In a field consisting mostly of current or former elected officials, Missy Hughes says her background — private sector experience in an agricultural co-op, then serving as the top economic advisor to Gov. Tony Evers — gives her a distinctive edge in the contest to be the Democratic nominee for governor.

For six years Hughes served as the secretary and CEO of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., a state agency tasked with helping Wisconsin’s economy grow and expand employment. Before that she was chief legal counsel at Organic Valley, a farmer-owned cooperative specializing in dairy products.

Hughes announced her campaign to seek the governor’s office in September, about two months after Evers announced he wouldn’t seek a third term.

“When Gov. Evers decided not to run and we were a few months into the Trump administration, I realized that my skills could really help the state during this really unpredictable time,” Hughes told a small gathering of Columbia County Democrats at the local party headquarters in Portage in mid-May.

As she has elsewhere, Hughes on that day cast herself as “a Democrat who understands the economy, who understands how to build the economy, who understands how Wisconsin’s economy works — whether it’s dairy or agriculture or manufacturing.”

She’s led with the economic argument at each of nearly a half-dozen forums over the last six months, using it not just as a big-picture case for her campaign but as the frame through which to address specific topics.

At a June 2 event organized by a coalition of unions, Hughes concurred with the rest of the Democrats on the stage in supporting an increase in the state government’s share of the cost of public schools to  two-thirds, taking the burden off local property taxpayers. Then came the moderator’s follow-up question about top education priorities and how the forum participants would navigate lobbies supporting the state’s private school voucher system and “an adversarial Legislature” to achieve their goals.

“The concern I have about the conversations we’ve had about public school funding, about healthcare — all of this costs a tremendous amount of money,” Hughes replied. “And we have to grow our economy. Communities are struggling because they don’t have economic opportunity.”

With manufacturing jobs declining and farmers struggling, “We have to recognize that the reality is we need more resources in this state. We have to grow,” Hughes observed.

“That’s what I want to bring back to this state,” she said. “Manufacturing and strong agriculture, those are the keys to our economy. They make up our economy. You all work in that economy. We all do and we have to build that. That’s how we pay for our public schools. And that’s how we make our public schools again the No. 1 place — the only place where Wisconsin parents want to send their children.”

Art, law and organic farming

Born Melissa Larkin, Hughes grew up in New York City’s northern suburbs. Her parents were doctors and her brother is a cardiologist. She graduated from Georgetown University in 1990 with a double major in political science and fine art. Drawing and sewing were her media, “but really drawing,” she says, and she still practices today.

Hughes got a law degree from the University of Wyoming in 1997. She wasn’t sure what kind of law she was going to practice — only that she wanted to be in the courtroom.

“I was going to be a courtroom litigator,” Hughes says. “And when I went to court the very first time in Gillette, Wyoming, I left saying, ‘I’m never doing that again.’”

Hughes didn’t like the combative nature of the work. “I’ve since said, ‘nothing ever good happens in court,’” she says. “I’d rather work outside to try to find solutions and move things forward than being in a court room.”

Hughes came to Wisconsin in 2002 and joined Organic Valley. The cooperative, headquartered in the Vernon County village of La Farge, was started in 1988 by a group of organic dairy farmers seeking alternative channels of distribution for their products. When Hughes arrived, about 500 farmers belonged and the co-op had “a couple of hundred employees, but it was on a rocket ship of growth,” Hughes told the Portage Democrats.

“I would sit at the table with farmers who were faced with losing their farms” in the face of unstable milk prices and rising costs. “They really had no stability and no future for how they can manage their farm and make a living and pass it on to the next generation,” she said.

Hughes’ job included handling government relations in Washington for the co-op and leading the Organic Food Association. By the time she left to join the Evers administration in 2019, she was general counsel and had the title of “Chief Mission Officer.” The co-op had grown to represent more than 1,500 farmers in states across the country and have 900 employees.

“It was incredibly fulfilling work,” Hughes says, “but it wasn’t easy, because we were fighting Big Ag, we were teaching consumers about good food.”

In her tenure at WEDC, Hughes became the face of Wisconsin’s economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. And in the years that followed, she and the agency were at the forefront of a series of Evers administration gains, including corporate expansions and a federal grant to strengthen Wisconsin’s biohealth sector.

Cleaning up Foxconn

When Evers named her to the post, she says, he told her that he wanted her for her knowledge of rural communities and agriculture.

On her first day, she told the Portage audience, “they sat me down and said, ‘Great. Now you have to clean up Foxconn.’”

WEDC was created after former Gov. Scott Walker took office in 2011, replacing the Wisconsin Department of Commerce. The new public-private corporation included a board with business executives as well as lawmakers and had been created to deliver on Walker’s claim he would foster the creation of 250,000 new jobs — a goal his administration never reached.

Both the agency and its most prominent Walker-era project — a promised flatscreen manufacturing plant in Racine County that would be built by the Taiwan tech giant Foxconn in return for up to $2.85 billion in tax credits for the creation of 13,000 jobs — had become politically polarizing.

Scornful of the Foxconn deal that had been touted by Walker and President Donald Trump, then in his first term, Evers during his 2018 campaign talked of abolishing WEDC or at least rewriting the agreement with the company. Just before leaving office at the end of that year, Walker signed Republican lame-duck legislation curtailing the incoming Democratic governor’s powers, including a bill that blocked Evers from changing WEDC’s leadership until eight months into his term. Hughes took office when the restriction expired.

The Foxconn renegotiation took “a lot of time,” Hughes told the Portage group. In April 2021 — with Foxconn’s plans repeatedly changing and its flatscreen plant long abandoned — Evers and Hughes announced a new deal. In the end the company qualified for $80 million in tax credits.

WEDC’s most prominent role in its first eight years had been to encourage major business investments, whether by outside companies or expanding companies already in the state, and to negotiate incentives such as tax credits in return.

That continued under Evers and Hughes. But the COVID-19 pandemic that landed in March 2020 and walloped small businesses — especially the hospitality industry — also demanded a pivot at the economic development corporation.

Expanding to small business assistance

Early on, WEDC took the role of offering guidance for employers and enhancing workplace safety when the primary defenses against the virus were frequent handwashing and social distancing. After the federal government began sending pandemic relief funds to Wisconsin, WEDC became the primary vehicle for distributing them.

A second, larger round of relief, enacted in 2021 at the start of President Joe Biden’s administration, helped fund more business grant programs in Wisconsin. National researchers singled out Wisconsin as the leading state for funding small business with its pandemic relief funds.

WEDC also kept its attention on big business, with high-profile expansion projects for companies including Eli Lilly, Milwaukee Tool and Kikkoman, and a Microsoft data center on the land originally developed for Foxconn.

Small business and local economic development were always in theory part of WEDC’s portfolio — but overshadowed, Hughes says.

“We were always saying we can walk and chew gum at the same time — we can help small businesses and we can help big businesses, and we need to do both,” she says. But the small business support wasn’t emphasized, she adds. “It wasn’t measured. It was kind of pushed off to the side.”

Hughes says with WEDC’s decision to invest more deeply in local economic development work, the agency began to examine local tax data. “And when we did that, we saw there is great impact from the programs, so let’s keep doing it and do more of it.”

She brings a similar focus to her policy agenda, which includes proposals for healthcare, childcare and small business. Economic growth informs those concerns “because you can’t grow the economy without those things,” she says.

Embracing ‘progressive,’ backing the budget deal

At a Madison West High School forum organized by students earlier this year, Hughes was asked what people’s biggest misconception about her was.

Her focus on business and the economy “makes people think that I’m very center and very moderate,” Hughes replied.

“I’m reasonable, there’s no doubt about that,” she said. But having worked at Organic Valley reflects “true progressive values,” she added, because a cooperative “is a very, very radical kind of a company” with a culture of long-term thinking and sustainable operation.

Even so, on several points related to education, Hughes has broken ranks with the other leading Democrats in the contest for governor.

She criticized presumed Republican gubernatorial nominee Tom Tiffany for urging his party’s lawmakers to vote against the $1.8 billion deal Evers reached with GOP leaders in the Legislature that would have sent $300 to each taxpayer and $300 million in additional special education money to Wisconsin public schools.

But she also criticized Democrats who voted against the deal, charging in a statement she posted on social media May 14 that “certain self-serving Democratic candidates for governor … would rather boost their own personal political ambitions than serve our kids and taxpayers.”

In an interview with the Examiner later that same day, she defended the deal as an example that showed “compromises are never going to be perfect and everything that everybody wants.” But she also said that its collapse was “demonstrative of a whole broken system” in Wisconsin politics.

“We couldn’t find ways to work together in public, and to me that just shows that we have a lot of work to do in Wisconsin around building the policymaking muscle, and that’s really been diminished in the last two decades,” Hughes said. “We always had that as a strength, but we’ve lost that and we have to rebuild that.”

At the union forum June 2, Hughes was one of three Democrats who said they wouldn’t favor immediately ending Wisconsin’s taxpayer-funded private school voucher programs.

“As governor, I would be really, really realistic about what we can get done and what fights we pick,” Hughes said. “I don’t want to pick the voucher fight. I want to pick the fully funding public schools fight. I want to have a singular focus on making sure that when parents are choosing schools, they absolutely are choosing Wisconsin public schools because they are the best schools for their children.”

Hughes also issued a statement last week saying she would accept a federal voucher tax credit enacted last year, although the deadline for states to accept it will pass before a new governor takes office. Evers vetoed legislation that would have enabled Wisconsin to take part in the credit. 

Navigating talk about Trump

Lingering in the background behind the race for governor has been the Trump administration’s policies and the way they’ve upended the political and social atmosphere. Over the course of the campaign, Hughes has shifted, to some extent, to her own navigation of that subject.

From the start she has targeted Trump, particularly on the subject of tariffs, for driving up the price of household goods. At the same time, earlier in the campaign she turned attention back to Wisconsin.

Asked in an interview after a forum in Milwaukee in January about navigating how much to focus on criticism of Trump, Hughes said, “The key for a governor is, you can control what you can control, and you can’t control what’s happening in Washington right now.”

In that vein, she suggested then, the role of the state, the governor — and by implication one who aspires to be governor — is to step in and help businesses hurt by economic disruption coming from the White House. “Reacting to everything that’s happening, you’ll drive yourself crazy,” Hughes said that evening.

Four months later, she’s become more outspoken in criticizing Trump as well as Tiffany, whose endorsement by Trump led other GOP candidates to cede the field to the four-term Republican congressman.

She name-checked the president several times in talking to the Portage Democrats in mid-May, including criticizing Trump’s unfounded claims of stolen elections as well as the administration’s cancellation of clean energy projects that the state had received support for under the Biden administration.

Ahead of the president’s visit to the Chippewa Valley on June 5, Hughes publicly announced her participation in a protest in Eau Claire. And this week, in a social media post that began, “Enough with Trump’s corruption already,” she attacked Trump and tied Tiffany to the president.

Asked about the shift, she points to the fatal shootings of two people in Minneapolis during the surge of immigration officers there this winter along with the invasion of Venezuela and the war with Iran.

“At some point you kind of got to call it for what it is and start to say, ‘OK, this has just gone too far,’” Hughes says. “When you start to have lives on the line, when you start to really endanger the United States, when you start to endanger soldiers, you know, now you’re really — it’s time to say something.”

Even under those circumstances, however, Hughes says she wants to be circumspect in her language.

“I don’t say things like ‘fascist’ or ‘authoritarian,’”  she says. “You can still call out this bad behavior.”

She says she wants to be able to talk to anyone who might be persuadable.

“I live on this couple-mile-long dirt road, and I have a bunch of neighbors, and I don’t know how they voted,” Hughes says — but she guesses that they’re like the rest of Wisconsin, meaning that there’s a 50% chance they voted for Trump.

“I want to be able to talk to them about why I’m running for governor. And if I call names or if I say, ‘You were wrong for voting for Donald Trump,’ they’re not going to listen to what I have to say.”

Most Wisconsin residents “want to be closer to the center and are closer to the center,” Hughes says. “I want to keep people open and having the conversation.”

Editor’s note: The Examiner is running periodic profiles of the contenders in the Aug. 11, 2026 gubernatorial primary as well as the candidates in the general election Nov. 3. 

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