The city of Milwaukee owns hundreds of vacant, abandoned houses. More than 100 are set for restoration and homeownership under the Homes MKE program.
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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.”
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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Protesters march in Milwaukee after the 2024 presidential election. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
“Our strategy is year-round civic organizing,” Amanda Avalos, executive director of Leaders Igniting Transformation (LIT) told Wisconsin Examiner, following the Nov. 5 election won by President-elect Donald Trump. LIT canvassers knocked on more than 665,000 doors ahead of Election Day, and the Milwaukee-based group plans to keep up its civic engagement work in the years ahead. “This doesn’t stop us,” Avalos said of the election results. “And if anything, this is fueling.”
LIT, a grassroots nonprofit and nonpartisan group led by youth of color, focuses on building political power for young people through strategic civic engagement. From canvassing neighborhoods and knocking on doors, to advocating for policy change or even preparing young people to run for office, recent years have seen the organization make a name for itself.
It isn’t that LIT’s staff didn’t feel the waves of fear, anger, and despair many community members experienced after Trump’s victory Tuesday. Those emotions were familiar to LIT organizers. “This is not the first time that we’ve been under a Trump administration,” said Avalos. “And we know the direct negative impact that he has on the communities that we work with. And that’s young Black and brown people in the state of Wisconsin.”
LIT plans to counteract that impact by staying organized and motivated. From advocacy efforts to leadership development, sustained organizing is LIT’s mission, said Avalos, explaining that the group is dedicated to “growing our base year-round in between election seasons — not just during election season, but for moments like these…where we need to mobilize and act.”
LIT is already preparing for another big election on April 1, when voters in Wisconsin cast ballots in the state Supreme Court race.
Meanwhile, Avalos says, organizers need to take time to rest, process, grieve, regroup and find community. “That’s what it’s going to take to get through more moments like this,” Avalos told Wisconsin Examiner. “That’s what it took last time, and we continue to hold onto each other and continue to move fiercely with our plan, with our advocacy, with all the ways that young people are leading all across the state.”
The day after Trump’s election victory, Black Americans across the country received racist text messages telling them to be prepared to be collected and sent to the nearest plantation for cotton picking. Women have also reported being increasingly harassed online since Trump’s reelection and a far-right social media meme has gone viral, trolling women on social media with the slogan “your body, my choice.”
The election was particularly divisive for young people. While Harris attracted many young women voters of color, Trump attracted more young men. Some young activists also expressed dissatisfaction at both major political parties. On Nov. 6, protesters gathered in Milwaukee’s Red Arrow Park to protest the war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza and express their frustration over the sense that they were ignored by the Democratic Party. The protest was led by groups including Students for a Democratic Society UWM, the Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, and the Milwaukee Anti-War Committee. Speakers encouraged protesters to find an organization to join and get involved.
Avalos agrees that young people feel ignored. “More than ever young people are frustrated,” she said. “The lack of social-economic progress, not being heard at the local decision-making levels — local government, state government and federal government. … There’s a lot of disillusionment, disappointment, frustration, completely valid.” Avalos has heard young people express their sense of powerlessness on issues including the war in Gaza, climate change, the cost of living, housing, tuition and gun violence, as elected officials have failed to remedy those concerns. “Those issues continue to be a priority, and we’re not at the point where we see that reflected in policy and law,” she said.
Avalos told Wisconsin Examiner that LIT will be back at the doors soon, engaging with communities and asking them what they want to to see from their elected leaders. Avalos stressed that connecting the issues that affect people’s families and communities to voting helps impress on people why it’s important to show up at the ballot box. LIT will focus on getting more citizens engaged in school board meetings, common council meeting and public hearings in the state Legislature.
As people process the fallout from the November election, Avalos said she hopes that people will support one another and remember what motivates them. “At the end of the day, it’s not because of anything more than we love each other,” she said of LIT’s continuing work, “and we need know that we all deserve better.”
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U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin (Screenshot | Democratic National Convention YouTube channel)
Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin has won a third term, defeating Republican California bank owner and part-time Wisconsin resident Eric Hovde in a contest characterized by relentless attacks on the part of both candidates.
With 99% of the ballots counted, Baldwin won with 49.4% of the vote and a margin of just under 30,000 votes, less than 1 percentage point ahead of Hovde, who finished with 48.5%. The Associated Press called the race for Baldwin at 12:42 p.m. Wednesday.
Baldwin declared victory eight hours earlier. “It is clear that the voters have spoken and our campaign has won,” she said in a statement released at 4:30 a.m. Wednesday.
Baldwin built on a continuing track record of success across Wisconsin, including carrying counties generally dominated by Republicans. In this year’s campaign, she also became the first statewide Democratic candidate to receive the endorsement of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau.
Tuesday’s election concluded a grueling campaign dominated by attacks in which Baldwin started with a lead of about 7 percentage points that dwindled in the final months.
Democrats early on painted Hovde, who was raised in Madison, as a California carpetbagger, pointing to his ownership of a bank based in Orange County and a multimillion-dollar mansion in Laguna Beach. Team Baldwin also highlighted numerous past statements from Hovde that they portrayed as denigrating nursing home residents, college students and farmers, among others.
Hovde, meanwhile, characterized Baldwin as a career politician with little to show for her two terms in the Senate and a tenure that included more than a decade in Congress and before that in the Wisconsin Assembly and the Dane County Board.
Baldwin was also likely helped by one of her core messages, focusing on reproductive rights in the post-Roe era. Baldwin has authored a bill to codify federal protections for abortion. Her campaign highlighted Hovde’s past anti-abortion statements and his championing the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ended the federal right to abortion that had been declared in the landmark decision Roe v. Wade.
This report has been updated.
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PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA - OCTOBER 27: Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris alongside Philadelphia City Council member Quetcy Lozada (R) and Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker greets supporters at Freddy & Tony’s Restaurant, a locally-owned Puerto Rican restaurant on October 27, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. With less than 2 weeks until Election Day, Harris is campaigning in the Philadelphia area. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Just a week out from Nov. 5, the Democratic presidential nominee will use her final pitch to voters to “turn the page” from former President Donald Trump, Harris campaign Chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a Tuesday morning call with reporters.
The Ellipse, a large grassy area just south of the White House, was the site of Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, remarks urging his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol.
Harris and Trump remain neck and neck in polling, both nationally and in swing states, in a race that could very well be decided by only a handful of voters across those battleground states.
In the press call, the Harris campaign previewed the contents of the veep’s highly anticipated speech, which is expected to draw tens of thousands of people.
For many undecided voters or those who are “questioning whether or not it is worth it to engage in the election at all,” Harris’ speech is an “opportunity for the vice president to intimately speak directly to that segment of the electorate’s sense of frustration, their sense of exhaustion with the way that our politics have played out under the Trump era — and offer them directly a vision that something is different, that something different is possible,” said Michael Tyler, Harris campaign communications director.
The veep is set to focus on “what her new generation of leadership really means, and centering that around the American people, what they care about, and that she’s going to make clear that she’s committed to ensuring that their needs and priorities are her top priority,” said O’Malley Dillon, who noted that Harris will touch on her vision, values and plans.
“You’re going to hear her really speak to middle-class families and what they’re worried about, and what she’s going to do about it, and she is going to very much focus the speech on them, on the American people, unlike what we hear from Donald Trump, which is his focus on himself, and we know that that is a pretty stark contrast,” O’Malley Dillon added.
Harris campaign Co-Chair Cedric Richmond, a former Louisiana congressman, said the veep will “use the powerful symbolism of the location to remind Americans that Trump is someone so all-consumed by his grievances and his power and his endless desire for revenge that he is not focused on the needs of the American people.”
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign continues to face a backlash following comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s series of racist and vulgar remarks during a Sunday night rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, including calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.”
“I think just seeing what’s happened over the course of the last 48 hours, the growth of support in some of our targeted Puerto Rican community, and some of our battleground states, obviously we have strength there to come in, but we obviously have seen a lot of movement and growth over the course of the last several days based on the response to what happened with Trump’s event,” O’Malley Dillon said.
With Trump set to hold a Tuesday rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania — a city and state with large Puerto Rican populations — the Democratic National Committee is launching a new billboard campaign across the Keystone State underscoring Hinchcliffe’s remarks.
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According to the candidates running for Wisconsin’s 30th Senate District, some of the top issues this year for northeastern Wisconsin voters are rising living costs and politicians’ inability to get along with their colleagues across the aisle.
Both Jim Rafter, a Republican and Allouez village president, and Jamie Wall, a business consultant and third-time Democratic candidate, are wearing bipartisanship as a badge of honor in their respective campaigns. It’s a strategic move for both parties amid the state’s increasingly polarized political landscape, reflecting the competitive nature of a Senate district that covers Green Bay and some of its suburbs.
From calls for tax cuts to redistributing Wisconsin’s surplus among municipalities, the two candidates share positions on many issues. But they do differ on some issues — Wall more openly sides with Democrats in calls for increased abortion access and taking federal funds to expand Badgercare, whereas Rafter has been a more vocal proponent for the closure of Green Bay Correctional Institution.
Redistricting has removed rural northern parts of Oconto and Marinette counties from the 30th Senate District in favor of more urban settings in Allouez and Ashwaubenon south of Green Bay. The district now reflects the more densely populated and politically varied region of metropolitan Green Bay instead. In response to redistricting, current Sen. Eric Wimberger, a Republican, announced in March that he would run in the more rural 2nd Senate District instead.
While Wimberger won by a margin of nearly 10 points in 2020, the open seat now ranks as the state’s closest Senate race this year, according to a Wisconsin Watch analysis.
Rafter, who has served on the Allouez board for 10 years, including eight years as president, said political polarization is one of the biggest issues in the state.
“Nothing’s getting done because people won’t talk to each other,” Rafter said. “I like to talk to people and get things done.”
Wall, a business consultant who is returning to the political sphere after two unsuccessful campaigns for Congress in 2006 and 2012, seems to agree, saying that his experience in the private sector will help him bring politicians together.
According to Wall, polarization is a decades-long problem, and constituents are tired of it. “They’ve seen all the dysfunction and all the partisan fighting,” Wall said. “We’ll get more done for the people of the state if we’re willing to work together across party lines and compromise.”
In terms of compromise, both hope to leverage bipartisan support to divert more of Wisconsin’s $3 billion surplus toward local funding and tax cuts.
Rafter said his decade in Allouez politics has demonstrated a need to appropriate more funding toward local governments.
“In Allouez, we’re a very small community, and we have absorbed tremendous increases in costs of operations such as building roads and just maintaining our infrastructure,” Rafter said. “There’s lots that local communities need to be able to do, and that money would go a long way in helping.”
“I don’t believe state government should be sitting on that money,” Rafter said. “If it doesn’t come back to the local communities, it should go back to the residents.”
Wall, similarly, hopes to see legislators compromise in order to allocate the surplus.
“It’s a sign that how things work in Madison is kind of broken,” Wall said in a September interview with WisconsinEye.
Budgeting the surplus, he said, should have the goal of “reducing health care costs … working to bring down the cost of housing for regular people, and providing a little bit of targeted tax relief for the people who need it the most.”
One of Wall’s central campaign promises is a tax cut, enabled by the state’s current surplus, that he says will be directed toward working families.
Wall also has attacked Rafter’s tax policies, criticizing him for supporting an increase in Brown County’s sales tax during his tenure as Allouez village president. Rafter advocated for the continuation of a 0.5% county sales tax during an Allouez village board meeting in 2022.
Rafter, however, views his past in a more practical light.
“I’ve seen and read how much money that half percent sales tax has saved the taxpayers of Brown County in terms of debt reduction, in terms of being able to do more roads and more buildings,” Rafter said.
Rafter, who also said that he would support a bill to cut taxes in order to address the rising cost of living, defended his record on taxes in Allouez. “Our existing tax rate has remained relatively flat over the last nine years I’ve been on the board,” Rafter said.
When asked whether or not he would oppose any future sales tax increases, Wall said he is “not a big fan of the sales tax.”
On the issue of abortion, Wall is critical about past Republican attempts at restricting abortion access in the state. In a statement on his campaign website, he said he “supports preserving and expanding (reproductive health care) rights.”
Rafter said his position differs from anti-abortion Republicans like Wimberger. He said he hopes to reduce the amount of abortions through “education and guidance,” and that if elected, he would not enter with a steadfast position on the matter.
“As a community we need to come together and figure out what the right solution is. We need to protect the rights of women. We also have to make every effort to protect the rights of the unborn child,” Rafter said. “I hope that we can find a way to reduce the number of abortions in the state of Wisconsin.”
Rafter takes a harder stance on the issue of Green Bay Correctional Institution, having become an outspoken advocate for its closure. The maximum-security prison, which has been plagued with dangerous living conditions in addition to problems relating to understaffing and overpopulation, is located in Allouez.
Wisconsin’s prison system as a whole, Rafter said, is riddled with problems.
“Our criminal justice system just needs a lot of help … the system that has been built, from what I’m learning, is not working,” Rafter said. “There are an awful lot of people working in our Department of Corrections that deserve better. There are inmates who deserve better. There are families of the inmates who deserve better. And from a financial perspective, every taxpayer in the state of Wisconsin deserves better.”
Wall said that he agreed with other local politicians that GBCI needs to be closed, but he did not specify support for any specific proposals going forward.
When asked about GBCI, Wall said that he wanted to “have a bigger conversation about what the state prison system ought to look like.”
“I’d like to be a part of that conversation,” Wall said.
On the topic of health care, Wall backed taking federal funding to expand BadgerCare. He said it should be a no-brainer.
“We can start off by taking federal Medicaid expansion monies, which 40 other states have done,” Wall said. “We’re paying taxes for people’s health care in 40 other states and not benefiting as a result of that.”
Rafter was less certain on his position, saying that health care is an important issue but that he’s unsure as to what problems currently exist or what a good solution might be.
“Just accepting (federal) money isn’t the right answer,” Rafter said. “I don’t have an opinion except that we have to come together and figure it out.”
The two candidates have some disagreements on school funding. Schools across the state have turned to referendums to obtain funding, and Wisconsin is trailing nationally in percentage increases in school funding over the past decade.
Both candidates called for increased funding to K-12 schools. Rafter also voiced support for funding private voucher schools while Wall said that “public dollars ought to go to supporting public schools.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Two moderates race to the middle for Green Bay state Senate seat is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
Wisconsin Watch is previewing legislative races in toss-up districts ahead of the Nov. 5 election by focusing on key issues for voters and what candidates say they will do to address them.
Abortion access, tax cuts and education funding are central issues in the race for Wisconsin Senate District 8 — a GOP-leaning toss-up district between Milwaukee and Port Washington that could help decide who controls the state Senate in the coming years.
The contest pits incumbent Sen. Duey Stroebel, R-Saukville, against environmental attorney and small business owner Jodi Habush Sinykin, a Democrat from Milwaukee. Stroebel has served in the Legislature since May 2011 and sits on its powerful budget-writing committee. Habush Sinykin previously ran for the state Senate in a special election in April 2023. She was narrowly defeated by Sen. Dan Knodl, R-Germantown.
The race is one of five Senate districts Democrats are targeting this cycle — hoping to tee themselves up to win a Senate majority in 2026 — and it’s one of only two flip opportunities in a district with a Republican incumbent, according to a Wisconsin Watch analysis of past voting patterns.
Still more than six weeks out from Election Day, groups on both sides are already running attack ads — an unusually early development for a state legislative race. New Wisconsin Majority is running a commercial attacking Stroebel’s opposition to abortion. Meanwhile, the Republican State Leadership Committee is running an ad blaming Democrats for increased costs that seeks to tie Habush Sinykin to Democratic lawmakers.
Here’s where both candidates stand on key issues in their district.
Habush Sinykin and Stroebel offer starkly different perspectives on what the state’s abortion laws should look like, according to an interview with the former and the latter’s work in the Legislature. Stroebel did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.
“Wisconsin’s abortion laws should very much reflect, as in any democracy, including Wisconsin’s democracy, the will of the people and the values of our people,” Habush Sinykin told Wisconsin Watch in an interview, pointing to polling from Marquette Law School that suggests between 60% and 70% of Wisconsin residents believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
New polling from the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation also found that just shy of 80% of Wisconsin residents are against criminalizing the procedure before fetal viability in the state. That includes 57% of Republicans and 93% of Democrats. Criminalizing abortion was defined in the survey as “prison time or fines for the doctor or the woman.”
Habush Sinykin said reproductive freedom and health care access are the top issues she is hearing from voters when knocking on doors, especially from women. Voters have expressed concerns about restrictive abortion laws preventing them from accessing the health care providers they need, she said, with many doctors deciding not to practice in Wisconsin because of the state’s 1849 ban, which is currently unenforceable after a court order.
“To make women have to leave Wisconsin, or make us uncertain about the health care we can receive, it is just not OK,” Habush Sinykin said.
Stroebel joined all 21 of his Republican colleagues in the state Senate in June 2023 in voting against repealing Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban. Democrats attached the repeal provision to the state budget, forcing GOP lawmakers to vote on the issue. The 1849 law, which had been unenforceable because of Roe vs. Wade, was believed at the time to outlaw most abortions in the state. The 19th-century statute contains a vaguely defined exception for an abortion that is determined to be medically necessary to save the mother’s life, but does not make exceptions for cases of rape, incest or the mother’s health.
In April 2020, Stroebel introduced a constitutional amendment that would have guaranteed a fetus at every stage of development a “right to life.” During his Senate race in 2020, Stroebel was endorsed by Pro-Life Wisconsin, an organization that supports “candidates who recognize the personhood of the preborn baby and hold the principled and compassionate no-exceptions pro-life position.”
Both candidates support cutting taxes, but largely for different groups.
“Strategic and intelligent tax cuts make sense for Wisconsin,” Habush Sinykin said.
As a business owner — she and her husband own a Janesville manufacturing company that produces paint rollers and other products — she said she has seen firsthand the “connection between our tax system and the ability to attract a strong workforce in Wisconsin.”
“We need Wisconsin to be able to keep and attract young families and a workforce,” Habush Sinykin said. She supports cutting taxes for middle class families while “ensuring that the highest earners pay their fair share,” according to her campaign policy platform.
“I very much think that we have to be competitive, not just in our region, but with the rest of the country, because that’s who we’re competing against,” she said.
Habush Sinykin said she would like to reduce taxes on Wisconsin seniors and retirees.
Too many people living on fixed incomes leave for other states with more favorable tax systems, Habush Sinykin said. She added that “Wisconsin can do far more to dissuade them from leaving the state.”
She declined to endorse a GOP-authored bill from the most recent legislative session that would have made retirement income for certain Wisconsin residents tax-free, but did say the proposal “certainly sounds to be a step in the right direction.” Habush Sinykin said she’d need to see the long-term financial implications for the state before endorsing any tax cut plan.
That plan would have raised the annual amount of tax-exempt withdrawals from a retirement account from $5,000 to $75,000 for single Wisconsin residents age 65 and older and up to $150,000 for joint filers. It was vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers, who said it would reduce revenue by $658 million in 2024-25 and $472 million in each subsequent fiscal year. Stroebel voted in favor of the legislation.
Stroebel has been a proponent of cutting taxes during his time in the Legislature. During the 2021-23 legislative session, he voted for reducing the state’s third-highest tax bracket from 6.27% to 5.3%, a $2 billion cut. That rate covers income between $27,630 and $304,170 for single filers and between $36,840 and $405,550 for joint filers.
During the most recent legislative session, Stroebel supported a number of tax cut provisions. He co-sponsored legislation that would have implemented a flat income tax system in Wisconsin by reducing income taxes for all filers to 3.25%. That proposal did not receive a vote in either the Senate or the Assembly.
Instead, during the most recent budget cycle, Stroebel backed a $3.5 billion income tax cut that would have focused its largest reductions on the state’s highest earners. The plan would have cut the top tax rate from 7.65% to 6.5% — a 15% reduction for high-earning joint filers who make $405,550 or more annually. It would have reduced the second-highest rate from 5.3% to 4.4%, a 17% decrease.
Evers vetoed those cuts from the budget but left in place reductions to the state’s bottom two brackets.
Habush Sinykin told Wisconsin Watch the state needs to be spending more on its public K-12 schools, noting that more and more districts around the state are turning to referendums to “maintain the quality and caliber of education that we have always been able to achieve in Wisconsin.”
U.S. Census Bureau data show that in 2022, Wisconsin’s per pupil spending was 7.21% lower than the national average. Wisconsin’s spending on schools ranked 25th among the 50 states in 2022, according to the data. That’s a drop from 11th in 2002 and 21st in 2012.
The state should kick in more for K-12 schools, Habush Sinykin said, to help address teacher shortages, reduce class sizes and improve education.
During the most recent legislative session, Stroebel sponsored a bill that increased funding for public K-12 schools by $1 billion. The funding was tied to $280 million in new funding for private voucher schools. Evers signed it.
The legislation helped close “the funding gap for private schools participating in the parental choice programs and gives parents more opportunities to decide which school best fits their child’s needs,” Stroebel said in a statement after the bill passed. “Wisconsin is making great strides towards establishing funding parity for all K-12 students with the passage of this piece of legislation.”
Editor’s note: This story was corrected to reflect that this district is one of two flip opportunities for Democrats in a Senate district with a Republican incumbent.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Democrat seeks to flip GOP suburban Milwaukee seat with focus on abortion rights, tax cuts is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
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