Public education funding, child care affordability and tax cuts are key issues in the race for the 85th Assembly District — a toss-up district in north central Wisconsin that encompasses Wausau and Weston.

Rep. Patrick Snyder, R-Schofield, faces a challenge from Yee Leng Xiong, a school board and Marathon County Board member who also serves as executive director of the Hmong American Center.

Snyder has served in the Legislature since 2017. Prior to serving in the Assembly, he was a morning radio host for WSAU, and he served as outreach director for U.S. Rep. Sean Duffy. Snyder was drawn into the 87th Assembly District under new voting maps approved by lawmakers in February, moving him out of the 85th by a couple of blocks. If he wins, he said he and his wife plan to continue renting an apartment in the district.

The district is among the most closely divided in the state, according to a Wisconsin Watch analysis of recent voting patterns, and could be influential in determining which party controls the Assembly at the start of the next legislative session in January. Xiong has knocked on 7,000 doors in an area where Democrats are hoping not only to win an Assembly seat, but help Vice President Kamala Harris and U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin improve their margins in rural areas.

Here’s where both candidates stand on important issues in the district.

Education funding

In an interview with Wisconsin Watch, Xiong said the state needs to provide additional funding to public schools in the state.

“When we invest in our teachers, when we invest in public education, we’re investing in the future of our nation,” he said.

In particular, he said the state should fund programs that help recruit and retain teachers and provide additional dollars for students with special needs. 

He also said lawmakers “need to look at the funding formula (for public schools). We need to look at it, reevaluate and see if it’s actually still effective.” Xiong noted with concern that almost half of all Wisconsin school districts will have gone to referendum by the end of the year to pay for capital projects and operating expenses. 

“That means that something’s not working,” he said.

In the short term, Xiong said, the state could tap into its sizable budget surplus to provide some immediate aid, but he added that’s not a sustainable solution. Instead, the state needs to reconsider the funding formula as a whole and determine if additional revenue streams need to be considered in order to bring long-term financial relief to public schools.

During the most recent legislative session, Snyder supported 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. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers signed it.

Snyder did not respond to multiple interview requests for this story.

Child care affordability

The state should be doing more to address the shortage of child care providers in Wisconsin, and it should also be working to bring down the cost of child care, Xiong said.

In the immediate term, he said the state should be investing in Child Care Counts, a program created by Evers using federal COVID-19 funds to provide payments to child care providers on a regular basis to help keep their doors open. The program is credited with keeping thousands of child care facilities open during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

In October 2023, Evers extended the program through June 2025 using $170 million in federal funds. He has previously sought to include $340 million in the state budget to support the program, but that plan was scrapped by Republican lawmakers.

“Right now, the cost for child care is more expensive than tuition at (UW-Madison),” Xiong noted, a nod to a September 2023 Forward Analytics report that found that the average annual cost of infant child care in 2021 was $13,572. For the 2024-25 academic year, tuition at UW-Madison for a Wisconsin resident is $11,606.

He pointed to recent action from the Marathon County Board, which approved $200,000 to train 30 child care providers and open 240 additional child care slots in the county, as an example of a program the state should consider.

Snyder supported a slate of Republican-authored child care bills during the most recent legislative session. During the floor session, Democrats attached extending Child Care Counts as amendments to one of the bills. Snyder voted against the extension.

The GOP-backed package included bills that would have allowed parents to contribute $10,000 in pre-tax money to an account to pay for child care, created a $15 million loan program to help child care centers pay for renovations, established a new category of child care centers that could serve between four and 12 children, and increased the child-to-child-care-worker ratio allowed in some child care centers. None of the proposals became law.

Tax cuts

Lawmakers need to reduce taxes for middle class Wisconsin residents, Xiong said in an interview, criticizing Republicans for supporting a tax cut in the state’s most recent budget that would have largely benefited the state’s highest earners.

“We need to look into ensuring that what we’re doing is we’re supporting the middle class,” he said, noting that people should not have to worry “whether they can afford groceries this weekend, or whether they can afford the utilities.”

Snyder has supported significant tax cuts during his time in office. During the 2021-23 legislative session, he backed 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.

Snyder co-sponsored another plan that 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 Evers, who said it would reduce revenue by $658 million in 2024-25 and $472 million in each subsequent fiscal year.

During the most recent budget cycle, Snyder 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.

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Wausau Mayor Doug Diny posted a photo of himself removing the drop box to social media. (Doug Diny)

A group of Wausau voters have filed a request with the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the mayor of Wausau over his removal of an absentee ballot drop box from outside of city hall. 

Mayor Doug Diny removed the box in late September and posted a photo to social media of his action without consulting the local election clerk, who has authority under state law to administer the state’s elections. The state Supreme Court in July allowed the use of absentee ballot drop boxes but gave local clerks the discretion to decide if they will be used. 

More than 60 municipalities have opted not to use the boxes, which were in place in rural and urban parts of the state for years. After the 2020 election, however, Republicans began criticizing their use, alleging the lack of security opens the voting system up to fraud and “ballot harvesting.” 

Diny’s actions have drawn criticisms from voting rights advocates across the state worried about efforts to prevent people from having access to vote. 

The box has since been returned, but an investigation has been opened into Diny’s actions. WISN reporter Matt Smith reported Wednesday that the state Department of Justice has taken over an investigation originally launched by Marathon County. 

Voting rights advocates want federal authorities to get involved as well. 

“For years, voters across Wisconsin safely and securely cast their ballots via drop boxes across the state,” the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign said in a news release Wednesday. “No matter where we work or what part of the state we call home, working Wisconsinites should be able to vote easily and safely. Making it harder to vote is out of touch with Wisconsin values.”

Nick Ramos of Wisconsin Democracy Campaign speaks at a press conference in Madison Thursday about the Wausau mayor removing his city's ballot drop box | Photo by Ruth Conniff

The mayor of Wausau, Wisconsin, made a national media splash this week when he dressed up in a hard hat and carted away his community’s only absentee ballot drop box, outraging local voters, city officials and voting rights advocates statewide.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would see a sitting mayor dressed up like Bob the Builder physically take a ballot drop box … and illegally place it in his office,” said Nick Ramos of Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. 

Ramos spoke at a press conference outside the Madison City County Building Thursday, standing beside a poster-sized photo of Wausau Mayor Doug Diny caught in the act.

“We cannot continue to allow bad actors to think this type of behavior is acceptable,” Ramos declared, calling for a thorough investigation of the mayor’s action.

Drop boxes were uncontroversial for many years in communities across Wisconsin. But after their use increased during the pandemic election of 2020, conspiracy theorists connected them to false claims of “massive voter fraud” and blamed their use for former President Donald Trump’s loss. A Republican-friendly majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court banned drop boxes in 2022. In July, the new liberal court majority reversed that decision. 

So now drop boxes are back and so are the election conspiracies swirling around them, along with grandstanding by Republican politicians like Diny, who turned his caper stealing the Wausau drop box into a photo op. 

Diny admitted Tuesday to the Wausau Pilot & Review, which broke the story, that he’d taken the drop box last Sunday and locked it in his office, and snapped a few photos to memorialize the act. The mayor had argued with the city clerk about setting up the drop box in the first place, the paper reported — something the clerk was specifically empowered to do by the state Supreme Court decision and subsequent guidance from the Wisconsin Elections Commission. 

Diny defended his unilateral move to override her authority and take the box, telling the paper, “I was hired to tighten things up at city hall. This action is consistent with my overall position and what I heard from residents when I was knocking on doors.”

But in a later radio interview, the Wausau paper reported, Diny backpedaled and claimed he was only trying to protect the drop box, which had not yet been bolted to the ground or unlocked for use, since he was afraid someone would “take it and throw it in the river.”

Diny may already be regretting his caper, which is now the subject of a criminal probe by the Marathon County district attorney. As City Council President Lisa Rasmussen told the Wausau Pilot & Review, “I have huge concerns about this behavior, as there is no place for elected officials to manage, alter or tamper with drop boxes, whether they agree with their use or not.” 

How worried should Wisconsinites be about efforts like Diny’s to undermine voting rights and the smooth operation of elections?

In a Thursday afternoon press call, former U.S. ambassador and national democracy expert Norm Eisen denounced the stunt by the Wausau mayor and “terrible, frivolous challenges” to the regular administration of elections, including the “complete, utter nonsense charge that noncitizens are voting.” 

The point of all these political attacks on voting is “to create the false impression that elections are unreliable” and to help set up a challenge by Trump if the 2024 election results don’t go his way.

The good news, Eisen said, is that it didn’t work last time and it won’t work this time, either. “They will not get away with it,” he declared. Other panelists on the press call agreed.

“We have secure, safe, well-managed, fair elections in Wisconsin,” said Jeff Mandell, general counsel of Law Forward, which brought a lawsuit against Wisconsin’s fake electors, forcing them to admit they tried to overturn the legitimate results of the last election and to agree not to serve as Trump electors this year.

Because of all that happened in 2020, Mandell said, Wisconsin is better prepared to prevent election interference this year. 

Both Eisen and Mandell celebrated accountability for key figures involved in trying to overturn election results in 2020, including Trump attorney Rudolph Giuliani, who was finally disbarred in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. 

Mandell ran down a list of reasons Wisconsinites should feel encouraged about the strength of democracy in our state, including the replacement of gerrymandered voting districts with new, fair maps, the reinstatement of drop boxes, and the defeat of voter purges and efforts to disqualify absentee voters for technicalities.

Sure, there is a lot of political grandstanding by MAGA Republicans, Mandell said, “but none of these things are doing real damage.”

Even the former top elections official in Milwaukee, Claire Woodall — who endured death threats when she was at the center of the MAGA storm while administering the 2020 election — sounded sanguine when I talked to her on the phone about the Wausau ballot box imbroglio.

“I think that the security of our elections and the integrity of our elections has always been in a good spot in Wisconsin,” Woodall said.

When Woodall suddenly left her job this year, apparently after being pushed out by Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, she joined an exodus of election officials in Wisconsin that has created an unprecedented number of clerks administering the 2024 election who’ve never handled a presidential race before.

But that doesn’t worry Woodall (who said she can’t comment on her own departure).

For years, Wisconsin has been known “as a nationwide example of how to run elections in a nonpartisan manner and not let politics dictate practice,” she said. “And so I think while you have new clerks, there’s always been new clerks. It’s always been a high turnover job. So that fact doesn’t really bother me.”

What does bother Woodall is the political pressure on nonpartisan clerks from partisan elected officials like the mayor in Wausau. 

“It’s just unfortunate that they’re putting clerks in that position,” she said. “Clerks are not well paid by any means,” and yet “they’re working around the clock right now, and they will be until at least two weeks after the election.”

Woodall agrees with Eisen and Mandell that Wisconsin voters can be reassured about the election. 

“You have 1,800 clerks who are members of your community. Whether they’re newer at their jobs or they’ve been doing it for 20 years, they’re following procedures that haven’t changed, that were also the same in 2016 when President Trump did win.”

She also thinks the conspiracy theories are easy to puncture. The drop box issue, which has become so politicized, is  “the most simple issue for people to understand,” she said. “How on earth is a drop box that’s under video surveillance, bolted to the concrete and checked by two election officials, less secure than a United States Post Office blue box in a neighborhood, under no surveillance whatsoever, and picked up by one postal carrier?”

Other misinformation about elections is also easily dispelled if people look at the evidence. 

“You know, has anyone actually vandalized and taken ballots out of a drop box? Have we seen anyone actually voting in large numbers who shouldn’t be? … you start to realize that elections are, and have been and will continue to be really well run.”

So cheer up, Wisconsin. 

In Wausau, while citizens wait for the mayor to give back their drop box, the municipal clerk has instructed voters they can return their absentee ballots the same way they pay city fees — by dropping them in a secure mailbox at City Hall.