America’s future cannot be left to politicians while the rest of us watch.

We cannot condemn money buying influence, hatred dividing communities and loyalty to individuals replacing loyalty to the Constitution, then surrender our responsibility to change course.

As a proud American Muslim who chose this country as my home, I refuse to abandon its promise. But loving America requires the courage to confront its failures and the determination to repair them.

Patriotism demands more than waving a flag. It demands living up to what that flag represents.

Disappointment is not a plan. Outrage is not a strategy. Silence leaves our future in someone else’s hands.

The Constitution begins with “We the People.”

That means us. And on Nov. 3, 2026, those words must become action.

Seeing something and saying something are no longer enough. We must do something: Vote, organize, challenge misinformation, defend our neighbors and demand accountability.

Our ballots must carry an unmistakable message: Public office belongs to the people.

Reclaim democracy from big money. When wealth purchases privileged access, politics begins to resemble legalized bribery. Elect leaders committed to pursuing a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, strengthening donor disclosure and expanding participation by small donors. A citizen’s influence should never depend on the size of a check.

Protect the vote. Demand secure, accessible elections, fair district boundaries and protection for election workers. Voters should choose their representatives; representatives should not manipulate maps to choose their voters. Candidates must accept lawful outcomes after legitimate challenges are resolved. Democracy cannot depend on whether your side wins.

Reject division disguised as leadership. Demand answers about groceries, housing, healthcare, education, energy costs and jobs. A struggling farmer and a struggling city worker deserve solutions, not reasons to hate each other. Reject prejudice against any race, religion or birthplace.

Unity, not uniformity. We can disagree without denying anyone’s dignity or belonging.

Defend constitutional limits. No president or party owns the government. Demand congressional oversight, respect for lawful court orders and protection for whistleblowers. Defend peaceful protest, religious liberty, due process, free speech and a free press, including when those freedoms inconvenience leaders we support.

Rights defended only for our allies will not remain secure for anyone.

Restore trust in the courts. Demand enforceable ethics standards, financial disclosure and clear recusal rules. I support constitutional reform establishing fixed judicial terms and electing federal judges, with strong safeguards against donor influence and political pressure. Judges must remain free to uphold the Constitution even when their decisions are unpopular.

Let the people directly choose their president. Pursue a constitutional amendment replacing the Electoral College with a national popular vote, supported by clear counting and recount rules. Every voter should matter, wherever that voter lives.

These changes will require sustained work and broad agreement. One election can begin that work.

Give young Americans real influence. Create a “We the People” Youth Council of high school students from rural, suburban and urban communities, reflecting each region’s racial, religious, cultural and economic diversity.

Make participation accessible regardless of family income. Keep the council independent of campaigns. Give students mentoring and regular access to officials from both parties elected on Nov. 3.

Within its first year, the council should publish a democracy agenda, convene bipartisan forums and publicly track lawmakers’ responses.

Young people deserve more than photographs with politicians. They deserve a voice in the democracy they will inherit.

Before voting, ask candidates: What will you do, by when, and how will we measure your progress?

Then keep asking after Election Day.

Verify your registration. Make a voting plan. Help another eligible voter. Attend town halls. Track commitments.

No party owns patriotism. No politician owns America.

On Nov. 3, turn conviction into votes. On Nov. 4, turn promises into accountability.

“We the People” must mean us, and it must mean now.

God bless America. Let us make it worthy of its promise.

I will do my part. I promise.

For years, billionaire Republican donors Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein have given a lot of money to right-wing causes and Republican politicians. The Washington Post recently reported they rank second only to Elon Musk among the biggest donors in the current election cycle. While they live across the border in Lake Forest, Illinois, they take a special interest in Wisconsin. Yet the millions of dollars in donations they’ve given to the Wisconsin Republican Party look like chump change compared to the massive amount of money they’ve showered on the state since Tom Tiffany announced his run for governor.

The Uihliens upped their contributions to the state party from $20,000 in 2014 to $500,000 in 2017 and more than $1 million in 2018, according to campaign finance data published on the Wisconsin Ethics Commission’s Sunshine website.  Altogether, they gave about $3.6 million to the party between 2016 and 2024. But in 2025 and 2026, as Tiffany launched his campaign for governor, the Uihleins gave exponentially more —  about $34.8 million. 

Thanks to a loophole created under former Republican Gov. Scott Walker, donors can sidestep limits on their contributions to particular candidates by giving unlimited money to political parties, which can then pass the money directly to the candidates. And the Republican Party of Wisconsin has funneled the Uihleins’ money directly to Tiffany. Almost all of the money Tiffany raised in the most recent reporting period came from the Uihleins and one other billionaire, Diane Hendricks.

The Uihleins support a lot of Republican candidates and causes, and would likely have supported the Republican no matter who was running for governor this year. But they have a special relationship with Tiffany. 

Back when he was serving in the Wisconsin state Senate, Tiffany’s district included Manitowish Waters, the small town where the Uihleins opened a resort, restaurant, spa, condominium complex and other businesses, turning the sleepy, lakeside community into a fancy tourist destination. 

Tiffany, who lived 30 miles away in Hazelhurst, was very helpful to the Uihleins when some local residents and environmentalists asked the DNR to study the damage caused by a dam on Rest Lake in Manitowish Waters. The dam kept water levels low in the fall so lakeshore property owners didn’t have to take in their piers and high in the spring, just in time for them to take out their boats. According to the River Alliance of Wisconsin, partially closing the dam’s gates in the spring, “to raise the levels back up in time for boating season” meant ”starving the Manitowish River of water at a time when fish spawn. Downstream river property owners would find mud flats where water had been the day before.”

A 2015 article, “Requiem for a River,” posted by the River Alliance, describes how Tiffany slipped a few sentences into the 2015-17 state budget undercutting regulation of the dam and pronouncing a “death sentence” for the Manitowish River, essentially turning Rest Lake, where the Uihliens owned a condominium complex, into a private lake. 

The tiny provision Tiffany added to the budget (#49 in a long list of last-minute budget tweaks), is titled “Dam Water Level Orders” and specifies that the Legislature must approve changes to a dam in Vilas County. With that deft maneuver, Tiffany killed a years-long effort by citizens to save the Manitowish River and rendered moot an environmental study by the DNR.

“What happened to the Manitowish River is a case study of how far we have fallen in resource conservation,” the River Alliance article concludes. “The Manitowish River now has upstream winners – well-connected and wealthy people who know how to use their influence to get what they want – and downstream losers without the same clout. Tiffany’s bill practically makes the Rest Lake chain a private waterway, in a state that prides itself on managing water in the public interest.”

“My constituents elected me to get results,” Tiffany said by way of explanation, in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report on his budget maneuver.

Tiffany’s constituents, of course, included the Uihleins.

His intervention in the matter of the Rest Lake dam was no small favor to the most well-connected and wealthy of all the constituents in his northern Wisconsin district. For the Uihleins, the transformation of Manitowish Waters was a special, personal cause.

Elizabeth Uihlein’s intense focus on funding improvements and reshaping even tiny aesthetic details of Manitowish Waters to her liking divided residents, according to a 2015 article in the Journal Sentinel. Some people appreciated the big investment in the community. Others did not like being left out of decisions about public spaces and objected to how their community was forced to conform to one wealthy woman’s tastes. 

Elizabeth Uihlein herself told the Journal Sentinel, “It’s like a little Aspen. It’s beautiful, but it’s dying.” She suggested that local residents should be grateful for her generosity in providing for them, since they would never make it on their own. “The whole thing is dying up there,” she said. “The money had to come from elsewhere.”

The Uilheins, founders of the packing supply company Uline, are among the richest people in the U.S. They were also some of former Gov. Walker’s biggest donors, a fact that was mentioned in news coverage of the sweetheart deal they got on a swath of lakefront property in Manitowish Waters in 2016. Walker’s DNR gave the Uihleins a stretch of Rest Lake shoreline in exchange for a parcel of state forest land the couple owned in a different part of the state. DNR officials came up with the land swap, the AP reported, after critics objected to the state’s proposal to sell the lakeshore property to Elizabeth Uihlein for more than $100,000 less than its appraised value. 

Long before the deal went through, the Uihleins started making unauthorized improvements on the public land they planned to buy. Some local officials were shocked to discover the extensive paths along the shoreline. Elizabeth Uihlein waved away their concerns. Later, with Walker’s help, she was able to claim the property as her own.

The section of Rest Lake shoreline the Uihleins received from the state gave lake access to their condominium complex. Tiffany’s deft tweak to the state budget ensured that boating conditions remained perfect in the spring, and in the fall the Uihleins and residents of their condo complex never had to go through the hassle of taking in their docks. 

It’s worth asking what kind of return on investment the Uihleins expect to receive from their hyperscale donations to Wisconsin Republicans this year.

“The Uihleins wanted to take over a city. Tom Tiffany gave them their law change,” says Democratic analyst Scot Ross. “A decade later the Uihleins give his campaign $35 million. The dam man wouldn’t have a damn campaign without the Uihleins’ millions.”

In addition to the $34.8 million they funneled to Tiffany through the state party, The Uihleins have also given millions of dollars this cycle to try to elect Republican majorities in the state Legislature. In some cases, they’ve provided almost all of the campaign cash those Republican candidates have raised. 

As the progressive group A Better Wisconsin Together put it in a statement on the politicians who received those donations, “it certainly raises questions about who they’re really looking out for.”

If Tom Tiffany loses in November, it’s not irrational to think he might try to overturn the election results. On Nov. 4, the day after the election, Tiffany might repeat the same, old, tired argument he made when he tried to overturn the 2020 election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania and said that, if he’d had the chance, he would have voted against certifying the results in Wisconsin. Tiffany might again accuse Dane County election officials as being “unscrupulous.” He might say that Milwaukee County allowed “hundreds of thousands of illegal votes to be cast and counted.” 

Tiffany only recently admitted that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and has said he supports an FBI probe into the 2020 election results in our state. 

Mayor Cavalier Johnson has offered Tiffany an open-ended invitation to observe Milwaukee’s elections procedures himself. “I invite you to see our election operation, to talk to officials who conduct our elections and scrutinize, first hand the extensive security and accuracy in place.”  Unsurprisingly, Tiffany has not accepted this offer. 

When Tiffany welcomed FBI agents this spring to investigate Milwaukee election officials, it wasn’t just to sow doubts in the 2020 election or to ensure election integrity. The real goal was to set the stage in case he loses in November. Then, he might  ask Donald Trump to help overturn Wisconsin’s election.

When facing this very real impending emergency to November’s election, what are Wisconsinites to do? Noted decent human being Mr. Fred Rogers has this advice.

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

So who are our helpers? Let’s start with the people you already know. Once you begin to ask around, you will discover that you know several helpers who volunteer at the polls in every election.  Personally, I attend weekly church services at First Unitarian Society of Milwaukee. A high percentage of our congregants volunteer at the polls. If you ask more than one of them, you hear a consistent story. 

Election volunteers care deeply about ensuring  free and fair elections and they do it year after year. They receive extensive training to carefully follow transparent procedures. They are given advice such as, “It is better to go slow, ask questions and get it right.” Additionally, there are so many people involved at the polls and so much transparency that, once you are a part of it, you have full faith in the integrity of Milwaukee elections. So ask around. Share these helpers’ stories before our city’s integrity is questioned this November. Want to join their ranks? They will gladly put you to work.

But what are we to do on Nov. 4? Luckily, you will always find people who are helping.  This winter, our city faced a real threat from federal ICE immigration agents. Before the victories of everyday helpers in Minneapolis, it was reasonable to believe that level of federal overreach would spread to our city. We know this because of the treatment of our neighbor Yessenia Ruano and the detainment of Elvira Benitez-Suarez and Salah Sarsour. Masked ICE agents detained at least 39 of our neighbors in July.  The ICE Out MKE coalition stood up on those dark days and those Milwaukee helpers are still here. I trust the League of Women Voters of Milwaukee County, Souls to the Polls, Milwaukee Turners, and Voces de la Frontera. Wisconsin has plenty of non-partician, non-for-profit helpers and these are just a few.

Your relationship with the nonpartisan not-for-profits that are working to defend our democracy will need to be deeper than digital. Go to a meeting and find out now which local helpers will be your trusted voice. Empowered with this connection, on the day after the election, your plan should be to listen to follow the guidance from these groups and join the organized, active citizens who are standing up.  

Most importantly, don’t relax into believing that Tiffany and Trump are interested in anything but autocracy. The dance of democracy is not choreographed by a single caller. It is not a solo act. It depends on all of us moving together.

It was a dreary, rainy Thursday morning when the state education department announced some depressing news: According to the final, official numbers, 62% of Wisconsin school districts will receive less money in state general aid this year than they did last year. 

Schools are struggling because, for the third year in a row, the state budget put no new money into general school aid, the Department of Public Instruction pointed out in an Oct. 15 press release. That’s after more than 15 years during which annual adjustments to per-pupil general operating revenue in Wisconsin schools has failed to keep pace with inflation. The latest school funding data arrived from DPI under the header: “Nearly two-thirds of districts will receive less aid due to flat state funding, antiquated funding formula.” 

About an hour later, a press release from Gov. Tony Evers’ office cheerfully announced that Wisconsin has ended the fiscal year with a $3.3 billion budget balance and a record  $2.1 billion in the state’s “rainy day” fund. The top line from the governor’s office message was upbeat: “Despite continued national economic turbulence, Wisconsin maintains strong fiscal position, reaching seven consecutive years of record-high General Fund balances during Gov. Evers’ tenure.”

These two announcements, although dramatically different in mood, are directly connected. The reason Wisconsin has a big budget surplus is largely because the state has abandoned its commitment to fund its public schools. 

A slide presentation by Anne Chapman, research director for the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials, graphically illustrates the decline in annual adjustments to per-pupil general operating revenue for Wisconsin public school districts since the 2008-2009 school year. Using Legislative Fiscal Bureau data, Chapman shows the steadily widening gap between the annual adjustment in general operating dollars schools would have had each year if revenue had kept pace with inflation and what they actually got. This year the shortfall reached $3,571 per kid. 

At the same time, schools have been carrying about $1.29 billion in special education costs that are not reimbursed by state or federal aid.

Schools have never bounced back from the drastic cuts to education spending during the administration of former Gov. Scott Walker. But the current budget situation is unprecedented 

“The 2025-27 state budget provided no increase to general school aids. This was an extremely unusual policy choice, especially in light of the fact that the state had a $4.3 billion surplus going into the budget process,” she says. “The last instance of flat or negative general aids across both years of a biennial budget was the 2009-11 budget, at which time the state was facing a deficit.”

In other words, in a historic act of stinginess, the Legislature, while staring at a sizeable budget surplus, chose not to add any money to general school aid, the largest form of state support for K-12 schools. That was a deliberate policy choice, not some sort of emergency measure taken under duress. 

Wisconsin’s school funding formula is complicated —  a mix of state and local funds divvied up based on school districts’ property wealth, enrollment numbers and spending patterns. Different districts get different amounts of funding from the state — and some get none at all. When funding is flat, statewide, some districts get more and some get less. This is the “antiquated” system DPI referred to in its press release. It uses outdated metrics, and doesn’t account for the effects of high poverty or large numbers of English language learners. 

State schools superintendent Jill Underly expanded on this in her State of Education speech in September: “The formula places value on the wrong things. It values enrollment, district spending, and property value, rather than student needs. It fails to ask the most essential question: how much does it actually cost to educate the students who live in a district so that they have an equal opportunity to succeed? A student’s opportunity for success should not depend on their zip code. If we are going to improve the academic outcomes for ALL students, then the funding formula must prioritize student need.”

Because of the complexity of school finance, and the patchwork of have and have-not districts, it’s hard to figure the exact amount Wisconsin has underfunded its schools since 2009, when overall per-pupil spending stopped keeping pace with inflation. But you can get a rough, back of the envelope estimate by taking the three-year rolling average for calculating revenue limit and per pupil categorical aid  from 2025-26  — 781,367 students — and multiplying it by a calculation derived from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau’s data on the cumulative shortfall in annual adjustments to per-pupil general operating revenue, which was $3,468.60. The number you get is $2.7 billion in combined state aid and property tax levies. If the state returned to its much-discussed commitment to fund two-thirds of the cost of public schools, that would mean we’d have to allocate $1.8 billion of the current $3.3 billion surplus to make schools whole. Add to that the $1.29 billion in special ed costs the state has sloughed off on the schools, and it reaches $3 billion.

One of the main effects of the state deciding not to fund schools is that the burden has fallen instead on local property taxpayers, who are confronting another surge in referendum requests from their local school districts in the voting booth this fall.   

Gov. Evers has proposed, by his own estimate in an address to the Wisconsin Public Education Network, $7 billion in new funding for schools that was rejected by the state Legislature over his two terms. He was bitterly disappointed when the state Senate rejected a $1.8 billion deal he struck with Republican legislative leaders that included some money for increased special education funding and property tax relief along with income tax cuts. 

But in his latest message, the governor embraces the unspent money sitting in state coffers as “damn good news.” 

“We’ve ended every fiscal year I’ve been governor with a positive balance,” he says. “We’ve shown that state government can work, and work better for the people we serve, and I’m incredibly proud of our efforts.”

Along with the surplus, the governor’s office celebrates the “largest balance in the ‘rainy day’ fund in state history” — at $2.1 billion, it’s six times larger than when Evers took office.

Meanwhile, schools are in worse and worse shape, and all over the state, people are struggling to keep up with the cost of housing as property taxes rise. 

Whatever feeling of satisfaction there is in knowing the state has squirreled away a fat rainy day fund, when you look outside, it’s raining. 

Do you know someone with an ostomy? I bet you do, but you might not know it.

The public often refers to an ostomy as a “colostomy bag.” But that’s an oversimplification.  An ostomy is a surgery that creates a new opening (stoma) on the abdomen for an individual to eliminate waste.

When the fit is right, most people get on with their lives. When it is wrong, the consequences can be immediate and deeply disruptive. It is this precise reason why Medicare’s decision to bring ostomy supplies into competitive bidding is bad policy.

Scheduled to take effect no later than Jan. 1, 2028, The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) says competitive bidding will lower costs for beneficiaries and reduce fraud, waste and abuse. These are both worthy goals. But saving money on an ostomy product is not necessarily saving money on healthcare—and fighting bad actors at the expense of patients’ access and choice is the wrong strategy.

As a patient, I know where the real cost can show up.

It shows up when my pouch leaks and effluent damages my skin.

It shows up when I cannot leave the house because I am worried about an accident, or when I lose sleep because I fear missing work.

And, in more serious cases, it shows up as a trip to the emergency room.

The fundamental problem with competitive bidding is that it treats products as though they are interchangeable, like a walker or knee brace. Ostomy supplies are not one-size-fits-all. They are prescribed to meet each person’s unique needs — stoma type and size, skin condition, body shape and lifestyle. I went through three different brands of skin barriers and bags before I found a combination that fit my body, and provided me with a sense of security.

Consider eyeglasses. A prescription that works for one person would not work for everyone. Ostomy supplies are no different.

Two products may look similar while behaving completely differently on an individual’s body. One person may need a particular adhesive because of their skin type. Someone else may require a specific pouching configuration for their body or lifestyle.

The federal government points to safeguards, saying that when a physician specifically prescribes a particular brand to avoid an adverse medical outcome, contract suppliers must provide it or help the beneficiary find a supplier that can. This all sounds reassuring on paper. But patients should not have to become medical advocates, insurance experts and supply negotiators every time they reorder the products that allow them to function normally. Nor should they have to wait until a problem becomes a documented “adverse medical outcome” before getting access to what works. Preventing complications is the whole point of good ostomy care.

I am not opposed to controlling Medicare spending. I want to eliminate unnecessary costs just like any taxpayer. But there is a difference between eliminating waste and creating incentives to substitute products that are cheaper but less appropriate for a particular patient. 

If a lower-priced product works perfectly for me, great. But the determination should be based on whether it works for me — not simply whether it won a bidding process.

An ostomy is already a profound adjustment. Many of us have had this life-saving surgery because of birth defects, cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, trauma or other serious medical conditions. We have learned to care for a part of our body in a way we never expected. We have adapted our routines and our sense of self. The least our healthcare system can do is recognize that the products we depend on are not interchangeable widgets.

The question should never be, “How cheaply can Medicare buy this pouch?” but rather, “What does this patient need to stay healthy, independent and out of the hospital?

I am reminded daily that when it comes to something as essential as managing my own body safely and with dignity, the lowest bid should never be more important than the right fit.

Wisconsin is facing another major test of how it plans its energy future.

We Energies has proposed a new 750-megawatt natural gas plant in Wrightstown, the Fox North Energy Center. If approved, it could begin operating around 2032 and run for 30 years or more. With Fox North added to the queue, We Energies now has roughly 4.25 gigawatts of methane gas generation awaiting Public Service Commission approval.

The utility says the buildout is needed to meet rapidly growing electricity demand and maintain reliability. Data centers are a major part of that growth.

But projected demand does not make new gas plants inevitable.

Wisconsin is being asked to make decades-long energy decisions based on electricity demand forecasts that are changing faster than our regulatory system. That is exactly why new methane gas plants must first prove they are the cleanest, lowest-cost, lowest-risk option before customers are committed to paying for them.

Before Wisconsin commits customers to decades of fuel costs and long-lived infrastructure, regulators should ask a more important question: What combination of resources can meet that demand reliably, affordably and with the least long-term risk?

That means comparing new gas plants not just with one solar farm or one battery project, but with complete portfolios of solar, wind, storage, energy efficiency, transmission, distributed resources, nuclear power and demand flexibility.

Other states, including Minnesota and North Carolina, have already shown that regulators can challenge utility assumptions and require closer examination of alternatives rather than treating new gas plants as the default response to projected load growth.

Wisconsin can do the same.

That approach is already gaining support in Wisconsin, including among labor leaders who see comprehensive energy planning as an opportunity to create good-paying jobs.

Climate Jobs Wisconsin, whose leadership includes representatives of Wisconsin building trades and construction unions, recently advanced a “35 by ’35” clean-energy and good-jobs agenda. The proposal envisions roughly 35 gigawatts of new clean-energy resources by 2035, including storage, utility-scale solar, wind, nuclear generation and networked distributed power. A plan  developed by the PSC would map what gets built, where and when, establish resource targets and create a grid-investment roadmap.

That is exactly the kind of planning Wisconsin needs.

Whether policymakers ultimately adopt those exact numbers is less important than the principle behind them: Evaluate the whole system before locking customers into decades of costs.

And expanding clean energy does not have to mean sacrificing Wisconsin’s best farmland or open space.

Renewable development can be directed toward brownfields, marginal and previously disturbed lands, rooftops, parking structures, industrial parks, sites near substations and existing infrastructure. Solar can also be integrated with agricultural production through agrivoltaics, allowing farming and energy production to coexist rather than compete.

Wisconsin should be able to protect prime agricultural land while dramatically expanding clean energy. Those goals are compatible if we plan carefully.

The jobs case matters, too.

Climate Jobs Wisconsin’s agenda is built around creating clean-energy careers with prevailing wages, registered apprenticeships and local hiring. It proposes tying those labor standards to PSC approvals and expanding Wisconsin’s ability to build new energy infrastructure with skilled union labor.

That is important because Wisconsin’s energy transition should not be framed as a choice between workers and the environment.

Done well, it is an industrial green growth strategy.

It can create careers for electricians, operating engineers, laborers, carpenters, pipefitters and other skilled trades while reducing exposure to volatile fuel costs and strengthening Wisconsin manufacturing.

The rapid growth of data centers makes this kind of comprehensive planning even more important.

Wisconsin families, farmers, manufacturers and existing businesses should not become the financial backstop for those investments.

If a gas plant is justified largely by projected data-center demand, regulators should determine how certain that demand really is, what alternatives were considered, who will pay for the plant and who bears the stranded-cost risk if forecasts change.

Transparency is equally important.

That means disclosing projected electricity and water use, infrastructure requirements, tax arrangements and long-term impacts before commitments become difficult to reverse.

It also means using transparent Community Benefit Agreements, so benefits are public, measurable and enforceable.

Transparency is not anti-development. It is how responsible development earns trust.

Wisconsin does not have an electricity shortage. It has a planning challenge.

The choice before us is not new gas or reliability. It is whether Wisconsin evaluates all available resources together before committing customers to another generation of long-term fossil fuel infrastructure costs.

The Fox North proposal gives Wisconsin another opportunity to get that right.

A new gas plant should have to prove it is necessary. It should not be treated as inevitable.

It is still weeks until the Nov. 3 midterm, but the early returns are in for Donald Trump, who wants voters to pretend he is on the ballot.  

Trump is at his lowest point ever in Wisconsin, with 60% of registered voters disapproving of him, 53% strongly, Marquette University polling says. 

Yet Tom Tiffany, Trump’s endorsed candidate for governor and a 100% supporter of his policies — which almost all poll even worse than Trump himself — is virtually tied with Dem David Crowley.  A good chunk of the electorate has not yet made the Tiffany-Trump connection. That may be the deciding factor over the home stretch.

Trump’s Iran war and its impact on skyrocketing gasoline and diesel prices are widely unpopular, and Tiffany has repeatedly voted to support the war and to leave  Trump unchecked.  One new Crowley TV spot takes Tiffany’s voting record  head-on, calling Tiffany “loyal to Trump, not Wisconsin.”  Trump is toxic.  Crowley is not just  running against “three billionaires” who have bought Tiffany with over $45 million — the majority of the money raised by the Republican gubernatorial  campaign.  Diane Hendricks, along with Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, are Trump’s billionaires. 

When Trump lost the 2020 election, the Uihleins provided millions of dollars to political groups that helped organize and promote the events of Jan. 6, 2021. And prior to the violent insurrection that day, Trump accomplice Tiffany  signed on to a brief to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, voted against certifying the election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania, and said he would have opposed the will of Wisconsin voters and invalidated our state’s electoral votes, too.

This week, in an interview with WLUK in the Fox Valley, Tiffany was asked if he’d be a rubber stamp for Donald Trump. Tiffany’s response: “They should check Tom Tiffany’s record.” 

Tiffany’s record in Washington is one of rubber stamping everything Trump has done to make things worse for Wisconsin. One hundred per cent of the time. Tiffany has supported Trump’s chaotic trade wars and reckless tariffs that have devastated farmers and raised the cost of groceries. He voted for healthcare cuts and rising insurance premiums for working families to pay for…you guessed it — tax breaks for Trump’s billionaires. 

Craig Gilbert, longtime Journal Sentinel political reporter who analyzes, interprets and explains polls, put it this way in his piece based on the latest MU poll: “Trump disapprovers” — those who disapprove of Trump — are a key voting bloc.

Tiffany now gets 11% of those voters.  Gilbert says he needs 15 to 20% to get to a majority on Nov. 3.  Crowley has a big lead among independent voters, but Tiffany is chipping away at that with his negative TV onslaught funded by the Trump billionaires. 

The MU poll shows 81% of independents disapprove of Trump, and even 62% of non-MAGA Republicans disapprove.  Those voters will be the target audience as Election Day approaches. 

As I was writing this, as if to underscore my point,  the Crowley campaign just launched a hard-hitting TV spot that makes the connection between Tiffany and Trump.  The subject line on a Crowley fund-raising email today is “100 percent of the time.” You can expect to hear a lot more about Tiffany and Trump between now and Nov. 3.

Voters don’t need to pretend Trump is on the ballot. For Wisconsin voters who will decide the outcome of the governor’s race, he is. 

The flyers that arrived in mailboxes in Oneida County, Wisconsin, just days before the April 1, 2014, county board elections, were nothing if not alarming. “Some County Supervisors have a Dam Plan which is much more than Water Over the Dam,” they warned. “Their plan would ELIMINATE DAMS!*” 

Underneath this incendiary accusation, in tiny type, was this asterisked elaboration: “*During the amendment process to the county master plan, Supervisor Martini proposed the removal of dams in Oneida County. The proposal did not advance.” The flyers, otherwise identical, each bore the names and photos of one of the four county board candidates who would heroically “Stop Their Dam Plan!”

Dams are critical infrastructure in northern Wisconsin, essential for lakefront homes and resorts, boating, fishing and other outdoor recreation. To seek their wholesale eradication, as Oneida County Board Supervisor Bob Martini allegedly did, is akin to proposing the expulsion of the Green Bay Packers. A 2013 report counted 42 dams in Oneida County, about half described as large, and half as small, some privately owned and some owned by utility companies, towns, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, and the county itself. 

In the April 1 election, two targeted incumbents were defeated. Martini lost badly to challenger Robb Jensen, 213 to 128 votes, and Supervisor Candy Sorensen lost to challenger Lance Krolczyk by fewer than a dozen votes. A third incumbent, Bob Mott, beat a challenger by a narrow margin, while a fourth targeted candidate, Alan VanRaalte, won election to an open seat.

In February 2015, I wrote a two–part report on this matter for the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, now Wisconsin Watch, where I worked as a writer and editor. I noted that both Martini and Sorensen blamed the flyers for their defeats, and all four targeted contenders said the representations in the flyers were false. 

Martini, a former rivers protection coordinator for the state DNR, told me he had “never made an amendment or proposal to remove dams in Oneida County” and does not support a policy of doing so. He noted that counties don’t even have this authority, adding “It’s just wrong to lie to try to get elected.” Sorensen said that, during her time as a county board member, “there has never been any discussion or plan on removing Oneida County dams.” Mott and VanRaalte likewise denied any knowledge of a dam-removal plan, with VanRaalte exclaiming, “I live on a lake that’s created by a dam!”

What makes this story significant 12 years after the fact is that the flyers were produced with input from a Republican state senator who went on to become a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and is now his party’s nominee in the race for Wisconsin governor. His name is Tom Tiffany.

Tiffany’s explanation

When I interviewed Tiffany in 2015, he admitted to me that he helped craft the wording of this flyer, as well as another flyer aimed at boosting the candidacies of the same four candidates by accusing the county board of wanting to sell a county building at a substantial loss. He told me he was acting not in his capacity as a state senator but as a resident of Oneida County: “I care about my county. It’s important to be engaged.”

Tiffany provided a convoluted explanation for why the mailing, disclaimed by all four targeted candidates, was somehow still true. He argued that besides playing an “instrumental” role in past DNR dam removal projects, Martini served on the board on the River Alliance of Wisconsin, which Tiffany said is “associated with” a national group called American Rivers, which has “a bias toward removing dams.” The folks at the River Alliance said the two groups had no formal ties.

Tiffany also claimed that, during discussions on a county land-use plan, Martini had offered “some wording that was favorable to dam removal when possible.” Jensen, the challenger who beat Martini, also latched onto this thin reed for alleging that some board members had a plan to eliminate the county’s dams, saying a draft land-use plan favored by Martini included this language: “Support dam/drainage way repair and removal where appropriate.” Martini said he had no role in crafting this language, which was removed when some towns objected.

In a recent email exchange, Martini elaborated on the allegation that precipitated his electoral defeat: “The flyer said there was a plan to remove all the dams in Oneida County. There was no such plan. Even if there was a plan I would have opposed it on several grounds.” He went on to list some examples of dam-removal efforts he opposed during his time at the DNR.

DOJ investigation

In August 2014, a group formed in response to the flyers, Citizens for Democracy in Oneida County, filed a complaint against Tiffany and others with the state Government Accountability Board, an entity which at that time oversaw state election laws. The complaint alleged more than 70 violations of state elections laws, most dealing with whether the mailings met requisite disclosure rules and reporting requirements. It also accused Sen. Tiffany of causing “the dissemination of improper campaign information.”

The GAB declined to investigate, saying it defers to county district attorneys to investigate and prosecute such matters. And so the group sent its complaint to then-Oneida County DA Michael Schiek, who forwarded it to the state Justice Department, then headed by Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel. “We have received the information and it is under review,” DOJ spokeswoman Anne Schwartz told me in January 2015.

Recently, in response to an open records request and some prodding, the DOJ released to me its 91-page file on the case and associated documents. These records show that Special Agent Loreen Glaman was assigned in April 2015 to investigate the allegations, She interviewed at least a half-dozen people, including all four of the candidates the flyers were meant to assist. Tiffany himself does not appear to have been interviewed, but his role was described by Jensen, who “explained that Tom Tiffany approached him and suggested a mailing” and “assisted in designing the flyer.”

On July 15, 2015, Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey M. Gabrysiak wrote a “closeout of investigation” memorandum to Assistant Attorney General Roy Korte. The memo says the investigation found that while “some of the conduct in question appeared to constitute technical violations of the state’s election laws,” none appeared to be deliberate. Specifically, Gabrysiak concluded the flyers’ almost microscopic and bizarrely misspelled disclosure — “Authoized and pad for by candidate” — fell short of what the law requires, which is to include the name of the candidate or committee in this wording.

But Gabrysiak said the more significant allegations reported by Citizens for Democracy in Oneida County “lacked merit,” calling the one exception regarding requisite disclosure “minor” and “likely attributable to a lack of knowledge regarding campaign law or simple inadvertence.” He shrugged off the complaint’s allegations of untruthfulness, saying “Whether false statements have been made in campaign fliers is a subject of debate.”

Nonetheless, Gabrysiak recommended and ultimately sent warning letters to the four candidates, saying they “failed to properly name the sponsoring candidate or committee as required by law.” The letters said that while this failure was likely not intentional, the candidates would not be given “the benefit of the doubt as you were in this situation” should they again run for office. “This letter is meant to put you on notice that you will be expected [to] make yourself familiar with, and comply with, all applicable campaign laws and that failure to do so will subject you to criminal prosecution.” 

Far from the truth

What is most remarkable about this episode is the vastness of the gulf between the truth and what was stated in the flyers that Tiffany instigated and helped craft. While it may not rival other concerns about Tiffany, including his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, Tiffany’s actions in connection with these flyers raise serious concerns about his honesty and integrity. 

The record shows that Tiffany set out, with some success, to kneecap candidates for local office with the blatantly untrue accusation that they had a “plan … to ELIMINATE DAMS” in Oneida County. And he stuck to this fabrication even after it was pointed out that none of the targeted candidates favored any such thing.

At the time I wrote about this episode, I remember being shocked by Tiffany’s apparent disregard for the truth, which I considered extraordinary. It was my impression, based on decades of reporting, that people in public office rarely say things that are flat-out and demonstrably untrue, as Tiffany did in this case. There is — or at least there was, back in the days before Donald Trump — too much danger that outright lies will be exposed and consequences will ensue. And indeed, the wounds opened by Tiffany’s conduct prompted some members of Oneida County to file a complaint that led to official investigation, however unsuccessful it proved to be.

In his current campaign for governor, Tiffany has also displayed a predilection for dishonesty. For instance, Tiffany has sought to distance himself from Trump’s wildly unpopular war in Iran, saying it’s time to wrap things up, when in fact Tiffany has voted five times against resolutions to end the war. 

Tiffany, to his discredit, has recently been airing an ads blaming Crowley for allowing a county jail inmate to download child pornography. It features Crowley’s face alongside text that proclaims “Used the tablet to access child pornography,” as though it were Crowley who was doing the accessing.

But even this ad is arguably more defensible than the flyers that Tiffany devised in 2014; the county jail does have a program to provide tablets to inmates, some of whom got busted for misusing the privilege. The fairness of blaming Crowley for this is debatable, but at least the criticism is based on something that actually happened, unlike the plan to eliminate dams.

I suspect the current ads were created with input from campaign professionals who are mindful of just how far they can push the boundaries of campaign speech, while the 2014 flyers reflected Tiffany’s own unchecked inclination to deceit. Maybe that’s why he is no longer interested in trying to defend them. Tiffany’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Correction: A previous version of this story mistakenly referred to the war in Iran as the war in Iraq. We regret the error.

U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil’s investments helped make him millionaire, nearly doubling his net worth from $812,000 to nearly $1.9 million since he went to Congress, Wisconsin Watch reports. According to the financial data tracking platform Unusual Whales, Steil’s stock portfolio was the fourth most profitable among members of Congress in 2025, outperforming the S&P 500 by 62.5%. Yet Steil is running as a watchdog on congressional stock trading. 

“You deserve a Congress you can trust, that’s working for you. … I’m leading the charge to ban members of Congress from trading stocks,” Steil says in a campaign ad now running in Wisconsin’s suddenly competitive 1st Congressional District.

The ad refers to Steil’s Stop Insider Trading Act, which failed in the Senate this week. Steil blamed Democrats for blocking his attempt at “ethics reform” and vowed to keep fighting.  But Wisconsin’s Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin called the bill a “sham,” pointing out that there are much stronger bills that, unlike Steil’s, require members to divest their stock holdings.

Steil’s bill allows members of Congress to keep and sell stocks. It places no restrictions on their purchases of cryptocurrency holdings, betting in prediction markets or trades in industry-specific mutual funds or private stock offerings from corporations. 

These giant loopholes drew the attention of Steil’s colleague U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado, who grilled Steil on the shortcomings in his bill during a House Rules Committee hearing on July 20. 

“There are many bills that have been introduced … that would ensure that the sale and the purchase of stocks is banned, and this bill does not do that,” Neguse pointed out. He and Steil debated whether a disclosure rule in Steil’s bill is a sufficient safeguard (Neguse didn’t think so), and why the bill didn’t cover prediction markets. 

The Senate unanimously passed a ban on members and staff participating in prediction markets, just one week after a U.S. special forces soldier was charged with using classified information to bet on the capture of the Venezuelan president. Members of Congress have access to all kinds of sensitive information they could use for personal gain by placing bets on wars, economic crises or elections, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer warned. Why can’t the House pass the same ban, Neguse asked. Steil replied that he has been working on a separate bill concerning prediction markets, which are a “new and novel technology.” 

“It took the Senate a day!” Neguse shot back. “It’s a one-page resolution. It literally is a paragraph. It just says members of the Senate are banned from participating in prediction markets.” Neguse suggested that the House adopt the Senate’s language and pass the same resolution immediately. 

Instead, Steil has crafted a narrow bill that imposes fines on members and their families if they bet on specific government policy matters that come to their attention through their congressional work. Like his narrow stock-trading bill, which avoids making members give up lucrative investments, the Stop Lawmakers from Predicting Act takes a permissive view of members interested in playing in prediction markets unless there is a specific, demonstrable conflict of interest that a member’s colleagues on the House ethics panel deem worthy of a fine.

At best, that’s a different goal than the “Congress you can trust” Steil talks about in his campaign ad. Instead of protecting the public from corrupt public officials who seek to profit from their privileged perch, Steil is intent on not making things too uncomfortable for his fellow members sitting on cushy portfolios.

It says a lot that Steil’s prediction market bill and his Stop Insider Trading Act both have the full support of President Donald Trump. As Baldwin points out, Trump is exempt from Steil’s proposed restrictions on stock trading, even though Trump made 21,000 stock trades and added $2.2 billion to his personal wealth in just the first year of his second term.

This is the real hole in Steil’s claim to be an ethics watchdog in Congress. His compromised reform proposals don’t come close to making up for the heavy lifting he has been doing in office carrying water for Trump. He has been a chief enabler for a president who is setting new records for unethical behavior as he uses his office to enrich himself. Along with his weak efforts at “ethics reform,” Steil has been pushing new voting restrictions dear to Trump’s heart. His proposed national Voter ID Act is even more restrictive than Wisconsin’s toughest-in-the-nation voter ID law, barring the use of student IDs to vote and potentially disenfranchising millions of eligible voters who don’t meet the requirements. 

Steil does not present as a rage-filled MAGA warrior. Like his mentor, former House Speaker Paul Ryan, he has repeatedly won reelection by comfortable margins while projecting a friendly, thoughtful image in his home district, even as his work in Washington diverges from his constituents’ interests. But as crises pile up, it’s getting harder to put a pleasant gloss on loyalty to an administration that is rapaciously devouring the nation’s wealth while trying to disenfranchise its citizens. 

Wisconsin’s 1st CD has attracted national attention recently as the political landscape gets tougher for Republicans even in solidly red House districts. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee added Steil’s reelection race to its Red to Blue list and an internal DCCC poll conducted Sept. 21-23 — with a margin of error of 4.4% — found the race is a dead heat between Steil and his challenger, former VA hospital nurse Mitchell Berman, with the two candidates tied 48-48 among likely voters, a plurality of whom identified as Republicans.

A new Berman campaign ad, paid for in part by the DCCC, which now sees Steil as a target, emphasizes Steil’s stock portfolio. In it, Berman declares, “Public service shouldn’t be about getting rich.” Steil couldn’t have said it better himself.

President Trump has an uncanny knack for speaking to problems that Americans experience —and then taking actions that make  things worse.

Take international  trade, which most Americans see as in need of reform.  Trump talked about getting better deals and helping U.S. workers displaced by NAFTA and other global trade agreements. But  instead of helping working people, he then launched a series of  a trade wars that no one asked for, imposing high tariffs tht triggered retaliation and sent prices for consumer goods soaring, while alienating  close allies like Canada. 

The upcoming G20 ministerial meeting in Milwaukee from Sept. 30 to Oct. 1 will feature leaders from around the world coming together to discuss these matters, especially trade, making Wisconsin the stage  for discussing global policy on everything from artificial intelligence to fuel prices.  World leaders including Trump will have the opportunity to hear from  working people, especially those who will take to the streets.

Long before  Trump campaigned on the promise to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and other “bad deals” for the U.S.,, Ross Perot during his unsuccessful bid for the Presidency in 1992 said he could hear  a “giant sucking sound” from NAFTA, as firms prepared to leave  the U.S. for countries where they could pay workers next to nothing.  That sound became  deafening in Wisconsin after President Bill Clinton signed NAFTA  into law in 1993. 

The deal took a heavy toll on the  dairy industry. Shortly before the agreement, in 1990, our state had about 34,000 operations milking cows.  As of August 2026, we have for the first time dropped below 5,000 licensed dairies. 

Even as the farms closed, production increased , along with exports.  The US Dairy Export Council notes that export values were $656 million in 1995, climbing to $8.32 billion in 2024. Wisconsin participates in these markets sending cheese, fluid milk, and whey to Canada and Mexico mainly.  Moreover, Wisconsin dairies produce about one million pounds of milk more than they did in 1995 – a 33% increase.

But more production hasn’t meant more stability. In fact, more exports have led to greater price volatility, hitting smaller farms harder because they tend to have smaller profit margins.  Adding insult to injury,  long before the Iran war the percent of farm expenses dedicated to fertilizer more than tripled, from about 2% in 2003 to just under 8% in 2025.  Trump’s tariffs, meanwhile, leave farmers especially in Wisconsin even more vulnerable to unforeseen economic disruptions. 

Amid these worsening economic conditions, Trump has campaigned on a promise to help dairy farmers, alleging that the Canadians are “ripping us off.” 

But Canada’s protections for it dairy farmers are not Wisconsin dairy farmers’ problem. In fact, Wisconsin farmers have begun seeking advice from their Canadian counterparts, expressing  interest in  the Canadian system.  Canada’s supply management system assures dairy farmers a fair price as industry stakeholders  including farmers  meet regularly to adjust supply and demand. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s renegotiation of NAFTA, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in 2019, did not stop farms from closing as bankruptcies in the Midwest continue to rise.

Global trade agreements, including those negotiated by Trump, failed to deal Wisconsin farmers and  workers a better hand.

From when NAFTA was passed until it became the USMCA, Wisconsin lost nearly 10% of its industrial workforce, or over 46,000 jobs.

On a positive note, according to the High Road Strategy Center’s State of Working Wisconsin Report, years of manufacturing decline seem to be ending as 2025 boasted a record high median wage of $26.17.  Unfortunately for workers, that same report finds that rising inflation will eat into wage gains and inequality is worsening because Black workers are being left behind. 

Under the current global trade regime, workers find themselves between a rock and a hard place.  For instance, workers at CNH Industrial in Racine and Burlington, Iowa, went on strike in 2022 for 260 days and gained a new contract in 2023.  But then, workers at the Racine plant found their company announcing layoffs and plans to shift some production to Mexico in 2024. 

Iconic firms in Milwaukee like Master Lock had their workforces depleted in the 1990s after NAFTA was passed and production moved south. Master Lock totally closed in the city in 2024. 

Workers fed up with being treated like pawns by their corporate employers and elected political leaders  will convene in Milwaukee before and during the G20 talks. 

The day before talks begin, on Sept. 29, Citizen Action of Wisconsin will host a panel of folks representing farmers, labor, and the environment to discuss the current global trade regime and possible alternatives.  The next day, the Milwaukee Labor Council is calling on many of these same groups to stand together and protest. 

In terms of concrete demands, most of the groups attending these events support the recently introduced House Resolution 1286. With 51 co-sponsors and endorsed by multiple organizations, including Citizens Trade Campaign, the AFL-CIO, United Steelworkers (USW), International Association of Machinists (IAM Union), Sierra Club, National Family Farm Coalition, Public Citizen, and others, the Resolution calls on our leaders to include within trade deals fair wages for workers, effective anti-monopoly policies, strong environmental standards, and data protection policies and AI regulations. 

Free trade deals have cost Wisconsin considerably.  Thankfully, the working people hurt by  these deals still have the strength to make their voices heard.  It’s time for our lawmakers and  the other leaders at the G20 to listen to them, and start making deals to benefit working people instead of harming them.

The Republican candidate for governor of Wisconsin, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, has been a reliable ally of President Donald Trump in Congress. He objected to the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, voted repeatedly against reining in Trump’s war in Iran, supported the massive healthcare cuts that are hitting rural Wisconsin particularly hard, and cast the deciding vote in the House for a measure that, had it not stalled in the Senate, would have banned all AI regulation by the states for the next 10 years.

But recently Tiffany has softened his tone, distancing himself from some of Trump’s most unpopular positions. Just this month he conceded that Biden won the 2020 presidential election and said it’s time to wind down the war in Iran. He also claims he wants to “preserve Medicaid for our most vulnerable” and is campaigning on preventing AI data centers from eating up Wisconsin’s farmland.

A recent text to voters from the Tiffany campaign strikes a friendly, moderate tone, declaring “it’s time to fix problems.”

“When I’m governor, we’ll raise academic standards. We’ll make health care more transparent, stop Wall Street from buying our homes, and lower property taxes. Kids who can read, prices you can see, and a home you can own. That’s a Wisconsin that works for everyone, and that’s the commonsense governor I’ll be.”

But this week, the mask slipped. 

On Thursday, Tiffany’s campaign blocked two reporters from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel from covering a campaign event. Taking a page from Trump, who yanked White House press credentials from CNN, POLITICO and MS NOW this week because he doesn’t like their reporting, Tiffany and his campaign staff called the Journal-Sentinel’s coverage “slanted” and said only journalists who produce what the campaign deems “balanced” coverage will be allowed to report on his candidacy. 

Tiffany’s effort to keep out journalists whose reporting he doesn’t like violates the same constitutional principle protecting the free press that a federal judge cited when he ordered the White House to restore press passes to the three news outlets Trump banned.

When he was asked about Trump’s White House press ban earlier this week, Tiffany claimed to be a believer in an “open, free press” and said he was not planning to restrict journalists’ access. But, as Henry Redman reports, his campaign not only blocked Journal-Sentinel  reporters Mary Spicuzza and David Clarey from covering Tiffany’s event Thursday, it followed up with a personal attack on Spicuzza from the campaign’s official  social media account, calling her a “liberal activist” and doubling down on the Trump-like threat to ban journalists whose stories Tiffany doesn’t consider “balanced.”

Those stories likely include Spicuzza’s report this week on campaign finance records showing that three billionaires are responsible for about two-thirds of the campaign cash Tiffany has raised so far. 

Spicuzza’s serious, factual journalism raises real questions about whose interests Tiffany would represent as governor — the millions of ordinary Wisconsinites whose problems he says he wants to solve, or his three ultra-rich donors, Diane Hendricks and Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein — two of whom live in Illinois —who have given him close to $10 million. Richard Uihlein’s Restoration of America PAC has separately spent another $11.3 million to boost Tiffany, Spicuzza and her colleague Eva Wen report. All that money has given Tiffany a massive financial advantage in the governor’s race, they point out.

By banning journalists and ducking multiple debates, Tiffany reinforces the impression that he prefers to remain in a bubble with like-minded Republicans and high-dollar donors, instead of making himself available to the public and the reporters whose job it is to shine a light on public officials and keep voters informed. That does not bode well for a potential Tiffany administration.

In addition to Tiffany’s Trump-like aversion to criticism and his attacks on a widely respected reporter, his coziness with the conspiracy-minded fringe elements of the Republican party are cause for concern. 

This week, Examiner reporters Redman and Baylor Spears published an investigative report on Tiffany supporter Leonard Boltz, the pilot who crashed while flying Tiffany in a private plane earlier this month. Boltz, the chair of the Langlade County Republican Party and a retired major in the U.S. Air Force, has spent a lot of time flying Tiffany around the state in his small, private plane during the current campaign season. He is also deeply involved in promulgating election-related conspiracy theories and, Spears and Redman report, has said that if Tiffany loses in November it will be because of “cheating” by Democrats. 

Unlike Tiffany, Boltz does not present as a friendly, folksy rural Wisconsinite. Nor has he backed away from the more paranoid edges of MAGA world. In a video of a speech he gave to the Langlade Republican Party in June, linked in Redman and Spears’ story,  he paces and rants, spewing dark warnings about cheating Democrats whom he says are engaged in rampant voter fraud. He gave that speech in front of a poster proclaiming the heroism of Harry Wait, the Racine County election conspiracy theorist who was convicted of breaking the law by impersonating Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Racine Mayor Cory Mason to request absentee ballots in their names. Boltz, like Wait, wanted to drive Vos out of office for not doing enough to overturn the 2020 election results. 

It’s sobering to contemplate the possibility of a governor of Wisconsin who is close to the most out-there conspiracy theorists in the state party and who has championed their preposterous claims. 

It’s even more concerning if that governor considers himself above scrutiny by the press. When Spears and Redman traveled to a Tiffany campaign event this week to try to get a comment from Tiffany for their story about Boltz, a campaign staffer intervened physically to block the question and adopted an aggressive posture that appeared to be designed to intimidate them. 

That’s not an atmosphere consistent with press freedom, democracy, or a healthy Wisconsin.

While gray wolves in Wisconsin and the Great Lakes region have been considered recovered by the federal government since the early 2000s, wolves currently continue to be listed as endangered in Wisconsin and Michigan, and threatened in Minnesota.  Delisting was intended to give states and tribes flexibility to manage wolf populations when wolves are no longer at risk of extinction. There has been a complicated history of delisting and relisting in the Great Lakes region, between 2007 –2022.  Each time the federal government attempted to delist wolves in the region, some group opposing delisting has filed lawsuits and managed to get wolves relisted as endangered (or threatened in Minnesota).

Tom Tiffany, as a member of the Wisconsin Assembly, the state Senate, , and as a member of Congress, has been an especially vocal supporter of  intense management of the state wolf population, and has attempted to delist wolves through congressional action. But Tiffany’s own rhetoric, exaggerations and misleading comments have not been useful at attaining delisting, and may have emboldened efforts to challenge such delistings through the courts.

As an Assembly member, Tiffany helped co-author a wolf hunting bill in 2012 that forced DNR to hold a wolf hunting and trapping season whenever wolves were not listed as threatened or endangered.  Unlike most hunting seasons that allowed DNR broad authority to regulate the harvest, the legislated wolf hunting season represented a major political overreach, which may have been a factor that resulted in wolves being relisted at the end of 2014.

In 2018, as a state senator, Tiffany attempted to defund wolf conservation in Wisconsin until federal delisting occurred.  Such defunding would have made it difficult to determine wolf abundance and the sound scientific management of the wolf population to allow delisting to occur. Luckily the bill to defund wolf conservation did not pass.

Tiffany has frequently made false claims about wolf attacks on people, exploding wolf population, and exploding rates of depredations on pets and livestock.  No wolf attack on humans has been documented in Wisconsin, and Tiffany’s references to attacks are cases of wolves losing fear of people and displaying bold behavior, but none have resulted in physical attacks on people. Depredations on pets and livestock peaked in Wisconsin in 2010, and have declined since then.  Most years less than 10% of state wolf packs attack pets or livestock, and wolf depredation represents much less than 1% of all the things that kill cattle in Wisconsin.  The wolf population in Wisconsin has mostly stabilized at 1,000-1,200 wolves since 2018, and is not increasing exponentially as often suggested by Tiffany

In the U.S. Congress, Tiffany has tried in two bills to attempt nationwide gray wolf delisting.  The bills included “Trust the Science Act” and “Pet and Livestock Protection Act.” Neither bill has succeeded thus far.  In support of these bills, Tiffany has insisted the Wisconsin DNR is very capable of managing the state wolf population.  But at an open house event in Wisconsin, after running for governor, he called the state wolf plan passed by the Wisconsin DNR “not a wolf management plan” and an “impediment to management of the wolf.”  Tiffany totally rejects the carefully crafted and science-informed wolf plan developed by the Wisconsin DNR over a three-year period and approved in 2023.  Tiffany has implied that major reductions are needed to reduce wolves to 350 or 500 wolves.  This would require very intense controls and eliminating wolves from 60-70 % of their range in Wisconsin.  Such intense controls would look more like the extermination programs that caused wolves to become endangered, and not like the proper management of a recovered wolf population. While Tiffany adds his name to the “Trust the Science Act”, he certainly shows no trust for scientific estimates of the state wolf population, or the science-based state wolf management plan.  

Wolves in the Great Lakes states should be delisted, and state and tribal wildlife agencies should be authorized to manage local wolf populations. Some farmers have had extensive problems with wolves and more flexible management including removal of problem wolves by government agents and landowners will help reduce conflicts.  The Wisconsin DNR has a well-designed wolf management plan, which allows some level of hunting and trapping as is required by law, but the plan also focuses on ecological and cultural benefits of wolves, while still helping reduce conflicts. 

Yes, Wisconsin DNR can manage wolves, and delisting and sound management can best be achieved if politicians such as Tom Tiffany stay out of the way.

U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican candidate for governor of Wisconsin, is skipping multiple debates with his Democratic rival, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley. 

Asked why he decided to break the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association’s 36-year streak of hosting gubernatorial candidate debates, Tiffany said, “We agreed to do one debate. In my experience in Congress as well as the state Legislature, doing one debate is sufficient.”

That’s absurd. In this high-stakes election, as Wisconsinites confront skyrocketing costs, healthcare cuts, struggling public schools, questions about election integrity, the threats posed by artificial intelligence and data centers, among many other issues, a single one-hour forum hosted by WISN on Oct. 21 cannot possibly cover their concerns in depth.

Another planned debate, hosted by the Milwaukee County Intergovernmental Cooperation Council, featuring questions gathered from mayors and community leaders around the state, was also called off this week after Tiffany indicated he would not participate.

The jilted hosts expressed their dismay in a joint statement, saying they are “deeply disappointed” and hope that the next governor will take seriously the local government issues the candidates will not be discussing on the debate stage Oct. 8.

The loss of these debates means Wisconsinites won’t have the opportunity to get answers to real people’s questions. Instead, they’ll have to settle for scripted talking points and millions of dollars in depressing negative ads.

The moderator of the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association debate, journalism professor Jill Geisler, has for years helped gather questions that are important to voters in different parts of the state. “We had someone who came from a community that had been using bottled water because of PFAS … we had someone asking about climate change’s effect on the wild rice harvest in Wisconsin,” she says, recalling some recent debate questions.

“I do think that we’re living in a more siloed era where people prefer to speak through the channels that they know are friendliest to them,” says Geisler, a professor at Loyola University Chicago. “I think what I worry about is that people think of truly well researched debates, you know, where people are asking researched questions, evidence-based questions, that that’s some kind of gotcha trap, and it’s not, you know, it is simply not that.”

The WBA team had already been hard at work planning the debate logistics and gathering issues important to local communities across the state when the debate was canceled. Before every debate, a point person does copious research on each topic, its history, legal background and the candidates’ positions and voting records. “Then we lock up for the last two days to workshop the questions,” Geisler says. After the debate, WBA publishes its questions online with links so people can read more about the issues. “We put all that out there because we think that we can’t cover it all in an hour,” Geisler says. “And people might want to do their own research, but they could see what we used.”

The broadcasters and the local government officials who were painstakingly putting together questions were planning to ask the candidates not just what they have to say about hot-button issues, but what specifically each would do as governor to address SNAP cuts, rural hospital closures, the childcare shortage and other urgent matters confronting Wisconsinites.

All of this serious, in-depth discussion has now been lost.

As President Donald Trump’s approval numbers crash and once-safe Republican congressional districts appear to be in play, Tiffany might want to avoid tough questions about his record of supporting Trump between 93% and 100% of the time while in Congress.

He seems to be leaning on an ad campaign to recast himself from MAGA warrior to folksy midwestern moderate, while relying on his supporters to attack his opponent. 

“In Wisconsin and other states, it is more often Republicans than Democrats who avoid debates,” says University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden. “There are sometimes exceptions, as when Mandela Barnes resisted doing more than one debate with Ron Johnson in the 2022 Senate race, but it tends to be GOP candidates who are distrustful of journalists or being they have something to lose by taking part.” 

“The irony is that candidates who lost probably could have helped themselves with additional debates,” Burden adds. “Barnes’ narrow loss to Johnson might have been turned into a victory had there been another debate or two. Tiffany is currently trailing in the polls and might also benefit from more face time and opportunities to question his opponent.”

While Crowley is slightly ahead in the latest polls, Tiffany is outspending his Democratic rival on advertising by a margin of  3-to-1, according to J.R. Ross of WisPolitics. Republicans and the outside groups that support them are outspending Democrats by more than $8 million. 

Even that huge financial advantage might not be enough to help Tiffany overcome his record of voting for and defending Trump’s cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, his support for the U.S. military entanglement in Iran and all the other Trump policies dragging down Republican politicians across the U.S.  

It will be interesting, in the single candidate debate next month, if the candidates are pressed to talk about data centers and Flock cameras — two issues where Tiffany has, interestingly, moved to capture some of the energy that animated supporters of Francesca Hong, the democratic socialist candidate Crowley narrowly defeated at the end of the chaotic Democratic primary. Crowley has not taken as strong a stance as Hong opposing either AI data centers or Flock surveillance. Tiffany’s position sounds more assertive, but his record is complicated, since he voted for Trump’s ban on AI regulation in Congress and seems more concerned with blocking wind and solar development that might fuel data centers than the data centers themselves. On Flock, it would be interesting to hear him square his support for local law enforcement with his proposal that local government be forbidden from using state revenue for Flock contracts. 

None of those nuances are going to get much airtime. Instead we will have the barrage of political advertising by shady groups, featuring grainy images and ominous music, shedding more darkness than light. 

“To have something that isn’t about sloganeering … to try to have civil discourse … I think that’s what we’ll have less of,” says Geisler.

For most of us that’s a big loss.

Vice President JD Vance is promoting a Trump administration plan to siphon off federal money that helps working parents afford childcare and use it to subsidize parents who stay at home. The man who ran for office mocking “childless cat ladies” is now trying to stir up a cat fight between working and stay-at-home moms. That’s not remarkable coming from a federal government run by social media trolls. But the main effect of the actual policy Vance is promoting will be to make the lives of already stressed working class families, especially in Wisconsin, even harder, more expensive and noticeably worse than before.

Childcare funding has been in crisis in Wisconsin ever since the pandemic relief money that briefly stabilized providers ran out. Without that money, which “prevented system collapse” according to the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, supporting more than 430,000 children in nearly 6,000 programs, parents are priced out of care and one in four providers say they will likely have to close their doors. 

Unlike Massachusetts and Vermont, Wisconsin does not treat childcare as a state budget priority. Ours is one of only a handful of states including Idaho, Indiana, Nevada and Ohio that failed to spend any money on childcare beyond what was required to draw down federal dollars, according to a 2025 report by the advocacy group ChildCare Aware. In 2026, the state created a new school readiness program for 4-year-olds. It was a first step toward acknowledging the needs of preschoolers and their parents. But it did nothing to address the massive shortage in care for infants and toddlers.

That’s all fine with JD Vance, who wrote on X that “normal Americans care more about their families than their jobs, and want a family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more ‘freedom’ in the paid labor force.”

But Vance is not offering to do anything about the fact that the U.S. is the only wealthy nation on Earth that doesn’t offer paid maternity leave, even though 68% of mothers with children under 6 are employed. Nor is he promoting the kind of high-quality early childhood education system that allows parents in Denmark, after their six months of paid parental leave, to enroll their preschoolers in beautiful, enriching childcare programs they don’t have to feel guilty about.

Instead, what Vance is proposing is to take an already paltry federal childcare subsidy and make working parents fight over crumbs with nonworking parents. Mainly, his aim seems to be to punish single parents. That’s not going to leave anyone in good shape — least of all children. 

One of the saddest aspects of the attack on childcare is that very recently parents, educators, business leaders and politicians of both political parties were finally coming together around the idea that childcare is an essential public good that requires public support.

The “mommy wars” attack Vance wants to revive is long out of date. It has been decades since most American families had the luxury of subsisting on a single wage-earner’s income, trad wife fantasies notwithstanding. 

Another major recent breakthrough is policymakers’ realization that the magic of the free market is not going to provide childcare parents can afford. 

“It was the Biden administration that put a ton of money into childcare during COVID, and we learned from that,” says Ruth Schmidt, executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association. “The lesson was not just the importance of keeping childcare open so that essential workers could work, but the other piece that’s really interesting is that it demonstrated what can positively happen in childcare when you put a little more money into it.”

Thanks to direct payments to providers during the pandemic, center closures dropped off, the number of teachers leaving the workforce slowed down, tuition stopped climbing and, Schmidt says, “this industry for the first time was finally able to say, ‘Our work is important. It is essential to the functioning of our country. It’s worth investing in, because if you invest in it, these positive things can happen.”

Then came Trump. 

Schmidt calls the rollout of Trump policies that slashed supports for families “death by 1,000 cuts.” During the second Trump administration, cuts to food assistance, Medicaid and Head Start, along with the federal government’s move to loosen safety standards and increase staff ratios in childcare centers have taken a huge combined toll on Wisconsin families.

If it were just ideological — if the Trump administration were actually pursuing the kinds of pronatalist policies that make getting married and having children more attractive, as Vance likes to claim, it wouldn’t be as bad. But instead, while spouting rhetoric about valuing families, this administration is subjecting little kids and their parents to more and more misery.

Wisconsin could do more to protect vulnerable kids. Before leaving the Capitol to hit the campaign trail, state legislators failed to pass a bill that would have used state money to fill the gap after federal childcare stabilization funds lapsed. That set off a vicious cycle, says Paula Drew of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association. Subsidies for families were cut and their out-of-pocket payments skyrocketed, so cash-strapped parents withdrew their kids from care. Under-enrollment meant less revenue for childcare centers, so they raised their rates. “It just sort of snowballed,” Drew says. “Programs said things like, ‘We’re gonna have to lower salaries for staff.’ … so I think we’re going to lose our educators, and in fact I think we’ve already lost a big percentage of our skilled, seasoned educators.”

An unintended consequence of the state’s investment in 4-year-old pre-K is that it creates a disincentive to provide care for infants and toddlers, which is already more expensive, Drew says. “Wisconsin serves very few infants and toddlers in regulated care,” she says. “And now, with additional funding going into the Get Kids Ready pre-K program, we expect that to be even lower a year from now.”

To make matters worse, the state no longer has a surplus of federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families funds, which it has used to cover some childcare costs for low-income families. 

Sooner or later, Wisconsin is going to have to start dedicating state revenue to childcare. Schmidt and Drew hope that, with a new governor and a new Legislature, Wisconsin will use the state surplus, payroll taxes or a tax on hemp products and gambling, as Louisiana has done, to subsidize childcare. Only then can Wisconsin reduce the astronomical tuition rates that parents pay ($13,000 for home care and $17,400 for center-based care, according to state data), give providers a better wage (currently $13.55 per hour), and stop the wave of childcare closures. 

They especially want the state to shore up disappearing infant and toddler care and retain experienced teachers — not just by giving them a raise but also by allowing them to continue to get higher education “and make this a profession, not just a fleeting step to something else,” says Drew. 

“We need supply of care; supply means educators that can work in programs. And then we want to help parents pay for care on the demand side. … You can’t do one and not the other, because it simply won’t work,” says Drew. “You can’t just help parents pay for care, but not tend to the supply of care available. And you can’t just tend to the supply of care available, but pretend you don’t see that parents are literally going into poverty to try to pay for childcare.”

“Childcare is infrastructure,” says Schmidt. “If we turned around and said to parents with 5-year-olds, you’ve got to start paying $17,000 a year for your child to be in school, we would see empty classrooms, right? We treat these as two very dramatically different concerns. But all of it is about families’ ability to work outside the home, impact the economy, all those kinds of things. “ 

It’s also about having a decent society that values families and takes good care of children. That’s the kind of society we need to come together and focus on, instead of being distracted by the rage-baiting bluster of internet trolls. 

Gov. Tony Evers is taking his final back-to-school tour of the state, visiting K-12 classrooms across Wisconsin to meet students, families and staff and tout his record as the “Education Governor.”

If you don’t happen to live in one of the 72 Wisconsin school districts that went to referendum last spring, begging local property taxpayers to cover basic costs the state is not meeting, you might get the impression from Evers’ valedictory tour that he is leaving office having solved the urgent problem of chronic underfunding of Wisconsin schools. 

“After a decade of disinvestment, Gov. Evers has spent the last almost eight years working to invest in public education at every level,” a statement released this week by the governor’s office declares. “During his time in office, Gov. Evers has enacted budgets to restore two-thirds funding for public schools for the first time in over two decades, provide the largest special education aid increase in state history, and bring per pupil aid to its highest level ever.”

Sounds like a strong record of accomplishment!

But wait, why does a lawsuit filed this year by the Wisconsin PTA, students, parents, teachers and communities across the state charge that Wisconsin “has seemingly abandoned its commitment to the education of Wisconsin’s public school children” and is violating its own constitution by failing to adequately fund public schools? 

The short answer is that Evers, along with the Republican legislative leaders who are the targets of the lawsuit, are using misleading language to pass off austerity for schools as generosity.

Take Evers’ claim about restoring the state’s long-abandoned commitment to two-thirds funding for schools. That two-thirds number is based on counting money in the state budget that schools are not allowed to spend. While the money is technically allocated for education, the state did not lift school revenue caps, so it can only be spent for property-tax relief. 

“Meeting the state’s two-thirds funding commitment doesn’t put a single new pencil in a classroom when you provide zero dollars in new spending,” explains Heather DuBois Bourenane of the Wisconsin Public Education Network, “and the current budget provided zero dollars in new spendable aid for both years of this biennium.”

Far from reaping a historic investment, students and teachers are starting the year in Wisconsin with no new money for schools. 

The state’s share of special education funding, which fell from a high of 70% in the 1970s to hover around 30% in recent years, did get a bump in the last budget, reversing a dire drop-off. But the “largest special education increase in state history” only amounted to a jump from 30 to 35% last year — considerably less than the 42% reimbursement rate state officials originally projected. 

Finally, in a sense, Evers did bring per-pupil aid to its highest level ever, but like his other claims, this is more a rhetorical victory than a concrete benefit to schools. Using his line-item veto, Evers extended school districts’ ability to raise $325 in revenue per pupil from local taxpayers for the next 400 years. This move infuriated Republicans, and they used it as a reason for not giving schools any new money in the current budget. But the $325 per pupil increase is not hard cash, it’s just revenue-raising authority granted to districts, which are allowed to raise property taxes by that amount if they choose to. Some, having exhausted the good will of local taxpayers with repeated referendum asks, have not done so. 

All in all, schools in Wisconsin are in bad financial shape, and property taxpayers are weary of filling the gap left by the state abandoning its obligation to kids. 

“The Legislature is selling kids short,” says Jeff Mandell of Law Forward, which is representing the plaintiffs in the school funding lawsuit. The Wisconsin Constitution guarantees every child an equal opportunity for a sound, basic education. But for years, the plaintiffs argue, the state has been breaking that promise.

Adams-Friendship school district, one of the parties in the lawsuit, used to have five elementary schools within its 500 square miles. Now, because of school closures due to low enrollment and shrinking budgets, it has only one K-12 school. Kids spend hours riding the bus to a single school building with aging infrastructure where many classrooms are unusable on hot days. 

Huge challenges are also facing urban districts. In Beloit last year one in eight students was homeless. 

“There is this fictitious idea that everyone has budgets, the schools just have to tighten their belts,” says Mandell. The reality is, even as the challenges schools face pile up, the state has steadily decreased funding, to the point where many now face an existential crisis.

The current lawsuit is not the first challenge to Wisconsin’s school funding formula based on the idea that the state is not meeting its constitutional obligation to provide a basic, free education to all children. 

Back in 2000, a divided Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected a similar argument in the Vincent v. Voight case. 

In that case, “the Court said the system is not bad enough right now to violate the constitution,” Mandell says. But since then, two full generations of kids have completed kindergarten through 12th grade, and conditions have deteriorated dramatically.

When Vincent v. Voight was decided, school revenue limits were still automatically pegged to inflation. A state law, abolished in 2003, still held that two-thirds of school funding should come from the state.  A popular program, abolished in 2018, still kept class sizes small and offered extra supports to children living in poverty to help them succeed academically.  Overall, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum, school funding has not kept pace with inflation in Wisconsin since 2009, a major reversal from the early 2000s, when Wisconsin schools were among the best funded in the nation. 

“The situation keeps getting worse and worse and worse, and we’re saying the court needs to give this another look,” says Mandell.

This is where the hopeful part comes in. Like the gerrymandering lawsuit that prompted the Legislature and the governor to pass fair voting maps in Wisconsin, Mandell believes the school funding lawsuit could trigger major legislative reform. As in the gerrymandering case, “the court’s job is to tell the Legislature, ‘What you have here is not good enough,’ and then give them a short window to fix it,” Mandell says.

It’s not the court’s job to come up with a new funding formula, but if the governor and the Legislature can’t agree, it could impose its own solution.

As the November elections approach, ushering in a new Legislature and a new governor, there’s a real opportunity for change. 

“There is growing momentum and understanding of what the problem is, and what the issue is, on both sides of the aisle,” says DuBois Bourenane. 

She and the other public school advocates in her organization are deeply disappointed that the governor and the Legislature failed to hammer out a deal to give more money to schools, after dangling the idea at the end of the last session. “It’s just criminal that they’re even willing to entertain the idea of sending these kids back to school with nothing again,” she says. “We’ve got 70-plus districts going to referendum again this fall … over a third of our districts went to referendum this calendar year.” 

DuBois Bourenane agrees with Mandell that the lawsuit could spur a breakthrough. 

“I’m just glad that everybody’s talking about it,” she says, “and I hope that they’re paying very close attention to what’s actually possible if we elect people who all agree that we have to fix this broken problem.”