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• Since its debut in March, the “Plaster + Patina” podcast has inspired excitement in Green Bay’s Astor neighborhood.

• Residents have pitched stories about their historic homes to the podcast team and opened their homes to them. 

• The first season focused on homes between Monroe Avenue and the Fox River.  

• The team does extensive research and searches for interesting stories about the properties they feature.

Inside Skip Heverly’s modified Dutch Colonial home, five people thaw from the near-freezing November evening by a green-tiled fireplace. Between them, a coffee table is littered with loose-leaf newspaper clippings, notepads and snacks. 

The group members, all residents of Green Bay’s Astor neighborhood, are preparing to spend the evening trading bits of local lore and hatching ideas that could make for an interesting deep dive. 

The neighbors run “Plaster + Patina,” a podcast series that digs up long-buried — and sometimes spooky — tales tied to the historic homes in Astor, one of Green Bay’s oldest neighborhoods. Through the project, they hope to create a shared sense of wonder and community among neighbors while memorializing the area’s history.

“Slowly but surely, I think we’re kind of seeing how this is really helping to bring the community together,” said Morgan Fisher, podcast chief editor and treasurer of the Astor Neighborhood Association. Each person on the podcast team is also a volunteer member of the association, which advocates for the area to local government and organizes events. 

After debuting in March, the series has inspired excitement around the neighborhood, with residents pitching their own houses to be featured and opening their homes to the team. At the mid-November brainstorm, the group invited longtime local civic leader Jim Gucwa to share stories he’s collected and spark inspiration for a future episode. 

The first season of “Plaster + Patina” uncovered a forgotten spring water bottling business; examined architectural changes that speak to larger societal shifts; and told tales of ghosts, among other topics. 

Each person has a unique role in the process, from digging through yellowed archives to splicing audio. Several enrolled in nearby community college to learn the skills they use. The project doesn’t currently have sponsors or advertisers to generate revenue, or plans to do so. The team pools resources, leveraging each others’ connections, interests and skills. 

“That’s what a neighborhood’s about,” said Paul Jacobson, the podcast’s historian.  

Bringing people out of their homes — and into others’

Between the 1830s and 1920s,  a high, dry slope running parallel to the Fox River — colloquially known as “The Hill” — was an attractive place for doctors, lawyers and other businessmen to build their homes. 

Today, the houses in the affluent neighborhood still reflect the period in which they were constructed. A 1980 historic district designation, championed with Gucwa’s help, preserves the homes’ exteriors from being substantially altered, among other protections. 

Astor’s design encourages social connection. Homes with large front porches sit close to the sidewalks lining each street. Parks host an ice rink, a wading pool and a shell where local bands regularly perform. 

Despite this, the area hasn’t been immune to the social isolation that’s swept across the country in recent years. 

“People have kind of gone into their (homes),” Fisher said. “They’re not on their porches anymore. They’re not out meeting their neighbors as much.”

When the Astor Neighborhood Association coalesced in 1974, it started as a way to improve the area and combat crime. It now focuses on maintaining a sense of community among residents, Fisher said. 

To do that, last summer several neighborhood association members discussed creating something where people could walk around the area, learn the stories behind the architecture they see and feel more connected to its past and present.

“What better way to do that than a podcast?” Jacobson said. 

Tales of ghosts, lost springs and … alligators?

At first, the group was nervous about how the endeavor would turn out. But once they started chatting about history and architecture, old stories of folks from the area, “everyone just lit up,” said Heverly, the producer of “Plaster + Patina.”

The first season focused on homes nestled between Monroe Avenue and the Fox River.  

“It’s nice to stay within an area, just to kind of really lay out that area,” host Al Valentin said. “We want to create a visual while you’re listening to it of what the neighborhood looked like at that time.”

Once they choose a home, Jacobson digs up the stories behind it. He dives into a slew of online resources, including newspaper archives, historical atlases and — his favorite — fire insurance maps, which include detailed hand drawings of buildings in the area dating back to the 1880s. 

After Jacobson goes “down a rabbit hole,” they zoom out and choose the most interesting event or detail he found. “Otherwise, you could spend five hours on one particular home,” Valentin said. 

The team then drafts a rough script, a bullet-point list of topics they want to hit during the show. Finally, they record the episode for free in a studio at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College. They invite homeowners or people connected to the stories to appear as guests for a live interview. 

“We kind of shoot from the hip,” Valentin said. “When you hear us converse on the podcast, it’s pretty real, with our knowledge and expertise.”

Lastly, Heverly edits out “ums,” “uhs” and any mistakes made during recording. He learned the skill at NWTC, where he studied audio editing, video editing, social media marketing and how to use Adobe applications. 

Since March, the team has created eight episodes.

In one, Jacobson shared the story of a forgotten mineral spring he unearthed when scouring old hand-drawn maps. Residents bottled and sold the water, marketing it as a natural health remedy, he discovered.

In another, they explored how the neighborhood’s first backyard pool signaled the shift of leisure from front porches to more private backyards — and was once home to an alligator.

For a Halloween edition, Valentin interviewed a paranormal investigator who shared supernatural experiences at Astor’s Hazelwood House — including an apparition descending stairs, a baby cradle rocking on its own and echoes of drums played by the Native Americans who first called the area home.

Throughout the season, local support for the project has grown. 

Lawn signs advertising the show sprouted up in front yards across the neighborhood. People asked for their home to be featured. Residents opened up their homes to the crew, giving them tours to aid the podcast. 

“Especially in today’s world, we’re all looking for that connection. We want to be a part of something that’s bigger than ourselves,” marketing and writing director Maddy Szymanski explained in the podcast’s first episode. “When you live in an old neighborhood — or a new neighborhood, really anywhere —  you’re a part of something that is bigger than you. You’re a part of a community and you can build that connection.”

The team is currently producing a final episode before moving onto the podcast’s second season. Find the episodes here. 

Miranda Dunlap reports on pathways to success in northeast Wisconsin, working in partnership with Open Campus. Email her at mdunlap@wisconsinwatch.org.

Green Bay podcasters dig up long-buried tales in their own neighborhood 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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• Free clinics like Bread of Healing in Milwaukee and Open Arms Free Clinic in Walworth County serve as a final safety net for community members who can’t afford health care.

• They are bracing for higher demand as more residents are expected to forgo insurance as a crucial tax credit is set to expire and premiums spike.

• Clinic staff say they may need more resources to meet demand. 

• The U.S. Senate on Thursday rejected dueling plans related to helping people pay for plans on the federal marketplace.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to note the U.S. Senate’s rejection on Thursday of legislation to address the expected rise in health care premiums.

Cars filled the small parking lot outside of Milwaukee’s Cross Lutheran Church on a recent Monday afternoon. The church’s pews sat empty, but downstairs visitors waited around folding tables. Not to hear a sermon, but to see a volunteer physician. 

Staff and volunteers walked patients past a row of dividers used to separate the “waiting room” from the folding tables where doctors and counselors filled out paperwork. 

In front of the free health clinic’s four exam rooms, two phones rang. 

“This is the Bread of Healing Clinic. Can you hold for a moment?” asked Diane Hill Horton, the free health clinic’s assistant.

Across from Hill Horton, another staff member scheduled an appointment in Spanish. 

On a typical Monday, the clinic sees up to 30 patients. Bread of Healing treated 2,400 patients in 2024 across three clinics it runs in Milwaukee. Patients typically lack any health coverage and aren’t asked to pay for their visits.

“We don’t turn anyone away,” Hill Horton said.

But without action from lawmakers in Washington, clinic staff worry that it will become harder to answer every call.

Free clinics like Bread of Healing serve as a final safety net for community members who can’t afford health care. They are bracing for higher demand as more residents are expected to forgo insurance as a crucial tax credit is set to expire and premiums spike.

Affordable Care Act premiums in Wisconsin will increase on average by 17.4% next year, a previous Wisconsin Watch analysis showed, with wide variation depending on age, income, family status and geography. Meanwhile, experts estimate more than 270,000 Wisconsinites rely on the enhanced premium tax credit to make insurance more affordable. It will expire at the end of the month without intervention. 

People without insurance are less likely to get preventative care. Bread of Healing focuses on treating chronic conditions to prevent people from overwhelming emergency rooms, said Executive Director Erica Wright.

“If we don’t try our best to move with that demand, we’re not going to be able to see as many people, and there’s going to be a lot of folks falling through the cracks,” she said.

Wright oversees all three Bread of Healing locations. While the clinics have some room to take on more patients right now, she wants to significantly increase their capacity over the next year — adding money and volunteers to serve a possible “monsoon” of demand.

“We’re never going to be able to serve everybody, we know that,” Wright said. “But I don’t want it to be where our phones are ringing off the hook and we just can’t meet at least a good chunk of the demand.”

Higher premiums and shrinking options

Ashley Bratz paid about $545 a month for a low-deductible marketplace plan this year. That same plan cost over $700 when she went to sign up for 2026.

Even with her job at Open Arms Free Clinic in Walworth County covering a portion of her health care costs, the only option in Bratz’s price range had deductibles higher than what she expects to spend.

 “It’s supposed to be reasonable, and this is not reasonable,” Bratz said.

Bratz, who works as the nurse clinic coordinator, said she did not receive enhanced marketplace subsidies this year. Those who did will face a particular shock as the tax credit expires — while also confronting rising prices and shrinking options.

The income-based tax credits have lowered some marketplace enrollees’ monthly premium payments since they became available in 2014.

In 2021, the federal government expanded those subsidies, further bringing costs down for lower-income enrollees and extending smaller subsidies to people making over four times the  federal poverty level — $62,600 a year for one person in 2025.

Without an extension, monthly premiums are expected to more than double on average nationally for subsidized enrollees, according to KFF, an independent source for health policy research.

A quarter of enrollees surveyed by KFF said they were “very likely” to go without insurance if their premiums doubled.

The U.S. Senate on Thursday rejected a Democratic plan to extend marketplace subsidies. Republicans, who have long criticized the Affordable Care Act (ACA), have instead called for a broader overhaul. The Senate also rejected a Republican plan that would have expanded access to high-deductible insurance plans and deposit $1,000 to $1,500 in enrollees’ health savings accounts — without renewing enhanced subsidies.

Sara Nichols, Open Arms Clinic executive director, is forging ahead regardless. When Bratz told her about her shrinking affordable coverage options, Nichols started working with an insurance broker to find a new plan for the clinic’s small team of paid staff.

“We cannot have health care workers not have health insurance,” Nichols said.

The move left Bratz relieved. Now she’s preparing to help more clients who can’t afford coverage or just need help navigating the complicated system.

They face challenges beyond lost subsidies and premium hikes. President Donald Trump’s “big” bill-turned law included additional changes to Medicaid funding and the ACA that are expected to increase the number of people without insurance by 10 million over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

“We always take what is thrown at us and we figure out how to handle it,” Bratz said. “Do I think we could also use more help? Yes.”

Resources needed to meet demand

Open Arms Free Clinic is already seeing higher demand, Nichols said. 

It operates a dental clinic five days a week, and she’s considering whether further demand would require opening its medical clinic for an additional day.

That would take more volunteers and money. 

While the Legislature sent state dollars to free clinics in its latest budget, private grants and donations have been harder to secure this year, Nichols said. She expects the clinic will have to get even leaner next year.

But she won’t start turning patients away.

The clinic provides dental, medical and behavioral health to low-income people who live and work in Walworth County. Its 250 volunteers help with things like translating, nursing, greeting patients and connecting people to the clinic. They also provide vision and pharmacy services.

“I know that we have enough smart people and kind people that we’re going to come up with a solution to anything that comes up,” Nichols said.

This is far from the first time Wisconsin’s free clinics have faced big changes, said Dennis Skrajewski, the executive director of the Wisconsin Association of Free and Charitable Clinics. 

Free clinics adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic, operating with fewer volunteers and switching to telehealth services and opening vaccine programs, Skrajewski said. Then clinics prepped for increased demand in 2023 after Medicaid unwinding.

“We’re used to waking up and the world changed yesterday, so we’ll adjust,” Skrajewski said.

Wisconsin’s free and charitable clinic association is collaborating with other safety net health providers as part of the Wisconsin Owns Wellbeing initiative, which will host statewide planning meetings to strengthen the state’s safety net services. 

Clinic co-founder: ‘I just wish it weren’t needed’ 

Rick Cesar started working as a parish nurse at Cross Lutheran Church in the 1990s. He took people’s blood pressure at a weekly food pantry and ran an HIV testing site and needle exchange out of the church’s basement.

He helped co-found the Bread of Healing Clinic in 2000, a decade before the ACA passed. 

“There were so many people that had no coverage,” Cesar said.

Demand for free services persisted even after more people enrolled in marketplace plans. The clinic expanded to two other locations and hired paid staff. Cesar retired from nursing in 2019 but still regularly volunteers. He feels proud watching the clinic grow.

“I just wish it weren’t needed,” he said.

The clinic is adaptable, Cesar said, whether it’s responding to a pandemic with vaccine drives or helping clients navigate ACA changes.

“We’re going to be here and do as much as we can,” Cesar said. “But those resources, you never know how long they are going to last when the demand is so great.”

‘We don’t turn anyone away’: Wisconsin’s free clinics fill gaps as thousands expected to go uninsured 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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Homosexual acts are illegal in 65 countries, according to several reports.

U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, a Madison-area Democrat, alluded to the number Dec. 3.

Human Dignity Trust, which uses litigation to challenge laws that target people based on sexual orientation or gender identity, says all or parts of 65 countries criminalize same-sex, consensual sexual activity. All criminalize men; 41 criminalize women. 

The continent with the most bans is Africa, with 32 countries.

In North America, the maximum punishment in Jamaica, Grenada and Saint Vincent is 10 years imprisonment.

The ILGA World advocacy group also counts 65 countries, including seven that impose the death penalty: Brunei, Iran, Mauritania, parts of Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Uganda and Yemen.
76crimes.com, which tracks anti-LGBTI laws, says 65 is down from 92 in 2006. The latest to criminalize homosexuality was Burkina Faso in West Africa on Sept. 1, 2025.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

• Human Dignity Trust: Home page
• Human Dignity Trust: Map of Jurisdictions that Criminalize LGBT People
• ILGA World: Criminalization of consensual same-sex sexual acts
• 76crimes.com: List of 65 countries where homosexuality is illegal

Are homosexual acts criminalized in 65 countries? 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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It’s hard to believe how much Wisconsin Watch has evolved since I joined in 2019, initially as investigations editor. We had just seven full-time staff members and a cycle of fellows and interns who powered most of our journalism. Weeks and even months would pass between publication of our investigative and explanatory stories as we pursued our mission of increasing the quality and quantity of investigative reporting in Wisconsin.  

Six years later, we’re a far different, much bigger organization. We have about 30 editorial and business staff across multiple newsrooms, and we’re responding to community needs in real time through a more frequent mix of stories. Although investigative journalism remains our strength, our broadened mission is to use journalism to make Wisconsin communities strong, informed and connected.

So it’s worth a reminder of all the places where you can find our free reporting every day:

• Our websites, where you can find reporting from our Madison-based statewide newsroom, our northeast Wisconsin bureau and Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, alongside bite-sized fact checks of trending claims.  
• Our statewide newsletters on Monday (Forward), Wednesday (Wednesday Report) and Friday (Wisconsin Weekly) and NNS’ daily newsletter in Milwaukee.
• On social media, including YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Bluesky.
• On the air, whether it’s through our partnerships with WPR, Civic Media or other broadcasters. 
• In print! We still share our work for free with newspapers across the state and country. If you’re in Madison this month, check out the latest issue of Isthmus to see the first in our three-part series on how spending on Supreme Court elections shattered national records.

What’s your favorite way to interact with us? And where else would you like to see us? We’d love to hear from you as we consider where to grow next. You can reach me at jmalewitz@wisconsinwatch.org.

Here’s how to keep up with Wisconsin Watch is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Update, Dec. 10, 2025:

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to release Dailin Pacheco-Acosta from custody on Wednesday, less than a day after an immigration court judge in Chicago granted asylum to Pacheco-Acosta and her husband, Diego Ugarte-Arenas. 

Pacheco-Acosta did not immediately leave Campbell County Detention Center in Kentucky, which contracts with ICE to hold detainees facing immigration charges. The couple’s attorney, Ben Crouse, told Wisconsin Watch he filed a new bond motion for Pacheco-Acosta on Wednesday afternoon, and she will return to Madison once the immigration court approves her bond. 

But her husband will remain in custody in the Dodge County Jail while awaiting the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s potential appeal of the couple’s asylum claim. 

If DHS appeals and Ugarte-Arenas remains in custody, their next legal phase could take another 6 months. But Crouse noted another lawsuit winding through federal courts could reopen the more straightforward path for immigrants in ICE custody to be released on bond. That case sits in the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction includes Wisconsin.

If ICE releases Ugarte-Arenas from the Dodge County Jail, the couple’s case would shift to the immigration court system’s “non-detained docket,” Crouse said, where cases move far slower than those of immigrants in custody.

Original story, Dec. 9, 2025:

A Chicago immigration court judge has granted the asylum request of a Madison couple who U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers arrested during a routine check-in at the agency’s Milwaukee office in October.

Judge Eva Saltzman sided with Dailin Pacheco-Acosta and Diego Ugarte-Arenas on Tuesday afternoon, but the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – ICE’s parent agency – reserved the right to appeal.

The ruling does not automatically free the couple from ICE custody. 

“It’s not over,” said Ben Crouse, the couple’s Milwaukee-based attorney. 

Ugarte-Arenas remains in the Dodge County jail, which contracts with ICE to hold immigrants facing deportation, and Pacheco-Acosta sits in a county jail in northern Kentucky. A recent Trump administration policy has prevented them from posting bond and continuing their asylum case from Madison, where they settled in 2021 after fleeing Venezuela. 

The couple crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without a visa, but because of a clerical error by Customs and Border Patrol officers they encountered near Eagle Pass, Texas, they did not initially land before an immigration court and were instead able to file for asylum with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services upon reaching Wisconsin. The couple refiled for asylum with the immigration court in Chicago after their arrests in October. Neither has a past criminal conviction nor a pending criminal charge.

As they await the next step in their legal battle, the Trump administration is defending the policy that has kept the couple in custody for more than a month, even after a federal judge in California challenged its legality. How higher courts rule will determine whether thousands of immigrants in ICE custody can post bond for the first time in months.

Trump officials seek ‘mandatory detention’

Reversing decades of precedent, DHS announced in July that most immigrants in ICE custody would be ineligible for bond and are instead subject to “mandatory detention.” The Board of Immigration Appeals, a body within the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that sets rules for immigration courts, sided with DHS in September. 

But a Nov. 20 ruling by U.S. Judge Sunshine Sykes of the Central District of California gave the Madison couple and ICE detainees nationwide a moment of optimism. 

Sykes partially ruled on the side of four undocumented immigrants ICE picked up during a June immigration raid in Los Angeles. The four immigrants, represented by attorneys from multiple immigrant rights organizations, had filed a class action lawsuit challenging the rule after they were denied bond. 

But both DHS and DOJ, which oversees immigration court judges, argue Sykes’ decision doesn’t apply to all immigrants in similar positions nationwide. Many immigration court judges, including in Chicago, the court with jurisdiction over most immigrants detained in Wisconsin, have continued to deny bond hearings for immigrants in custody, citing the administration’s reasoning. 

DOJ spokesperson Kathryn Mattingly said department leaders are not instructing immigration judges to specifically reject bond motions.

“Immigration judges are independent adjudicators and decide all matters before them on a case-by-case basis,” Mattingly wrote in a statement to Wisconsin Watch.

Next steps for Madison couple

Crouse, the couple’s attorney, filed motions seeking the Madison couple’s bond before the California ruling. Their motions, even if futile, could help clarify the scope of Sykes’ ruling, he said. 

Crouse and other attorneys are separately testing the last remaining pathway to release: filing “habeas petitions” asking judges to rule on the lawfulness of their clients’ detention. A district court judge in Milwaukee denied a petition for Ugarte-Arenas on Monday, and Pacheco-Acosta is still awaiting a decision from a judge in Kentucky. If Pacheco-Acosta’s petition is successful, she will receive a bond hearing. 

Back in Chicago, Judge Saltzman is preparing a written order outlining her reasoning for granting the couple asylum. DHS signaled plans to challenge her decision before the Board of Immigration appeals. It has 30 days to do so after Saltzman releases her written order. 

Though Crouse called the couple’s case strong — not least because of mounting U.S. military actions in Venezuela —  he noted that recent board decisions siding with DHS mean nothing is assured. 

After asylum win, judge rules ICE must release Madison woman who fled Venezuela. Her husband will remain detained. 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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State funding of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has been reduced by more than $100 million per biennium in the past 30 years.

A key factor: smaller debt payments.

DNR received $334.3 million in state general purpose revenue in the 1995-97 state budget and $226.2 million in 2025-27.

That’s a reduction of $108.1 million, or 32%.

Between the two periods, debt service dropped from $234.7 million to $103.4 million. 

A Wisconsin Reddit user posted Nov. 22 about the cuts.

A 2023 report on DNR by the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum said those savings have been used to fund Medicaid, K-12 schools, prisons and tax cuts. Republicans have controlled all or part of the state budget process for all but one cycle since 1995.

The DNR is charged with protecting and enhancing air, land, water, forests, wildlife, fish and plants and provides outdoor recreational activities.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

• Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau: 1995-97 Wisconsin State Budget
• Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau: 2025-27 Wisconsin State Budget — Natural Resources
• Wisconsin Policy Forum: This Land Is Our Land
• 2025-26 Wisconsin Blue Book: The Executive
• 2025-26 Wisconsin Blue Book: Wisconsin governors since 1848

Has biennial state funding for the Wisconsin DNR dropped by $100 million over 30 years? 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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• Undergraduate students can major in public policy starting in fall 2026.

• Officials say that it’s the first public policy major in Wisconsin and that it may be the only one in the country focused on teaching students how to engage in civil dialogue and find common ground. 

• More and more students were interested in undergraduate certificates from the La Follette School of Public Affairs, which caused leaders to investigate whether there would be demand for a major. 

• Students will learn how to use curiosity to connect with people, as well as how to evaluate the effectiveness of policies.

At a time when American politics are increasingly polarized and partisan, the University of Wisconsin-Madison is launching a new undergraduate major focused on working across those divides to create evidence-based public policy. 

The public policy major, debuting in fall 2026, is the first undergraduate major from the La Follette School of Public Affairs. The Wisconsin Legislature created the school in 1983 to educate future public servants for state and local government. In 2019, after decades of offering only graduate programs, the school added undergraduate certificates — UW-Madison’s version of a minor — in public policy and later in health policy.

Today, they’re among the most popular certificates on campus, said La Follette School Director Susan Webb Yackee. The animosity and gridlock that plague American politics hasn’t discouraged students. In fact, she thinks it’s only made them more interested. 

“This could be a time when our young people are running away from our policy problems, but many of them are running toward them,” Yackee said, noting that she’s seen particular interest in policies about health, environment and climate change. 

With the new major, those young people will have the option to make public policy their primary focus. School leaders say that it’s the first public policy major in Wisconsin and that it may be the only one in the country focused on teaching students how to engage in civil dialogue and find common ground. 

Those are the skills society needs today, Yackee said.

“In a 50-50 state like Wisconsin, in a 50-50 country like the United States, we won’t be able to solve our big public policy problems by simply taking the point of view that one might agree with,” Yackee said. “We will have to work across the political aisle to make real change.”

Yackee spoke to Wisconsin Watch about how she hopes the new program will transform students, campus and the future of policymaking in the United States.  

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

What exactly is public policy, and how is it different from political science?

Public policy is the study of government institutions as well as decision making that affects everyone’s lives. That differs from political science in the sense that we’re interested in not just the politics of how those decisions get made, but also whether public policies that go into effect work or not. Evaluating what works and what doesn’t in existing public policy, as well as predicting what kinds of policies may work and why, is a terrifically important part of our faculty research, as well as the classes that students take….

I’m a political scientist, but most of our faculty at the La Follette School are economists. They’re oftentimes much more focused on … Does that policy work? How is it different than policies in other states? If there’s a policy change, did that change actually match what legislators or practitioners wanted to see happen? 

Why did the faculty decide to focus the new curriculum on civil dialogue and finding common ground?

Our mission is evidence-based policymaking, and we quickly identified that to get to our mission, people had to be able to sit down in the same room and talk about it. You have to be able to talk before you can talk about evidence … That was a need we felt we could serve particularly well within our major … That’s also a skill that a lot of our undergraduate students on campus, who might not be public policy majors, could also benefit from. 

For some people, this feels like a sort of dismal time for politics or public policy. What are you hearing from students about why they’re interested in public policy and what kinds of problems they want to solve?

It’s absolutely true that politics and our current public policy atmosphere turns off a lot of people right now. But very interestingly, we’re seeing huge student engagement in public policy on campus …

A lot of UW-Madison students are interested in working in the nonprofit sector. Many nonprofits need to be able to evaluate their programs to see if they work or not … We teach classes in: How would we understand the goals of the program? How would we quantify them? … So the kind of skills-based classes that we teach have a lot of translation into other fields beyond just government service. 

Do you hear students expressing frustration with politicians today? 

I think there’s a lot of frustration with inaction, and I think that’s normal for traditionally aged college students. Is that any different today than it was in the 1970s or the 1950s? They’re impatient for change, and good for them. I am too, and I love their impatience. 

Let me give you a concrete example of a class I taught … It was for students to do applied policy analysis with real-world clients. This class happened to have three real-world clients, and they were all sitting Wisconsin legislators…

The first day of class was me saying, “Some of you are going to get assigned to work with a Republican (client), and some of you are going to get assigned to work with a Democrat … and if that’s a problem for you in this class, then you ought not to take it, because we are going to provide the best nonpartisan analysis that we can possibly provide to these elected members so that they can make the best decisions they can make for our state.” 

It was sort of like a pin drop when I said that. Nobody dropped the class. Those students did a fabulous job … A lot of those students were bio majors or chem majors — they weren’t political science majors. They did these reports on these topics, and some of them have now been passed into state law. So they were part of the ecosystem which created real change. 

The students … (also) testified in one of the Senate committee rooms in the Wisconsin Legislature… They presented. They were asked questions. Afterwards, one of the students came up to grab me and said, “Dr. Yackee, this is the professional thrill of my lifetime” …

That class is sort of a nutshell of what we’re hoping to accomplish in this undergraduate major.

What do we know about how to promote civil dialogue and find common ground and about how to teach people to do that?

One of the things that we know about teaching classes on talking across the political divide is the importance of establishing ground rules in terms of how those conversations are going to take place. One of our current faculty members, Associate Professor Amber Wichowsky, very much emphasizes curiosity. One of the ground rules for her classes is you need to be curious about how and why people feel differently than yourself … 

It’s innate human behavior to put people in different camps of “us” and “them” … If we come into conversations with that framing, we will not be successful. If we come in with a framing of curiosity and an openness to new perspectives and ideas — it is not that we’re looking to change people’s values, but we are looking to humanize the other because that is one step toward being able to listen to other people’s points of view and work across the political divide.

Free speech on campus is a hot topic these days. How do you hope the major and the skills that you’re providing students might create the kind of environment that you’d like to see on campus? 

Great question. I think of it like my bicep: I don’t work out as much as I should, but the more I work out that muscle, the stronger it gets. I think we don’t have enough opportunities for students to engage with people that are different than them and think differently than them.

Let me submit that a university is a place of ideas, so the most important kind of diversity is the diversity of ideas. It should be a fundamental job of ours to encourage those interactions … We’re going to do that in our classes, but we’re also going to do that by hosting politicians and practitioners and journalists that have different points of view. We’ve done that now for years, and we will continue to do that. 

So if this major is successful, how do you picture the campus will be different?

We hope that it would provide an outlet for students who are interested in applied politics and policy and careers in that space to have a fuller and richer UW-Madison educational experience … 

If we can position students with (these) skills … and they can be trained and ready to go when our country arguably needs them more than ever, then we will have done our job as educators, but we’ll also have done our job in promoting the Wisconsin Idea in a really important way. 

Have a question about jobs or job training in Wisconsin? Or want to tell a reporter about your struggle to find the right job or the right workers? Email reporter Natalie Yahr, nyahr@wisconsinwatch.org, or call or text her at 608-616-0752‬.

Yahr reports on pathways to success statewide for Wisconsin Watch, working in partnership with Open Campus.

New UW-Madison major will teach students to bridge partisan divides 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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Click here to read highlights from the series

• A record $144.5 million was spent on Wisconsin’s 2025 Supreme Court election. That’s more than every state Supreme Court election in 2021-22 combined, and far more than the $45.6 million spent in 2000 on all state Supreme Court elections that caused court watchers to warn about “a new and ominous politics of judicial elections.”

• Wisconsin’s two major political parties are now the largest donors to judicial candidates. The state has also seen an unprecedented level of out-of-state spending in recent years.

• Wisconsin’s narrow political divide, hot-button political issues like abortion and collective bargaining, loose campaign finance laws, lax recusal rules for justices and even holding elections in the spring are all contributing to Wisconsin’s unique spending situation.

• Wisconsin is one of 22 states that initially elect justices. The majority of states appoint them with some adding retention elections. 

• Public financing of elections has failed twice here, and the public remains strongly in favor of elections. Other states have found ways to combine merit selection or some other form of appointment vetting with retention elections to ensure justices are beholden to the law, rather than interest groups or political whims.

A quarter-century ago, the total cost of every state Supreme Court race in the country reached an unprecedented $45.6 million, prompting the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University to warn “a new and ominous politics of judicial elections” posed a “threat to fair and impartial justice.”

Yet in 2025, spending on one Wisconsin Supreme Court seat reached $144.5 million, even more than the $100.8 million spent on 68 state high court contests in the nation in 2021 and 2022.

At the same time, this state’s two major political parties have become the largest donors to the candidates for an officially nonpartisan office. And the last two justices elected in Wisconsin received most of their individual campaign contributions from outside the state.

State Supreme Court races have become everything they were never meant to be — highly partisan, astronomically expensive national political battles in which candidate ideologies overshadow qualifications for an office requiring them to “administer justice … faithfully and impartially.”

Several factors are driving the massive spending in Wisconsin, one of 22 states that elect justices rather than appoint them. The factors include:

• Hot-button issues that turn on ideological control of the high court, such as abortion.
• Wisconsin’s narrowly divided electorate, state government and court composition.
• Campaign finance laws and federal court rulings that have loosened campaign finance limits.
• Lax recusal rules for justices in cases involving their major political donors.
• Electing justices in April, which grew out of an early desire for a nonpartisan judiciary.

Some of those factors have pushed up spending in high court races in other states into the eight-figure range, but only Wisconsin — the first to see nine-figure spending on a court contest — has them all.

“It’s the whole picture that makes us so obscene,” said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, which advocates for transparent and accountable government.

Voters could be in for more of the same, facing a high court election every spring for the next four years. And even if the 2026 race doesn’t break records, it’s shaping up to be another multimillion-dollar contest.

High costs for high courts

In Wisconsin, high court candidates in the 1990s typically spent around $250,000 each. The first million-dollar campaign featuring negative TV ads was in 1999, but the next year candidates pledged to run positive campaigns and it only cost $430,963.

Howard Schweber, professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called those earlier races “gentlemanly” and “low-key affairs.”

But such spending  exploded after Justice Louis Butler wrote a landmark 2005 product liability decision, holding that a lead paint poisoning victim could sue product manufacturers without proving which company was responsible.

Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce spent an estimated $2.2 million to elect conservative Annette Ziegler in 2007 and $1.8 million to help Michael Gableman unseat Butler the next year. Both races set state records at almost $6 million apiece.

Similar story lines have played out nationwide as big-money donors target court races to influence specific cases or issues, said Douglas Keith, deputy director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center. In the latest Wisconsin election, Elon Musk spent $55.9 million to boost conservative Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel, who lost to liberal Dane County Judge Susan Crawford. Musk’s Tesla Inc. was suing to overturn the state law prohibiting auto manufacturers from owning their dealerships, a key part of Tesla’s business model.

Big spenders are rarely transparent about their agendas, instead pouring their money into television advertising with lurid accusations about how candidates handled criminal cases that have little connection to what the Supreme Court does.

Big donors are reinforcing a growing feeling among voters that “the court is just one more institution to obtain the policies that we (the voters) want,” said conservative former Justice Dan Kelly, who lost multimillion-dollar races in 2020 and 2023.

The stakes range all the way up to control of the White House. In 2020, President Donald Trump contested more than 220,000 absentee ballots from Milwaukee and Dane County. The state Supreme Court ruled 4-3 to toss the suit.

The 2020 presidential election was part of a nationwide record five times in 24 years that Wisconsin was decided by less than one percentage point. The same swing-state energy pumps up both sides in high court races — even though only two of the last 12 contested court elections were that close.

And while conservatives ruled the court for 15 years after Gableman’s election, their majority was never more than five of seven seats, meaning that a change in ideological control could be just one or two elections away. That’s one of the most common factors driving big-spending court elections nationwide, Keith said.

Parties crash in with cash

Wisconsin has tried to keep partisan politics out of court elections since its founding. The first state constitution prohibited electing judges at the same time as most other state officials, aiming to discourage parties from nominating judicial candidates.

Wisconsin is one of only four states that hold judicial elections in the spring or summer. Candidates in other states running in the fall are competing for donations with many other high-profile races, Keith noted.

Another major factor that has supercharged spending in Wisconsin came in 2015, when a Republican campaign finance overhaul allowed unlimited donations to political parties and unlimited contributions from parties to candidates.

Donations from state and local Republican parties jumped more than fivefold, from $75,926 in 2016 to $423,615 in 2018. After fundraising powerhouse Ben Wikler took over as state Democratic Party chair in 2019, state, local and national Democratic parties gave their preferred candidates $1.4 million in 2020, $9.9 million in 2023 and $11.8 million in 2025.

Together, the two major parties spent $34.9 million on officially nonpartisan Supreme Court races from 2007 through 2025, almost all of it in the last three campaigns. Democrats outspent Republicans nearly 2 to 1.

In February, the Marquette Law School Poll found 61% of Wisconsin voters believe party contributions reduce judicial independence, compared with 38% who think partisan support gives voters useful information about candidates.

Party contributions represent less than one-quarter of the $161.5 million that special interests spent on the last 12 Supreme Court races. Conservative organizations and business interests spent $80.2 million supporting conservative candidates, while progressive groups and unions spent $46.4 million backing liberal candidates. 

For the entire 2007-2025 period, spending on so-called “issue ads” — which try to persuade voters without explicitly endorsing a candidate — totaled $40.2 million, $31.8 million for conservatives and $8.4 million for liberals.

Out-of-state donors didn’t play a major role in high court elections until relatively recently. From 2007 through 2018, most Supreme Court candidates received more than 90% of their individual donations from state residents, with Gableman being the biggest exception at 32%, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a campaign finance watchdog.

But the out-of-state cash exploded for liberals after 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed each state to regulate abortions.

Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz positioned herself as the abortion rights candidate and took in a record $3.6 million — 57% of individual contributions — from donors outside Wisconsin. Crawford, who had represented Planned Parenthood, received $14.6 million from out-of-state donors or 69% of her individual contributions.

Public financing fails

Wisconsin has tried and failed to stem the tide of judicial spending.

After the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1976 decision saying campaign spending limits violate the First Amendment, the Legislature enacted the nation’s most comprehensive public financing law. Taxpayers could check a box on their income tax returns to designate $1 of their taxes for public financing.

That system “worked extremely well for over a decade,” according to a 2002 analysis by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. However, in 1986 the Legislature stopped adjusting maximum campaign grants for inflation. Taxpayer participation waned from 19.7% in 1979 to 5% in 2002.

After the record-spending 2007 campaign, all seven justices called for “realistic, meaningful public financing for Supreme Court elections.”

But the system Democrats passed in 2009 lasted for just one Supreme Court campaign before Republicans repealed it in 2011. New Mexico is now the only state funding judicial campaigns with taxpayer dollars.

State Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, wants to revive the law, which she calls “really important to preserving judicial integrity.”

Roys, who is running for governor, said she’s considering amounts 10 times higher than what she called the “laughably low” original grants of $100,000 for primary candidates and $300,000 for general election candidates.

Conflict over conflicts of interest

Public financing doesn’t stop special interests from spending big on issue ads or through independent expenditures on ads that clearly state who they favor or oppose, but strict recusal rules for judges could disincentivize such expenditures.

After the 2007 and 2008 elections, justices fielded four petitions asking them to clarify recusal rules. The petitions from groups such as the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin urged the court to set thresholds for when donations or outside spending by a litigant or attorney would require a justice to recuse. Conversely, WMC and the Realtors Association called for rules that would not require justices to recuse based only on how much a litigant or attorney had spent supporting their campaigns.

The court voted 4-3 in 2010 to adopt verbatim the rules backed by WMC. Explaining the new rules, the court majority argued that disqualifying judges based on legal campaign donations “would create the impression that receipt of a contribution automatically impairs a judge’s integrity.”

By contrast, several states and the American Bar Association’s Model Code of Judicial Conduct “require judges to recuse when a party or a party’s lawyer have contributed more than a specific amount to a judge’s campaign.” A few other states call for recusal based on campaign contributions but don’t set a specific dollar limit.

In 2017, 54 retired judges petitioned the high court to toughen recusal rules. When the 2010 rules were adopted, the petition noted, the majority contended that direct donations were too small to influence justices because contributions were capped at $1,000 from individuals and political action committees. But the 2015 campaign finance law boosted the donation limits to $20,000 for individuals and $18,000 for PACs.

Similarly, the petition said, the 2010 majority had argued that judicial candidates couldn’t be held responsible for groups making independent expenditures and running issue ads because at the time they were legally barred from coordinating with those groups. But the 2015 law also loosened the coordination rules.

The retired judges wanted to require litigants and their attorneys to disclose their contributions to the judges hearing their cases at each level. Supreme Court justices would be required to recuse if they received contributions or benefited from outside spending of more than $10,000, with lower amounts for lower court judges.

But the Supreme Court rejected the petition on a 5-2 vote along ideological lines. Most of the conservative justices in the majority said they trusted judges to decide when to recuse.

The issue could be revived. Liberal Chief Justice Jill Karofsky said at a WisPolitics event in October she is committed to holding an “open” and “transparent” hearing about establishing new court recusal rules.

Alternatives to electing judges

In the current legal environment, holding down spending on Supreme Court campaigns could remain challenging as long as Wisconsin elects justices.

Not all of the other systems succeed in taking the politics out of choosing judges. The process of appointing federal judges is widely viewed as partisan, particularly for the U.S. Supreme Court. And even some retention elections have become multimillion-dollar contests, as activists try to change the ideological balance of state high courts.

However, 11 states have set up independent nonpartisan or bipartisan nominating commissions to choose justices by merit. Many other countries select judges through civil service systems. And 12 states use independent performance reviews of judges to help voters or appointing authorities decide whether judges should keep their jobs.

In 1940, Missouri voters approved an appointment system in which a nominating commission screens judicial applicants based on merit. The governor then chooses a judge from a list of potential nominees presented by the commission. Newly appointed judges typically serve a relatively short first term before facing voters in a yes-or-no retention election to keep their jobs for a longer second term.

Some form of commission-based gubernatorial appointment is now in place in 22 states.

Wisconsin is one of 10 states that don’t require their governors to consult a nominating commission or seek confirmation for a high court appointee.

Although 57% of all Wisconsin Supreme Court justices were first appointed by governors to fill vacancies, past efforts to switch to appointing justices faced pushback.

Former Justice Janine Geske said that she had long supported elections because they “made justices more human and someone who people can identify with.” But her perspective has changed.

“People are so sick of these terrible ads that relate to issues that the court doesn’t decide,” Geske said.

Geske said she leans toward appointment if nominees are screened by a bipartisan commission and if the governor must choose from the commission’s list.

Kelly, the former conservative justice, also said he supports appointment with Senate confirmation. Kelly said judges “must reject politics entirely” in their rulings, and appointment offers “much more protection against politics” than elections.

February’s Marquette poll found 90% support for continuing to elect justices, with relatively minor differences by party.

Nonpartisan or partisan elections?

Since 2000, all eight states with fully partisan elections have had million-dollar court contests, while only nine of the 13 states with nonpartisan elections — including Wisconsin — have had one.

In October, the Marquette poll found 56% of state voters thought high court races have become so partisan that candidates should run with party labels. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans backed the idea, with Democrats and independents almost evenly split.

After liberals won four of the last five Supreme Court races, Wisconsin Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden called for moving all spring elections to the fall of even-numbered years. 

Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, a GOP gubernatorial candidate, is calling for shifting only the statewide contests for Supreme Court and superintendent of public instruction to fall and moving primaries for fall races from August to April. 

Schoemann said he didn’t have a strong feeling about whether high court elections should remain nonpartisan, but he added, “Everybody acknowledges that they’re largely partisan races anyway. … Let’s be honest about what they are.”

To keep or not to keep

Most states with independent commissions skip the confirmation process and wait for voters to decide the justices’ future in retention elections. Altogether, 20 states use retention elections for at least some high court races.

As an alternative to incumbent justices facing voters the Brennan Center advocates for a single term of 14 to 18 years, and the State Bar of Wisconsin has called for a single 16-year term, compared with Wisconsin’s current 10-year terms.

Although no state restricts justices to a single long term, Rhode Island justices are appointed for life, like federal judges; Massachusetts and New Hampshire justices serve until mandatory retirement at 70; and Hawaii has an independent commission that decides whether to reappoint justices after an initial 10-year term.

Brennan Center data show four states with head-to-head judicial elections have escaped the national trend of high-spending races: Minnesota, Oregon, Idaho and North Dakota.

In Minnesota, candidates and their supporters spent just $637,011 to elect 10 justices from 2013 through 2022 — a period when Wisconsin candidates and their allies spent almost $33 million, according to the Brennan Center and the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. 

Both states share a history of nonpartisan elections, but unlike Wisconsin, Minnesota elects justices in the fall for six-year terms, with no restrictions on how many seats can be on the ballot in the same election.

Supreme Costs: A condensed version of our series on the ‘obscene’ spending on Wisconsin justices 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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Wisconsin refugee support organizations and food banks are preparing for the worst as regulators in other states implement new rules barring many refugees and people granted asylum from federal food assistance programs. 

But they haven’t yet seen the new restrictions take effect in Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services, which administers FoodShare — the state’s name for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — has continued to provide benefits to immigrants rendered ineligible under the new federal restrictions, support groups say. The agency has not said how long it will continue to do so. 

Refugees, asylees and other immigrants who entered the country through humanitarian programs had long been eligible for SNAP before securing legal permanent residency. But President Donald Trump’s “big” bill-turned law, signed in July, rewrote SNAP eligibility rules to exclude such immigrants who have yet to obtain green cards.  

The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave states until Nov. 1 to comply. 

Refugee assistance groups and food banks across Wisconsin have sounded the alarm about the ban. Nearly 8,000 refugees and asylees have settled in the state over the past decade, federal data show, and resettlement organizations note many rely on FoodShare as they find their footing.

 “SNAP is a lifeline for refugees and asylees as they rebuild their lives in the United States after traumatic and often dangerous circumstances,” said Matt King, CEO of Milwaukee food bank Hunger Task Force. “Food support is one of the first stabilizing resources they receive as they navigate an unfamiliar country and begin the process of resettlement.” 

Hunger Task Force helped more than 1,600 refugees access food assistance in 2024 alone, he added.

Anticipating a benefits cutoff, Wisconsin aid groups have geared up for a surge in demand for services.

 “We’ve already been proactive,” said Donna Ambrose, executive director of The Neighbor’s Place, the largest food bank in Marathon County – a longtime hub for refugee resettlement. Her organization is extending its hours and offering an “evening market” on Thursday nights to accommodate rising needs. 

In the Fox Valley, the nonprofit Casa Hispana recently received an anonymous donation to support food and fuel assistance. It plans to hold a giveaway in the coming weeks. CEO Carlos Salazar expects part will go to asylees from Latin America who stand to lose FoodShare benefits.

COMSA, a resource center for immigrants and refugees in Green Bay, faces a more difficult position. While the nonprofit will continue its core programs – job application support and English language classes, for instance – the center lacks resources to begin providing food assistance, Executive Director Said Hassan said.

Officials with refugee resettlement groups say their clients who lack green cards are still receiving FoodShare — for now. They haven’t heard details about what’s next. 

“We’re supposed to find out any day” about benefits, said Sean Gilligan, the refugee services manager with Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Green Bay. 

Last-minute guidance from the federal Agriculture Department adds to the uncertainty. The agency on Oct. 31 directed states to permanently block all immigrants who entered the U.S. through humanitarian pathways – including refugees and asylees – from receiving SNAP, even after obtaining green cards.

Wisconsin Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul and 21 other state attorneys general challenged the directive in a late-November lawsuit, arguing that the department’s instructions conflict with provisions of Trump’s new law. The lawsuit asserts refugees and asylees with green cards remain eligible for SNAP aid.

The attorneys general also argue that federal rules allow a 120-day grace period to implement latest guidance, meaning states shouldn’t immediately be held to its provisions. The Trump administration claims that period ended Nov. 1.

“Wisconsin and other states have already begun implementing the statutory changes enacted earlier this year, but USDA’s guidance now forces them to overhaul eligibility systems without sufficient time,” Kaul’s office said in a press release.

The state could face financial penalties if the Trump administration determines it is distributing aid to  immigrants who are ineligible for SNAP. A provision of Trump’s landmark law will strip some funding from states with high SNAP “error rates” – a measure of over- and under-payments to recipients – beginning in fiscal year 2028. Wisconsin is among few states with an error rate below the bar for penalties, but Kaul’s office said confusion over the new eligibility rules could push the state’s error rate over the penalty threshold. 

The new rules will “create widespread confusion for families, increase the risk of wrongful benefit terminations, erode public trust, and place states in an untenable situation where they must either violate federal law or accept severe financial liability,” Kaul’s office said in a press release.

The state health department declined to comment about its plans, and about what steps it has taken to implement the new eligibility requirements.

Refugee advocates brace for impact from federal limits on food aid 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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A November fundraising email paid for and sent by Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley’s Democratic campaign for governor included a message signed by “Team Taylor,” the campaign of Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor, who is running in the nonpartisan April race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. 

The note describes the power the next governor will have and how the court can be a “check” on the person in that office. It ends with an appeal: “Will you split a contribution of $10 between our campaign and David Crowley to help elect Judge Chris Taylor and protect a fair, independent Wisconsin Supreme Court?”

The fundraising message is one of potentially thousands of emails Wisconsinites may receive from campaigns seeking donations ahead of pivotal elections next year. But it also raises questions about why asks from nonpartisan campaigns can appear in a partisan candidate’s fundraising materials and whether a message, like the one from Crowley’s campaign featuring  Taylor’s team, can seem like an endorsement.

Taylor has not, in fact, endorsed Crowley, who is running in a crowded Democratic primary field for governor next August. Crowley has endorsed Taylor, a liberal who is running against conservative Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar in the April election. 

Though the joint fundraising belies Wisconsin’s nonpartisan-in-name — though increasingly partisan-in-practice — Supreme Court elections, the communication doesn’t raise ethical or legal issues, experts told Wisconsin Watch. Additionally, a fundraising email like this is not unusual in the context of Wisconsin’s recent Supreme Court elections, said Howard Schweber, a professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In fact, Wisconsin’s main political parties were the top donors to the campaigns of the liberal and conservative candidates in the record-breaking 2025 Supreme Court race, with Democrats giving $11.75 million to now-Justice Susan Crawford’s campaign and Republicans sending $9.76 million to the campaign of former Attorney General Brad Schimel.  

“This is just yet another data point, number 115, demonstrating that these are, in fact, partisan campaigns run … at least in some cases, by candidates who present themselves as representatives of a party,” Schweber said.

Since its founding, Wisconsin has tried to keep judicial races nonpartisan. Justices are supposed to interpret the law and constitution like a referee, not side with one team or the other. But over the past 20 years, as hot-button political issues have come before the court and spending from political interest groups has reached astronomical heights, that tradition has eroded.

Taylor and Lazar are the likely candidates in the court race in April and are on completely opposite ends of the political spectrum. Taylor is a former Dane County judge who served as a Democrat in the state Assembly and was a policy director for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin. Lazar is a former Waukesha County judge who was an assistant attorney general under a Republican administration.

Wisconsin prohibits judges and judicial candidates from endorsing partisan political candidates or directly soliciting campaign donations. During the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court race, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign filed an ethics complaint against Schimel after reports that he joked about buying knee pads to ask for campaign donations. 

The message sent by the Crowley campaign is a different scenario, as the text is signed by “Team Taylor,” not Taylor herself. Taylor has not endorsed any political candidates or directly solicited donations in her campaign for the Supreme Court, Sam Roecker, a spokesperson for Taylor’s campaign, told Wisconsin Watch.  

Messages Taylor’s campaign sends to its list of email subscribers can be shared by other political campaigns with their own fundraising lists, such as in the case of the Crowley email. 

“Other campaigns, regardless of party, who believe in electing a justice who will protect our fundamental rights and freedoms, are welcome to amplify our messages to their supporters,” said Roecker, the Taylor spokesperson. 

It’s not clear whether other Democrats running for governor may have shared fundraising messages from the Taylor campaign. Only Rep. Francesca Hong, D-Madison, responded to questions from Wisconsin Watch with a simple “nope.”

Lazar’s campaign has not sent fundraising messages with candidates running for partisan offices, a spokesperson said. 

Ahead of the 2025 court race, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany in a campaign email promoted Schimel’s candidacy. But the message was signed by Tiffany rather than anyone connected to Schimel’s campaign.

A spokesperson for Crowley’s campaign said Democrats believe it’s “critical” to elect Taylor to the high court — which was the reasoning behind the campaign message.

“The Crowley campaign sent a fundraising email to support her campaign and highlight the importance of this race, recognizing the natural overlap between the two candidates,” the spokesperson said. 

Political activities during a Wisconsin Supreme Court campaign can resurface once a candidate is elected. Earlier this year, Crawford was criticized for attending a briefing with Democratic donors with a discussion on putting two of Wisconsin’s U.S. House seats “in play.” 

In November the justice denied a request from Wisconsin’s Republican congressmen that she recuse herself from cases challenging the state’s congressional maps based on attending that meeting.

As fundraising email shows, line between nonpartisan and partisan Wisconsin elections continues to erode 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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SUPREME COSTS: This is the third in a series of articles about how Wisconsin chooses its judges.

Wisconsin is one of the only places on Earth that thrusts top judges into big-time politics.

Here Supreme Court candidates compete in officially nonpartisan statewide elections that have grown increasingly polarized and expensive, with campaigns now costing far more than those in any other state. This spring’s $144.5 million high court contest marked the first time that campaign spending approached that of recent races for governor and U.S. senator.

By contrast, the federal government and the majority of other states and countries appoint their judges. Some of those appointed judges eventually must face voters, but only in yes-or-no retention elections intended to avoid the political heat of head-to-head campaigns.

Not all of those other systems succeed in taking the politics out of choosing judges. The process of appointing federal judges is widely viewed as partisan, particularly for the U.S. Supreme Court. And even some retention elections have become multimillion-dollar contests, as activists try to change the ideological balance of state high courts.

However, 11 states have set up independent nonpartisan or bipartisan nominating commissions to ensure that Supreme Court justices are chosen by merit. Many other countries select judges through civil service systems. And 12 states use independent performance reviews of judges to help voters or appointing authorities decide whether judges should keep their jobs.

Although 57% of all Wisconsin Supreme Court justices were first appointed by governors to fill vacancies, past efforts to switch to appointing every justice faced strong political headwinds. No other state has dropped judicial elections in four decades.

Some Republicans are even pushing in the opposite direction, calling for Wisconsin to join the eight states that pick Supreme Court justices in fully partisan elections.

The trail to big-money campaigns

When Wisconsin became a state in 1848, electing judges was a new and controversial idea. Most judges had been appointed since their federal or state courts were created. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton argued for lifetime appointments to preserve federal judges’ independence against political pressures.

But some states started to embrace judicial elections in the populist wave that followed President Andrew Jackson’s 1828 election. That was partly a reaction to judicial appointments that were seen as political rewards, Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson said in 2009. Mississippi was the first to switch in 1832, followed by New York in 1846 — just before Wisconsin’s first constitutional convention. 

Walworth County delegate Charles Baker argued during the convention that electing judges was consistent with democratic principles, according to the State Law Library. That view was met with thunderous opposition from Racine County delegate Edward Ryan, a future chief justice, who asked of the judiciary, “Must its judgments represent the will of the people? No sir! No sir! God forever forbid it! … It represents the eternal principles of truth and justice.”

As a compromise, the new constitution banned electing judges at the same time as other state officials, in an attempt to discourage political parties from nominating judicial candidates. After parties didn’t take the hint, the Legislature outlawed party labels on judicial ballots in 1891.

Meanwhile, every state admitted between the Civil War and the 1950s decided to elect at least some of its judges. Those races were initially partisan, until 1873, when Chicago-centered Cook County, Illinois, pioneered nonpartisan judicial elections, a concept that spread during the Progressive Era. Of the 22 states that now elect high court justices, 13 (including Wisconsin) have fully nonpartisan elections, eight have fully partisan elections, and Michigan nominates justices at party conventions but doesn’t list partisan affiliations on general election ballots.

Yet nonpartisan elections haven’t kept big money and ideological divisions out of state Supreme Court races. As documented by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, many states’ high court campaigns have ballooned past $1 million in spending over the past 25 years, driven by special interests trying to influence rulings on social, political and economic issues that include hot-button topics like abortion and same-sex marriage.

Since 2000, nine of the 13 states with fully nonpartisan elections — including Wisconsin — have seen at least one $1 million-plus high court race. But every state with fully partisan elections has had million-dollar court contests, along with partly partisan Michigan. 

Taking the ‘non’ out of nonpartisan

Political parties have helped push up the price tag for Wisconsin’s formally nonpartisan elections, aided by a state law allowing unlimited donations to candidates. The last three Supreme Court races drew $34.1 million in party cash, with Democrats outspending Republicans more than 2-to-1.

Voters seem to have mixed feelings about the partisan involvement. On one hand, 61% of Marquette University Law School Poll respondents in February said they believe party contributions cut into judicial independence, while only 38% said partisan support gives voters useful information about candidates.

Yet the partisan passions ratcheted up by big spending and polarizing issues have dramatically transformed how closely Supreme Court results reflect the most recent presidential vote.

In 1978, county-level results showed almost no relationship between the two, according to calculations by Marquette Poll Director Charles Franklin. But the correlation has trended sharply upward, particularly after the start of multimillion-dollar races in 2007, Franklin found. Last spring, his calculations showed a 98.5% correlation between support for liberal now-Justice Susan Crawford and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and between backing for conservative Brad Schimel and GOP President Donald Trump.

“It’s a stunning change, but not a new change,” considering how the partisanship evolved over time, Franklin said.

Nationwide, however, nonpartisan elections may still affect how voters react to candidates, said Douglas Keith, deputy director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center. In nonpartisan races in Montana, Arkansas and Kentucky, “voters chose the candidate who ran the less overtly partisan campaign,” Keith said. 

By contrast, Keith said, voters seem more likely to treat partisan high court campaigns like other partisan races — including in Ohio, where the Republican-controlled Legislature switched from a variation on the Michigan method to fully partisan elections, starting in 2022.

Franklin, Keith and other experts also believe that Wisconsin’s spring elections, originally designed to deter partisanship, could have had the opposite effect, by taking high court races out of competition with other major contests where candidates are seeking donations and attention. Most other states hold judicial elections in the fall, regardless of whether they’re partisan or nonpartisan, with only Georgia and West Virginia joining Wisconsin in the spring.

In October, the Marquette poll found 56% of state voters thought high court races have become so partisan that candidates should run with party labels. That idea was backed by nearly two-thirds of Republicans, with Democrats and independents almost evenly split.

However, politicians’ support for switching to partisan judicial elections seems to depend on whether they think it will help their own side. Ohio Republicans figured they would benefit from fully partisan high court elections, and they have won every race since the 2022 change, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Similarly, Louisiana Republicans are changing Supreme Court justice nominations to regular partisan primaries, starting in 2026, instead of the state’s unique all-party primaries.

In 2009, after the conservative candidate won a brutal, record-spending Wisconsin high court race the previous year, Sen. Tim Carpenter, D-Milwaukee, and other Democrats introduced a constitutional amendment to abolish nonpartisan spring elections and elect all public officials in the fall. The measure died in committee in a Democratic-controlled Legislature.

That was when conservatives were more likely to vote in low-turnout contests, said Franklin and UW-Milwaukee Professor Emeritus Mordecai Lee, a former Democratic lawmaker. Now liberals have the edge in those races, Franklin and Lee said, and support for partisan elections has flipped. 

After liberals won four of the last five Supreme Court races, Wisconsin Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden called for moving all spring elections to the fall of even-numbered years. GOP state Rep. Dave Maxey, chair of the Assembly Campaigns and Elections Committee, and Van Orden’s Republican House colleague Tom Tiffany, who is running for governor, are open to discussing that idea, their spokespeople said.

Such a major change would cause numerous complications for thousands of currently nonpartisan local officials and lower court judges, as well as presidential primaries, said Wood County Clerk Trent Miner, president of the Wisconsin County Clerks Association.

Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, another GOP gubernatorial candidate, is calling for a more modest change: shifting only the statewide contests for Supreme Court and superintendent of public instruction to fall and moving primaries for fall races from August to April. 

In an interview, Schoemann said he didn’t have a strong feeling about whether high court elections should remain nonpartisan, but he added, “Everybody acknowledges that they’re largely partisan races anyway. … Let’s be honest about what they are.”

Both Schoemann and a Tiffany spokesperson said maximizing voter participation would be the main reason to reschedule elections.

Because constitutional amendments must be approved in two consecutive legislative sessions and then in a statewide referendum, any change would be at least a few years away.

Pointing back to appointment

By the 1920s, some states were growing disillusioned with judges’ involvement in electoral politics. Nowhere was this concern greater than in Missouri, where Democratic Party boss Tom Pendergast’s Kansas City machine regularly defeated state Supreme Court justices who ruled against its wishes, according to a 2014 report by the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS) at the University of Denver.

In 1940, Missouri voters approved a new method of appointing judges. Under that system, now called the Missouri Plan, a nominating commission screens judicial applicants based on merit. The governor then chooses a judge from a list of potential nominees presented by the commission. Newly appointed judges typically serve a relatively short first term before facing voters in a yes-or-no retention election to keep their jobs for a longer second term.

Kansas was next to adopt the Missouri Plan in 1958, after its governor resigned a few days before his term ended — and was promptly appointed to the state Supreme Court by the lieutenant governor who succeeded him. Some form of commission-based gubernatorial appointment is now in place in 22 states, including Iowa.

Merit selection is supposed to guard against the appearance of “cronyism, patronage and self-dealing” that can arise if a governor or president has no limits on nominating judges, according to a 2018 Brennan Center report.

“With merit selection, candidates move forward in the process based on their qualifications and

experience,” the 2014 IAALS report said. “In other systems, the amount of money spent in an election campaign, name recognition, and political or party connections can be the determinative factors.”

For example, Indiana law requires that state’s Judicial Nominating Commission to “consider each candidate’s legal education, legal writings, reputation in the practice of law, physical ability to do the job, financial interests (for conflict-of-interest purposes), public service activities, and any other pertinent information the commission feels is important to select the most qualified candidates.”

A 2021 paper in the Journal of Public Economics found that justices chosen in merit selection processes or nonpartisan elections produced better work — as measured by how often their rulings were favorably cited in other judges’ decisions — than justices chosen in partisan elections.

Missouri was the first state to create an independent commission and require the governor to choose from its list. In most of the 11 states with that approach, no single official or institution dominates commission appointments, and members may be appointed by various elected leaders, the state high court or the state bar association. Some states also call for geographic or demographic diversity among commissioners.

However, not all commissions are equally independent. In 11 of the 22 states where such commissions advise governors, the governor can either appoint a majority of commission members or choose a candidate who’s not on the commission’s list. In South Carolina, legislative leaders appoint a commission to screen candidates for election by lawmakers.

Four other states allow governors to nominate high court justices without consulting a commission, although some of those governors may create their own advisory panels and all of those appointees must be confirmed by lawmakers or other officials. 

Confirmation is also required in seven states with governor-controlled commissions and three states with independent commissions.

Virginia’s legislature elects justices without nominations from either the governor or a commission.

Contentious races build support for appointments

In 1999, after Wisconsin’s first million-dollar Supreme Court race, then-state Rep. Mary Hubler, D-Rice Lake, introduced a constitutional amendment to let the governor appoint high court justices with Senate confirmation, but without a nominating commission. The measure drew bipartisan support but died in committee in a Republican-controlled Assembly. After three even more expensive races, then-state Rep. Mark Gottlieb, R-Port Washington, introduced a 2009 amendment calling for appointment with confirmation and retention elections. It died in committee in a Democratic-controlled Assembly. 

Abrahamson, the state’s first female justice and the only one to win four contested elections, opposed a switch to appointment. “Elected judges are more apt to go and speak with the people about the judicial system and listen to their concerns,” the late justice said in 2009.

Former Justice Janine Geske said that she had long supported elections for the same reason: “It made justices more human and someone who people can identify with,” in contrast to more isolated federal judges. But Geske added, “I liked the elected judiciary until all this happened (with big-spending television-centered campaigns). People are so sick of these terrible ads that relate to issues that the court doesn’t decide,” mainly criminal cases in lower courts.

Now the moderate Geske said she leans toward appointment, but only if nominees are screened by a bipartisan commission and only if the governor must choose from the commission’s list.

Former Justice Dan Kelly, a conservative who lost back-to-back multimillion-dollar races in 2020 and 2023, said he also supports appointment, with Senate confirmation. Citing the Federalist Papers, Kelly said judges “must reject politics entirely” in their rulings, and appointment offers “much more protection against politics” than elections in which “campaigns have become explicitly political.”

However, Kelly — who was appointed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker to fill a vacancy — disagrees on one key point with Geske, an appointee of GOP Gov. Tommy Thompson. Kelly said the governor should be free to name someone outside a nominating commission’s list as a check on a panel that may have been “politically captured” by special interests.

Kelly’s comments echo a frequent conservative critique of the Missouri Plan — that nominating commissions may be controlled by liberal-leaning lawyers. Although some states specifically require non-lawyer representation on nominating panels, a 2019 study by the Brennan Center’s Keith found attorneys dominated most commissions, with corporate and plaintiff’s attorneys outnumbering prosecutors and public defenders. 

In Kansas — the only state where the bar association names a majority of the commission — the Republican-controlled legislature has endorsed a constitutional amendment to abolish the merit selection process and return to electing justices. If voters approve the amendment in August, lawmakers would decide whether the elections should be partisan or nonpartisan.

Although 13 states switched from elections to merit selection in the 1960s and 1970s, Utah was the last state to do so in 1985, while Rhode Island was the last state to convert its appointment process to merit selection in 1994, according to IAALS. Voters rejected merit selection of high court justices in Ohio in 1987 and in Nevada in 1972, 1988 and 2010.

Geske and Burden said it would be challenging to convince Wisconsin legislators and voters to drop judicial elections for merit selection. February’s Marquette poll found 90% support for continuing to elect justices, with relatively minor differences by party. And in 2018, voters resoundingly defeated a GOP-backed constitutional amendment to end elections for state treasurer.

“On the other hand, Republicans are having their heads handed to them in Supreme Court races, so there may be some interest” among GOP lawmakers in appointment, Burden said. Liberals have won four of the last five high court races by double-digit margins and now hold a 4-3 majority on the seven-member court. Conservatives are defending seats in 2026 and 2027 and won’t have a shot at regaining control until 2028 — or later if liberals boost their majority in April.

Governors have appointed 46 of the 81 justices who have served since statehood. Conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley, who is not seeking re-election in 2026, is the only current member of the court who was originally appointed.

Wisconsin is one of 10 states that don’t require their governors to consult a nominating commission or seek confirmation for a high court appointee. By contrast, 29 states require governors to use nominating commissions in filling vacancies, and 17 states require confirmation of justices appointed to fill vacancies. Lawmakers fill vacancies in South Carolina and Virginia, and sitting justices fill vacancies in Illinois and Louisiana.

In 2000, a Wisconsin state task force on judicial diversity endorsed the governor’s use of an advisory committee to screen candidates, but opposed writing the practice into the state constitution. It didn’t recommend creating a more independent commission or requiring the governor to choose only applicants recommended by the committee.

To keep or not to keep

Most states with independent commissions skip the confirmation process and wait for voters to decide the justices’ future in retention elections. 

Altogether, 20 states use retention elections for at least some high court races. California, Maryland and Tennessee combine confirmation and retention elections. In Illinois and Pennsylvania, justices initially chosen in partisan head-to-head elections must run in retention elections for subsequent terms. And in Montana and New Mexico, regular elections become retention elections if nobody files to challenge an elected incumbent.

“Because judges do not face opponents in retention elections, they usually do not need to raise money and conduct campaigns,” IAALS says on its website. “At the same time, special interest groups are not as active in retention elections as they are in contested elections, because a good judge’s performance speaks for itself” and even if they try to oust an incumbent, “they cannot select a replacement who fits their particular agenda.”

Nonetheless, special interests have targeted some retention elections, driving them into the multimillion-dollar range. According to the Brennan Center, that trend was accelerated by a $1 million race in 2010, when conservatives waged a successful campaign to defeat three Iowa Supreme Court justices after the seven-member court unanimously overturned the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. Retention election spending peaked at $9.9 million in 2020, when conservatives ousted a Democratic justice from the Illinois Supreme Court. 

As an alternative to incumbent justices facing voters in either head-to-head contests or retention elections, the Brennan Center advocates for a single term of 14 to 18 years, and the State Bar of Wisconsin has called for a single 16-year term, compared with Wisconsin’s current 10-year terms.

“Extensive evidence suggests that election pressures impact judicial decision-making in a wide array of cases, and that retiring justices rule differently than those seeking to keep their jobs,” the Brennan Center wrote in its 2018 report.

Among the 46 states where justices stay in office through elections or reappointment by elected officials, New York’s 14-year terms are the longest, followed by five states with 12-year terms.

Conversely, “15 years is a long time to go without any accountability to the public,” said Danielle Kalil, IAALS director of civil justice and the judiciary.

Although no state restricts justices to a single long term, the Brennan Center cited four states that found other ways to insulate them from political pressure:

• Rhode Island justices are appointed for life, like federal judges.
• Massachusetts and New Hampshire justices serve until mandatory retirement at 70. 
• Hawaii has an independent commission that decides whether to reappoint justices after an initial 10-year term.

Judging the judges

Working with former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, IAALS came up with a system for adding judicial performance reviews to the Missouri Plan, to help inform voters before retention elections. The institute now advocates for that modified plan, which it named after the late justice.

“Most Americans undergo job evaluations, and there is no reason why judges should not do the same,” IAALS says on its website. Such evaluations focus on “holding judges accountable to high quality job performance while maintaining judicial independence, by focusing on politically neutral qualities like impartiality, case administration, and clarity of communication rather than specific case outcomes.”

Alaska was the first state to use judicial performance reviews, starting in 1976. Now seven states release evaluations to voters before retention elections, five others use evaluations in reappointment decisions, and four share them only with judges. Hawaii and New Hampshire also release summaries that don’t identify specific judges. Republican-led legislatures ended evaluations in Kansas in 2011 and Tennessee in 2014.

IAALS recommends that evaluations be conducted by independent commissions, separate from nominating commissions. Kalil said evaluating commissions should survey attorneys and possibly others involved in the justice system and observe judges in courtrooms.

Cut-rate campaigns

Even if states elect high court justices, multimillion-dollar campaigns aren’t inevitable. Brennan Center data show four states with head-to-head judicial elections have escaped the national trend of high-spending races: Minnesota, Oregon, Idaho and North Dakota.

In Minnesota, candidates and their supporters spent just $637,011 to elect 10 justices in five contested and five uncontested races from 2013 through 2022 — a period when Wisconsin candidates and their allies spent almost $33 million to elect seven justices in six contested campaigns and one uncontested election, according to the Brennan Center and the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. 

Both states share a history of nonpartisan elections, but unlike Wisconsin, Minnesota elects justices in the fall for six-year terms, with no restrictions on how many seats can be on the ballot in the same election, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities research fellow Eric Ostermeier said.

Minnesota’s elections also have been far less competitive than Wisconsin’s, said Ostermeier, the author of the Smart Politics blog. Since 2000, the average margin of victory in Minnesota has been 23 percentage points across 20 contested elections, almost twice the 11-point average in 14 contested Wisconsin elections. Only one Minnesota race was decided by a single-digit margin, compared with five in Wisconsin.

Perhaps most telling, Minnesota’s incumbent justices never lost an election and the state never had a wide-open race for any seat in that time, while Wisconsin voters ousted two appointed incumbents and six elections lacked incumbents.

Regardless of whether states elect or appoint justices, “no system is perfect,” Kalil said.

Yet public sentiment could be shifting toward change, said Nick Ramos, executive director of the election watchdog Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

“People are becoming fed up and tired,” with the flood of attack ads, Ramos said. “People are becoming more receptive to doing something.”

Sick of those state Supreme Court campaign ads, Wisconsin? Here’s how other states avoid them 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.

Reading Time: 13 minutes

SUPREME COSTS: This is the second in a series of articles about how Wisconsin chooses its judges.

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court justices were concerned.

For the first time, a campaign for a high court seat had topped $5 million in spending, driven by negative television advertising that had rarely before been part of this state’s judicial races. They feared it could happen again.

That’s why all seven justices — conservatives as well as liberals — signed a 2007 letter to Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and the Legislature, calling for “realistic, meaningful public financing for Supreme Court elections” to protect the court’s reputation against “the risk … that the public may inaccurately perceive a justice as beholden to individuals or groups that contribute to his or her campaign.”

It took two tries — and two more big-spending high court elections — before a Democratic-led Legislature and Doyle enacted a public financing law in 2009. But it lasted for just one Supreme Court campaign before a Republican-controlled Legislature and GOP Gov. Scott Walker repealed it in 2011.

The justices still had their own chance to protect the court’s reputation, by strengthening the rules for when they would have to step aside from cases involving their financial backers. Instead, they adopted what might be one of the nation’s most lax recusal rules for campaign donations. 

Three of the conservative justices who had signed the 2007 letter were part of the 4-3 majority that enacted a 2010 recusal rule largely written by the major business organization that was pumping millions of dollars into conservative high court campaigns.

The stories behind that shift in recusal rules, the short-lived venture in public financing of high court races and the campaign finance laws that followed help explain how Wisconsin Supreme Court campaign spending exploded this spring to a national record of $114.2 million — almost 20 times the cost of that first big-money election 18 years earlier. That total doesn’t include billionaire Elon Musk’s controversial $30.3 million effort to hand out checks to conservative voters.

Yet the history of public financing and attempts to tighten recusal rules also offer hope for those still trying to stop the trend of ever more expensive judicial races.

Checking a box for reform

Public financing responds to a central concern that current and former justices and others voice about multimillion-dollar Supreme Court elections — the perception that big donors are buying justices who will rule in those donors’ favor when their cases reach the court.

“Why do people think this is a good use of their money? What do they think they are getting from this court?” Justice Brian Hagedorn asked about big donors in an August interview with Milwaukee’s WISN-TV. “It is in many respects a vote of no-confidence in this court — that this court is not going to be a place that’s just going to apply the law, at least all seven of us.”

Advocates of public financing believe voters and taxpayers should be a candidate’s biggest donors. Candidate campaigns receive grants from state or local governments while agreeing to limits on spending and on how much they accept from individual and organizational donors.

That wasn’t a new idea in Wisconsin in 2007. A public financing system already had been in effect for 30 years for candidates for all state offices, including Supreme Court justices. 

The Wisconsin Election Campaign Fund grew out of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, which held that limits on campaign spending violated the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech — unless candidates voluntarily agreed to limit their spending in exchange for public financing.

The Legislature responded by enacting the nation’s most comprehensive public financing law. Taxpayers decided how much the state campaign finance fund should receive each year, by checking a box on their income tax returns to designate $1 of their taxes for public financing.

That system “worked extremely well for over a decade,” according to a 2002 analysis by the nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. “The vast majority of candidates in both parties accepted public financing and ran campaigns under spending limits.”

However, the system declined for several reasons, the Democracy Campaign report found. In 1986, the Legislature stopped adjusting maximum campaign grants for inflation, leaving them frozen at that year’s levels. Also, even though the $1 checkoff didn’t increase any individual’s taxes, taxpayer interest waned, as participation fell from a peak of 19.7% in 1979 to 5% in 2002.

The third factor, according to the Democracy Campaign, was another side effect of Buckley v. Valeo, which ended limits on “issue ads” that aren’t coordinated with candidates and that don’t explicitly tell viewers to vote for or against a specific candidate. Such ads started popping up in Wisconsin elections as early as 1996. Candidates balked at spending limits when they knew they might have to respond to unlimited negative advertising by outside groups, the Democracy Campaign wrote.

Nonetheless, the 2000 Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates, then-Milwaukee County Judge Diane Sykes and then-Milwaukee Municipal Judge Louis Butler, still used public financing in their campaigns. After Sykes won, one of her advisers complained that the spending limits “killed the drama of a truly exciting matchup.” However, the candidates themselves attributed the drama-free race to their own commitment to civility, with Butler reflecting that “media coverage … didn’t come because we weren’t being nasty to one another.”

That would change after the conservative Sykes became a federal appeals court judge and Doyle appointed the liberal Butler to replace her. Incensed by a product liability decision written by Butler, the state’s largest business group, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, started spending millions of dollars to elect conservatives to the high court.

In the first WMC-funded campaign in 2007, now-Justice Annette Ziegler defeated liberal attorney Linda Clifford at a cost more than four times the previous record of $1.4 million. The high price tag and flood of negative advertising spurred calls for reform.

Doyle proposed more extensive public financing for Supreme Court campaigns. Ziegler and Butler joined the rest of their colleagues in backing the concept, without signing on to the specifics of Doyle’s proposal. The bill passed in the Democratic-led Senate but died in committee in the Republican-controlled Assembly.

Just as the justices feared, Butler’s 2008 bid for a full term sparked an even more expensive and mean-spirited contest than Ziegler’s 2007 race. Conservative Michael Gableman defeated Butler, the court’s first Black justice, in a $6 million campaign that drew accusations of racist and misleading advertising.

Diane Diel, then president of the State Bar of Wisconsin, warned lawmakers that “the infusion of such large amounts into a judicial campaign poses a threat to both judicial neutrality and public trust in the justice system.”

The Democratic-controlled Legislature passed a public financing bill, and Doyle signed it into law as the Impartial Justice Act in 2009. Abiding by the new law, both 2011 Supreme Court candidates, conservative Justice David Prosser and liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg, accepted state grants and held to spending limits.

But the candidates’ treasuries accounted for less than a quarter of the $5.9 million spent in a campaign supercharged by controversy over Republican legislation that stripped most public-sector workers of nearly all collective bargaining rights. Anticipating that legal challenges eventually would reach the high court, conservative interests outspent unions on issue ads, $2.7 million to $1.6 million, in a race so close that Prosser won only after a recount.

Prosser’s victory maintained the conservative court majority that later upheld the bargaining legislation known as Act 10. Meanwhile, the GOP-led Legislature and Walker repealed the Impartial Justice Act and dismantled the Wisconsin Election Campaign Fund shortly after the spring 2011 election.

Back to public cash?

State Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, is now drafting a bill to revive the Impartial Justice Act, which she calls “really important to preserving judicial integrity.”

Roys, who is running for governor, said one major difference in her proposal will be the size of the campaign grants. She’s considering amounts 10 times higher than what she called the “laughably low” original grants of $100,000 for primary candidates and $300,000 for general election candidates. Grants of $1 million in the primary and $3 million in the general election would exceed the campaign treasuries of any high court candidate before the 2023 race, which at the time set a national spending record of $50.4 million.

“It can’t be joke money or nobody will do it,” Roys said.

North Carolina’s first-in-the-nation system of paying for state supreme and appellate court campaigns met the same fate as Wisconsin’s original Impartial Justice Act in 2013, after Republicans won control of that state’s legislative and executive branches. That leaves New Mexico as the only state funding judicial campaigns with taxpayer dollars.

Instead of setting specific grant levels, New Mexico uses a formula based on the number of registered voters eligible to vote in each partisan primary or general election and on whether the election is contested or uncontested, with limited individual donations supplementing public grants. With no primary contests and four general election candidates for two contested seats, the state fund provided $1.1 million of the $1.2 million spent in 2022, up slightly from 2020, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Of the other 13 states that offer public campaign financing for at least some elections, 11 appoint high court justices; Michigan’s system applies only to gubernatorial races; and Minnesota’s system excludes Supreme Court candidates.

Both the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and the Brennan Center advocate for public financing.

Conflict over conflicts of interest

Public financing doesn’t stop special interests from spending big on “issue ads” or through independent expenditures on ads that clearly state who they favor or oppose.

That outside spending has exceeded the cash spent directly by the candidates in 10 of the last 12 contested Supreme Court campaigns — by ratios as high as 4 to 1 in 2008 and 3 to 1 in 2011.

The only exceptions were two elections in which liberal incumbents trounced conservative circuit judges: then-Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson in 2009 and then-Justice Ann Walsh Bradley in 2015.

In Wisconsin’s first two multimillion-dollar Supreme Court contests, WMC’s political action committee (PAC) spent $2.2 million on issue ads backing Ziegler in 2007 and $1.8 million on issue ads backing Gableman in 2008, according to Wisconsin Democracy Campaign estimates.

That triggered disputes over whether those two justices should step away from cases involving WMC. Ziegler refused to recuse herself from one 2007 case in which WMC had filed a friend-of-the-court brief, but a month later recused from another case brought partly by the Wisconsin Realtors Association, which had directly contributed the then-maximum $8,625 to her campaign.

Over the next two years, justices fielded four petitions asking them to clarify recusal rules. The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin and former Justice William Bablitch urged the court to set thresholds for when donations or outside spending by a litigant or attorney would require a justice to recuse. Conversely, WMC and the Realtors Association called for rules that would not require justices to recuse based only on how much a litigant or attorney had spent supporting their campaigns.

While the Wisconsin justices considered those petitions, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on a case in which coal company CEO Don Blankenship had spent $3 million supporting candidate Brent Benjamin’s 2004 West Virginia Supreme Court campaign — more than all of Benjamin’s other backers combined. Benjamin narrowly won and cast the deciding vote to overturn a $50 million judgment against Blankenship’s company after refusing to recuse himself.

In their 5-4 decision tossing the state court’s ruling, the federal justices held that the circumstances were so extreme that they created “a serious risk of actual bias” that required Benjamin to recuse. However, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s 2009 opinion added that few other cases would likely meet the same standard.

Against that background, the Wisconsin Supreme Court voted in 2010 to deny the LWV and Bablitch petitions and adopt verbatim the WMC and Realtors Association rules recommendations. Conservative Justices Patience Roggensack, Gableman, Prosser and Ziegler backed the new rules, while liberals Abrahamson and Bradley and moderate Justice Patrick Crooks dissented.

“Neither Justice Ziegler nor any other justice recused from this rulemaking process, despite the financial backing they had received from the parties requesting the rules,” the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative recounted in a report.

Explaining the new rules, the court majority argued that disqualifying judges based on legal campaign donations “would create the impression that receipt of a contribution automatically impairs a judge’s integrity.”

Also, because Supreme Court justices aren’t replaced when they recuse, the majority wrote, “involuntary recusal … has greater policy implications” than in lower courts because it changes how many and which justices are deciding a case. On Wisconsin’s closely divided seven-member high court, the withdrawal of a single justice from the majority bloc can often create a 3-3 deadlock.

Nonetheless, the State Democracy Research Initiative called the Wisconsin rules “unusual.” Former Justice Janine Geske agreed the change was a step backward.

By contrast, several states and the American Bar Association’s Model Code of Judicial Conduct “require judges to recuse when a party or a party’s lawyer have contributed more than a specific amount to a judge’s campaign,” according to the State Democracy Research Initiative. A few other states call for recusal based on campaign contributions but don’t set a specific dollar limit. And most states leave recusal up to judges but don’t exclude contributions as a reason to do so.

Both recusal rules and outside campaign spending were in the spotlight again in 2015.

A case before the high court turned on a state law barring independent expenditure groups and issue ad organizations from coordinating with candidates’ campaigns. Act 10 had triggered an unprecedented recall against Walker. After the Republican governor’s victory in that 2012 recall election, several district attorneys jointly opened what was supposed to be a secret John Doe investigation into whether his campaign had illegally coordinated with groups that funded issue ads supporting him.

Some of the same organizations under scrutiny had also spent millions on issue ads in support of four conservative justices. But Prosser and Gableman refused to recuse themselves from the case challenging the probe. 

Howard Schweber, professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called the conservative justices’ decision not to recuse “a truly shocking situation.” By contrast, Ann Walsh Bradley recused herself because her son worked with one of the attorneys involved.

With its four-member conservative majority intact, the high court ruled the prohibition on coordinating with issue ad groups was unconstitutional, ending the investigation of Walker. Legislative Republicans promptly wrote the court’s decision into a 2015 campaign finance law, which Walker signed.

At the time, Wisconsin and Florida were the only states that allowed issue ads to be coordinated with a candidate’s campaign, said Jay Heck, executive director of the government reform group Common Cause Wisconsin. Weak coordination rules like Wisconsin’s “effectively allow wealthy special interests to bankroll candidates,” sidestepping limits on direct donations to campaigns and opening the door to “corruption and the appearance of corruption,” said Elizabeth Shimek, senior legal counsel for campaign finance at the Campaign Legal Center.

Strike two for recusal reform

Concern about Wisconsin’s lax recusal standards would only grow. In 2017, 54 retired judges — including Geske and Butler — petitioned the high court to toughen recusal rules.

When the 2010 rules were adopted, the petition noted, the majority contended that direct donations were too small to influence justices because the 2009 Impartial Justice Act had sliced contribution caps from $10,000 for individuals and $8,650 for political action committees to $1,000 for each. But the 2015 campaign finance law boosted the donation limits to $20,000 for individuals and $18,000 for PACs.

Similarly, the petition said, the 2010 majority had argued that judicial candidates couldn’t be held responsible for groups making independent expenditures and running issue ads because at the time they were legally barred from coordinating with those groups. But the coordination rules for issue ads also had changed with the 2015 law and the John Doe decision that preceded it.

The retired judges asked for a rule that would require litigants and their attorneys to disclose their contributions to the judges hearing their cases at each level. Supreme Court justices would be required to recuse if they received contributions or benefited from outside spending of more than $10,000, with lower amounts for lower court judges.

And to address the high court majority’s concern about recusal leaving the bench short, the retired judges called for a constitutional amendment that would allow Court of Appeals judges to sit in for justices who recuse themselves.

But the Supreme Court rejected the petition on a 5-2 vote along ideological lines. Most of the conservative justices in the majority said they trusted judges to decide when to recuse, while Justice Rebecca Bradley argued that required recusal would disenfranchise the voters who elected a justice.

The issue could come up again now that liberal Jill Karofsky is chief justice. Speaking at a WisPolitics event in October, she said she is committed to holding an “open” and “transparent” hearing about establishing new recusal rules for the court.

State law sets recusal standards for some conflicts of interest, but not campaign contributions, according to the State Democracy Research Initiative.

The Brennan Center still advocates nationwide for the kind of recusal rules that the retired judges supported, said Douglas Keith, deputy director of the center’s judiciary program. However, Keith added that he wasn’t aware of any state that requires litigants to disclose contributions in court.

Another Brennan Center recommendation urges independent review of recusal motions. As of 2016, Wisconsin was one of 35 states that allow high court justices to decide whether to recuse themselves, while Michigan was among the 15 states where someone else rules on recusal, according to the center’s most recent report on that question.

Power shift prompts recusal reversal 

Efforts to redraw legislative and congressional districts in this decade have spurred new recusal controversies — and turned the tables on which party backs recusal.

When Republicans took full control of the executive and legislative branches after the 2010 elections, they drew maps that guaranteed their party a comfortable majority in both the Assembly and Senate, even if state voters were split 50-50, in what experts called one of the nation’s most extreme examples of gerrymandering.

A decade later, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers clashed with legislative Republicans over how to redraw the maps after the 2020 Census, throwing the issue into the courts. With virtually no legal precedent, justices voted 4-3 to accept the GOP argument that court-approved maps should change as little as possible from the 2011 gerrymander.

Liberal Janet Protasiewicz, then a Milwaukee County judge, called those 2021 maps “rigged” during her successful 2023 high court race. Shortly after Protasiewicz took office, flipping the court to a liberal majority, voting rights groups filed suit to overturn the legislative maps.

Citing Protasiewicz’s previous comments and her heavy Democratic financial support — which amounted to 59% of her campaign treasury — Republicans demanded that she recuse from the redistricting case. However, neither state law nor judicial rules require judges to recuse because of their statements, as long as they have not specifically promised to rule in a certain way, the State Democracy Research Initiative noted.

Also, the $9.9 million Democratic contribution to Protasiewicz was proportionately less than the $2.6 million that the conservative Alliance for Reform dropped on issue ads supporting Rebecca Bradley in 2016, the State Democracy Research Initiative’s report pointed out. Bradley didn’t recuse when an alliance leader was a party to the original redistricting litigation.

Protasiewicz didn’t recuse either when justices voted 4-3 along ideological lines to reverse the least-change doctrine and order new maps.

But Protasiewicz declined to participate in one of the liberal-led court’s three otherwise unanimous rulings rejecting challenges to the 2021 congressional maps. Two more challenges are still pending.

If the issue reaches the high court again, the panel will include new Justice Susan Crawford, whose campaign last spring received $11.8 million from Democrats while Republicans were pumping $9.7 million into her conservative opponent Brad Schimel’s race.

Shining light on dark money

Although donations to parties and party donations to candidates are unlimited under the 2015 campaign finance law, they are publicly disclosed, along with the parties’ donors’ names. Issue ad and independent expenditure groups also aren’t limited in how much they take in or spend. And issue ad groups don’t have to report either donations or spending, a practice known as “dark money” for its lack of transparency.

Roys and Rep. Amaad Rivera-Wagner, D-Green Bay, are working separately on campaign finance legislation that would set limits on donations to those organizations and require issue ad groups to disclose their donors, as parties and independent expenditure committees already do. Roys said her bill would focus specifically on judicial elections, while Rivera-Wagner’s bill would apply to all elections.

“Wisconsin is becoming the centerpiece for billionaires trying to influence elections,” Rivera-Wagner said. “This is just unacceptable.”

Both Roys and Rivera-Wagner said they would like to go further, but could be limited by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which removed limits on corporate and union spending on issue ads and independent expenditures, and by the GOP legislative majority’s support for Wisconsin’s 2015 campaign finance law. Another federal court case, SpeechNow.org v. FEC, struck down federal limits on donations to PACs.

In that legal environment, holding down spending on Supreme Court campaigns could remain challenging as long as Wisconsin remains among the 22 states that elect justices.

Next: Should Supreme Court justices be appointed?

Wisconsin Watch reporter Brittany Carloni contributed to this report.

Unlimited donations, weak recusal rules led to record Wisconsin Supreme Court spending 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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The Wisconsin Supreme Court has agreed to hear a lawsuit challenging five Wisconsin sheriffs’ practices of holding detainees in their jail for handoffs to ICE.

The ACLU filed the lawsuit in September on behalf of the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera. It names sheriff’s offices in Brown, Kenosha, Marathon, Sauk and Walworth counties as respondents. 

All five sheriffs’ offices honor ICE detainers —  nonbinding requests that a law enforcement agency assist ICE in taking custody of a person suspected of being in the country illegally by holding an inmate in a jail up to 48 hours past the person’s scheduled release. The local law enforcement agency can then pass the detainee directly to ICE officers.

The lawsuit argues that the detainers qualify as an arrest and that state statutes prohibit law enforcement agencies from making arrests based on ICE’s administrative warrants.

While most Wisconsin sheriffs’ offices honor ICE detainers, the lawsuit claims that five named offices received roughly a quarter of all detainers issued to Wisconsin sheriffs’ offices between January and July of this year. 

The sheriff’s offices have differing relationships with ICE. Brown and Sauk counties, for instance, also contract with ICE to hold immigrant detainees in their jails, meaning a person could remain in the same jail after entering ICE custody. Kenosha County has no such contract, but it does participate in a federal grant program that partially reimburses local law enforcement agencies for incarceration costs in exchange for data on undocumented inmates. 

ICE records list more than 130 arrests at county jails in Wisconsin between January and July of this year. Nearly 40% of those arrested were awaiting a ruling in their first criminal case.

In its initial petition, Voces de la Frontera urged the Supreme Court to immediately take up the case as a statewide concern. The court’s order, published on Wednesday afternoon, allows the plaintiffs to skip the lower courts entirely.

Liberal justices have a 4-3 majority on the court. At least four unnamed justices voted to immediately accept the case. Justices Annette Ziegler and Rebecca Bradley, both conservatives, dissented. Justice Brian Hagedorn, who often votes with conservatives, discussed the process in an opinion that did not specify his vote.

“When this court grants review in a case, we almost always let our grant order proceed without comment or dissent,” he wrote, later adding: “Even if some of my colleagues publicly record their dissent, as in this case, that does not necessarily reveal which justices voted for or against the petition in closed conference.”

Voces de la Frontera has 30 days to file a brief in the case. The court has not yet scheduled oral arguments in the case.

None of the five sheriffs’ offices named in the lawsuit immediately responded to requests for comment.

“We are reviewing the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s order and evaluating our next steps in this litigation,” Milwaukee attorney Sam Hall, who is representing all five sheriffs, wrote in an email Wednesday evening. “We are confident, however, that Wisconsin sheriffs who honor ICE detainers do so fully within the bounds of Wisconsin law and the federal legal framework governing immigration enforcement.”

Wisconsin Supreme Court to weigh sheriffs’ cooperation with ICE 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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The state of Wisconsin generally cannot consider U.S. citizenship or national origin in hiring for state jobs.

Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany of northern Wisconsin, who is running for governor in 2026, said Nov. 17 he would ensure state jobs “go to Americans.”

His congressional and campaign offices did not respond to requests for comment. 

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that states cannot restrict public employment to citizens.

Both public and private employers are generally barred by federal law from treating people differently based on national origin or ethnicity.

Wisconsin laws prohibit discrimination by public or private employers based on national origin or ancestry.

The state’s hiring handbook says the state can hire only people legally in the U.S., but “shall not refuse to hire aliens based on their foreign appearance, accent, language, name, national origin, citizenship, or intended U.S. citizenship.”

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

• FindLaw: Sugarman v. Dougall 413 U.S. 634 (1973)
• Cornell University Legal Information Institute: Amdt14.S1.5.3.2 Alienage Classification
• Wisconsin Statutes: State Employment Relations
• U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: National Origin Discrimination
• Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development: Discrimination because of Race, Color, National Origin, and Ancestry
• Wisconsin Personnel Management Division: Wisconsin Human Resources Handbook

Can Wisconsin require state jobs go only to Americans? 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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SUPREME COSTS: This is the first in a series of articles about how Wisconsin chooses its judges.

A quarter-century ago, the total cost of every state Supreme Court race in the country reached an unprecedented $45.6 million.That figure was so high that it prompted the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University to warn that “a new and ominous politics of judicial elections” posed a “threat to fair and impartial justice.”

Yet in 2025, spending on a single Wisconsin Supreme Court seat exceeded $114.2 million.

That doesn’t include a legally questionable $30.3 million voter giveaway by billionaire Elon Musk.

The $144.5 million spent on one seat in Wisconsin was even more than the $100.8 million spent on all other state high court contests in the nation in 2021 and 2022 combined.

At the same time, this state’s two major political parties have become the largest donors — and in some cases, the majority donors — to the candidates for an officially nonpartisan office.

And the last two justices elected to Wisconsin’s highest court received most of their individual campaign contributions from people who don’t live in Wisconsin.

State Supreme Court races have become everything they were never meant to be — highly partisan, astronomically expensive national political battles in which the candidates’ ideologies overshadow their qualifications for an office that requires them to swear an oath to “administer justice … faithfully and impartially.”

Several factors are driving the massive spending in Wisconsin, one of 22 states that elect justices rather than appoint them. Reducing the influence of those factors would require changing the state constitution, state law or judicial rules of conduct. The factors include:

• Hot-button issues that turn on ideological control of the high court, such as abortion and public employee collective bargaining rights.
• Wisconsin’s narrow political divide in its electorate, state government and the high court itself, plus its role as an Electoral College swing state.
• Campaign finance laws and federal court rulings that have loosened limits on money in politics.
• Lax rules for when justices must recuse themselves from cases involving people and organizations that have spent huge sums to elect them.
• Holding court elections in the spring, which grew out of the state’s earliest yearnings for a nonpartisan judiciary but now eliminates competition against campaigns for most other major offices for donations and the public’s attention.

Some of those factors have pushed high court races in other states into the seven- or even eight-figure range, but only Wisconsin — the first to see nine-figure spending on a court contest — has all of them.

“It’s the whole picture that makes us so obscene,” said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, which advocates for transparent and accountable government.

Wisconsin Watch estimates the final total was $114.2 million — more than double the previous national record of $50.4 million for high court races — also set in this state, only two years earlier.

And that total doesn’t include the largest and most controversial expenditures of the spring campaign: Musk’s payments of $100 each to Wisconsin voters who signed a petition against “activist judges,” plus $1 million checks to three signers. Add in that $30.3 million effort and the race’s price tag jumps to $144.5 million.

The 2025 Supreme Court election was the fourth-most expensive campaign for any office in Wisconsin history, behind only the 2022 and 2024 U.S. Senate contests and the 2022 governor’s race.

“As politics has grown more intense, more polarized and more expensive, high court election campaigns now resemble the worst of a presidential primary, complete with attack ads, dark money and presidential endorsements,” Brennan Center President Michael Waldman wrote in a March analysis. “All this hardly seems the best way to induce public trust in the courts.”

Since the era of multimillion-dollar Supreme Court campaigns came to Wisconsin in 2007, candidates and special-interest groups have spent $217.2 million on 12 contested races, with the 2023 and 2025 elections accounting for three-quarters of that total, excluding the petition spending, based on information compiled by the campaign finance watchdog Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. 

Voters could be in for more of the same, facing a high court election every spring for the next four years. And even if the 2026 race doesn’t break records, it’s guaranteed to be another multimillion-dollar contest.

The liberal candidate, Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor, reported in July that she had raised $583,933 in the first six weeks of her campaign, ahead of now-Justice Susan Crawford’s record-breaking 2025 pace. By late August, Taylor’s campaign manager said the former Democratic state legislator had taken in more than $1 million.

After conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley announced she wouldn’t seek a second 10-year term, Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar entered the race. Spending topped $1 million in the conservative Lazar’s successful 2022 bid to unseat incumbent Lori Kornblum. That was almost certainly Wisconsin’s second-most expensive appellate court race, behind a $1.6 million contest for another seat in the same southeastern district in 2021.

High costs for high courts

Although Wisconsin now outpaces every other state in Supreme Court campaign costs, it wasn’t an early leader in the national trend of divisive multimillion-dollar contests.

In its 2002 report, the Brennan Center called 2000 “a watershed year for fundraising and spending in state supreme court elections,” as the total raised by candidates nationwide leaped 61%, from $28.3 million in 1998 to $45.6 million in 2000, led by Alabama, Michigan, Ohio and Illinois.

Much of that money was spent on “television advertising — especially by political parties and interest groups — that has grown increasingly negative and controversial, and in some cases fallen far beneath the level of dignity most Americans associate with their judicial system,” the report said.

That kind of “strident, negative television advertising” characterized Wisconsin’s first million-dollar contest in 1999, then-Rep. Mary Hubler, D-Rice Lake, complained at the time. Liberal Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson won reelection against conservative challenger Sharren Rose in a race that cost $1.4 million.

Before then, high court candidates in the 1990s typically spent around $250,000 each, which “looks like a pittance” now, former Justice Janine Geske said in an interview. Howard Schweber, professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called those earlier races “gentlemanly” and “low-key affairs.”

The low-key tone returned for the 2000 high court race. Justice Diane Sykes, a conservative appointed by Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, and liberal challenger Louis Butler kept their pledges to run positive campaigns. Both scrupulously avoided commenting on any issues that might come before the court. They spent a total of $430,963, with both accepting public financing that limited their expenditures.

But that contest and the similarly civil 2003 race turned out to be only a temporary reprieve. After Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle appointed Butler to a vacant seat, Butler wrote a landmark 2005 product liability decision, holding that a lead paint poisoning victim could sue product manufacturers even if he couldn’t figure out which company was responsible.

That 4-2 ruling triggered a sharp reaction from Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, which spent an estimated $2.2 million to ensure conservative Annette Ziegler defeated liberal Linda Clifford in 2007. The race cost $5.8 million, with conservatives outspending liberals almost 2.5 to 1.

The following year’s contest promptly broke the new record as spending jumped to almost $6 million in conservative Michael Gableman’s successful bid to oust Butler. WMC dropped an estimated $1.8 million in support of Gableman as conservatives again outspent liberals, $3.2 million to $2.7 million.

Gableman’s victory created a solid conservative majority that controlled the court for the next 15 years. And after Republicans took control of the legislative and executive branches in 2011, they changed the product liability law to prevent future rulings like the 2005 lead paint case.

Similar story lines are playing out nationwide as big-money donors target court races to influence specific cases or issues, said Douglas Keith, deputy director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center. 

Musk is a prime example of that trend, said Nick Ramos, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. At the same time that Musk was spending $55.9 million to boost conservative Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel’s losing Supreme Court bid, the billionaire’s Tesla Inc. was suing to overturn the state law prohibiting auto manufacturers from owning their dealerships, a key part of Tesla’s business model. The Tesla case is pending in Milwaukee County Circuit Court and could reach the high court that Musk unsuccessfully tried to influence.

Big spenders are rarely transparent about their agendas on issues like auto sales or product liability, instead pouring their money into television advertising that luridly accuses one candidate or the other of mishandling criminal cases as a lower court judge or attorney. Special interests see crime as “just a visceral idea that they can use to get voters’ attention in an ad,” Keith told Wisconsin Watch. But as the UW Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative recently noted, “Only a tiny fraction of the state’s criminal cases ever get to the Supreme Court level, and in recent years such cases have made up only about a third of the court’s docket.”

Big donors are reflecting and reinforcing a growing feeling among voters that “the court is just one more institution to obtain the policies that we (the voters) want,” similar to the legislative and executive branches, said conservative former Justice Dan Kelly. And with frequent deadlocks between the GOP-controlled Legislature and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, both sides are relying more on lawsuits than lawmaking, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

The stakes range all the way up to control of the White House. In 2020, President Donald Trump’s campaign filed suit seeking to throw out more than 220,000 absentee ballots from the Democratic strongholds of Milwaukee and Dane County. The state Supreme Court tossed the suit, but only because Justice Brian Hagedorn broke ranks with fellow conservatives to join the body’s three liberals.

That razor-thin 2020 presidential election was part of a nationwide record five times in 24 years that Wisconsin’s electoral votes were decided by less than one percentage point. Schweber, Ramos and Heck said the same swing-state energy pumps up both sides in high court races — even though only two of the last 12 contested Supreme Court elections were that close.

And while conservatives ruled the court for 15 years, their majority was never more than five of seven seats, meaning that a change in ideological control could be just one or two elections away for most of those years. That’s one of the most common factors driving big-spending court elections nationwide, Keith said.

Spending on high court contests is rising nationwide, hitting $100.8 million for the 68 justice seats decided in the 2021-22 cycle, according to the Brennan Center’s most recent report on the politics of judicial elections.

Electing a single Wisconsin Supreme Court justice cost more this year than operating the entire seven-member court for three years.

The 16-member Court of Appeals costs $12.9 million per year.

The high court and other statewide court services, including the CCAP system for looking up cases online, cost $40.7 million.

The state share of circuit court costs in all 72 counties, including salaries and benefits for all 261 trial judges as well as reserve judges and court reporters, totals $132 million.

*Each circle represents $1 million.

Sources: Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and OpenSecrets

Graphic by Hongyu Liu

Parties crash in with cash

Efforts to keep partisan politics out of judicial campaigns date back to Wisconsin’s 1848 founding. In a provision that survives to this day, the first state constitution prohibited electing judges at the same time as most other state officials, a move that some constitutional convention delegates hoped would discourage parties from nominating judicial candidates. That proved to be a vain hope, but it laid the groundwork for formally nonpartisan spring elections to evolve by 1891, according to the State Law Library.

Wisconsin is one of only four states that hold judicial elections in the spring or summer.  Other states that elect judges hold those elections in the fall, regardless of whether they are partisan or nonpartisan. That means they’re competing for donations with many other high-profile races, while Wisconsin’s high court races are often the biggest spring contests outside presidential primaries, noted Burden, Keith and Marquette University Law School Poll Director Charles Franklin.

The spring timing took on national political significance this year, as the first major election in a battleground state after Trump’s November 2024 victory, Burden said. Musk “essentially connected the dots for voters” by turning the contest into a referendum on Trump’s policies, and by extension on Musk’s own role in slashing the federal government, Burden said. That strategy backfired so spectacularly that Musk said afterward he planned to cut back his future involvement in politics.

But it took more than a century for that partisan dynamic to evolve. Even as the total cost of high court campaigns soared into the millions, a relatively small percentage of the cash was coming from the parties, although the state Republican Party soon became the largest single donor to some conservative candidates.

The proportions started to change after 2015, when a campaign finance overhaul by the GOP-dominated Legislature allowed unlimited donations to political parties and unlimited contributions from parties to candidates. While wealthy donors can contribute no more than $20,000 directly to a Supreme Court candidate (up from $1,000), they now can give as much as they want to a party, and the party then can donate all of that money to the candidate.

Donations from state and local Republican parties jumped more than fivefold, from $75,926 to Bradley in the 2016 campaign (which was already under way when the new law took effect) to $423,615 to Sauk County Circuit Judge Michael Screnock in the next contested race in 2018. The GOP cash was more than 39% of the money raised by the conservative Screnock, who lost to liberal Rebecca Dallet.

Democrats still weren’t spending heavily on high court races until fundraising powerhouse Ben Wikler took over as state party chair in 2019. The state, local and national parties poured $1.4 million into Jill Karofsky’s 2020 campaign, $9.9 million into Janet Protasiewicz’s 2023 campaign and $11.8 million into Crawford’s 2025 campaign. The state party was the largest single donor to each justice, accounting for more than 59% of Protasiewicz’s treasury, just under half of Karofsky’s fundraising and more than one-third of Crawford’s cash.

That far outpaced Republican contributions of $328,586 to then-incumbent Kelly in 2020 and $900,461 to his unsuccessful comeback bid in 2023. The GOP didn’t start to catch up until this year, when it threw $9.7 million into Schimel’s losing campaign, representing more than 61% of the former attorney general’s war chest.

Together, the two major parties spent $34.9 million on officially nonpartisan Supreme Court races from 2007 through 2025, almost all of it in the last three campaigns. Democrats outspent Republicans by $23.2 million to $11.7 million, or nearly 2 to 1.

In February, the Marquette poll found 61% of Wisconsin voters believe party contributions reduce judicial independence, compared with 38% who think partisan support gives voters useful information about candidates.

State Democratic and Republican party leaders didn’t respond to interview requests. But some GOP activists blamed party chair Brian Schimming for the conservative losses in 2023 and 2025. That led to a study that called for an even greater party role in high court elections, while discouraging advertising by other outside groups like Musk’s PACs.

Special interests spend right and left

Party contributions represent less than one-quarter of the $161.5 million that special interests spent on the last 12 Supreme Court races. Nearly all of that spending fell along ideological lines. In addition to the parties, conservative organizations and business interests spent $80.2 million supporting conservative candidates, while progressive groups and unions spent $46.4 million backing liberal candidates. 

Of all the special-interest spending, only $38.3 million, or 24%, went into candidates’ campaign treasuries from 2007 through 2025, $25.8 million on the liberal side and $12.5 million on the conservative side. The rest was spent directly by outside groups, typically on advertising that is usually outside the candidates’ control. That money mainly fell into two categories: independent expenditures and “issue ads,” both operating under rules that were significantly loosened by the conservative-led U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision.

Campaign ads funded by independent expenditures clearly state which candidates they support or oppose. Like the campaigns themselves, political action committees making independent expenditures must file reports with the Wisconsin Ethics Commission, disclosing how much they received and spent and who their donors were. Unlike campaigns, they can take money from corporations and unions, and anyone can give them unlimited contributions.

By contrast, “issue ads” try to sway voters under the guise of expressing concern about a particular issue, but without using specific phrases like “vote for” or “vote against.” Issue ad groups aren’t required to reveal how much they spent or who gave them cash. Their funding is often called “dark money” because it’s hidden from the light of public disclosure.

Because of the way issue ad spending is reported, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign was unable to distinguish the exact amount spent on issue ads in the Supreme Court race from similar spending that targeted the simultaneous campaign for state superintendent of public instruction. Based on preliminary data from the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and the Brennan Center, Wisconsin Watch estimates $13.9 million was aimed at the Supreme Court contest.

Using that estimate and previous Wisconsin Democracy Campaign estimates, issue ads accounted for most of the special-interest spending in eight consecutive Supreme Court contests from 2007 through 2018. For the entire 2007-2025 period, issue ad spending totaled $40.2 million, $31.8 million for conservatives and $8.4 million for liberals. 

By contrast, most of the special-interest money went into independent expenditures in the last four high court campaigns. Liberal groups spent slightly more than conservative organizations in the 2019, 2020 and 2023 races, but this year, Schimel supporters outspent Crawford backers, $33.3 million to $18.1 million. From 2007 through 2025, independent expenditures totaled $83.5 million — $47.6 million for conservatives and $35.4 million for liberals, plus almost $450,000 on candidates eliminated in the 2023 primary.

Musk’s petition giveaways don’t fit neatly into either the independent expenditure or issue ad categories — and whether they fit into campaign finance law at all is a subject of litigation. The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign filed a civil suit against Musk, accusing him of violating Wisconsin’s election bribery law.

Donors change tune to 'Non-Wisconsin'

Out-of-state donors like Musk didn’t play a major role in high court elections until relatively recently. From 2007 through 2018, most Supreme Court candidates received more than 90% of their individual donations from state residents, Wisconsin Democracy Campaign figures show. During that time, the highest proportions of out-of-state donations were:

• Almost 32% to Gableman in 2008.
• More than 12% to Ziegler in 2007.
• Almost 12% to liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg, who narrowly lost to then-Justice David Prosser in 2011, after Republicans stripped nearly all collective bargaining rights from most public-sector employees.

Out-of-state donations to conservative candidates remained below 10% as out-of-state donations to liberals rose to about 23% each for Hagedorn’s opponent Lisa Neubauer in 2019 and Karofsky in 2020.

But the out-of-state cash exploded for liberals after 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and left each state to regulate abortions. The decision revived an 1849 Wisconsin law that was interpreted as banning all abortions except to save the life of the mother.

As Protasiewicz positioned herself as the abortion rights candidate, her 2023 campaign took in a record $3.6 million — 57% of individual contributions — from donors outside Wisconsin, while Kelly’s $340,405 in out-of-state money represented just one-eighth of his individual donations.

Similarly, Crawford, a Dane County judge who had represented Planned Parenthood as an attorney fighting a different abortion law, received $14.6 million from out-of-state donors for her 2025 campaign, hitting a likely unprecedented 69% of individual contributions.

Crawford took in more from individual out-of-state donors alone than all liberal candidates from 2007 through 2023 had received from all individual contributors combined. By contrast, Schimel’s $1.1 million from other states amounted to less than one-fifth of his individual donations.

In July, after Crawford was elected but before she took her seat, the liberal-controlled court voted 4-3 along ideological lines to overturn the 19th-century law. 

Over the last 12 campaigns, out-of-state donors contributed $20.7 million to Wisconsin Supreme Court races, all but about $1 million of that in the last two races. Liberal candidates took in almost $19 million from outside Wisconsin, more than 10 times the nearly $1.8 million that went to conservative candidates. In its review of the 2025 campaign, the state GOP called for a greater effort to attract out-of-state dollars for conservatives.

From the parties’ perspective, Democrats have beaten Republicans at their own game, triumphing under rules largely crafted by GOP lawmakers and conservative judges. Now Republicans hope to win back their advantage with more of the same.

But for reformers, the most pressing issue is how to stop the competition for ever-greater spending and reduce the influence of big money on the high court.

Next: Could new laws and recusal rules stem the tide of Supreme Court campaign spending?

Because of the use of scrolling graphics, the republication button is not available for this story. Reach out to Matthew DeFour at mdefour@wisconsinwatch.org if you would like to republish.

Wisconsin Supreme Court elections have drawn an ‘obscene’ amount of spending. Here’s why and what can be done about it. 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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• Wisconsin leaders want more high school students to have the opportunity to take college-level courses, called dual enrollment. 

• However, teachers need the same qualifications as college instructors, and those teachers are in short supply. 

• For many, teaching dual enrollment would require them to enroll in graduate school, even if they already have a master’s degree. 

• The state offers graduate credit reimbursement to educators interested in teaching dual enrollment classes, but school leaders say it’s a hard sell.

It’s fourth period in the auto lab at Madison’s Vel Phillips Memorial High School, and a dozen students maneuver between nearly as many cars. 

At one bay, a junior adjusts the valves of an oxygen-acetylene torch and holds the flame to a suspended Subaru’s front axle to loosen its rusty bolts. Steps away, two classmates tease each other in Spanish as they finish replacing the brakes on a red Saab. Teacher Miles Tokheim moves calmly through the shop, checking students’ work and offering pointers.

After extensive renovations, the lab reopened last year with more room and tools for young mechanics-in-training. What visitors can’t see is the class recently got an upgrade, too: college credit. 

Through a process called dual enrollment, high schoolers who pass the course now earn five Madison College credits for free and skip the class if they later enroll. Classes like these are increasingly common in Wisconsin and across the country. That’s allowed more high schoolers to earn college credit, reducing their education costs and giving them a head start on their career goals. 

Wisconsin lawmakers and education officials want more high schoolers to have this opportunity. But these classes need teachers with the qualifications of college instructors, and those teachers are in short supply. 

That leaves many students — disproportionately, those in less-affluent areas — without classes that make a college education more attainable. 

“What’s at stake is access to opportunity, especially for high school students at Title I, lower-income high schools, rural high schools … It’s really been an on-ramp for so many students,” said John Fink, who studies dual enrollment at Columbia University’s Community College Research Center. “But we also know that many students are left behind.” 

To teach the auto class, Tokheim had to apply to become a Madison College instructor. As a certified auto service technician with a master’s degree, the veteran teacher met the college’s requirements for the course. 

But for many teachers, teaching dual enrollment would require enrolling in graduate school, even if they already have a master’s degree. 

That, school leaders say, is a hard sell, despite the state offering to reimburse districts for the cost. Teachers in Wisconsin often don’t make much more money teaching advanced courses the way they do in some other states, and adding these courses doesn’t raise a school’s state rating.

“You’re asking people who are well educated to begin with to go back to school, which takes time and effort, and their reward for that is they get to teach a dual credit class,” said Mark McQuade, Appleton Area School District’s assistant superintendent of assessment, curriculum and instruction. 

High standards, short supply

Nationwide, the number of high schoolers earning college credit has skyrocketed in recent years. In Wisconsin, the tally has more than doubled, with students notching experience in subjects ranging from manufacturing to business. 

Most earn credit from their local technical college without leaving their high school campus. In the 2023-24 school year, 1 in 3 community college students in the state was a high schooler.

Education and state leaders have welcomed the trend, pointing to the potential benefits: Students who take dual enrollment classes are more likely to enroll in college after high school. They can save hundreds or thousands of dollars on college tuition and fees. If they do enroll in college, they spend less time completing a degree.

“It also proves to the kids — to some of our kids that are first-generation — that they can do college work,” McQuade said.

But not all students get these advantages. Many Wisconsin schools offer very few dual enrollment courses, or none at all. A July Wisconsin Policy Forum analysis showed small, urban or high-poverty schools are least likely to offer the classes.

Wisconsin Watch talked to leaders in five school districts. All said the shortage of qualified teachers was one of the biggest barriers to growing their dual enrollment programs. 

In 2015, the Higher Learning Commission — which oversees and evaluates the state’s technical colleges — released new guidelines about instructor qualifications. The new policy required many of Wisconsin’s dual enrollment teachers to have a master’s degree and at least 18 graduate credits in the subject they teach, just like college instructors. 

In 2023, the Commission walked back the new policy.

By then, colleges across the state had already adopted the higher standard.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin schools have struggled to hire and retain teachers, even without college credit involved. Four in 10 new teachers stop teaching or leave the state within six years, a 2024 Department of Public Instruction analysis shows.

The subject-specific prerequisite is much different from the graduate education K-12 teachers have historically sought: the kind that would help them become principals or administrators, said Eric Conn, Green Bay Area Public Schools’ director of curricular pathways and post-secondary partnerships.

“To advance in education, it wasn’t about getting a master’s in a subject area. It was getting a master’s in education to develop into educational administration or educational technology,” Conn said. For teachers who already have a master’s degree, he said, going back to school just to teach one or two new classes is “a large ask.” 

Funding tempts few 

When the Higher Learning Commission announced the heightened requirements in 2015, leaders of the Wisconsin Technical College System sounded the alarm. They warned 85% of the instructors currently teaching these classes could be disqualified, whittling students’ college credit opportunities.

Wisconsin education leaders called on the Legislature to allocate millions of dollars to help teachers get the training they’d need — and they agreed. In 2017, lawmakers created a grant program to reimburse school districts for teachers’ graduate tuition. 

But of the $500,000 available every year, hundreds of thousands go unused.

“Nobody’s ever, ever requested this funding and been denied because of a funding shortage,” said Tammie DeVooght Blaney, executive secretary of the Higher Educational Aids Board, which manages the grant.

Tuition and fees for a single graduate credit at a Universities of Wisconsin school can cost over $800, putting the total cost of 18 graduate credits around $15,000. For teachers who don’t already have a master’s degree, the cost is even steeper. The state grant requires teachers or districts to front the cost and apply for reimbursement yearly, with no guarantee they’ll get it.

A handful of Green Bay teachers have used the grant, Conn said, but many just aren’t interested in returning to school, even if it’s free.

The district offers 50 dual enrollment courses, but he’d like to offer classes in more core subjects, which help students meet college general education requirements. There just aren’t enough teachers qualified to teach college sciences and math to offer the same options across the district’s four high schools. 

Teachers are busy, and not just in the classroom, said Jon Shelton, president of AFT-Wisconsin, one of the state’s teachers unions. Many already spend extra hours coaching, grading or leading after-school activities. Those who do go back to school typically enroll in one class at a time, he said, meaning they could be studying for several years.

Pros and cons

The financial perks for teachers returning to school for dual enrollment credentials are dubious at best. 

Some teachers get a salary bump for obtaining a master’s degree, and some earn modest bonuses for teaching dual enrollment. But many teachers make no more than they would have without the extra training. 

“There’s no incentive,” said Tokheim, the Madison auto instructor, who receives a $50 yearly stipend for teaching the college course. In contrast to his standard classes, his dual enrollment class required him to attend two kinds of training.

There’s little incentive for schools either. They receive no extra state funding to offer college-level courses. Plus, the classes don’t factor into their state report card score, which measures students’ standardized test performance and graduation preparation, among other things.

Leaders at Sheboygan’s Central High School wish it did. At that school, where the majority of  students are Latino and almost all are low-income, 1 in 3 students took dual enrollment courses in the 2023-24 school year. Still, the state gave the school a failing grade. 

“It’s an afterthought in our report card, and it’s always the thing that we can celebrate,” Principal Joshua Kestell said. 

So why would a teacher take on the added schooling? 

“It’s good for kids,” Tokheim said. “That’s why they get us teachers, because we care too much.” 

Other potential draws: the challenge of teaching more rigorous courses or the opportunity to collaborate with college instructors. 

Heather Fellner-Spetz retired two years ago from teaching English at Sevastopol High School in Sturgeon Bay. She taught college-level oral communication classes for 10 years before she retired. When the Higher Learning Commission set the heightened requirements, she was allowed to continue teaching dual enrollment while she studied for more graduate credits.

“There wasn’t much I didn’t enjoy about teaching it. It was just fabulous,” Fellner-Spetz said. 

She especially liked having a college professor observe her class, and she said it was good for the students, too. “When they had other people come into the room and watch the lesson or watch them perform, it just ups the ante on pressure.”

Rules remain controversial

Meanwhile, the jury is still out on whether it’s necessary for dual enrollment teachers to have the same credentials as college professors.

“Folks running these programs generally would say that teaching a quality college course to a high school student requires a unique skill set that blends high school and college teaching, and that is not necessarily captured by the traditional (graduate coursework) standard,” Fink said.

Wisconsin educators are divided on that question. Fox Valley Technical College has kept the higher standard, limiting the number of Appleton teachers who qualify. McQuade, the Appleton leader, questions those “restrictions,” saying he believes his teachers are well qualified to teach college-level courses. A different standard tied to student performance, for example, could let his district offer more classes across each of its schools. 

Schauna Rasmussen, dean of early college and workforce strategy at Madison College, said the answer isn’t to lower the standard, but to help more teachers reach it. 

In October, a group of Republican Wisconsin lawmakers introduced a bill aimed at making it easier for students to find dual enrollment opportunities. It would create a portal for families to view options and streamline application deadlines, among other changes. 

It doesn’t address the shortage of qualified teachers.

“Separate legislation would likely have to be introduced addressing expanding the pool of teachers for those programs,” Chris Gonzalez, communications director for lead author state Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, R-Appleton, wrote in an email.

As of Monday no such legislation has been introduced.

Correction: This story has been corrected to note that the Higher Learning Commission revised its policy on faculty qualifications in 2023. The current policy requires that colleges have “reasonable policies and procedures to determine that faculty are qualified” but it states colleges can consider “a variety of factors, including academic credentials, progress towards academic credentials, equivalent experience, or some combination thereof.” Wisconsin Watch regrets the error.

Miranda Dunlap reports on pathways to success in northeast Wisconsin, and Natalie Yahr reports on pathways to success statewide. They work in partnership with Open Campus.

Wisconsin high schools want to offer more college classes. First, teachers must go back to school. 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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Former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, a Milwaukee Democrat, announced Tuesday he’s running for governor in 2026.

Barnes served as lieutenant governor under Gov. Tony Evers from 2019 to 2023, the first African American to hold the position. He previously served in the state Assembly from 2013 to 2017.

Barnes’ entry into the race has long been anticipated, especially after a poll in early October showed him with the most support (16%) among a wide open field of Democratic contenders.

Wisconsin Watch has checked several claims related to Barnes during his unsuccessful 2022 campaign against Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson. Here’s what we found:

Defunding police: Barnes did not say that he supported defunding police, though in 2020 he backed reduced spending for Milwaukee police.

Gun rights: Barnes did say in a 2013 social media post he “could not care less about a 2nd Amendment ‘right.’ Bear arms all you wish, but you should pay for your mishandling.” In 2022, he said “we can respect the Second Amendment” while increasing “common-sense” gun control measures.

Immigration: Barnes did not say that he wanted to open U.S. borders. He backed a policy that “secures the border and also includes a path for citizenship.”

Abortion: Barnes did oppose the government legislating a limit on abortion, though a spokesperson at the time told Wisconsin Watch he didn’t support “abortion up until birth,” noting the standard before Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022 allowed limits on abortion after viability. He emphasized the abortion decision should be between a woman and her doctor.

Taxes: Barnes did not support raising taxes on the middle class, but rather backed middle-class tax cuts.

Criminal justice: As a state Assembly member in 2015, Barnes did vote against a law that expanded penalties for battery and threats against public officials.

Climate: Barnes did support the Green New Deal in 2021. During the 2022 campaign, he supported elements of the federal proposal to fight climate change while not referring to it by name.

Former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes is running for governor. Here are 7 related claims we checked … and the facts is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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In 2018, a mobile home park owner in Stevens Point lost his operator’s license after submitting falsified drinking water samples to the state, purportedly leaving longtime residents of the park at risk of consuming excess iron and manganese. He appealed.

In 2022, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources authorized the spreading of human waste on farmland in Vilas County. A nearby Indigenous tribe contested the permit when it became apparent the state hadn’t included sufficient setbacks from tribal land.

And in 2021, a wildlife rehabilitator in Frederic, Wisconsin, who also served as a local police chief, lost her rehabilitation license after a raccoon in her care — Gimpy — bit an employee. The rehabilitator appealed.

These cases, all of which went to administrative hearings, pit state regulatory authority against individual residents. That’s why I was interested in reading them in my role as an investigative reporter. But I learned vital information in these and other cases, nearly always the parties’ names and places of work, is missing. 

Wisconsin’s Division of Hearings and Appeals, the agency that oversees administrative hearings for several state departments, has taken to posting only heavily redacted records on its website. That means readers will often see black bars drawn through the names of people and businesses, state employees who evaluate permits and licenses, attorneys who represent parties and even newspapers that publish notices related to the cases.

Division Administrator Brian Hayes told me that last year’s passage of a state law prompted the DHA to evaluate how it posts personally identifying information on its website. That law enables judges to request that their personal information, including addresses and telephone numbers, be removed from public view. 

The DHA, Hayes said, extended this protection to witnesses and petitioners, saying disclosing this information “needlessly opens up litigants to scams and stalkers.”

Hayes noted, however, that personally identifying information likely would have to be released to someone who submitted a records request for unaltered documents.

So I submitted one.

It took two months and the assistance of an attorney to wrestle the name of Gimpy’s owner from the agency. (Gimpy, however, was named.) The employees I encountered in this process offered a moving target of justifications.

First, DHA’s records custodian said she can provide unredacted documents only to parties to a case and suggested that I request the redacted version. I pointed out that the law requires her to either release the requested record or offer a legal justification for withholding it.

Another employee cited Wisconsin’s 1980 victims’ rights law, which provides a bill of rights for witnesses and victims of crime. The problem with this excuse is that the protections are situated in Wisconsin criminal code, not licensing.

In the end, I received unredacted records in the raccoon case and an apology from DHA for the difficulties I encountered in obtaining this information. But I still am moved to question the will to secrecy at the heart of this matter.

In fact, many of these cases involve public hearings. Anyone who attended could presumably observe witnesses and evidence — or see the names of parties on public notices state agencies post to announce hearing schedules.

When protective laws are zealously applied to contexts for which they were not intended, it can cause its own form of harm. The public is circuitously deprived of information related to potentially unscrupulous activity on the part of both individuals and government.

It shouldn’t take an attorney to pry open the gates for administrative decisions, even if the state means well.

Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (wisfoic.org), a nonprofit, nonpartisan group dedicated to open government. Bennet Goldstein is an investigative reporter with Wisconsin Watch.

Your Right to Know: The problem with the will to secrecy 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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Edith Butler is dealing with a real-world math problem: Her housing costs keep rising while a tax credit intended to help keeps shrinking. 

The widow and retired nurse, 68, lives by herself in a two-bedroom Eau Claire home. She paid $9,000 in rent over the course of last year, eating up more than 60% of her Social Security paycheck — her primary source of income. Her utility costs are also expected to hike next year.

She received $708 last year from claiming a homestead tax credit, which is meant to help lower-income homeowners and renters recoup some property tax costs. That was down from the $900 credit she received five years ago after paying just $6,600 in rent. 

In the past, the homestead credit has paid to fill her propane tank for about three months during winter and offset some other costs. But it’s dwindling each year because the state rarely updates eligibility guidelines and credit calculations for inflation. Butler’s credit shrinks whenever the federal government increases her Social Security payment to account for the rising costs of living. 

She’s not alone. Statewide homestead credit claims dropped from an average of $523 per recipient in 2013 to $486 in 2025, with thousands fewer claimants as fewer people remained eligible.

“These things have never adjusted. But we’ve paid into these programs all our lives. I paid taxes for 50 years, (and) my Social Security is my benefit that I paid in,” Butler said. “You work hard and you pay into programs, and then when you need them in your older years like this, they’re not there for you.”

The Legislature has not substantially updated the homestead credit for 25 years, causing its value to erode. Recent Democratic proposals to update program guidelines have failed to gain Republican support.  

A tax credit’s history

By the 1960s, many in Wisconsin acknowledged the regressive nature of property taxes — that lower-income residents pay higher shares of their income than richer households do,  John Stark, then-Assistant Chief Counsel in the Legislative Reference Bureau, wrote in a 1991 history of property tax relief in Wisconsin. But the state Constitution’s “uniformity clause” restricted what type of tax relief lawmakers can enact. 

Against that backdrop, a State Commission on Aging in 1962 held hearings around the state in which older adults expressed concerns about health care and property taxes. The Legislature responded in 1963 with the homestead credit. Residents 65 and older could claim up to $225 (the equivalent of $2,380 today), with the precise calculation based on income, property taxes paid through ownership or rent.

The Legislature expanded eligibility over the years, notably in 1973, when it lowered the age minimum to 18. That dramatically boosted total claimants and payouts. By 1988, more than 250,000 people received a collective $100 million (roughly $270 million today) in credits.

The trend has since reversed. 

Fewer than 67,000 residents claimed a collective $32.6 million in credits last year — a precipitous plunge, Department of Revenue data show.

The program’s income cap today — $24,680 — has barely budged since 2000. The nearly identical cap of $24,500 in 2000 is the equivalent of $45,812 today when adjusted for inflation.

Meanwhile, the program’s “phaseout income” of $8,060, under which homeowners or renters can recoup the maximum 80% of property taxes paid, has increased by only $60 since the 1989 tax year.

Today’s maximum credit a household can claim ($1,168) is just $8 higher than the 1990 level.

Diane Hanson, Butler’s tax agent, said her clients are receiving smaller credits each year or becoming ineligible as inflation pushes wages or Social Security payments above the static income limit. 

Still, Hanson suspects many who remain eligible don’t realize it.

The homestead credit helped Hanson through her most challenging times. After learning about it at her local library, she claimed the credit for several years while raising her two children during a divorce, one of them with disabilities. 

After becoming a tax agent in 2019, she began to educate clients facing similar circumstances. They include Renata Braatz, who raises her 12-year-old son and spends about 30% of her monthly income on rent through the Section 8 voucher program. She claimed about $600 through the homestead program last year. She spent it on groceries and other expenses for her son.

“I never knew about it. I lived here for six years, and I just started doing it two years ago,” Braatz said. 

But asking questions paid off. 

“Renata was proactive, reaching out, phoning us, and asking if there could be any credits for her. I think that is more than some folks know to do,” Hanson said. “Before I was a tax professional, I myself didn’t know how much the federal earned income credit can help out parents.”

Democrats call for credit’s expansion 

Senate and Assembly Democrats earlier this year introduced identical bills to expand the homestead credit — allowing households earning up to $35,000 to claim it and indexing the maximum annual income, phaseout income and maximum credit to inflation. The proposal would have reduced state revenue by an estimated $36.7 million, $43 million and $48.8 million over the next three fiscal years.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers also proposed a homestead credit expansion in his last two-year budget. 

Neither  proposal advanced in the Republican-controlled Legislature. 

Sen. Mark Spreitzer, D-Beloit, authored the Senate version of the bill with colleagues. His district borders Illinois, which offers a range of more generous homestead tax incentives. Several constituents who previously lived in Illinois asked him why Wisconsin doesn’t offer what Illinois does, inspiring the legislation.

The Wisconsin Constitution’s uniformity clause prohibits lawmakers from enacting Illinois-like tax exemptions for older adults or other low-income residents, Spreitzer said, but the credit offers a legal work-around.

“There’s not really another credit that takes the place of this,” he said. “That’s why the homestead credit is so important.”

Spreitzer said he plans to reintroduce an expansion bill, and he encourages residents to share their perspectives with their representatives.

“If we want to do something about affordability, this is a very direct thing we can do,” Spreitzer said. “We’re not creating a new credit here. This already exists. We’re just talking about increasing who qualifies and how much money they would get back, and that’s money that they would directly be able to get back on their taxes and then spend to put food on the plate for their families.”

Hanson sees a path for bipartisan support for an update. 

“The alternative is to see it dwindle,” Hanson said. “It hurts the segment of people that actually need it, the people who just don’t get much help anywhere. They’re still working hard to be independent.”

As living costs soar, tax relief shrinks for low-income Wisconsin residents 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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This week, we are reflecting on what we’re thankful for. One of the things we’re thankful for is you – our readers and supporters. Some of you have sent us tips, others have given us constructive feedback on our reporting, and many of you have helped us reach more people by sharing our reporting with your friends, family and neighbors. 

In the spirit of gratitude and giving, we want to share five stories that remind us of the power of community and how ordinary people can spark extraordinary impact. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we enjoyed reporting them. 

“When we show up, when we speak up, we can make a positive difference” 

Portage, Sauk, St. Croix and Lincoln counties – Public nursing homes tend to be better staffed, have higher quality of care and draw fewer complaints than facilities owned by for-profits and nonprofits. As counties across Wisconsin look to sell off their nursing homes, grassroots campaigns are working to keep the homes in public hands – and some of them appear to be succeeding. 

“It kind of feels like I’m more connected to the stories … instead of just being behind my phone” 

Brown, Oconto and Shawano counties – For more than eight decades, Pulaski High School’s student newspaper has been the community’s newspaper of record, as the only news outlet consistently covering the rural village. Along the way, the paper has secured a level of community buy-in that might feel foreign to some news organizations today, as trust in news declines. 

“I don’t know just exactly how to say this, but my perspective for people has changed” 

Milwaukee and Dane counties – When Larry Jones arrived at the Wisconsin State Capitol on March 12, he didn’t know what he was getting into — let alone that he would be a viral internet sensation the next day. The 85-year-old self-described conservative had been invited by his grandson to a public hearing on a Republican-authored bill that would ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth in the state. While he was there, he changed his mind. 

“We’re learning how to navigate conflict in community. We’re learning how to support people in distress” 

Brown and Outagamie counties – In downtown Appleton, a “community living room” aims to give northeast Wisconsinites ways to deeply connect with one another — and a free community space to do so — in hopes they can combat the social isolation many feel today. It also hosts “emotional CPR training” or ECPR to train professionals and community members in how to assist someone in crisis or emotional distress. 

“There are too many wrong doors in this system, and we want to be a right door” 

Dane County – Yahara House, part of the nonprofit Journey Mental Health Center, is a community mental health program focused on building relationships and job opportunities. It is one of just seven clubhouses in the state and just three with international accreditation. Experts and advocates say the clubhouse model reduces hospitalizations and boosts employment in adults with serious mental illnesses.

These 5 stories show people building connection, power and hope 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.