his rights to request a recount and ensure that the vote count is indeed accurate, but questioning the integrity of Wisconsin elections is an avenue that only sows distrust in the system moving forward,” declared the Democracy Defense Project, made up of Republican and Democratic political veterans

The statement was attributed to former Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, a Democrat; former Attorney General JB Van Hollen, a Republican; former U.S. Rep. Scott Klug, a Republican; and former Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Mike Tate — the joint leaders of the Democracy Defense Project’s Wisconsin branch.

Joe Handrick, a Republican election analyst, predicted on Election Day a late-breaking boost to Democrats in Milwaukee, and reiterated that in a follow-up post Monday on X.

Bill McCoshen, a GOP lobbyist whose political career dates to the administration of former Gov. Tommy Thompson, said Tuesday morning on X that differences like the one between the number of votes for former President Donald Trump, who carried Wisconsin, and for Hovde are “not uncommon.”  

The gap of just under 54,000 votes between the two is easily explained by people not voting all the way down the ballot and by third-party candidates, of which there were two in the Senate race, McCoshen wrote. “It’s neither complicated, nor a conspiracy.”

Barry Burden, who directs the UW-Madison’s Election Research Center, said Hovde’s decision to not yet concede represents a new but troublesome trend.

“It’s been happening in the United States over the last few years, of candidates not conceding immediately or graciously as often as they did in the past,” Burden told the Wisconsin Examiner. Donald Trump’s refusal to concede his reelection loss in 2020 “provided a model for some candidates.”

Wisconsin law qualifies Hovde to seek a recount since he finished less than one percentage point behind Baldwin. Nonetheless, “the margin seems so large that I can’t imagine a recount reversing the outcome,” Burden said. “There’s probably no election in U.S. history where that has happened — elections need to be very close for a recount to produce anything different.”

An explicit concession “is one of the things that shows us that democracy is working,” according to University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Mike Wagner. “Democracy is for the losing side because they get a chance to try again in the next election, and admitting when you lose is a critical factor required for the maintenance of democracies.”

Wagner is faculty director of the UW-Madison Center for Communication & Civic Renewal. How the ballot counting unfolded Tuesday night and early Wednesday was no surprise, he said, and absentee ballots are counted according to state law.

“It’s sad when a candidate for office raises unfounded questions about the Integrity of an election,” Wagner said.

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Sen. Tammy Baldwin gives a victory speech Thursday at the Steamfitters Local 601 hall east of Madison after winning a third term Tuesday. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)

While a majority of Wisconsin voters helped elect Republican Donald Trump as president this week, one statewide candidate managed to defy the odds that favored the GOP.

Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin squeezed out enough votes to overtake Republican Eric Hovde and return to Washington, D.C. for a third term.

Although the victory was much narrower than her last reelection in 2018, the outcome preserved Baldwin’s winning streak.

“2024 marks a continuation of Tammy Baldwin’s record of undefeated elections,” Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, said Thursday at a brief Baldwin victory celebration.

“The way we won this race is the way I’ve always approached this job,” a smiling Baldwin said in her 10-minute victory speech. “We did everything, everywhere, all at once. I traveled to red, blue, purple, rural, suburban, urban parts of our state. I listened to people. I really listen to people and then deliver for them, and in turn, these Wisconsinites showed up for me, and I’m so grateful.”

Baldwin is “uniquely good at cultivating her own brand and separating it from the national Democratic Party brand,” said Marquette University political scientist Julia Azari in an interview Thursday.

Democrats in Wisconsin often seem to do better in midterm elections, “where it is a little bit less nationalized and the candidates can cultivate their kind of personal and localized brands,” Azari said. “Baldwin has been pretty successful and she’s running ahead of Democrats statewide in a lot of contests.”

Baldwin got her political start on the Dane County Board, graduated to the Wisconsin Legislature and was elected to the U.S. House in 1998, the state’s first female and first gay member of Congress. After 14 years in the House, she was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012, the year Barack Obama won his second term.

In 2018, running against a Republican state senator, Leah Vukmir, Baldwin easily won reelection by nearly 11 points, while her fellow Democrat, Tony Evers, won his first term as governor by 1 percentage point.

“She addresses more sort of state priorities, and has become well known in rural parts of the state that we don’t really associate with Democrats,” Azari said. Baldwin’s much narrower 2024 victory came in “a very difficult national environment for Democrats.”

Baldwin held her event Thursday at a Steamfitters union apprenticeship training center on the East Side of Madison.

Steamfitters Local 601 business manager Doug Edwards called Baldwin “a homegrown roots type of person” who has been “just fabulous for working families in Wisconsin” and a staunch union ally.

“Tammy has just been a good advocate for all the people in Wisconsin, and I think that’s what put her over the top, even though it was close,” Edwards said in an interview.

In her victory speech, Baldwin recapped the broad range of issues that she’s made her own as a lawmaker, along with the people behind those issues who have been her supporters.

“It’s the farmers in the dairy industry who I fought alongside, earning the endorsement of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau,” Baldwin said. “It’s the workers on foundry floors who are getting more business because of my Buy America rules — big shout-out to labor.” 

Baldwin has successfully pushed congressional colleagues to include provisions favoring domestic suppliers and manufacturers in bills such as the bipartisan infrastructure law.

“It’s the LGBTQ families who saw through the nasty attack campaigns and knew that I had their back, and it’s the women who’ve had our rights stripped away and saw me on the front lines fighting for their freedom,” she added.

Baldwin has championed legislation to restore a federally protected abortion rights, ended in 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 1973 ruling Roe v. Wade. The bill she authored has stalled in both houses.

Also in 2022, however, Baldwin argued that the loss of Roe meant that the Court’s 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage could be at risk. She spearheaded a successful bill that gained bipartisan support affirming same-sex marriage as well as interracial couples.

Baldwin also highlighted her involvement in the Affordable Care Act, for which she wrote a provision that allows children to remain on their parents’ health insurance plans until they reach the age of 26.

After four years in the Senate as a member of its Democratic majority, in January Baldwin will begin her third term as a member of the minority party. Throughout her tenure in Congress, however, Baldwin has repeatedly joined with Republicans on bills that have aligned with her own stances.

On Tuesday, her margin of roughly 30,000 votes was about the same as the margin by which Harris lost to Trump in Wisconsin. And the senator’s final tally was about 5,000 more than Harris’ — suggesting that some Wisconsin voters who picked Trump split their tickets to vote for Baldwin.

Baldwin diplomatically acknowledged the presidential contest outcome Thursday.

“While we worked our hearts out to elect Kamala Harris, I recognize that the people of Wisconsin chose Donald Trump, and I respect their choice,” Baldwin said.

“You know that I will always fight for Wisconsin, and that means working with President Trump to do that, and standing up to him when he doesn’t have our best interest at heart.”

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