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The news that a Dane County judge struck down key parts of Act 10 — former Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s signature anti-union law — prompted Walker to comment on X: “Collective bargaining is not a right. It is an expensive entitlement.” 

That’s the kind of message that helped make Walker a national Republican star back in 2011. The billionaire Koch brothers supported him and his pioneering approach to politics — turning neighbor against neighbor by weaponizing the resentment of working class people and training it on teachers and other public employees whose union membership afforded them health care and retirement benefits. Walker memorably called his approach “divide and conquer.” That philosophy is at the heart of Judge Jacob Frost’s decision, which found that Act 10’s divisive carve-out for “public safety” employees (i.e. Republican-voting cops) is unconstitutional. 

Walker started by pitting private sector workers against public employees. The next step, he promised his billionaire backer Diane Hendricks, would be to make Wisconsin a right-to-work state, smashing unions across the board.

Walker made good on that promise and signed the right-to-work law that undercut private sector unions. And he certainly succeeded in dividing Wisconsin, ushering in a toxic style of politics that set the stage for Donald Trump and nationwide polarization.

But Walker’s war on organized labor is out of tune with the populism of today’s Trump-dominated Republican party, which courted union support in the recent election. It’s also out of step with public opinion. A September Gallup poll found near record-high approval of labor unions with 70% of Americans saying they approved of unions, compared with 48% approval in 2009. 

In embracing Act 10 and Walker’s dubious legacy, Wisconsin Republicans are marching to a different beat than the rest of the country. 

“Act 10 has saved Wisconsin taxpayers more than $16 billion,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos declared in a statement. “We look forward to presenting our arguments on appeal.”

Other Republicans have made even bigger claims about the “savings” that came out of teachers’ paychecks and benefits. But over time, it has become clear who the real beneficiaries of those savings were. The Kochs and Hendricks didn’t support Walker because they thought he would do wonderful things for working class voters. They backed him because they wanted to squeeze workers and enrich themselves.

Act 10, and the other measures passed by the Wisconsin Legislature in its wake, including right-to-work and prohibitions on local governments from increasing wages and improving working conditions in city and county contracts, hurt Wisconsin workers and the state economy. 

“The changes, labor leaders and experts say, have caused flattened real wages for construction workers, higher pay for their bosses and local governments stuck offering wages that make it difficult to hire contractors — and hard for those workers to make a living,” Wisconsin Watch reported. 

A study by the Economic Policy Institute compared the economies of states with strong collective bargaining laws with so-called “right-to-work” states from 2011 to 2018. “Those ‘right-to-work’ states see slower economic growth, lower wages, higher consumer debt levels, worse health outcomes and lower levels of civic participation,” one of the study’s authors, Frank Manzo, told Wisconsin Watch.

On top of all that, Walker’s oft-repeated promise to create 250,000 new jobs in his first term was a bust. He made it just over halfway to that goal, according to a “gold standard” report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the end of his second term, Walker still hadn’t reached the 250,000 jobs number. Instead, when he left office, Wisconsin ranked 34th in the nation for private sector job growth, according to the BLS. Walker’s 10.3% growth rate fell far behind the national growth rate of 17.1%. And Wisconsin public schools have never recovered from Walker’s savage budget cuts.

There has been a lot of talk since the 2024 election about how Democrats have lost touch with working class voters, allowing the Trump-led Republican Party to capture disaffected working people who are suspicious that politicians don’t really care about them or represent their interests.

The Act 10 fight, which will be front and center in Wisconsin’s spring state Supreme Court race, reverses that dynamic. Democrats in Wisconsin have been fighting all along for better wages and working conditions for working class people, and Republicans have been outspoken in their opposition to workers’ rights.

Walker’s war on workers prompted historic protests in Wisconsin back in 2011, bringing together teachers, firefighters, police, prison guards, snowplow drivers and tens of thousands of citizens from across Wisconsin to protest at the Capitol. Democrats in the state Legislature fled to Illinois to temporarily deprive Republicans of the quorum needed to pass the law. Walker dismissed the protesters as “union bosses” and agitators brought in from “out of state.” But anyone who was there could tell you the crowd was made up of lots and lots of regular Wisconsinites outraged that the governor had made hardworking people his target.

The uprising in Wisconsin inspired other pro-democracy protests around the globe. Egyptian activists ordered pizza from Ian’s Pizza downtown for the protesters at the Capitol.

Still, in the short term, the protests failed. A grassroots recall effort against Walker fell short, and he went on to be reelected to a second term. But the tide has been turning steadily ever since. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers defeated Walker in 2018. Evers’ reelection by a larger margin in 2022 was one of 7 out of 10 statewide races Democrats have won since 2019. In one of those races, the Democratic-backed Supreme Court candidate Janet Protasiewicz beat her conservative rival by more than 10 points, flipping the ideological balance on the court and setting up the demise of Republican gerrymandering and, potentially, a final judgment against Act 10.

Today, as Democrats reel from their losses in the recent national elections, Wisconsin offers an example of a state where the fight over workers’ rights is at the center of politics. The Act 10 battle makes it clear which side each party is on. That’s good news for Democrats. For Walker’s brand of Republicanism, not so much.

Former President Donald Trump speaks at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee | Photo by James Gould

The weekend before Election Day, former President Donald Trump brought his campaign to Milwaukee.

During a Friday night rally at the Fiserv Forum, the same venue where Trump  formally accepted the Republican Party’s presidential nomination just a few months ago, Trump told the crowd that, if he’s elected again, he will bring America back to the “golden age.”

“America will be bigger, better, bolder, richer, safer and stronger than ever before,” Trump said. 

Trump slammed the current state of the economy and also talked about his plan to impose high tariffs on imports. “You’re going to become so rich with the word tariff,” he told the crowd. That was met with a massive cheer. 

The former president declared that his opponent, Vice President  Kamala Harris, “has a low IQ.”

During the rally a section of the crowd in the upper deck began to shout that  they could not hear what was being said on stage. 

A clearly frustrated Trump ripped the microphone away from the mic stand  and yelled, “Do you want to see me knock the hell out of people backstage?”

“I am up here seething. I’m working my ass off with this stupid mic,” Trump added. “I’m blowing out my left arm, now I’m blowing out my right arm and I’m blowing out my damn throat, too, because these stupid people.”

After the mic issues appeared to be fixed, Trump claimed he won Wisconsin twice, although actually, after winning the state in the  2016 presidential election he lost to President Joe Biden in  2020.

John Kettman, a fan of Trump who attended the rally, held a pumpkin with the former president’s face on it while he waited to get into the Fiserv Forum for the rally. He called the prop  a “Trumpkin.”

Kettman said the “middle-class people” are the ones suffering the most in America.

When it comes to foreign policy, Kettman said that Harris “can’t be trusted” and that Trump is the man who can “deal with” North Korea and Russia. 

Another Trump voter who waited to enter the rally was Fernando Puente.

“All the polls say it’s coming out tight,” Puente said of the presidential election.“I’m here on the ground, I see that it’s going to be a landslide, Trump is going to win big.”

Puente added that he wasn’t always a big fan of Trump before 2016. He said he had felt Trump  was “arrogant” and disliked the way he talked, but that all changed for him when Trump started talking about “the border and inflation.”

Wisconsin Republicans who spoke at the rally included ​​former Govs. Scott Walker and Tommy Thompson, U.S. Reps. Scott Fitzgerald and Bryan Steil and candidate for U.S. Senate Eric Hovde, who is challenging incumbent Wisconsin Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

“This election is so consequential,” Hovde said from the stage, contrasting “what President Trump and I want to do versus what Kamala Harris and Tammy Baldwin want to do.” Trump and Hovde want to “make America great again” and “restore the American Dream,” Hovde said, while the Democrats  “bankrupted our country, causing the worst inflation in 40 years. … jeopardized our safety by defunding the police and opening our southern borders,” and “divided our country …  by gender, by race, by socio economic class, by religion.”

When Trump took the stage he praised Hovde, calling him “a great guy,” and joked, “He’s a great-looking guy, too, sometimes I say maybe he’d be better off without that mustache. I’m not sure.”

In recent TV ads Hovde’s  campaign has been attacking Baldwin’s girlfriend, highlighting her work as an investment adviser on Wall Street and the couple’s same-sex relationship.

Hovde’s campaign has repeatedly mentioned Maria Brisbane, referring to her as Baldwin’s “life partner,”  although Baldwin publicly refers to Brisbane as her girlfriend.

While Trump spoke,  Harris held a simultaneous rally in Milwaukee just over five miles away at the Wisconsin State Fair Exposition Center. Harris spoke for 24 minutes, according to NBC News, while Trump gave a 90 minute speech. She described Trump as “increasingly unstable,” and said if elected he would walk into the Oval Office with an “enemies list” while Harris would walk in with a “to-do list.”