Madison, Wisconsin high school students march on the Capitol on Friday, Dec. 20 | Photo by Daphne Cooper

It was a brilliant, snowy Friday, the last day of school before winter break, as more than 100 students from high schools across Madison converged inside the Capitol. They gathered around the 30-foot balsam fir festooned with handmade ornaments, a model train chugging around the track at the base of the tree. At first it looked like a festive scene, but as the students poured into the first floor of the rotunda, then filled the second- and third-floor balconies, their shouting drowned out a group of Christmas carolers, who retreated, their songs giving way to chants of “No more silence! End gun violence!”

The Madison teens showed up to express their grief and outrage over the deaths this week of a 14-year-old student, her teacher and a gun-wielding 15-year-old girl who opened fire Monday in a classroom at the small private Abundant Life Christian School on Madison’s east side. It was the city’s first school shooting but, incredibly, the 323rd in the nation this year.

Gun violence is the leading cause of death of children and teens in the U.S. Shouting, chanting, demanding to be heard, the crowd of children came to the Capitol Friday demanding that we wake up and do something about this appalling fact. 

Our nation is an outlier, with a rate of gun violence that dwarfs other large, high-income countries. Firearm homicides here are 33 times higher than in Australia and 77 times higher than in Germany, according to a report from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington medical school. Not surprisingly, firearm injuries tend to be more frequent in places where people have easy access to firearms, according to a 2018 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

What other country in the world could live with the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, where 20 little children between 6 and 7 years old and six adult staff were gunned down, and respond by making no significant restrictions on firearms? 

“My parents constantly talk about how, when Sandy Hook happened, they thought that would be the end of it,” said Danny Johnson, a first-year student at Madison West High School who joined the 3-mile march to the Capitol on Friday, carrying a sign scrawled on a sheet of notebook paper that said, “Thoughts and prayers until it’s your own child.” 

“To constantly have to go through it — we shouldn’t have to be here. We should be in school not having to worry about it at all,” Johnson added.

Hanging over balconies and leaning against marble pillars, teens held up handmade signs that said; “Enough!” “You write your policies on a carpet of our dead bodies,” and “Graduations not funerals.”

In Wisconsin, the rate of gun deaths increased 45% from 2013 to 2022, compared to a 36% increase nationwide, according to the Giffords Law Center.

Every year since he was elected in 2018, Gov. Tony Evers and Democrats in the state Legislature have tried in vain to get Republican cooperation on ending the state’s current exemption from background checks for private gun sales. A proposed “red flag” law that would allow police or family members to seek an extreme risk protection order in court to take guns from gun owners who are found to be a danger to themselves or others has also gone nowhere. Both of these measures are broadly popular with voters across the political spectrum. Somehow that doesn’t seem to matter.

After this week’s school shooting. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos released a statement saying, “Today’s tragedy is shocking, senseless and heartbreaking. My thoughts and prayers are with the students, parents and faculty who will have to live with the trauma and grief of this day for the rest of their lives.” But Vos stopped short of saying he would make any effort whatsoever to protect kids and teachers from being shot to death at school. That phrase “thoughts and prayers,” rightly derided by the students who protested at the Capitol on Friday, is a pathetic substitute for action. 

“Last year it was 12 years since Sandy Hook, 25 years since Columbine, and all our politicians can say from their cushy seats is that they’re sending out their thoughts and prayers about the leading cause of death for children in America!”  yelled Ian Malash, a senior at Vel Phillips Memorial High School in Madison, pacing around the tree in the center of the rotunda. “We’re showing them right now and we are going to continue to show them that we are done with thoughts and prayers. We will make change happen because our lives depend on it.”

Vos, apparently recovered from his heartbreak over Monday’s tragedy and back to his old snarky self by Wednesday, mounted a robust defense of the status quo on X, retweeting a post from Wisconsin Right Now that mocked Democrats who “politicize this tragedy with cheap talking points.” The post claimed that, since it’s already illegal for a 15-year-old to possess a handgun, it’s ridiculous to connect the recent shooting to any effort to change gun laws.

But, as state Sen. Kelda Roys told the crowd on Friday, “We know that states that have passed gun safety laws like background checks, like red flag laws … they see gun deaths and firearm injuries go down. We can do that here in Wisconsin, too.  We just need to change the minds or change the legislators — and the judges, too, by the way.” 

“My generation and the people in this building have let you down,” Rick Abegglen, the parent of a West High School daughter who helped organize the protest, told the crowd in the Capitol. “I am so proud of each and every one of you for standing up for yourselves. A few moments ago I saw somebody close the doors of the Senate because they did not want to hear your voices. Think about it.”

As he spoke, the students yelled louder, their voices bouncing off the marble walls, becoming harder and harder to ignore.

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The Wisconsin Policy Forum recently reported that property tax bills mailed out to Wisconsin taxpayers this month will show the biggest tax increase from a previous year since 2009.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos wasted no time in assigning blame. On X, Vos wrote: “When you receive your property tax bill this month, please remember it was Governor Evers who used his line item veto to create a 400 year guaranteed property tax increase.”

It’s true that Evers’ headline-grabbing partial veto of the last state budget extended the two-year tax increase the Legislature approved for school districts. The Legislature allowed schools to raise another $325 per pupil per year from local taxpayers for each year of the 2023-25 budget. By deleting some digits, Evers stretched that out until the year 2425. 

But Vos’ accusation is fundamentally misleading in a couple of ways. First, the Legislature approved the increase for the duration of the current budget cycle. The fact that Evers extended it for centuries into the future made a big splash, but it didn’t add a penny to anyone’s property taxes this year. 

Second, and more important to understand, as we begin another budget cycle and another slugfest over spending on schools, is that the Legislature’s stinginess when it comes to the state’s share of school funding is a major driver of property tax increases. 

As the Wisconsin Policy Forum points out in its report, one key reason for the recent spike in property taxes is the historic number of school district referenda passed by local communities. Local property taxpayers voted to raise their own taxes. And why is that? Because the Legislature refused to give school districts enough money in the state budget to cover their costs.

But, you might object, Vos and other Republicans made a big point of touting their last budget’s “historic” $1.2 billion increase in funding for schools. Unfortunately, that claim is as misleading as Vos’ effort to blame Evers for your property tax bill.

To understand why school districts are begging local taxpayers for money at the same time Republicans claim they gave schools a “historic increase,” take a look at how little of that $1.2 billion in “education spending” actually went to schools. 

For each budget cycle, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau produces a detailed summary of budget items by category. In the “Public Instruction” category, the Fiscal Bureau reports that “total school aid” in the 2023-25 budget came to $625 million. 

Where did the rest go? To find out, you have to look down the list of Fiscal Bureau categories to “shared revenue and tax relief.” There, under the heading “school levy tax credit” you will find the missing $590 million in so-called school funding, in the form of a rebate to property taxpayers. Schools never get to touch that money. It is an oddity of Wisconsin law that the school levy tax credit is labeled as school funding.

The school levy tax credit puts school districts in an awkward position every year. At the end of October, every district sets its levy. People believe, based on that number, that they know what their tax bill will be. But later, on Nov. 20, the Wisconsin Department of Revenue tells each municipality the amount of the school levy tax credit that will be applied to local property tax bills and the number is readjusted. The state calls this tax credit money for schools, but it’s actually just a straight-up discount for property tax payers. 

Now, had the Legislature actually put $590 million into school funding, schools would have been in a much better financial position, and we probably would not have seen a record-breaking number of districts asking property taxpayers to hike their own taxes to keep their local schools afloat. 

The backdrop to all this was a huge, historic cut to school funding in Wisconsin back in 2012, followed by a decade and a half in which schools never recovered. Wisconsin has not given schools enough funding to keep pace with inflation for the last 15 years, state schools superintendent Jill Underly pointed out when she released her $4 billion 2025-27 budget proposal.

Vos dismissed Underly’s budget proposal as completely unrealistic. But in truth, it would pretty much restore Wisconsin schools to the level of funding they enjoyed right before the brutal cuts of former Gov. Scott Walker’s administration.

One of Underly’s top budget priorities is asking the state to meet its neglected commitment to cover 90% of special education costs, instead of the current 32%, which forces schools to raid general funds and cut programs to cover this unavoidable, federally mandated expense.

Another sensible idea, endorsed by the Legislature’s bipartisan Blue Ribbon Commission on School Funding in 2017, is to end the deceptive practice of putting money into the school levy tax credit and pretending that it funds schools.

Instead of playing a shell game with school funding and pointing fingers as local taxpayers continue to shoulder more and more of the cost, Wisconsin should use a portion of the state’s massive budget surplus to adequately fund schools.

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The news that a Dane County judge struck down key parts of Act 10 — former Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s signature anti-union law — prompted Walker to comment on X: “Collective bargaining is not a right. It is an expensive entitlement.” 

That’s the kind of message that helped make Walker a national Republican star back in 2011. The billionaire Koch brothers supported him and his pioneering approach to politics — turning neighbor against neighbor by weaponizing the resentment of working class people and training it on teachers and other public employees whose union membership afforded them health care and retirement benefits. Walker memorably called his approach “divide and conquer.” That philosophy is at the heart of Judge Jacob Frost’s decision, which found that Act 10’s divisive carve-out for “public safety” employees (i.e. Republican-voting cops) is unconstitutional. 

Walker started by pitting private sector workers against public employees. The next step, he promised his billionaire backer Diane Hendricks, would be to make Wisconsin a right-to-work state, smashing unions across the board.

Walker made good on that promise and signed the right-to-work law that undercut private sector unions. And he certainly succeeded in dividing Wisconsin, ushering in a toxic style of politics that set the stage for Donald Trump and nationwide polarization.

But Walker’s war on organized labor is out of tune with the populism of today’s Trump-dominated Republican party, which courted union support in the recent election. It’s also out of step with public opinion. A September Gallup poll found near record-high approval of labor unions with 70% of Americans saying they approved of unions, compared with 48% approval in 2009. 

In embracing Act 10 and Walker’s dubious legacy, Wisconsin Republicans are marching to a different beat than the rest of the country. 

“Act 10 has saved Wisconsin taxpayers more than $16 billion,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos declared in a statement. “We look forward to presenting our arguments on appeal.”

Other Republicans have made even bigger claims about the “savings” that came out of teachers’ paychecks and benefits. But over time, it has become clear who the real beneficiaries of those savings were. The Kochs and Hendricks didn’t support Walker because they thought he would do wonderful things for working class voters. They backed him because they wanted to squeeze workers and enrich themselves.

Act 10, and the other measures passed by the Wisconsin Legislature in its wake, including right-to-work and prohibitions on local governments from increasing wages and improving working conditions in city and county contracts, hurt Wisconsin workers and the state economy. 

“The changes, labor leaders and experts say, have caused flattened real wages for construction workers, higher pay for their bosses and local governments stuck offering wages that make it difficult to hire contractors — and hard for those workers to make a living,” Wisconsin Watch reported. 

A study by the Economic Policy Institute compared the economies of states with strong collective bargaining laws with so-called “right-to-work” states from 2011 to 2018. “Those ‘right-to-work’ states see slower economic growth, lower wages, higher consumer debt levels, worse health outcomes and lower levels of civic participation,” one of the study’s authors, Frank Manzo, told Wisconsin Watch.

On top of all that, Walker’s oft-repeated promise to create 250,000 new jobs in his first term was a bust. He made it just over halfway to that goal, according to a “gold standard” report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the end of his second term, Walker still hadn’t reached the 250,000 jobs number. Instead, when he left office, Wisconsin ranked 34th in the nation for private sector job growth, according to the BLS. Walker’s 10.3% growth rate fell far behind the national growth rate of 17.1%. And Wisconsin public schools have never recovered from Walker’s savage budget cuts.

There has been a lot of talk since the 2024 election about how Democrats have lost touch with working class voters, allowing the Trump-led Republican Party to capture disaffected working people who are suspicious that politicians don’t really care about them or represent their interests.

The Act 10 fight, which will be front and center in Wisconsin’s spring state Supreme Court race, reverses that dynamic. Democrats in Wisconsin have been fighting all along for better wages and working conditions for working class people, and Republicans have been outspoken in their opposition to workers’ rights.

Walker’s war on workers prompted historic protests in Wisconsin back in 2011, bringing together teachers, firefighters, police, prison guards, snowplow drivers and tens of thousands of citizens from across Wisconsin to protest at the Capitol. Democrats in the state Legislature fled to Illinois to temporarily deprive Republicans of the quorum needed to pass the law. Walker dismissed the protesters as “union bosses” and agitators brought in from “out of state.” But anyone who was there could tell you the crowd was made up of lots and lots of regular Wisconsinites outraged that the governor had made hardworking people his target.

The uprising in Wisconsin inspired other pro-democracy protests around the globe. Egyptian activists ordered pizza from Ian’s Pizza downtown for the protesters at the Capitol.

Still, in the short term, the protests failed. A grassroots recall effort against Walker fell short, and he went on to be reelected to a second term. But the tide has been turning steadily ever since. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers defeated Walker in 2018. Evers’ reelection by a larger margin in 2022 was one of 7 out of 10 statewide races Democrats have won since 2019. In one of those races, the Democratic-backed Supreme Court candidate Janet Protasiewicz beat her conservative rival by more than 10 points, flipping the ideological balance on the court and setting up the demise of Republican gerrymandering and, potentially, a final judgment against Act 10.

Today, as Democrats reel from their losses in the recent national elections, Wisconsin offers an example of a state where the fight over workers’ rights is at the center of politics. The Act 10 battle makes it clear which side each party is on. That’s good news for Democrats. For Walker’s brand of Republicanism, not so much.

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Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Ben Wikler speaks at a climate rally outside Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson's Madison office. On Sunday Wikler announced his bid to lead the Democratic National Committee.(Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Ben Wikler announced Sunday that he is running for chair of the Democratic National Committee. 

In a launch video, Wikler described the “permanent campaign” he has created in Wisconsin. After Democrats lost the White House in November and failed to gain a majority in either chamber of Congress, the national party is searching for new leadership and a new strategy. Wikler, in his video, said his record in Wisconsin, a closely divided swing state, can serve as a model. 

Under Wikler’s leadership, Wisconsin Democrats reelected Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in 2022 by a wider margin than Evers won four years earlier. In the most recent election, Democrats reduced large Republican majorities in both houses of the state Legislature, flipping 14 formerly Republican-held state legislative seats. 

Those legislative victories came after Wikler and state Democrats helped elect a new liberal majority on the state Supreme Court, setting in motion a process that ended gerrymandered voting maps that had heavily favored Republicans.

Wikler, a prodigious fundraiser, helped the Wisconsin Democrats raise more than $53 million in the last election cycle, according to Open Secrets, more than any other state party in the country. He also opened new Democratic field offices throughout the state and has made it the party’s mission to compete in rural, urban, red and blue areas alike. 

“This past election, the nation shifted 6% towards Trump — but Wisconsin only shifted by 1.5%, the least of any battleground state,” Wikler said in announcing his campaign for national party chair.

“I have led the Democratic Party of Wisconsin for the last five years, helping to transform it into an organizing, fundraising and winning machine,” he said, adding, “I’m now running for chair of the Democratic National Committee to supercharge our work in every state.” 

Echoing former DNC Chair Howard Dean’s call for a “50-state strategy,” Wikler said, “For Democrats to move forward, we must build a big tent, organize and communicate in every place and on every platform, and find the resources, people, and focus to reach voters who currently get their news about Democrats from Republicans.”

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Hundreds of immigrant rights advocates and others participate in rally and demonstration at the Federal Building in lower Manhattan on June 1, 2018 in New York. In coordinated marches across the country people gathered outside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field offices, U.S. attorney's offices, and the Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Spencer Platt | Getty Images).

The week before Thanksgiving, I spoke with an immigration attorney in Madison, Grant Sovern, who helped found the Community Immigration Law Center (CILC) — part of a flurry of new services created in the wake of the 2018 ICE raids that terrorized Dane County during President-elect Donald Trump’s first administration. No one knows what the immigration crackdown Trump has promised for his second term will look like. But advocates are once again meeting to try to prepare.

Sovern told me about desperate calls from friends of his college-age daughter — students who are worried about losing their protected status under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). While he has been offering them hope that the new administration won’t start by targeting Dreamers, who grew up in this country and just want to continue to study and work here, he added that the easiest targets for mass deportation are other people who’ve followed the rules. Asylum-seekers and those with temporary protected status and work visas — like the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, that Trump and incoming Vice President J.D. Vance falsely accused of eating their neighbors’ pets — will be the easiest to find.

What an ominous holiday season. We need the warmth of gatherings with friends and family more than ever. But it’s a weird time to be celebrating the arrival of our nation’s first immigrants and the mythical meal where they bonded with Native Americans before swiping their land and wiping them out. Talking about colonialism, genocide and how our society is built on historic injustice is quickly dismissed as “woke” and out of fashion these days. But it’s unavoidable if you’re trying to understand the rise of right-wing authoritarianism here and around the globe.

The same week I spoke with Sovern about preparations in Dane County to counter Trump’s mass deportations, Israeli peace activist Rotem Levin came to Madison with his Palestinian peace movement colleague Osama Iliwat to speak out against the war in Gaza and to discuss their vision for “a path to shared safety, justice and liberation,” according to the promotional materials from Jewish Voice for Peace, Vets for Peace and a handful of local religious groups that brought them to the Presbyterian church near my house.

I met Levin at the home of a neighbor who hosted the pair (Iliwat was resting, feeling unwell after their trip). Levin said their goal was to get people to stop being “sleepy” about the occupation and the hopelessness of the seemingly endless war on Palestinians by his country, supported by the U.S.

“We’re not like you – you genocided all the Native Americans and now they have to accept you,” Levin said with startling Israeli frankness. “We’re in the Middle East. There are Muslims all around us. The only way to guarantee safety and security is by building trust.”

Of the recent U.S. election, he said, “I want to encourage you. We have been living with dictatorship for 20 years. You will be OK.”

People who have been living comfortably with the thought that they are part of a democracy, protected by the rule of law, are not the ones who need to be afraid, he added. In the U.S., “people without papers” are the most vulnerable, like the Palestinians in Israel, he said. His parents, among other Israelis, have been shocked by his country’s rapid slide into fascism under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu and his right-wing cabinet. For his mother, who suddenly doesn’t recognize her country, and for his father, who was beaten at a protest march, the shift to militarism and the crushing of free speech was unthinkable until recently. For his Palestinian friends, however, repression is a familiar fact of life. His message is that security depends on justice for everyone.

Levin was not keen to talk about the daunting project of finding a political solution to the conflict. He didn’t want to get bogged down in arguments about the details, he said. Focusing on the small things, building personal, humanizing connections between Israelis and Palestinians, is critically important, even if there is no big-picture solution on the horizon yet. 

The same approach applies here, on the cusp on the next Trump administration.

Community leaders and immigration attorneys have been meeting in Madison to try to figure out what to do. Local funding has dried up since the first Trump term. CILC lacks adequate resources and doesn’t have enough volunteer lawyers to respond to the crisis advocates see coming. And they don’t even know what shape that crisis will take. The prospect that the Trump administration will likely do away with its own practice, in the first administration, of not conducting raids in churches and schools “sends shivers down everybody’s spine,” Sovern said.

Mass raids like the 2018 ICE operations that shut down local restaurants could be scaled up, and could cause huge economic harm, especially for Wisconsin dairy farms where an estimated 70% of the workforce is comprised of undocumented immigrants.

But raiding isolated farms in rural areas of the state wouldn’t make the kind of news splash Trump is probably seeking. To achieve that effect, Democratic cities like Madison could be in the crosshairs. Instead of dropping busloads of migrants off in liberal northern cities, the publicity stunt gleefully executed by Republican Govs. Greg Abbot of Texas and Ron Desantis of Florida, the Trump administration could send in buses to round people up, crashing local economies by emptying out restaurants and other businesses that depend on an immigrant workforce.

According to The Hill, Texas has offered the incoming Trump administration 1,400 acres to build a mass deportation detention camp. 

In Madison, immigrant rights groups and local officials have begun trying to calm people down.

After the 2018 ICE raids, advocates hosted an information session to offer legal advice and “the only thing anyone wanted to ask was, ‘Who will pick up my kids from school if I’m deported?’” Sovern recalled.  

There is a lot to worry about, including the bill that recently passed the U.S. House allowing the federal government to designate U.S. nonprofits “terrorist supporting” organizations and strip them of their tax-exempt status.

But it’s also important to remember that, under current law, “they can’t do all the bad things they want to do all at once,” Sovern said.

He pointed to an evaluation of the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, the nation’s first public defender system for immigrants facing deportation. (CILC, in Madison, was the second such effort.) The project provided lawyers to all low-income immigrants facing deportation proceedings in New York City. Before the project, only 4% of those challenging deportation were successful. Once they were provided with attorneys, the rate of success rose to 48%. 

And despite polls showing increasing public support for mass deportations, even in the current amped-up anti-immigrant climate, most Americans (about 64%) say undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay in the country if they meet certain conditions including applying for citizenship, working, paying taxes and not committing crimes.

People are more sympathetic if they hear the stories of real people who are affected by deportation threats, not just the lies about violent criminals who are eating pets.

It’s also important to spread the word that there are good people trying to hold up a light in the darkness. As Sovern puts it, “What we can do are little bits of tons of hard work.” 

Even if it’s impossible to solve the big problem all at once, brave people are doing their best to lead us to a better future.

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Eric Hovde speaks in a video posted on X Tuesday, Nov. 12, in which he questions how ballots were counted in his election loss to Sen. Tammy Baldwin that was called early Nov. 6. Hovde did not concede then, only doing so on Monday, Nov. 18.. (Screenshot | Hovde campaign on X)

Poor Eric Hovde. His protestations that the election was rigged against him have fallen on deaf ears. Hovde’s grudging concession to Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who beat him by 29,000 votes to hang onto her seat in the U.S. Senate, came as Republicans across the country rejoiced at winning control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. Like his Tom Selleck mustache, Hovde’s election denial is way out of style. 

Hovde’s baseless accusations during his very tardy concession speech about the questionable “legitimacy” of “absentee ballots that were dropped in Milwaukee at 4 a.m.” is so 2020. This year, Trump won all the swing states and, unlike last time, when he lost to Joe Biden, allegations of illegal voting, fraud, recounts, court challenges and death threats aimed at election officials have disappeared like morning dew in the Southern California sun.

Hovde heads home to Laguna Beach, California, a lonely, sore loser instead of storming the U.S. Capitol as a champion for MAGA grievance with his Trump-supporting friends. 

“I entered the race for the U.S. Senate because I love our country and I’m deeply concerned about its direction,” Hovde declared in his concession speech Monday. By then, the country’s direction had taken a sharp right turn. 

The top concerns that Hovde, an enthusiastic Trump supporter, said motivated him to run — government spending, border security and international relations — are now firmly in MAGA hands. 

“Lastly, as I’ve repeatedly expressed, I’m very worried about the political divisions and rhetoric that are tearing our country apart,” Hovde declared.

This last worry led him, Hovde said, to run a campaign that “focused on issues instead of personal attacks.” He followed this assertion by besmirching the integrity of Wisconsin election officials, denouncing his opponent as a liar and blaming Democrats for underhandedly stealing the election from him by allowing third-party candidates to run and by spreading rumors that he’s a California bank owner (a verifiable fact). For good measure, he added, “Equally concerning is the large segments of the press that don’t care to fact-check these lies and even helped propagate misinformation to help their preferred candidate.”

Anyone who watched the debate between Hovde and Baldwin might be surprised to hear Hovde congratulate himself for running a high-minded campaign rooted in the “values of integrity and morality.”

“The one thing you’ve perfected in Washington is your ability to lie,” Hovde sneered at Baldwin at the start of the debate. While Baldwin focused on her long record of detailed policy work, reaching across the aisle to pass bills that helped Wisconsinites, Hovde relied heavily on unsubstantiated accusations and repeatedly called out Baldwin’s girlfriend, a Wall Street investment adviser, demanding that she release financial information she is not required to disclose and unsubtly calling attention to the fact that Baldwin, an out lesbian, is in a same-sex relationship. 

This week, Baldwin is back in Washington doing what she does best — focusing on unsexy issues that matter to her constituents (see her Wednesday press release: “Baldwin Calls on USDA to Provide Emergency Aid for Gamebird Farmers Hit By Tornadoes”). Hovde, who admitted during the debate that he doesn’t know much about what’s in the Farm Bill and then griped afterward to rightwing talk radio host Vicky McKenna: “Like, I’m supposed to study [the bill] in depth?!” can’t imagine why Wisconsin chose Baldwin over him.

There was nothing nefarious about Baldwin’s win. She received a predictable boost from absentee voters in heavily Democratic Milwaukee, and as she has done in her previous statewide races, and she got a lot of votes in Republican-leaning areas of the state where she has spent a great deal of time listening to her constituents and championing their interests in bills that help Wisconsin agriculture and manufacturing. That’s the kind of work that made her the only Democrat to win the endorsement of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau.

Hovde distinguished himself, according to The New York Times, by becoming the first prominent Republican in the nation to suggest the election was rigged, parroting Trump’s 2020 conspiracy theories. 

Fortunately, this year Hovde’s complaints are just one man’s sour grapes. But in his incivility, his poor grasp of policy, and, most of all, in refusing to concede for so long and, even when he did, questioning the integrity of the election, Hovde made a divisive political environment more toxic.

As Sam Liebert, Wisconsin state director of All Voting is Local told Erik Gunn, “The rhetoric of questioning our democracy is more than just words. … It  contributes to chaos and confusion, which undermines public trust in our elections and the officials who administer them.” 

As Hovde himself might put it, the kind of campaign he ran is tearing our country apart. Fortunately for Wisconsin, in this case, it’s over. 

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Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, introduces Sen. Tammy Baldwin at her victory celebration Thursday. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)

In the midst of a barrage of absurd and appalling news pouring out of Washington, where President-elect Donald Trump keeps topping himself with new, unqualified cabinet appointments, Democrats are looking for hope in Wisconsin.

Two bright lights from our state made headlines after Nov. 5. U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin bucked the red wave to win a third term, and Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler was reported by Politico to be in the running to lead the national party. Baldwin and Wikler share an approach to politics that could help guide Democrats out of the wilderness. 

After losing the White House and failing to capture control of either the U.S. Senate or the House (not to mention the likelihood of two new Trump appointments on the U.S. Supreme Court that could create an enduring far-right supermajority), Democrats would do well to look to Wisconsin for a new approach to politics.

In Wisconsin, Trump’s margin of victory — 0.9% of the vote — was the narrowest among the seven swing states he carried. Baldwin, as she has consistently done, made inroads in rural, Republican-voting counties. And Wikler deployed an approach to organizing across rural and urban areas of the state that took no vote for granted.

While extreme polarization and losing touch with working-class swing-state voters are widely counted as prime reasons Democrats lost the 2024 election, Baldwin and Wikler have a recipe for addressing those problems.

“It’s a state where showing up, being present in all different communities, rejecting the kind of false choices that cable pundits might like to inflict on a state like Wisconsin, and rolling up your sleeves can make the difference,” Wikler told me back in 2019, shortly after he moved back to Wisconsin to reenergize the state party. At that moment, Republicans had just lost complete control over all three branches of state government, with the election of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in 2018. Since then, Wikler has overseen a scrappy fight to claw back power in a state where Republicans, until recently, still dominated politics.

Wikler followed his own advice, opening new field offices across the state. He remained tenaciously upbeat as he steered his party through the rough waters of the pandemic and, in addition to helping elect President Joe Biden and reelecting Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, helped shepherd in a new liberal majority on the state Supreme Court that ended the worst partisan gerrymander in the nation, which had protected a wildly disproportionate Republican legislative majority. 

I was impressed by Wikler’s optimism back in 2019, when the gerrymandered maps seemed insurmountable. 

He pointed to grassroots organizers all over Wisconsin who were building the case for fair maps, and “getting every elected group of human beings in the state to pass resolutions condemning gerrymandering.”

“All of that needs to clearly lead to electoral accountability for anyone who smashes the idea of representative democracy in the state,” Wikler said at the time. It sounded wildly optimistic. Yet here we are.

Commenting on the eternal debate about whether Democrats need to drive their base to turn out or persuade disaffected centrist Republicans and independents to vote for Democrats, Wikler told me, “in Wisconsin we have to do both.”

“The thing I’m frustrated by every day is the idea that you can’t fight for both white working class voters and voters of color,” he added. “Guess what? There are people of all races in the working class. And all of them want schools and jobs and safe communities and air they can breathe. And none of them like the effects of Trump’s actual policies—even if some of them think they might like Trump as a guy.”

That philosophy is very similar to the politics practiced by Tammy Baldwin, who consistently amazes pundits by winning rural and working class voters even though she is an out lesbian with a strongly progressive voting record. Listening carefully to her constituents and delivering for them, whether through the provision she wrote into the Affordable Care Act that lets children stay on their parents’ insurance until they turn 26, or federal investments in Wisconsin farming and manufacturing, or “Buy America” rules, Baldwin connects with her constituents across the ideological divide. 

As Baldwin puts it, “People across Wisconsin want solutions to their challenges and are not all that interested in Republican versus Democrat—they’re interested in who you’ll stand up to, and who you’ll stand up for.”

Wikler agrees: “The key thing to understand is that Wisconsin voters are less centrist than they are conflicted. There’s a populist streak that has both left-wing and right-wing flavors that runs through the state. And the fundamental question that voters are asking is: ‘Is this person on my side?’”

That’s a clarifying vision that could lead Democratic politicians and voters toward a brighter day. 

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Wisconsin State Flag | Getty Images

Look on the bright side — all the talk about a stolen election, massive voter fraud, rigged voting machines and threats against local election workers disappeared overnight. Instead of planning an insurrection, MAGA Republicans have pivoted to picking out their outfits for president-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration parties. 

The minute it became clear that Trump won, Republican fulminating about “massive cheating” blew over. Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe declared the election in Wisconsin a “great success.” Bipartisan poll watchers agreed: the whole thing went off  practically without a hitch. Never mind the WisGOP warnings all day on social media about (nonexistent) illegal voting by noncitizens. Never mind the grandstanding at Central Count in Milwaukee by fake elector scheme co-conspirators Sen. Ron Johnson, elections commissioner Bob Spindell and WisGOP chair Brian Schimming. All is forgiven, because Trump won Wisconsin.

The mechanics of voting are not under attack. Instead, a majority of American voters, including a majority of Wisconsinites, chose to elect a right-wing authoritarian leader and to give his party control of the federal government, apparently because they believe Trump will repeal pandemic-fueled inflation (which is already way down in the U.S.).

As my friend Hugh Jackson, editor of our sister outlet the Nevada Current wrote on Wednesday morning:  “the U.S. Supreme Court, and the U.S. judiciary generally, is now even more on track to become nothing more than a functionary outlet for a right-wing extremist and authoritarian executive branch hell-bent on dismantling and superseding the rule of law. Also, poor Gaza. Poor Ukraine (poor Europe). And for all that, and so much more, a box of Honey Nut Cheerios still isn’t going to fall back to 2019 prices.”

Stress-eating leftover Halloween candy while watching the triumph of MAGA well into the wee hours, I remembered I’d agreed to speak to a group of retirees the morning after the election. What was there to say? The election results are a gut punch. Here in Wisconsin we are at the center of it. “You know Wisconsin put Trump over the top,” a journalist in Washington, D.C., texted me, helpfully. 

Since I had to pull myself together and try to make sense of the results, I headed downtown and found myself in a room full of friendly faces. There’s no sugar-coating things, I told them. The results are a shock. Especially for Wisconsin’s immigrant community, this is a frightening time and we need to do everything we can to support people and ease the fear and suffering of those who are the targets of terrifying threats.

There are a few bright spots in Wisconsin among Tuesday’s results. In addition to the hiatus on election denial, there are the results of state legislative races — the first to be run with Wisconsin’s new fair maps — which ended the gerrymandered GOP supermajority in the state Senate and yielded a more evenly divided state Assembly. 

The end of gerrymandering is the fruit of a long, difficult battle by citizens determined to get fair maps. It’s worth remembering that when all three branches of government in Wisconsin were controlled by a single party, that goal seemed far off. And a hard-fought win it was. We’ve come a long way. Don’t forget that progress is possible. It’s important to combat despair. 

There will be a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking of this election. I’ve written about how I believe the Democrats lost touch with their working class base, and how Trump took the opportunity to move into that space with his right-wing populist message.

But the fact is Harris was a powerful candidate who picked up the torch from Biden when he fell apart, painfully, publicly and irretrievably. 

There are those who say our country is too sexist or too racist for a woman of color to be elected president. Another white guy would have been better, they suggest. Without a doubt, misogyny and racism were big features of the 2024 campaign. But you don’t beat that backlash by surrendering to it. And we must beat it back. That takes a lot of resilience. Harris took us another step forward in making Americans believe they could elect a female president. It will take more than one or two tries to bring that about.

For now, perhaps the most important thing for all of us who are hurting after this election is to prioritize real, human contact. Remember that you are still surrounded by friends, neighbors and loved ones. We need to connect with each other and stay in touch. As simple and maybe even simplistic as it sounds, we need each other’s company to help get us through this difficult time. We need to see other people in person and we need to take a break from scrolling online.

Being with other people, strengthening our bonds of affection and solidarity, is the foundation of democracy. That’s where we need to start. 

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Wisconsin Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski speaks at a press conference defending ballot drop boxes and local election officials on Oct. 30, 2024 in Madison | Wisconsin Examiner photo

As the 2024 campaign air war reaches a furious crescendo over our battleground state, a few groups of public-spirited citizens have been quietly organizing on the ground to shore up the foundations of our democracy.

Take just three events that occurred during the week before Election Day: 

• A bipartisan group of current and former elected officials signed a pledge to respect the results of the election — whatever they may be.
• A separate bipartisan group of Wisconsin political leaders held a press conference to declare their confidence in the security of Wisconsin’s election system and to pledge to fight back against people who cast doubt on the legitimacy of the results — whatever they may be
• Wisconsin Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski and grassroots pro-democracy advocates held an event in downtown Madison to support the use of ballot drop boxes and to defend local election clerks in a season of threats, intimidation and destabilizing conspiracy theories.

All of these public declarations of confidence in the basic voting process we used to take for granted show just how far from normal we’ve drifted.

As Democratic U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan put it in a joint press conference with Republican former U.S. Rep. Reid Ribble, “This is sort of no-brainer stuff.” Yet the two Wisconsin congressmen celebrated the announcement that they got 76 state politicians to sign their pledge to honor the results of the 2024 election.

Notably, however, the list of politicians who agreed to respect what Ribble described as “democracy 101” — that “the American people get to decide who leads them; candidates need to accept the results” — does not include many members of the party of Donald Trump.

Petition signers so far include 64 Democrats, one independent and nine Republicans. Worse, nearly every one of those Republicans has the word “former” next to his or her title. 

Technically state Sen. Rob Cowles is still serving out the remainder of his term. But the legislative session is over and Cowles won’t be back. After announcing his retirement, he made waves this week when he renounced Trump and endorsed Kamala Harris for president. Other GOP officials who pledged to respect the election results include former state Sen. Kathy Bernier, who leads the group Keep Our Republic, which has been fighting election conspiracy theories and trying to rebuild trust in local election clerks, and former state Sen. Luther Olsen, a public school advocate who worked across the aisle back before the current era of intense political polarization.

On the same day Pocan and Ribble made their announcement, a different bipartisan group of Wisconsin leaders, members of the Democracy Defense Project – Wisconsin state board, held a press call to emphasize the protections in place to keep the state’s elections safe and to call out “bad actors” who might try to undermine the results.

Former Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes and former Republican Attorney General JB Van Hollen joined the call along with former Republican U.S. Rep. Scott Klug and former state Democratic Party Chair Mike Tate.

“I can speak from personal experience, having won and lost very close elections, that the process here in Wisconsin is safe and secure, and that’s exactly why you have this bipartisan group together,” said Barnes, who narrowly lost his challenge to U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson in 2022.

Barnes said false claims undermining confidence in voting and tabulating election results “have been manufactured by sore losers.”

If you lose an election, he added, “you have the option to run again at some point. But what you should not do is question the integrity or try to impugn our election administrators just because the people have said no to you.”

Former AG Van Hollen, a conservative Republican, seconded that emotion. “I’m here to tell you as the former chief law enforcement officer for the state of Wisconsin that our system does work,” he said.

Van Hollen reminded people that he pushed for Wisconsin’s strict voter I.D. law, which Democrats opposed as a voter-suppression measure. “Whether you were for it or against it, the bottom line is that it is in place right now. If people pretended to be somebody else when they came in and voted in the past, they cannot do that any longer,” Van Hollen said.

For voters of every stripe, he added, “Get out and vote. Your vote will count. Our system works and we have to trust in the result of that system.”

Former Republican Congressman Klug underscored that Trump lost Wisconsin in 2020 “and it had nothing to do with election fraud. It just had to do with folks who decided to vote in a different direction.”

He also praised local election workers and volunteers, like those who take his ballot at his Lutheran church, and “who make Wisconsin’s election system one of the best in the country.”

Tate, the former Democratic Party chair, warned that the unusually high volume of early voting and a state law that forbids clerks from counting ballots until polls close on election night will likely mean delays in results coming in. “There are good reasons for that,” he said, “because our good election workers are exercising extreme due diligence.”

In a separate press conference outside City Hall in Madison, members of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and Secretary of State Godlewski also chimed in to defend Wisconsin’s hard-working election clerks and combat conspiracy theories.

Nick Ramos, the Democracy Campaign’s executive director, connected recent news stories about drop-box arson in other states to the hijacking of a local dropbox by the mayor of Wausau, Wisconsin, who physically removed his town’s ballot drop box and locked it in his office. The mayor was forced to return the box and is now the subject of a criminal investigation. It’s important to hold people accountable who try to interfere with voting, Ramos said, because otherwise “people will try to imitate those types of bad behaviors.”

Besides sticking up for beleaguered election officials, the pro-drop-box press conference featured testimony from Martha Siravo, a founder of Madtown Mommas and Disability Advocates. Siravo, who uses a wheelchair, explained that having a drop box makes it much easier for her to vote. 

Godlewski described conversations with other voters around the state — a busy working mom, an elderly woman who has to ask her kids for rides when she needs to go out, and a young man who works the night shift — all of whom were able to vote by dropping their absentee ballots in a secure drop box, but who might not have made it to the polls during regular voting hours. “These stories are real and that’s why drop boxes matter,” Godlewski said. Restoring drop boxes is part of “helping ensure Wisconsin remains a state where every vote matters.”

That’s the spirit we need going into this fraught election, and for whatever comes after.

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Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Eric Hovde in the 2024 Senate campaign debate | Screenshot via Youtube

Eric Hovde doesn’t know much about the Farm Bill, he told the moderators of his debate with Sen. Tammy Baldwin, whom Hovde is running to replace. Investigative reporter Dan Bice called it “the worst moment” of the only debate between Wisconsin’s U.S. Senate candidates. Baldwin immediately cut an ad highlighting Hovde’s profession of ignorance.

Hovde says he doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. “Like, I’m supposed to study [the bill] in depth?” he griped to rightwing talk radio host Vicky McKenna. McKenna was sympathetic. “Every debate is rigged against Republicans,” she said. Anyway, the Farm Bill, McKenna and Hovde agreed, is just a big boondoggle. “It’s a bill about food stamps,” McKenna said contemptuously. 

“It’s all for big corporations, food stamps, everything else,” Hovde added vaguely. “And by the way, Sen. Baldwin, I bet, wouldn’t know one-tenth of what’s in the bill.”

In fact, Baldwin wrote a number of provisions of the Senate’s Farm Bill framework, including dairy business innovation grants, protections for farmers who face a sudden drop in milk prices or increase in the cost of feed, mental health supports for agricultural communities, a federal program to track foreign investment in U.S. farmland, upgrades for rural drinking water infrastructure and funding for rural hospitals, child care and economic development.

In the debate, she said she was disappointed by the delay in passing a new Farm Bill. (Congress takes up a new Farm Bill every five years. Because the House and Senate failed to agree on the 2023 bill, the 2018 bill has been extended.) But deep cuts to federal food assistance in the House version are unacceptable, she added. 

This is the sort of nerdy policy discussion that made Baldwin the first Democrat to receive the endorsement of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation in 20 years. But it doesn’t make for sexy talking points in the campaign

Hovde, as Erik Gunn reports, is running a campaign fashioned in the image of former President Donald Trump, who gave Hovde his “complete and total endorsement”

His focus is on how “the American Dream is slipping away” and the country is in “decline” because of President Joe Biden’s “disastrous” stewardship of the economy and “the worst border crisis in our nation’s history.”

Unlike Baldwin, with her detailed policy proposals and long list of legislative accomplishments, Hovde is mostly running on a throw-the-bums-out mood of disaffection which appeals to Trump voters.

A lot of those voters are in rural parts of the state, where, as Hovde observed during the debate, you can see huge Trump and Hovde signs waving over farm fields along the highway

But those same areas have produced surprising margins for Baldwin, as split-ticket voters have repeatedly supported her, even as they cast their ballots for Republican presidential candidates. That’s because she regularly shows up to listen to them and gets deeply in the weeds on rural issues.

This year, like the presidential election in battleground Wisconsin, the Senate race is a tossup. No one knows how voters will weigh wonky policy proposals against outrage and showmanship. 

Nowhere is the disconnect between concrete policies and the politics of the current election more glaring than on the issue of immigration. Trump’s promised “mass deportation” would be a death blow to Wisconsin dairy farmers, removing 70% of the dairy industry’s labor force who are immigrants, mostly with no legal work authorization because Congress has not extended agricultural visas to year-round farm workers — including the people who milk the cows on Wisconsin dairies.

Baldwin has discussed that issue in public forums on the Farm Bill. But like other Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris in her campaign for president, she is not pushing back that hard against the Republican “border crisis” message. In the debate she focused on the importance of stopping fentanyl from crossing the border, not the degree to which Wisconsin farmers depend on undocumented immigrant labor. 

From a campaign perspective, Democrats have apparently decided that defending the immigrants who prop up so much of the U.S. economy is a losing strategy. As with the broader issue of the economy, including low unemployment, surging job growth and a dramatic recovery from the pandemic thanks in large part to the Biden administration’s aggressive investments (which, among other feats, cut child poverty in half while the nation experienced COVID lockdowns), Democrats are not swimming against the tide. They know people feel that prices are high and things aren’t going their way, and they don’t want to sound callous or out of tune by saying the economy is actually in good shape.

It’s up to voters to make up their own minds. As the Republicans say, are you better off than you were four years ago? Another question we’ll all have to answer: Do you think government policies like the Farm Bill can make things better or are you ready to throw a rock at the system and see what happens? The answer to that question will determine which radically different path we take in the future.

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Opposing political signs in neighbors' yards in Maple Bluff, Wisconsin | Photo by Ruth Conniff

“Truth Decay” is rotting our politics and public discourse, according to political scientist Ray Block. Block delivered the keynote address at the WisPolitics “polling summit” at the Madison Club this week, where a panel of pollsters discussed trends in the 2024 election. (Top takeaway: No one knows who is going to win.)

“We’re in a worrying place,” Block warned, with disinformation and misinformation eroding confidence in election integrity and public institutions. “Lies kill democracy,” he said. If people can’t debate in good faith, public trust, community cohesion and ultimately all of our democratic institutions will collapse.

Block is the inaugural Michael D. Rich Distinguished Chair for Countering Truth Decay at the Rand Corporation, where researchers first began focusing on the degradation of truth in our current political and social media environment because it posed a threat to the value of scientific and academic expertise. After all, if facts don’t matter, research and hard-won expertise lose their currency. 

But the antidote to the bitter polarization and the sheer wackiness of our new political reality, Block and his colleagues have decided, lies not with experts or even with identifying objective truth. Instead, he said, it’s a matter of rebuilding individual relationships among neighbors. 

As he spoke, I thought about my suburban neighborhood, where Trump and Harris signs bristle at each other across sidewalks and driveways. How will we ever get along again?

“You can’t ‘correct’ your way out of these problems,” Block said of some voters’ beliefs that, for example, massive amounts of voter fraud changed the outcome of the 2020 election, or that President Barack Obama wasn’t really born in the United States. It’s no use treating these pernicious narratives as “a wrong answer on a test question,” he added. Instead, we have to understand how such false ideas are attached to a sense of shared social identity and community — and then do something to rebuild community among people with different points of view. 

The antidote to polarization and fact-aversion, Block and his Rand colleagues have decided, is to rebuild civil society through individual acts of community engagement. He talked about the urgency of preserving local news, and he urged people to get involved in local community-building efforts. Rand is doing this by hosting community dialogues near its headquarters in Santa Monica, California. The events bring together people with opposing views to discuss and debate the issues that worry them. The idea, Block said, is to “get people used to the idea that you’ve got to live together even if you don’t agree.” 

It sounds simple, but it’s not an easy thing to do. 

Close to home, I saw a good model of what Block is talking about during high holiday services at Shaarei Shamayim, Madison’s Reconstructionist Jewish congregation, where my family and I belong.

Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman led a conversation on the war in Gaza on Yom Kippur, the traditional Jewish day of mourning. She invited people to share their grief, both for the people killed in the  Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the hostages who remain in Gaza, and for the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians who have been killed and displaced in the ensuing war. “You are going to hear things you don’t agree with,” Rabbi Laurie said, to a group of congregants with conflicting views on Israel, Palestine and the war, “and that’s OK.

In her Rosh Hashanah sermon, Rabbi Laurie described her own uncomfortable conversations with family members with whom she disagrees, and her participation in a community forum on Gaza that devolved into shouting. In her humble, self-deprecating way, she described an unsatisfying conversation about the war with fellow rabbis. One of them pooh-poohed her suggestion that children learn about the complexities of the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians, including the history of repression and injustice Palestinians have experienced. He asserted that “kids need to know what side they’re on.” In his Sunday school classes, he said, he skips complexity and has children draw Israeli flags.

“It’s not soccer,” Rabbi Laurie grumbled. 

In the community forum, she found herself on the opposite side, arguing heatedly with an activist who insisted that the rapes and murders of Oct. 7 were justified — comparable to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of Polish Jews during the Holocaust. 

“​​The attack on October 7th and ensuing war has created, or maybe unleashed, deep polarization — in families, among friends, in congregations, and in the larger community,” Rabbi Laurie said. “It widened the discourse to the point where I have heard people I know and love say things that are untrue, conspiratorial, hateful, and bereft of the basic values I had thought we all shared.”

Despite the discomfort, she continues to pursue these awkward conversations, and encouraged her congregation to do likewise, “not to find solutions, but to become more connected with one another. To think deeply about the meaning of kinship and of justice. To become more committed to our deepest ideals.”

It’s a credit to Rabbi Laurie’s willingness to endure these difficult encounters, to persist despite not knowing where it will lead, that the Shaarei Shamayim community does, in fact, make room for a diversity of opinions. If people can talk to each other and hold onto their relationships through deep disagreement, there’s hope for peace and justice. It’s a good model for all of us going forward. 

As Block said, no matter who wins the election, “we are not going to make it if we don’t figure out how to work together.” 

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Detail of a mural inside the Madison Labor Temple building celebrating unions and worker rights. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

This week The New York Times podcast “The Daily” did an excellent segment with reporter Dan Kaufman on his story “How NAFTA Broke American Politics.”

Kaufman focuses on Masterlock, the iconic Milwaukee lock company that outsourced 1,000 jobs to Mexico shortly after then President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Masterlock shut down its entire Milwaukee operation this year. In the podcast, you can hear former Masterlock worker Chancie Adams describe the arc of his disaffection from the Democratic Party. It’s a painful journey. 

Adams’ family was part of the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South who moved to Milwaukee when the city was a manufacturing powerhouse. He was the first among his relatives able to buy a house, thanks to his union wages. The union got him involved in politics, too, and he actually met President Barack Obama when Obama made a campaign stop at Masterlock in 2012. “Milwaukee, we are not going back to an economy that’s weakened by outsourcing and bad debt and phony financial profits,” Obama told Masterlock employees, praising the company’s decision to bring back some of its previously outsourced jobs. But a few years later the company moved all the jobs away and shut its Milwaukee plant.  

After supporting Obama, Adams won’t be voting in 2024, he said. “I’m done with all that,” he told Kaufman. He has no faith that Harris will do anything to help people like him. All politicians are crooks, in Adams’ view. But if he did vote, he’d probably cast his ballot for former President Donald Trump, he said. Trump’s a crook, too, but “he’s a gangster,” Adams said, laughing.

I’ve heard similar reactions from Wisconsin dairy farmers who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. They liked it when Trump pledged to remember “the forgotten men and women of America.” They laughed off some of his outrageous statements. As a political outsider, they felt he would throw a rock at the two-party system that, in their view, abandoned ordinary people and really only served the interests of big corporations, especially when it came to trade deals like NAFTA.

Disappearing factories and farms

In addition to spurring devastating job losses at manufacturing plants in places like Milwaukee, Janesville and Racine, NAFTA helped make Wisconsin the No. 1 state in the nation for farm bankruptcies, accelerating the “get big or get out” trend in agriculture. Wisconsin lost more than half its family farms during the early 2000s. 

Don’t get me wrong. The Democrats were not solely responsible for trade deals that made investors rich by setting off a race to the bottom in wages and prices. Mainstream candidates of both major political parties embraced “free trade,” while on the right and left-wing margins, conservative commentator and 1992 presidential candidate Pat Buchanan and socialist U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders sounded the alarm that what was good for Wall Street could be devastating for Main Street. 

Kaufman does a good job documenting how NAFTA “signaled the Democratic Party’s move away from its working-class, New Deal roots.” I remember that shift in the early 1990s, when liberal intellectuals and New Democrats sneered at down-at-the-heel union workers and farmers, and began embracing more upscale suburban voters.

“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia,” Kaufman quotes Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer saying before the 2016 election. “And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” 

That strategy didn’t work out too well for the Democrats in 2016. And despite Biden’s narrow victory in 2020, it’s still a problem for them in 2024. 

“Democrats have privately grown worried about Kamala Harris’s standing among working-class voters in the crucial ‘blue-wall’ states,” the Wall Street Journal reported on Oct. 8 in a piece citing pleas from allies including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for Harris to make a “sharper economic appeal.”

This criticism is maddening to Democrats who point out President Joe Biden’s pro-union record, including being the first president to walk a picket line, his creation of 765,000 new manufacturing jobs, and massive federal investments in job creation, infrastructure and clean energy projects — plus low unemployment and wage growth. 

Biden came to Wisconsin this year to visit the site of the failed Foxconn plant, to tout a new Microsoft A.I. facility that will create 1,000 jobs on the site where Trump promised “the Eighth Wonder of the World” but where, after billions in public investment, the promised Foxconn facility never materialized.

Contrary to his rhetoric about representing the working class, Trump created a huge trade deficit and his 2017 tax cut gave corporations a new incentive to offshore jobs by cutting taxes on foreign profits.

Still, Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance have capitalized on Democrats’ decision in the 1990s to shift away from working class concerns and embrace NAFTA. They are speaking directly to the voters who were left behind.

One farmer I interviewed for my book “Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Immigrants,” said he wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clintion because Bill Clinton signed NAFTA. It’s worth remembering that in Wisconsin, a critical battleground state, Sanders won the Democratic primary in 2016 by a massive 13 point margin over Hillary Clinton.

Speaking to working class voters

For her part, Harris says she would have voted against NAFTA were she in the U.S. Senate when it came up. She has promised to continue Biden’s pro-union efforts and to support and protect U.S. manufacturing. 

But unlike Trump and Vance, Harris doesn’t have a big-picture story to tell “the forgotten men and women” that reverses the impression that Democrats are mostly the party of sophisticated city-dwellers and suburbanites. Her plans to help first-time home buyers come up with a downpayment, expand Medicare to include long-term care, and help families cover the costs of child care — all part of what she calls the “opportunity economy” — are good. But they sound like a grab bag of technocratic solutions to economic upheaval that has played out in the lives of ordinary workers and farmers as an epic catastrophe — something a lot of Democrats haven’t acknowledged.

One exception is Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a staunch opponent of global trade deals, including Most Favored Nation trading status for China and Obama’s Trans Pacific Partnership deal. Baldwin has championed Made in America rules and is constantly visiting farms and pushing investment in ag innovation and in Wisconsin manufacturers. 

In a recent campaign ad, a parade of Teamsters truck drivers wearing baseball caps and their family members praise Baldwin, saying she “fought like hell” and saved their pensions after their employer tried to cut their retirement savings in half. “You don’t forget something like that,” one guy says. That’s the kind of message that helps Baldwin win in districts that voted heavily for Trump.

There’s a lot at stake in the coming election: reproductive freedom, a potentially brutal crackdown on immigrants, voting rights and even the survival of democracy itself. 

But one of the most important questions candidates must answer is who is looking out for working class Midwesterners. Many Democrats have taken a pass on that issue in recent years. Unless they make it very clear that has changed, it will come back to bite them.

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CAMBRIDGE, WI - APRIL 25: Cows walk from a barn after being milked on Hinchley's Dairy Farm on April 25, 2017 near Cambridge, Wisconsin. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

While Republican politicians were busy spreading lurid stories about immigrants bringing chaos, violence and economic harm to communities across the Midwest, organizers of last week’s World Dairy Expo were quietly adjusting their program to offer programs in Spanish for employees and managers who play a crucial role in the industry.

Workers from Mexico and other Latin American countries make up an estimated 70% of the labor force on Wisconsin dairy farms. Over the last several years, the annual dairy expo in Madison has been responding to the needs of these workers, as well as to visitors from Spanish-speaking countries around the world, with the “expo en español.”

On Wednesday afternoon Juan Quezada, director of training and development at Milk Source LLC, gave a lecture on leadership entirely in Spanish. (Other Spanish-language sessions this year concerned women in dairy, animal welfare and labor retention.) 

The meeting room inside the Alliant Center was full of Latino farm managers, some from as far away as Spain and Ecuador and others from nearby dairy operations in Wisconsin. Outside, the fairgrounds hosted people from 130 countries and more than 2,500 cows, exhibits showing off gleaming farm equipment, and aisles of food vendors.

The expo declined an offer to appear from Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

“We host an event for cows and people who care for cows and not for candidates,” Lisa Behnke, communications manager for World Dairy Expo, told Wisconsin State Farmer, who added that the same decision would apply to any partisan candidate. “We’re staying in our lane.”

But given Trump’s attacks on immigrants, and the promise of a “mass deportation” that, if it ever happened, would destroy the dairy industry overnight, the Republican presidential candidate would have been a particularly bad fit for the expo this year.

“We’ve seen a big population of Latinos coming to these events,” said Alison Pfau, bilingual regional dairy educator for the University of Wisconsin Extension, explaining the decision to offer programs in Spanish. 

It stands to reason that immigrants, who are the backbone of the dairy industry, are moving into leadership positions, training and supervising workers, keeping operations running smoothly, becoming trusted managers on farms that lean heavily on them to survive.

In his lecture, Quezada told his own story, how he moved up from milking cows to management after a long apprenticeship. He described how he got a big break one day, while leading a tour of international visitors on the large farm where he was working. As he was giving the tour, he stopped now and then to pick up bits of garbage. When the tour was over, a farm manager from Europe asked if he would like to work overseas. His attention to detail and care for the little aspects of the job caught his prospective employer’s eye and led to his next job in Denmark. “Thanks to the garbage, I achieved one of my dreams,” he declared. Eventually, Quezada made it back to Wisconsin to work at Milk Source, the largest single milk-producer in Wisconsin. 

It was one of many anecdotes about leadership qualities — honesty, punctuality, respect — that Quezada expounded on to his audience, mostly broad-shouldered Latino men wearing baseball caps, who nodded in agreement.

How many immigrant workers have come to this country and arrived in our state following Quezada’s path, I wondered — working hard, keeping their heads down and slowly becoming an indispensable part of our economy and society?

Last week the Immigration Research Initiative in New York and the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., co-released a one-page infographic showing how immigration benefits the U.S. economy.

Together, immigrant workers and business owners generated $4.8 trillion in economic output in the U.S. in 2022, the groups reported.

In addition to their outsized role in agriculture, immigrants, who make up 14% of the U.S. population, are 27% of janitors, 37% of construction laborers, 47% of maids and 46% of software developers.

On the rooftops of houses, above the Trump/Vance signs displayed in some of my neighbors’ yards, teams of Latino workers have been busy lately, hammering away to Reggeaton music as they replace hail-damaged roof tiles. It’s astounding how much work is getting done by immigrants even as the toxicity of anti-immigrant rhetoric keeps ramping up. 

“When immigrants move to the United States, the economy grows,” the Immigration Research Initiative and EPI researchers found. “That doesn’t mean fewer jobs; it means more jobs: there are more consumers, more workers and more business owners. Study after study shows there is no fixed number of jobs in the economy. Immigration creates opportunities that benefit U.S.-born workers, too.”

Quezada’s lecture emphasized both the importance of hard work — an easy sell to his audience, which knows a lot about that topic — and the responsibilities that come with leadership. Leadership means setting an example, he told the group. It means thinking about how your speech and actions create a positive or negative atmosphere for others. It means listening well, inspiring people to follow your example, being consistent by saying hello every day. 

When he asked for examples of leadership qualities from audience members, they offered more: respect, good communication skills, the ability to control your emotions.

Quezada told a story about how he lost his temper once, the night before he was about to be promoted to a new job. A cow gave birth unexpectedly and he had to stay in the barn late on a Sunday night. Angrily, he kicked the wall, only to find that his employer was standing behind him. He could have lost his promotion, he said. He told the story to illustrate another quality of good leaders: integrity — doing the right thing even when you think no one is watching. 

I can think of a few political leaders who would benefit from Quezada’s lessons in leadership. But they’d need a translator to help them understand.

Correction: An earlier version of this column incorrectly stated the total amount immigrants contribute to U.S. GDP, based on a draft of the Immigration Research Initiative report that was later corrected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So cheer up, Wisconsin. 

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

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Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Lafayette County Democratic volunteer irene kendall. Shapiro campaigned in rural Wisconsin for Sen. Tammy Baldwin's reelection Saturday. | Wisconsin Examiner photo

Two-term U.S Sen. Tammy Baldwin got a boost Saturday from a fellow Democrat, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, in her tight reelection race against Republican challenger Eric Hovde. The incumbent senator from Wisconsin and the governor — who attracted national media attention when he was recently considered as a possible vice presidential candidate — toured rural Richland and Lafayette counties, meeting with farmers and small town residents in sparsely populated areas of the state. In both counties, most voters chose former President Donald Trump in the last two presidential elections. But they also voted for Baldwin by more than 10-point margins in 2018. 

The night before embarking on the rural Wisconsin tour, Baldwin spoke from the same stage as Democratic nominee Kamala Harris to a cheering crowd of 10,000 people who packed the Dane County Coliseum, a frequent venue for rock concerts in deep-blue Madison.

Since both population growth and voter turnout are sky-high in Dane County, Democrats are focusing heavily on the area as key to winning elections in this closely-divided swing state. But Baldwin, like Shapiro, who made inroads with rural voters in Pennsylvania, makes a point of campaigning in rural and suburban areas that lean Republican. 

Appealing to voters in areas where other Democrats don’t often show up is a big part of both politicians’ formula for success. In their joint, rural campaign stops in Wisconsin they modeled an approach to politics that refuses to take the urban-rural political divide for granted, and that reconnects with voters the rest of their party has often overlooked. That approach dovetails with the Harris campaign’s effort to appeal to disaffected Republicans and to present the Democratic party as a “big tent.”

Lafayette is among the most rural counties in Wisconsin, and one of only two counties in the state that doesn’t have a traffic light, according to U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, a Democrat, who represents the area in Congress. Voters there chose Trump by 9 percentage points in 2016 and by 13.7 points in 2020 — but Baldwin won the county by 10.6 points in 2018. 

“It really does feel like home,” Shapiro told the Examiner, standing outside a big, red barn at the Iowa and Lafayette County Democrats’ picnic. “There’s a sensibility, and there’s a desire from the people I’ve met to just have elected officials work together to get stuff done,” he said.

Getting stuff done — Shapiro’s trademark phrase — was the theme of his speech endorsing Baldwin’s 2024 reelection bid. He touted her work to bring agriculture innovation grants as well as her work on rural broadband and expanding health care access.

In her own speech at the county picnic, Baldwin also focused on specific accomplishments. She told a story about meeting with executives of a handful of medical device companies and “shaming” them into agreeing to set a cap of $35 per month on the price of inhalers, after hearing from constituents who were struggling to pay hundreds of dollars per month to treat their asthma. 

While Shapiro and Baldwin described themselves as pragmatists, they also espoused progressive values, denouncing Republican “extremism” and threats to democracy and vowing to work to claw back abortion rights after the demise of Roe v. Wade. 

Baldwin warned that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which held that there is no fundamental constitutional right to privacy, poses a threat to other precedents besides Roe, including protections for access to contraception as well as interracial and same-sex marriage. She described the skepticism she encountered from journalists who did not believe she would be able to get enough Republican votes to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, which codified federal recognition of same-sex and interracial marriages. 

“I said, ‘Just you watch,’ ” she told the audience of rural Democrats, adding she was sure at least 10 of her Republican colleagues had a loved one who would be hurt if same-sex marriage was overturned. In the end she found 12 Republicans to join all 50 Democrats in the Senate to pass the bill.

Baldwin added that she is proud to be the lead author of the Women’s Health Protection Act, “which would restore Roe, make it a part of our national laws, and tell states like Wisconsin and Texas and Florida and Idaho that you can’t pass a whole bunch of laws at the state level that interfere with those rights and freedoms.”

“I don’t have 60 votes yet, but I do have a plan,” she told her rural constituents. “That plan involves all of you working super hard to get me reelected to the United States Senate.”

Democrats are working harder than ever in Lafayette County, said Democratic Party Chair Nancy Fisker, who added that the group has doubled its membership in the last year and a half after opening a new office, with help from the state party. The chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, Ben Wikler, also gave an impassioned speech at the picnic. A prolific fundraiser, he has helped to open new Democratic Party offices all over the state.

Still, county residents are often afraid to put up yard signs or otherwise publicly identify themselves as Democrats, Fisker said. “We have to be aware of it, and we have to not push our agenda at people who don’t want to hear it,” she said. “We don’t just take a bunch of Democrats to a restaurant in Darlington to have a meeting unless we talk to the owner first, or they’ll throw us out on our ear. It’s serious.”

This year, after pushing for a long time, county volunteers are putting up more yard signs. And, after opening the new party office, “We started to have some successes,” Fisker said. Lafayette County voted for liberal state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz, whose victory over conservative former Justice Dan Kelly changed the ideological balance on the court. Most voters in the county also rejected a pair of constitutional amendments drafted by the Republican-controlled Legislature that would have taken away the governor’s power to give out federal emergency relief funds. Fisker attributes both results to her group’s stepped-up voter education effort.

Fisker said she meets a lot of split-ticket voters. “I have a couple of friends who just said, ‘Oh, well, you know, I’m going to vote for Baldwin, but I don’t know about that Harris person. So then there’s lots of conversations, and it’s your neighbors.”

“We care about reproductive rights. We care about the environment. We care about ensuring that our rights are not taken away. But you have to come to us in the way that we want to engage with you,” said Lafayette County Democrat irene kendall (she spells her name in all lower-case letters), who helped organize the event. She credited Baldwin and Pocan with coming to the area frequently and listening to people. “They understand what happens in the rural communities, because they’re out there, right? And so we know we matter to them. So showing up is a huge part of it, I think.” She has relatives, she said, who split their tickets, voting Republican in most races, but making and exception for Baldwin.

Steve Pickett, now retired, described himself as the first Democratic county clerk elected in Lafayette County since Reconstruction. He agreed that Democrats could do a lot better just by showing up.

“In rural Wisconsin, probably more so than in the cities, people want to know who the candidate is,” he said. “It’s hard for people to say, ‘Well, yeah I want to vote for someone I don’t even know.’”

The working theory for a long time has been that you have to be a Republican to win in Lafayette County, he said. Now that’s starting to change. “You can be a Democrat and win, but you have to work at it,” he added.

“It isn’t that it’s so Republican,” he said of the area. “It’s that we haven’t given people a reason to vote for the Democrats.” Baldwin and Pocan “gave you reasons” in their speeches, he added.

“We have to get the party to understand,” Pickett said, “that these are the races that are going to make them, as opposed to spending money in the really safe districts.”

Shapiro and Baldwin both seem to understand that point — and not just on the state level.

Shapiro told the rural Democrats in Wisconsin the same thing he said he tells voters in Pennsylvania: Because of the way national elections are structured, as swing state voters they have enormous power.  “You’ve got the power to shape the future,” he said, “not just of this state, but of this entire country.”

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Faith leaders with the Dane Sanctuary Coalition spoke out against anti-immigrant rhetoric at the Midvale Community Lutheran Church Thursday | Wisconsin Examiner photo

Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance traveled to western Wisconsin this week to double down on his spurious attacks on immigrants, promising to “kick these illegal aliens out.” 

It was the second time in two weeks that Republicans have campaigned in the rural, western part of the state on their “mass deportation” platform. 

The region where Vance and U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden made their recent stands against immigrants is heavily dependent on immigrant labor. Immigrants make up a large majority of the workforce on area dairy farms and they do most of the heavy lifting for other key businesses in the area including Ashley Furniture — the world’s largest furniture manufacturer — and the Pilgrim’s poultry processing plant. 

Western Wisconsin has experienced a big recent demographic shift with an influx of Latin American immigrants. And those newcomers have revitalized small towns across the region that were in decline because young people are moving away, leaving an aging white population. Mexican restaurants, grocery stores and other small businesses have given new life to fading Main streets and young families have filled schools that were on the brink of closure from low enrollment.

It’s hard to keep up with all the falsehoods politicians are spreading about immigrants in this campaign season. Among the doozies Vance dropped during his visit to Eau Claire was his baseless assertion that immigrants caused two area hospitals to close recently and that mass deportation will “make the business of rural health care much more affordable.”

The closure of those rural hospitals was agonizing for the communities that struggled to hold on to them. An aging patient population, low Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, trouble finding and keeping staff, and a larger harsh landscape for nonprofit hospitals were among the factors that caused the hospitals to close. But neither the legislators who worked on the issues nor hospital management pointed to immigrants as the problem. There’s good reason for that.

Across the country, immigrants use the U.S. medical system far less than people born in the U.S. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that: “Recent immigrants were responsible for only about 1% of public medical expenditures even though they constituted 5% of the population,” and “immigrants’ medical costs averaged about 14% to 20% less than those who were US born.”

As Alison Pfau, bilingual regional dairy educator for the University of Wisconsin Extension, has seen that phenomenon up close. She explained during a panel I participated in this week that given a choice between seeking medical care and staying on the job, “immigrant workers will choose to keep working every time, unless it’s a dire emergency.”

Meanwhile, national research shows that immigrants — including those without legal status — pay more into government health care programs through tax withholdings than they use in benefits. In 2022, undocumented immigrants paid almost $100 billion in taxes, about a third of which went to Medicare and Social Security —  programs they will never be able to use —Wisconsin Watch reports. Without them, U.S. safety net programs would take a big hit.

Other misleading campaign talking points mix up immigrants who are in the U.S. without legal authorization, like most Wisconsin dairy workers, with refugees and asylum seekers like the atrociously slandered Haitian refugees Vance and Trump have been falsely accusing of eating pets in Springfield, Ohio — who are here under U.S. protection and therefore not, contrary to campaign rhetoric, eligible to be deported. 

Antonio De Loera-Brust, a United Farm Workers spokesman, told Wisconsin Watch that the point of anti-immigrant rhetoric is not a real policy plan. After all, deporting millions of workers would be logistically impossible, in addition to depriving U.S. agriculture of a huge portion of its labor force. Employers who support Trump despite his threats, De Loera-Brust theorized, aren’t worried about losing their workers — they see the rhetoric as a way to frighten farmworkers so they don’t demand their rights. “I don’t think you need to psychoanalyze it that much further beyond, ‘This is in their economic interest,’” he told Wisconsin Watch.

He has a point. There is nothing coherent or logical about the barrage of hateful rhetoric about immigrants. Fear itself seems to be the point. And a system in which a disempowered workforce lives in fear is a system that is bound to be rife with exploitation.

Still, some farmers do object to the nasty characterization of immigrants. They point out that there is no legal visa for year-round farm work, even though the U.S. has depended on these workers to do jobs Americans don’t want to do for decades now. They want a visa program that recognizes that work and gives the people who’ve been here a long time a path to citizenship. 

Perhaps the most important thing to understand about all the political flame-throwing over communities supposedly afflicted by immigrants is that many of the people who live in those communities don’t agree that they are afflicted at all.

I found this out when I interviewed local leaders in Whitewater, Wisconsin, which was the focus of a lot of misleading political spin about a supposed sudden “flood” of Nicaraguan asylum seekers causing a crime wave. It turned out that story was false.

Eau Claire, like Whitewater, has been welcoming asylum seekers from other countries for years, and, as in Whitewater, residents there say the experience has enriched their community.

Matt Kendziera, executive director of Wisconsin Faith Voices for Justice, lived in Eau Claire for 29 years before moving to Madison last year. He said he never heard divisive talk about the arrival of people from other countries in the community until Vance visited this week to talk about the scourge of immigration. “Eau Claire has been a wonderful and welcoming community to the refugees who are there,” he  told me. Many former refugees have become community leaders, he added, running for city council and becoming active in the local schools. 

I spoke to Kendziera Thursday during a news conference at the Midvale Lutheran Community Church in Madison, where faith leaders who are part of the Dane Sanctuary Coalition were speaking out against “the growing number of vicious, racist lies, hatred, bomb threats, persecution and death threats against asylum seekers,” according to a coalition press release.

“This church has had the privilege of accompanying asylum seekers,” said Midvale Lutheran’s co-pastor, Rev. Katie Baardseth. Families from Cameroon, Ukraine and Colombia fleeing persecution and violence had found “peace and success in Madison,” she said. The experience of welcoming those families had benefited the congregation, she added.

Rabbi Jon Prosnit of Temple Beth El talked about Jews’ historical experience: “We’ve been targeted, we’ve been scapegoated. … We are always on guard lest our own hearts harden,” he said, adding that welcoming and protecting outsiders is “the most repeated injunction in the entire Torah.” 

Ibrahim Saeed, president of the Islamic Center of Madison, described the history of the Muslim people as a history of persecution and exile but also of being welcomed by strangers. God made humanity, he said, “so you can get to know each other, not to despise each other.”

Without a doubt, there’s a demographic shift going on in Wisconsin, especially in rural areas. But community leaders, employers and regular citizens in Wisconsin communities like Whitewater, Eau Claire and Arcadia have embraced the change and the energy and economic and cultural benefits that come with it.

It’s inspiring to talk to people who have opened their hearts, welcoming newcomers and feeling their own lives and communities enriched by the experience.

Contrary to all the toxic rhetoric, immigration is a net plus for our country, and especially for the white, rural areas the Trump/Vance campaign is targeting in Wisconsin. Beneath the noise of the political campaign, a lot of people in those communities can tell you about it. 

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Migrants wait throughout the night on May 10, 2023, in a dust storm at Gate 42, on land between the Rio Grande and the border wall, hoping they will be processed by immigration authorities before the expiration of Title 42. (Photo by Corrie Boudreaux for Source NM)

It seems absurd to take the time to refute the preposterous claims about immigrants made by Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans in Wisconsin, including U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden and Sen. Ron Johnson. But the campaign of slander targeting vulnerable workers who milk our cows, pick our crops, build our roads and prop up our economy is genuinely dangerous.

Trump hit a new low when he claimed during Tuesday’s presidential debate that “in Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Kamala Harris’ bemused reaction, laughing and shaking her head, reflected the feelings of a whole lot of viewers who were appalled to hear the former president spreading a racist internet fable from the debate stage. 

This was not a one-off. Outrageous lies about immigrants are the centerpiece of Republican campaigns this year.

On Monday, as Henry Redman reported, Van Orden held a press conference to turn a single criminal case against a Venezuelan immigrant into fodder for his reelection campaign in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District. 

“American citizens’ human rights are being violated. They’re being kidnapped, raped and murdered by criminal, illegal aliens, and it’s just got to stop,” Van Orden declared.

In reality, an extensive study led by Stanford University economist Ran Abramitzky shows that immigrants are significantly less likely to be locked up for serious crimes than people born in the U.S. “From Henry Cabot Lodge in the late 19th century to Donald Trump, anti-immigration politicians have repeatedly tried to link immigrants to crime, but our research confirms that this is a myth and not based on fact,” Abramitzky said.

As dairy farmer John Rosenow, who lives in Van Orden’s district, told Redman, anti-immigrant rhetoric does nothing to help farmers like him, who employ some of the immigrants performing 70% of the labor on Wisconsin dairy farms. Almost all of those workers are not here legally and could be deported at any time, because Congress has failed to enact a visa program for year-round farm work. 

“If there’s one thing you can do to help us [it’s to] tone down the rhetoric,” Rosenow said he told Van Orden’s staff. “They’re doing all the work, and why do we select one person that does something wrong that’s an immigrant and make it like all immigrants are like that person?” Rosenow added. “We don’t do that for Americans. We’ve got plenty of bad white people around here that do bad things, and we don’t extrapolate that to everyone else.”

But stirring up white voters with race-baiting stories about immigrants is a vote-getter, Republicans figure. 

On Wednesday, Wisconsin’s Sen. Johnson joined Senate GOP colleagues in a press conference demanding immediate passage of the SAVE Act “to protect integrity in U.S. elections and ensure only U.S. citizens can vote.” Republicans are threatening to shut down the U.S. government over the non-issue of alleged voting by undocumented immigrants — something that is already a felony. 

Instances of unauthorized immigrants voting are “so rare as to be statistically nonexistent,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnik, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told the Christian Science Monitor — hardly a “crisis” that merits the extreme measures Johnson and his colleagues are calling for.

For the most part, Democrats have responded to Republican alarmism about immigration by sticking to policy and brushing off the fearmongering and grotesque caricatures of immigrants. Taking the high road might be a smart political strategy, particularly for Harris, who is herself the child of immigrants and the first woman of color with a serious shot at the White House. Like Barack Obama, the first Black president of the United States, Harris has responded to race-baiting attacks by rising above them and encouraging Americans to do likewise, to “turn the page” on ugly, divisive politics, to embrace a big-hearted sense of ourselves as having “more in common than what divides us.” Calling out racism directly is a loser for candidates of color, political consultants advise.

At the same time, Democrats including Harris and Wisconsin’s incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin point out — correctly — that Republicans in Congress abandoned a bipartisan border security deal they’d helped negotiate because Trump told them to let it die so he could use immigration as a campaign cudgel.

It’s true that the incident shows the GOP’s lack of seriousness about tackling the U.S. immigration system they are constantly complaining about. But the border security bill also drew a lot of criticism from immigrant rights groups, particularly for the way it turns the U.S. asylum application process into a game of roulette, allowing a future administration to deny asylum protections, and changing the rules on a day to day basis when border crossings exceed a certain threshold.. Harris has pledged to sign it anyway if she’s elected.

That’s too bad, because the bill does nothing to address the issue she was charged with looking into as vice president: the root causes of mass migration. Nor will it stop people from sneaking across the border to fill jobs while employers are desperate for their labor — including on Wisconsin dairy farms. 

These workers are already vulnerable to exploitation. They come here with no legal protections and work long hours for low pay doing back-breaking jobs Americans won’t take. They pay taxes through wage withholdings into social safety net programs they can never access. 

To a lot of citizens they are invisible. Anti-immigrant campaign rhetoric casts them in an ugly glare, focusing resentment on people who are already living in tenuous circumstances. They are not only doing our dirty work, they are boosting the wages of U.S. workers and making our economy stronger.

The injustice of Republicans’ anti-immigrant libel, set beside immigrant contributions to the U.S. economy, is overwhelming. 

Political point-scoring aside, it would be nice to see Democrats stand up more forcefully on this topic, instead of tacitly agreeing with Republicans’ false claims that immigrants are harming our country. Eric Hovde, the Republican challenging Baldwin this year in the U.S. Senate race, claims without evidence that immigrants are causing the lack of affordable housing and driving up the cost of health care. Baldwin has said she supports the bipartisan border security bill and wants to stop fentanyl from crossing the border. 

What we don’t hear enough about is that the big reason migrants pour across our southern border is because employers like the farmers here in Wisconsin demand it. Without those immigrants — if, for example, Trump launched his promised “mass deportation,” sending federal agents door to door to arrest undocumented workers — our dairy industry would go belly-up overnight.  

“Immigrants are driving the U.S. economic boom,” the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell writes in a recent column. “That is: The United States has escaped recession, hiring growth has exceeded expectation, and inflation has cooled faster than predicted — all largely because immigration has boosted the size of the U.S. labor force. Don’t just take my word for it; ask the Federal Reserve chair or Wall Street economists.”

Van Orden, in his recent press conference, acknowledged the contributions of immigrants to the dairy industry in his district, along with the construction and hospitality industries, and said that’s why he supports the H-2A visa program, which gives temporary visas to migrants to do seasonal farm work in the U.S.

But the H-2A program “means nothing to dairy farmers,” Rosenow told the Examiner, since it doesn’t apply to workers who labor year-round on dairy farms, as well as in all of the other industries Van Orden mentioned.

Instead of scapegoating, we owe hard-working immigrants a debt of gratitude. And we need to listen to employers like Rosenow, who are asking politicians to show some common decency and come up with policy solutions that acknowledge what they’ve known for decades: Our country benefits tremendously from immigrants. 

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