The future may not have been written yet, but as it unfolds in 2025, Wisconsin Watch’s statehouse team will be on the lookout for stories that expose societal problems, explore solutions, explain the decisions that affect your daily life and hold the powerful to account.
Here are four storylines we predict we’ll be following in the new year:
1. The Wisconsin Supreme Court will expand abortion rights.
There are two abortion-related cases at the Wisconsin Supreme Court right now. One questions whether or not an 1849 law has been “impliedly repealed” by subsequent abortion laws and whether it even applies to consensual abortions. The other asks the justices to declare that access to abortion is a right protected by the state constitution. I’m guessing they will.
In another recent but unrelated case, Justice Rebecca Dallet suggested the court should broadly interpret the Wisconsin Constitution. “There are several compelling reasons why we should read Article I, Section 1 (of the state constitution) as providing broader protections for individual liberties than the Fourteenth Amendment (of the U.S. constitution),” she wrote. Article I, Section 1 of the state constitution states, in part, that all “people are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
That’s the exact provision Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin relies on in arguing abortion access is protected by the constitution. Seems noteworthy.
— Jack Kelly
2. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and the Republican-controlled Legislature will again strike a deal to increase funding for public education and private voucher schools, similar to the compromise they made in 2023.
Wisconsin held a record number of public school referendums this year. School districts, public officials, local taxpayers and public education advocates are speaking out, calling for increases in state aid after approving $4.4 billion in property tax hikes so their local schools can continue to cover operating costs, as well as large projects. After speaking with both Republican and Democratic lawmakers about this issue during the 2024 election cycle, many of them agreed that voters aren’t happy when they have to increase their own property taxes. Assuming Republicans are feeling the pressure to increase funding for public schools, K-12 spending could be on track to become one of the most significant budget items in 2025.
But Republican lawmakers have also stood their ground in support of school choice and have criticized state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly’s $4 billion ask for public school funding in the upcoming budget. If Republicans do agree to per-pupil funding increases, it likely won’t match the amount Evers asks for. In turn, Republicans will likely demand an increase for the voucher system as well.
— Hallie Claflin
3. The state Supreme Court election will set another spending record.
The last time Donald Trump won the presidency, Democrats were so shell-shocked they didn’t field a candidate to challenge conservative Supreme Court Justice Annette Ziegler’s re-election bid. Then in January 2018 Democrat Patty Schachtner won a special state Senate election in rural northwestern Wisconsin, signaling a Democratic wave was building. Rebecca Dallet’s Supreme Court win in April of that year affirmed the wave. It also heralded a leftward swing of the state Supreme Court culminating with Janet Protasiewicz’s win in April 2023, an election that shattered national spending records for a state Supreme Court election.
Whether Dane County Judge Susan Crawford can continue the liberal winning streak or former Attorney General Brad Schimel can channel Trump’s winning vibes is far from certain. But April’s high court contest is a must-win for Republicans, so expect the $51 million record from 2023 to fall. A Crawford win would guarantee liberal control through 2028. A Schimel win would set up another pivotal election in 2026.
— Matthew DeFour
4. Ben Wikler will be the next chair of the Democratic National Committee.
Democrats have been doing a lot of soul searching since their setbacks in November. While they haven’t reached a consensus on how to move their party forward — and they likely won’t anytime soon — they will need an effective communicator as their leader while they regroup. Wikler, who is a powerhouse fundraiser, is about as media-savvy as it comes. Whether it’s catering to a national audience on cable news, firing up the base on liberal podcasts like “Pod Save America” or speaking about local issues with local reporters like me, Wikler always stays on message. In a time when Democrats need to convince voters that they are looking out for their best interests, staying on message would be a valuable quality in a leader. That, combined with a track record of building strong party infrastructure at the state level and, most importantly, winning, makes him a standout among the declared candidates. We’ll find out his fate Feb. 1.
— Jack Kelly
Forward is a look ahead at the week in Wisconsin government and politics from the Wisconsin Watch statehouse team.
But what made this year particularly special was the introduction of the Forward newsletter. Each week the Wisconsin Watch state team produces shorter stories about what we expect to be the big news and trends in the days, weeks and months ahead. It’s something our local media partners asked for and our state team reporters delivered.
As the year winds down, we gave each state team reporter the assignment of picking a favorite story written by another member of the team (Secret Santa style!). Here were their picks:
Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, speaks during a Republican press conference on June 8, 2023, in the Wisconsin State Capitol building to announce a tentative agreement between legislative Republicans and Gov. Tony Evers on a shared revenue bill. (Drake White-Bergey / Wisconsin Watch)
To some, radio is a source of entertainment and information from a bygone era. They’re mistaken. Hallie Claflin’s deeply reported, authoritative story illustrates the immense and continuing influence of talk radio — especially conservative talk radio — in Wisconsin politics. The rise of former Gov. Scott Walker, the toppling of a Democratic mayor in Wausau and the deaths of certain bills in the Legislature can all be tied, at least in part, to advocacy or opposition from conservative talk radio hosts. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the state’s most powerful Republican, makes regular appearances on broadcasts and described talk radio as being “as powerful as it’s ever been.” This story is worth your time as you look ahead to 2025.
Phoebe Petrovic’s profile of militant, anti-abortion Pastor Matthew Trewhella, her first investigation as Wisconsin’s first ProPublica local reporting network fellow, was an engaging read. But I especially liked the companion piece she wrote. It’s a reader service to do this kind of story when we do a large takeout on a person or subject unfamiliar to most readers. It also might drive readers to the main story when they learn more about why we did it. It puts the readers behind the scenes a bit and has the potential to make readers feel more connected to Wisconsin Watch.
Tom Kertscher does an amazing job with all of his fact briefs, but my favorite has to be a compilation that fact-checked presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump right before their September debate. Over the past few races, presidential campaigns have been full of misinformation. Debates are a vital time to show the reality of candidates and their beliefs. Tom’s story made sure people could accurately judge the claims both candidates were making. I learned about many new and important topics across party lines like Trump’s for-profit college, Harris’ claim about tracking miscarriages and accurate deportation statistics.
The Waupun Correctional Institution — shown here on Oct. 27, 2023 — was not over capacity as of late July 2024. But the state prison system as a whole has long incarcerated more people than its prisons were designed to hold. (Angela Major / WPR)
Khushboo Rathore’s DataWatch report detailing that the state’s prison population was at nearly 130% capacity stood out as one of my favorite pieces this year. Not only did this short story shed light on severe deficiencies in Wisconsin’s prison system, it also presented the findings in a digestible format that helped readers understand overcrowding in prisons through striking data. It’s one thing to report that Wisconsin prisons are overwhelmed, and it’s another to have the numbers that show it. This piece has the power to reshape future conversations about statewide prison reform, which is what our work here at Wisconsin Watch is all about!
The Wisconsin Supreme Court holds its first hearing of the new term on Sept. 7, 2023, at the Wisconsin State Capitol. (Andy Manis / For Wisconsin Watch)
Jack Kelly has some of the best sourcing this newsroom has ever seen. He’s such an affable people-person, and it enables him to get coffee with anyone and everyone and build legitimate relationships that result in wild scoops, like this one. It’s a testament to his brilliance as a reporter.
Two lawyers and a former Trump campaign aide are scheduled to make their initial appearances in court Thursday, each facing 11 felony charges for their roles in a scheme that generated documents falsely claiming Donald Trump won Wisconsin’s 2020 election.
Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul in June initially charged Michael Roman and attorneys Jim Troupis and Kenneth Chesebro with “uttering as genuine a forged writing or object,” a felony that can result in up to a $10,000 fine and imprisonment of up to 6 years. The charges stem from their efforts to craft a slate of false electors for Donald Trump in 2020 after he narrowly lost Wisconsin and other key swing states to Joe Biden.
On Tuesday, the state Department of Justice added 10 additional charges for each defendant, arguing Chesebro, Roman and Troupis defrauded the 10 Republicans who falsely posed as electors for Trump. All 10 new charges are felonies and they can each result in up to a $10,000 fine and imprisonment of up to 6 years.
The defendants are set to appear in Dane County Circuit Court almost four years to the day after a group of Republicans met at the State Capitol in Madison to create the documents.
Kaul’s office declined to answer a question about why he believes it’s important to continue the prosecutions into 2025. But Kaul spokesperson Gillian Drummond reiterated that the Department of Justice’s approach “has been focused on following the facts where they lead and making decisions based on the facts, the law and the best interests of justice.”
The case’s original 47-page criminal complaint details how Chesebro, Troupis and Roman helped craft a “Certificate of the Votes of the 2020 Electors from Wisconsin” that falsely said Trump won Wisconsin’s 10 Electoral College votes at the time — tactics replicated in six other swing states. The complaint also outlines efforts to deliver the paperwork to then-Vice President Mike Pence.
A majority of the 10 Republicans who acted as the false Trump electors told investigators that they did not believe their signatures would be sent to Washington, according to new details in Tuesday’s amended complaint. A majority of the false electors also said they did not consent to their signatures being presented as Wisconsin’s electoral votes without a court ruling handing the state to Trump.
Chesebro and Roman have faced charges in Georgia, where Chesebro is seeking to invalidate an earlier deal in which he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit filing false documents.
Of the trio charged in Wisconsin, Troupis is the only one who has filed motions to dismiss ahead of Thursday’s hearing.
One motion, which was filed before the additional charges were handed down, argues the DOJ failed to allege a criminal offense.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court just two hours before the alternative electors met ruled against Trump’s efforts to throw out more than 220,000 Dane and Milwaukee county votes and to reverse his loss. But an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was still in the works, Troupis’ motion notes. The Republican electors cast their illegitimate ballots for Trump, the motion adds, as Troupis worked to protect his client’s rights in case the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Wisconsin’s election results.
“That practice of having both sets of electors meet and vote during an on-going legal challenge or recount is over a century old,” Troupis argues in his brief. He points to the 1876 presidential election, when three states sent competing slates of electors to Washington, and the 1960 race, when Hawaii featured competing electors due to an ongoing recount that eventually flipped three electoral votes from Richard Nixon to John F. Kennedy. Historians have identified key differences between those cases and 2020.
“Having the Republican electors meet and cast their ballot was not criminal or even untoward and the ballot was not a forgery,” Troupis argues.
A separate motion argues the criminal complaint omits information that pokes holes in the DOJ’s allegations.
Troupis’ attorney points to a 2022 memo from the DOJ solicited by the Wisconsin Elections Commission as it investigated a complaint filed against the Trump electors.
That complaint argued the Trump electors “met in a concerted effort to ensure that they would be mistaken, as a result of their deliberate forgery and fraud, for Wisconsin’s legitimate Presidential Electors.” But the DOJ concluded in its memo that the “record does not support this allegation” and that the Trump electors even before the Dec. 14 meeting “publicly stated, including in court pleadings, that they were meeting to preserve legal options while litigation was pending.”
Troupis’ legal team claims that conclusion — omitted from the criminal complaint —shows “it was proper and necessary for the alternate electors to meet and vote on December 14.”
In another motion, Troupis argues election-related prosecutions can unfold only if the elections commission determines probable cause and refers the case to a county district attorney — not the attorney general.
Troupis’ legal team argues his motions to dismiss must be heard before Troupis makes his initial appearance. Dane County Circuit Court Judge John Hyland declined on Friday to hear the motions before the initial appearance.
Trump could not pardon his former aides upon his return to office. Presidential pardon power extends only to federal offenses. These are state charges.
The hearing is scheduled for 10:30 a.m at the Dane County Courthouse.
Forward is a look ahead at the week in Wisconsin government and politics from the Wisconsin Watch statehouse team.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Monday will hear oral arguments in a high-profile case that could, at least partially, determine the future of abortion rights in the state.
The case was filed by Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul and Gov. Tony Evers in the days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade in 2022. It challenges the state’s 1849 abortion ban, which was believed for almost 18 months to ban most abortions in Wisconsin.
The case is perhaps the most high-profile litigation to reach the state Supreme Court since a redistricting case that resulted in the court’s now-liberal majority throwing out Republican-gerrymandered legislative districts. New districts implemented after that decision resulted last week in 10 additional Assembly seats and four additional state Senate seats for Democrats, though Republicans maintain majorities in both houses.
The arguments will focus on two issues: First, whether the 1849 law applies to consensual abortions. Second, whether the 1849 ban was “impliedly repealed” when the Legislature passed additional laws — while Roe was in effect — regulating abortion after fetal viability.
A Dane County judge ruled in late 2023 that the 1849 statute applied to feticide, not consensual abortions. That decision was appealed, resulting in Monday’s high court hearing.
Attorneys for Sheboygan County District Attorney Joel Urmanski, who is one of the prosecutors named in the case and has said he would prosecute violations of the 1849 law, argued in briefs submitted to the court that Dane County Circuit Court Judge Diane Schlipper’s interpretation of the law was incorrect.
They argued the “plain meaning (of the law) prohibits consensual abortion.” The statute, in part, provides: “Any person, other than the mother, who intentionally destroys the life of an unborn child is guilty of a Class H felony.”
Accordingly, attorneys for Urmanski argued, the law should apply to consensual abortions for three reasons.
“First, a doctor who performs an abortion is a person other than the mother of an unborn child,” they wrote.
“Second, ‘unborn child’ is defined in (the statute) as ‘a human being from the time of conception until it is born alive.’”
“Finally, a consensual abortion involves the intentional destruction of the life of the unborn child,” Urmanski’s lawyers continued.
“There really should be no dispute that a consensual abortion falls within the scope of the prohibition of (the 1849 ban),” they argued.
Lawyers for Urmanski also argued that the 1849 law was not repealed because it does not conflict with more recent abortion statutes and those laws did not “clearly indicate a legislative intent to repeal (the 1849 law).”
Attorneys for the state Department of Justice — and the district court’s ruling — relied heavily on a 1994 Wisconsin Supreme Court decision. In that case, a man was charged under a portion of the 1849 law “for destroying the life of his unborn quick child by violently assaulting his wife five days prior to her anticipated delivery date.” The man argued the statute applied to abortion, not feticide, but the state Supreme Court disagreed.
In that case, the court concluded that at least portions of the 19th-century law “is not an abortion statute. It makes no mention of an abortive type procedure. Rather, it proscribes the intentional criminal act of feticide: the intentional destruction of an unborn quick child presumably without the consent of the mother.”
“It is a feticide statute only,” the court wrote.
The precedent established in the 1994 case means the 1849 law cannot be applied to consensual abortions, attorneys for the state argued.
On the issue of whether the ban was “impliedly repealed,” the state points to two other cases, both from 1971. A “later-enacted law impliedly repeals an earlier law where an ‘irreconcilable’ conflict exists between the two laws — where the later-enacted statute ‘contains provisions so contrary to or irreconcilable with those of the earlier law that only one of the two statutes can stand in force,’” attorneys from DOJ argued, citing one of the two cases.
Additionally, a law is implied repealed “by the enactment of subsequent comprehensive legislation establishing elaborate inclusions and exclusions of the persons, things and relationships ordinarily associated with the subject,” the attorneys wrote, citing the second case.
Monday’s arguments mark the first of two high-profile abortion cases the court will hear this term. The second, filed by Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, asks the court to declare that abortion access is a right protected by the state constitution.
The court has not scheduled oral arguments in the second case.
Forward is a look ahead at the week in Wisconsin government and politics from the Wisconsin Watch statehouse team.
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Democrats flipped 10 Assembly seats and four Senate seats in Tuesday’s election. While they didn’t claim either majority, they have a chance of flipping at least one chamber in 2026.
Republicans performed much better than their historical averages in the newly drawn districts. On average their candidates in competitive races ran 3.6 points ahead, while Democrats ran 2.3 points behind.
One of the signs that the Republican 2011 gerrymander is dead was Democrat Joe Sheehan’s win in a unified Sheboygan Assembly district.
Wisconsin Republicans held on to the state Legislature in Tuesday’s election, but the flipping of 14 Senate and Assembly seats from red to blue provided the clearest evidence yet that the 2011 partisan gerrymander was real and is now dead.
Republicans will maintain majorities in both the Assembly and Senate — though at much slimmer margins than during the most recent legislative session. The math sets up a chance for the Democrats to retake at least one chamber in 2026, especially if Republicans face the usual midterm headwinds that check a new president.
Senate Republicans lost four seats, going from a supermajority that could override Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ vetoes to an 18-15 majority. The four Democratic pickups resulted from new voting maps legislative Republicans and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers agreed to after the newly liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out GOP-gerrymandered districts last year.
The Democratic gains in an election environment favoring Republicans provided further evidence that Wisconsin’s Republican governor and Legislature in 2011 designed maps to allow their party to keep legislative control no matter how much statewide sentiment might change. The party re-upped those maps after the 2020 Census with help from the then-conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court.
The results show that “when people have a real choice at the ballot box, that they’re going to choose the person that best represents their values and the policies they want to see going forward,” Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein, D-Middleton, told Wisconsin Watch in an interview.
Entering the next election cycle, state Senate Democrats will hold 10 guaranteed seats (they were elected Tuesday) and be favored in six of the 17 seats up for election in 2026. That’s according to an analysis of past voting patterns in state Senate districts that does not yet include 2024 results. By comparison, Republicans will hold just six guaranteed seats while being favored in nine districts up for election in 2026.
That will leave both sides battling for two toss-up districts — currently held by GOP Sens. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, and Rob Hutton, R-Brookfield — to determine control of the chamber. On Tuesday, Democrats won two of the three Assembly seats in Hutton’s district.
In the state Assembly, where Democrats hoped new maps would help them win a majority, Republicans won 54 seats, according to unofficial returns, while Democrats captured 45 seats. That marks a 10-seat swing from the previous legislative session, when Assembly Republicans were just shy of the votes needed to override a gubernatorial veto.
That’s a remarkable outcome given Republican candidates almost across the board performed better than the historical GOP candidate averages in their districts. By comparison, Democrats performed worse in relation to the historical partisan makeup in 68 of the state’s 99 Assembly districts, according to a Wisconsin Watch analysis of past voting patterns and unofficial results. On average Republican candidates in competitive races ran 3.6 points ahead of the historical GOP average, while Democrats ran 2.3 points behind.
Incumbency also helped. Though Democrats unseated three Assembly incumbents, Republican incumbents outperformed the past voting trend of their new district by an average of 4.27 points, compared with 3.14 points of those who had never held office. Lawmakers with three or more terms under their belts like Reps. Tony Kurtz, Todd Novak, Travis Tranel and Nancy Vandermeer outperformed their district averages by more than 8 points.
Still, Democrats projected optimism that business in the Capitol wouldn’t proceed as usual this year.
“Things are going to change in the Legislature,” Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer, D-Racine, said in a Wednesday statement. “Fair maps have allowed voters to hold legislators accountable, and this will change how policy is written and what bills move through the Legislature.”
Some Republicans on Wednesday downplayed the Democratic gains.
“(Democrats) spent weeks and months talking up trying to take over at least the Assembly and they didn’t, frankly, come close to doing it, including losing some of the key races,” said Republican Party of Wisconsin Chair Brian Schimming. “The truth of the matter is, they had their one moment when they had a huge turnout to take over this year, and they failed in both houses.”
“Majorities matter in the Legislature,” he added.
An election worker counts ballots on Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024, at Milwaukee Central Count at the Baird Center in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Speaking to reporters at the Capitol, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, declared Republicans would not compromise with Democrats if it meant “expanding welfare, having boys play girls sports and all the craziness that the national Democratic Party stands for,” WisPolitics.com reported.
Republicans will also have a chance to pick up seats in two years, Vos said.
Assembly Democrats lost five races on Tuesday in districts with a Democratic edge, including Novak’s in southwest Wisconsin that carries a 13-point Democratic advantage based on past election results. Republicans won all districts in which they have an edge. Among the 14 toss-up districts, those with less than a 10-point spread based on past election results, Democrats won five and Republicans won nine.
Sheboygan Democrat defeats GOP incumbent in reunited city
In Sheboygan, local Democrats celebrated on Election Night as the majority blue city elected a local Democratic candidate to state office for the first time in over a decade.
Former Sheboygan Area School District superintendent Joe Sheehan defeated freshman Rep. Amy Binsfeld, R-Sheboygan, under new legislative maps that reunited the 26th Assembly District after the 2011 redistricting process blatantly split the city in half, extending to surrounding rural areas to secure two Republican seats. Sheehan, whose campaign slogan was “together again,” led Binsfeld by less than 900 votes, according to unofficial results.
“Some people were choosing not to vote because they just didn’t feel, for a decade, that their vote made any difference,” Sheboygan County Democratic Party co-chair Maeve Quinn said. “It got to the point where nobody wanted to run for the office either.”
But fair maps meant the candidates actually had to get out and earn the vote, Sheboygan Mayor Ryan Sorenson told Wisconsin Watch, saying it strengthened the democratic process in their “light blue city” where the seat wasn’t completely safe.
“We realized the cards were really stacked against us when we had local representation because of the city being cut in half,” Sorenson said. “Sheboygan is the urban center for the county. When you loop us in with small, rural communities that are 45 minutes away, it really dilutes our voice.”
Sheboygan County Democratic Party co-chair Mary Lynne Donohue, who ran for the district in 2020 as a “sacrificial lamb,” told Wisconsin Watch the new maps had been a “rallying cry.” Both Quinn and Donohue noted their office saw far more volunteers, distributed signs and campaign surrogates this cycle than in previous election years, with over 40 door-knocking volunteers stopping in on both Saturday and Sunday before Election Day, they said.
“This place was like a ghost town in 2022,” Donohue said.
UW-Oshkosh student Theodorus Guigley casts a ballot. Students and community members voted at the Culver Family Welcome Center at UW-Oshkosh in Oshkosh, Wis., on Nov. 5, 2024. (Julius Shieh / Wisconsin Watch)
The Chmura-Moore family, consisting of parents Sharon and Dylan and kids Sophia and Elliot, went to the polling site at Oshkosh Public Library in Oshkosh, Wis., on Nov. 5, 2024. Donning raincoats and umbrellas, several dozen voters lined up at the library before 7 a.m. (Julius Shieh / Wisconsin Watch)
The heightened energy is a sign of revival after 13 years of gerrymandering dampened the democratic process in places like Sheboygan all across the state.
Get-out-the-vote volunteers continued to filter into the office on Election Day, including Bryan Cones and Mike Schoen, who came from Chicago to knock on doors in Sheboygan for Democrats up and down the ballot. Cones, originally from Tennessee where Republicans have gerrymandered districts around Nashville, understands how skewed maps make people feel like their vote doesn’t count.
Another volunteer, Patrice Worel-Olson, said she had never before volunteered with the party but did so this year because of the new maps. “We have a chance,” she said.
Donohue was one of the original plaintiffs in a federal redistricting case that challenged the Republican gerrymander of the state Assembly. The U.S. Supreme Court threw out the case on a technical issue. In a more recent legal challenge, a liberal-majority Wisconsin Supreme Court tossed out the state’s Republican-friendly 2020 maps, leading to lawmakers in both parties to approve today’s more balanced maps.
Sheehan’s campaign raised nearly $1.3 million to Binsfeld’s $330,000, with the Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee and the Republican Assembly Campaign Committee investing heavily in each race.
Binsfeld had a falling out with the Sheboygan County GOP earlier this year after she distanced herself from its anti-abortion stance and member concerns about election integrity, according to party chair Russ Otten. The GOP refused to distribute her campaign signs, and Otten predicted she would fall short in the race without local party support.
In stark contrast with Donohue’s ill-fated 2020 campaign, which raised $75,000, Sheehan told Wisconsin Watch he knocked on over 4,000 doors in the district, where voters shared their enthusiasm for his chances.
“That’s incredible that we got a voice, and now we can talk about some of the issues that really affect Sheboygan, which gerrymandering did not allow,” Sheehan said in an interview.
At the Sheboygan County Democratic Party headquarters on Nov. 5, 2024, local party co-chair Mary Lynne Donohue sits at her computer. Donohue ran for Assembly in 2020 as a “sacrificial lamb” because she lived in a Sheboygan district that had been gerrymandered to prevent Democrats from winning. On Tuesday her party won the new Sheboygan district made possible by new legislative maps. (Hallie Claflin / Wisconsin Watch)
End note: The polls were right
Republicans celebrated the continued legislative majorities alongside Trump’s victory in the state and nationally. Democrats breathed a sigh of relief as Sen. Tammy Baldwin eked out a win to secure a third term.
The results also brought relief to Marquette University Law School poll director Charles Franklin. The final Marquette poll had both races in a statistical tie with Kamala Harris up by a point and Baldwin up by two. Trump in fact won by 0.8 points and Baldwin won by 0.9 points — well within the poll’s margin of error.
“We missed the president by 1.9 points and the Senate by 1.1 points, better than our 2.2 average error,” Franklin told Wisconsin Watch in an email. “SO I get to keep my job.”
Former President Donald Trump declared victory in the 2024 presidential election early Wednesday morning. Hours later the Associated Press affirmed the win after results showed Trump narrowly won Wisconsin by about 33,000 votes or 1 point.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin won another term as well, though by her narrowest margin yet. The Associated Press called the race at 12:42 p.m. Wednesday. Baldwin’s Republican challenger Eric Hovde trailed by less than a percentage point, falling short of Trump’s total by more than 50,000 votes. It’s the latest case of split-ticket voters having clout in Wisconsin after Democratic Gov. Tony Evers won re-election in 2022 while Sen. Ron Johnson won a third term by a narrower margin.
Democrats broke a Republican supermajority in the state Senate, flipping enough seats to set up a possible takeover of the chamber in 2026. They also narrowed the Republican majority in the Assembly, electing a representative from Sheboygan for the first time since Republicans gerrymandered the state’s legislative districts in 2011. But several Republican incumbents won new districts that favored Democrats.
Trump spoke to a crowd at Mar-a-Lago in West Palm Beach, Florida, after the Associated Press projected Trump would win Pennsylvania, a critical state considered a must-win for Vice President Kamala Harris.
“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump said.
The Associated Press described Trump’s victory as an extraordinary comeback for a former president who refused to accept defeat four years ago, sparked a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts.
The victory validates his bare-knuckle approach to politics. He attacked his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, in deeply personal – often misogynistic and racist – terms as he pushed an apocalyptic picture of a country overrun by violent migrants. The coarse rhetoric, paired with an image of hypermasculinity, resonated with angry voters – particularly men – in a deeply polarized nation.
As president, he’s vowed to pursue an agenda centered on dramatically reshaping the federal government and pursuing retribution against his perceived enemies.
The results cap a historically tumultuous and competitive election season that included two assassination attempts targeting Trump and a shift to a new Democratic nominee just a month before the party’s convention. Trump will inherit a range of challenges when he assumes office on Jan. 20, including heightened political polarization and global crises that are testing America’s influence abroad.
His win against Harris, the first woman of color to lead a major party ticket, marks the second time he has defeated a female rival in a general election. Harris, the current vice president, rose to the top of the ticket after President Joe Biden exited the race amid alarm about his advanced age. Despite an initial surge of energy around her campaign, she struggled during a compressed timeline to convince disillusioned voters that she represented a break from an unpopular administration.
Harris’ campaign manager announced earlier in the night that Harris would address her supporters Wednesday.
The Associated Press called Wisconsin’s 10 Electoral College votes for Trump at 4:34 a.m. Wednesday. A tabulator problem forced election workers in Milwaukee to restart their count of absentee ballots earlier in the day Tuesday.
Here’s when other high-profile statewide races here in Wisconsin were called by the Associated Press:
2022 U.S. Senate race: Wednesday, Nov. 9, 11:46 a.m.
Check out the Wisconsin Watch voter guide for results from the Associated Press for each individual race in Wisconsin.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Republicans poised to hold 6-2 House edge
Republicans were poised to win all six seats they currently control in Wisconsin’s House delegation.
As of Wednesday morning the Associated Press had called winners in every race but the 3rd Congressional District, where Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden had an 11,000-vote lead over Democratic challenger Rebecca Cooke with 99% of votes reported.
Incumbent Democrats Mark Pocan and Gwen Moore and Republicans Bryan Steil, Scott Fitzgerald, Glenn Grothman and Tom Tiffany won their races.
Tony Wied celebrates his 8th Congressional District victory at the Legacy Hotel in Green Bay, Wis., on Nov. 5, 2024. (Julius Shieh / Wisconsin Watch)
Thanking his family, friends and Trump, newcomer Republican Tony Wied gave a victory speech to a crowd of supporters at The Legacy Hotel in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He defeated Democratic candidate Kristin Lyerly by nearly 15 points.
Wied’s campaign victory in Wisconsin’s largely red 8th Congressional District came as no surprise. Previous Rep. Michael Gallagher, also a Republican, won the district by comfortable margins during each election cycle between 2016 and 2022.
Wied credited much of his success to an endorsement from Trump, saying that Trump’s “support for me (during) this campaign was second to none.”
Even before Green Bay precincts reported any significant results, local Republican candidates felt confident about the election.
Patrick Buckley, candidate for the 89th Assembly District, said he thought efforts to reach voters and canvass would end up paying off.
“We did a wonderful job, and hopefully voters will see that,” Buckley said. “I think for Republicans, it should be a good night.”
Buckley, a first-time Assembly candidate, lost to Democrat Ryan Spaude, also a first-time Assembly candidate, in the Green Bay district.
Attendees at Cooke’s watch party followed the tug-of-war over Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District for hours Tuesday night.
The campaign projected incoming results at the front of the event in downtown Eau Claire. Mild cheers broke out a few times as Cooke took a slight lead, but by 10 p.m. enthusiasm for result updates dampened.
Cooke didn’t give a victory or concession speech during Tuesday’s event which ended long before the outcome was finalized. But Cooke told WPR and Wisconsin Watch that if things didn’t go in her favor she’d tell her supporters “that we ran a hell of a race.”
“We really left no stone unturned,” Cooke said. “We’ve really pulled people off the sidelines. People who don’t always see themselves reflected in the political process and I’m really proud of the work that we’ve done in that way.”
– Julius Shieh, Addie Costello
Citizenship voting amendment passes
Wisconsin voters approved a constitutional amendment that prohibits foreign nationals from voting in the state.
Republicans across the country have been pushing voters to adopt constitutional amendments that explicitly prohibit non-U.S. citizens from voting. The move was spurred by the District of Columbia and municipalities in California, Maryland and Vermont allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections.
The Wisconsin Constitution states that every U.S. citizen who is at least 18 can vote. The amendment revises that language to read that only U.S. citizens can vote in federal, state and local elections held in Wisconsin.
The amendment was on the ballot in seven other states besides Wisconsin this cycle, according to Ballotpedia. North Dakota, Alabama, Florida, Colorado, Ohio and Louisiana have already adopted it.
Democrats contend the measures could create hurdles for legal voters and lead people to believe that the problem of noncitizens voting is bigger than it really is. Data from states indicates that voting by noncitizens is rare, although Republican officials in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio and Texas have highlighted voter registration reviews that turned up potential noncitizens.
– Todd Richmond, The Associated Press
Republicans return smaller Assembly majority as incumbents win new districts
Despite less friendly voting maps and considerable spending from Democrats, Republicans won a majority in the Wisconsin Assembly, extending 13 years of GOP control of the Legislature’s lower chamber by two more years.
Republican success on Tuesday was fueled in part by incumbents. Rep. Todd Novak, R-Dodgeville, defeated Democratic challenger Elizabeth Grabe in a district that a Wisconsin Watch analysis of previous voting patterns suggested was almost 56% Democratic, according to unofficial results. Rep. Pat Snyder, R-Schofield, breezed past Democratic challenger Yee Leng Xiong in a district that a Wisconsin Watch analysis rated as just 2% more Republican than Democratic.
The election results were a gut punch for Democrats, who were eager to win back a majority in the Assembly for the first time in more than a decade after the liberal-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out Republican-gerrymandered voting maps last year.
In the months leading up to the election, Democrats were confident they could win back the majority. Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer, D-Racine, told reporters during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that her party would win a 52-seat Assembly majority in the fall. They missed the mark on Tuesday.
Trevor Ford, a spokesperson for the Republican Assembly Campaign Committee, offered a simple assessment of returns early on Wednesday: “Wisconsin Assembly Republicans will hold the majority.”
The exact size of the majority was unclear as of early Wednesday morning.
There were a few bright spots for Democrats, who seemed poised to return to Madison in January with bolstered ranks. In the 26th Assembly District, Joe Sheehan unseated Republican Rep. Amy Binsfeld in a district that reunited the city of Sheboygan into one Assembly district.
A spokesperson for the Assembly Democratic Campaign Committee didn’t return a request for comment early Wednesday.
– Jack Kelly
Nov. 6, 12:30 a.m.
Democrats break GOP supermajority in state Senate
Democrats broke Republicans’ two-thirds supermajority in the state Senate on Tuesday, according to unofficial results, reining in overwhelming GOP control in the chamber that threatened the veto authority of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.
The exact number of seats each party will control come January remained unclear as of early Wednesday morning, though Republicans had secured the 17 seats needed for a majority while Democrats flipped at least two seats and were leading the vote totals in two others, dropping Republicans below their current 22-seat supermajority.
One flip came in the 14th Senate District, a Democratic-leaning toss-up district that stretches from the Madison area north and west to encompass Portage, Wisconsin Dells, Baraboo, Reedsburg and Richland Center. Democrat Sarah Keyeski defeated incumbent Sen. Joan Ballweg by 2 points, according to unofficial returns.
Another came in the 30th Senate District, where redistricting had caused incumbent Republican Sen. Eric Wimberger to move into the 2nd Senate District, where he will replace retiring moderate Republican Sen. Rob Cowles. Democrat Jamie Wall, a business consultant and third-time Democratic candidate, defeated Republican Allouez village president Jim Rafter, in the 30th.
“Senate Democrats have broken the Republican’s manufactured supermajority, and I remain optimistic for our candidates who are still awaiting final vote tallies,” Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein, D-Middleton, told Wisconsin Watch in a statement.
Results in the 8th and 18th showed Democrats poised to further chip away at the GOP majority, but the races were too close to call as of early Wednesday morning. Those gains could help Democrats secure a majority in 2026, when the other 17 recently redrawn Senate seats are up for four-year terms.
A spokesperson for the Committee to Elect a Republican Senate did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Wednesday.
– Jack Kelly
Nov. 6, 12:30 a.m.
Sheboygan incumbent loses Assembly seat without local GOP support in newly drawn toss-up district
A freshman Republican Assembly member’s fight to hold her Sheboygan seat was complicated after she lost the support of the Sheboygan County GOP earlier this year. The infighting could be a sign of the changing face of the Republican Party in Wisconsin.
Freshman Rep. Amy Binsfeld, R-Sheboygan, views the local party as extremist and distanced herself from it in January due to its anti-abortion stance and member concerns about election integrity, according to local party chair Russ Otten.
“I find that incredible in a person who’s running as a Republican in a very tight race,” Otten told Wisconsin Watch.
Text messages posted by the county GOP in September show Binsfeld asked the party to distribute her campaign signs, but they refused to do so after she declined to meet with the party’s leaders, Otten said.
“I feel you should probably confirm that choice with all Republican voters in the 26th District being you are willing to give up a seat to the Democrats in November,” Binsfeld wrote in the exchange. “I’m asking for signs to be available to Republican voters.”
Binsfeld did not immediately reply to Wisconsin Watch’s request for comment.
“She does not like the fact that our county party has become a patriot-driven party,” Otten said. “She is a cohort of Robin Vos in Madison, and we see Robin Vos as part of the problem.”
Binsfeld lost to Democratic newcomer Joe Sheehan, who decided to run earlier this year after new legislative maps reunited the city of Sheboygan, which was split in half to secure two Republican seats under Wisconsin’s previously gerrymandered maps. The district is now a toss-up, with a slight Democratic lean.
– Hallie Claflin
Update: Nov. 6, 1 a.m.
Stephanie Rushing, Milwaukee Election Commission election services coordinator, sorts through rejected absentee ballots on Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024, at Milwaukee Central Count at the Baird Center in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Milwaukee setback stands out in otherwise smooth Wisconsin election
Polls closed across Wisconsin after an Election Day marked most notably by a human error in Milwaukee that prompted city election officials to count 31,000 absentee ballots all over again, potentially delaying the state’s results for hours.
In Milwaukee, election chief Paulina Gutiérrez projected that the city’s counting of absentee ballots would go well into Wednesday morning, partially a result of her decision Tuesday afternoon to make election workers count 31,000 absentee ballots all over again because some staff didn’t lock tabulator doors in the early morning.
For security reasons, those panel doors — which cover the on/off switch and sometimes a slot for USB drives — are to be locked during counting, though other security measures ensured there was no chance of tampering.
The decision to restart the count, city spokesperson Jeff Fleming said, was “out of an abundance of caution.”
Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe said the commission didn’t weigh in on the city’s decision to rerun the batch of ballots, but she praised the city’s transparency throughout the process.
After Gutiérrez made that decision, the city put out an all-call to every Milwaukee employee to help election officials count the ballots that had already been tabulated. Between 30 and 50 city staff from health, fire and other departments came to help, city spokesperson Caroline Reinwald said.
Paulina Gutiérrez, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, prepares to clear the flash drives used to store the final vote count during Election Day on Nov. 5, 2024, at Milwaukee Central Count at the Baird Center in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
“Things are moving really smoothly right now and quickly, so hopefully this isn’t actually that much of a delay,” she said.
But Republican leaders criticized the oversight that led to the second count. U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin called Milwaukee’s central count “grotesquely disorganized.” State GOP Chair Brian Schimming said about election officials, “You had one job,” adding that the election operation had gone “ridiculously wrong.”
Johnson said his concerns about Milwaukee election officials’ oversight could be alleviated if they present him video logs of the central counting site as well as records from the initial and second count of the 31,000 absentee ballots, including how they’re split by party. There are video streams of central count, but vote totals weren’t exported in the manner that Johnson was seeking, though each vote has a paper trail, city officials stated.
Election Day in Milwaukee was also marked by a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee, alleging that GOP election observers were being restricted at city election sites. The GOP walked back its claims at a Tuesday hearing, conceding there weren’t any issues.
Outside of Milwaukee, election officials faced few issues.
In Thornapple, a northern Wisconsin town that faced a Justice Department lawsuit over its decision not to use accessible voting machines in the past, election officials did have a voting machine in use, said Erin Webster, a local resident who was an election observer on Tuesday.
The state had a surge of early in-person voting, but election officials said that Tuesday was still very busy. Melissa Kono, who has been a clerk in the small northern Wisconsin town of Burnside since 2013, said it was the most intense election she had ever administered in terms of turnout.
— Alexander Shur, Votebeat
11 p.m.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
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Republicans and Democrats are looking to college as a key part of their strategy for electing their presidential and Senate candidates with the candidates making several appearances on college campuses in Wisconsin.
College students voting in their first presidential election are slightly more conservative than their older counterparts, but there’s also a growing gender gap with women more likely to support Democrats.
A new College Democrats chapter at Madison College seeks to mobilize more students on a campus that often gets overlooked.
With Election Day squarely in view, both Democrats and Republicans have shifted their focus to turning out every possible voter — including first-time presidential election voters on college campuses.
Every vote matters in Wisconsin. The last two presidential races in this critical battleground state have each been decided by about 21,000 votes, or 1%. And next week’s contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump could be even closer, with polls in Wisconsin and other battleground states suggesting there’s little daylight separating the rivals.
Those margins of victory happen to be less than half the number of students currently enrolled at just UW-Madison. It’s also just a fraction of the more than 160,000 four-year students at UW System campuses and Marquette University as of the start of the 2024-25 academic year — and that doesn’t include the thousands of other students who attend smaller private institutions spread across Wisconsin.
Many of those students come from out of state, establish residency on or near campus and are eligible to vote — establishing a bulky pool of potential voters for campaigns to target. On UW System campuses in 2023, for example, some 51,000 students were from states other than Wisconsin. As of the start of this school year, 57% of Marquette’s 11,300 non-international students were from out of state.
College students could be the margin maker in the presidential race. With a week to go, both sides are responding accordingly.
Democrats invest in college campuses
Trudging through a hilly Madison neighborhood, Joey Wendtland and Ty Schanhofer, a pair of UW-Madison students, were on a mission: Win votes for Democrats.
Earnestly, the two, along with a small group of other student volunteers, knocked on doors up and down the streets immediately west of the university’s towering football stadium in a neighborhood home to a mixture of students and non-students.
Each encounter with a resident followed the same formula: Do you have plans to vote? Who are you voting for? What issues do you care about most? Here’s where Kamala Harris stands on them.
“Three votes per ward was the difference in 2020,” Wendtland told one voter as he implored her to get three friends to vote — a nod to President Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the state four years ago.
Democrats are investing heavily this year in turning out students on college campuses. The Wisconsin Democratic coordinated campaign, a collaboration between the Harris campaign and the state Democratic Party, has seven full-time organizers dedicated to college campuses across Wisconsin in addition to a youth organizing director, a Harris campaign official told Wisconsin Watch. Many of those organizers have been on campuses since the fall of 2023, looking to build relationships with local College Democrats chapters, student volunteers and allied student organizations.
Ty Schanhofer, 21, volunteer coordinator of College Democrats of UW-Madison, canvasses a neighborhood west of campus on Oct. 17, 2024, in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Over the past year, the coordinated campaign has also been experimenting with a “relational organizing program,” the official said. Using a smartphone app, students are able to import their existing contacts and communicate with their friends, sharing material from a content library of premade, Wisconsin-specific infographics, videos and even memes about Harris and the presidential race.
Peer-to-peer organizing is the most effective way to motivate college voters, several student activists told Wisconsin Watch.
“The most effective way to get young people on your side — and what we’ve seen in the past election cycles — is just young people talking to young people,” said Matthew Lehner, chair of College Democrats of Wisconsin and a senior at UW-Eau Claire.
College students are better able to engage with other college students because they care about the same issues, he added, pointing to climate change, gun control, increasing the minimum wage and abortion rights as issues that many young people have shared views on.
Wendtland, a senior and chair of College Democrats of UW-Madison, said it was critical to “meet students where they’re at” and “talk to them about the issues they care about.”
But it’s also important “to generate that enthusiasm among our student base,” he said.
UW-Madison College Democrats has hosted events with prominent Madison-area Democrats, like U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan and state Rep. Francesca Hong, to get people excited about next week’s election, Wendtland said. The group has also hosted more casual events, including bingo nights and bracelet-making events, to provide a forum for students to gather and get energized about the Democratic ticket.
Democrats are also hoping to make inroads on campuses that haven’t been front of mind in past elections. A College Democrats chapter was formed last spring at Madison Area Technical College and now has around 50 members, according to Kai Brito, a founding member of the student organization.
In previous election cycles, Brito said, he and other students at MATC felt like they had been forgotten and that they didn’t have a voice in politics.
“But now we’re saying, ‘No, we do.’ And I think it’s really important when you have someone taking the lead and saying, “Yeah, we have a voice, and we’re going to use it,’” he said. “I think we’re going to have hopefully a much higher turnout than we would have if we didn’t exist, because we’re keeping the conversation alive on campus.”
College Republicans push forward, face hurdles
Even during a busy afternoon on the campus, few students approached the College Republicans table at UW-Madison, an overwhelmingly liberal campus. A pair of students snagged Trump signs, and others accepted fliers for an upcoming event with U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde. One student, who said he studies nuclear engineering, stopped to talk about Trump’s nuclear policy.
Getting students to vote Republican is more of an uphill battle on typically liberal college campuses. Undeterred, conservative student groups on campuses like UW-Madison and UW-Eau Claire press on with their efforts to appeal to young voters.
“A lot of the voters that we’re trying to get aren’t people who typically vote Democrat, but people who just typically don’t vote,” said Tatiana Bobrowicz, president of the UW-Eau Claire College Republicans.
A nuclear engineering student stops to talk with Thomas Pyle, UW-Madison College Republicans chair, and Korina Thomas about former President Donald Trump’s nuclear policy on Oct. 23, 2024, in Madison, Wis. (Hallie Claflin / Wisconsin Watch)
In Madison, the student group has set up a table on campus nearly every day in the weeks leading up to the election. Thomas Pyle, a college senior and chair of the UW-Madison College Republicans, said their efforts have been greeted by glares and even protesters in years past. Bobrowicz said students passing by their table on UW-Eau Claire’s campus have flipped them off and harassed them.
“Among Republicans, it’s more difficult, especially here at UW-Madison,” Pyle told Wisconsin Watch. “Having your voice heard, feeling comfortable in your vote and what you believe is really difficult when you’re surrounded by people who disagree with you.”
Turning Point Action, College Republicans of America, Young Republicans, the American Conservation Coalition and Trump Force 47 are among the larger conservative groups that have been active across Wisconsin’s campuses this year. Student groups also draw funding and support from their county GOPs, the Republican Party of Wisconsin and the Tommy Thompson Center on Public Leadership.
“It’s really the lose by less mentality,” Hilario Deleon, 23, chair of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, said of college voters. “We’re not going to win areas like Milwaukee outright, we’re not going to win Dane County outright, but if we increase our voter percentage even by a few points, we win the state.”
Young people are concerned about jobs and the economy, making Trump an attractive candidate, according to Pyle. The Democratic Party “demonizes” young men, and they don’t feel welcome, Deleon said, adding that Trump’s message resonates with college students in the workforce.
“I think it’s gotten the attention of a lot of students, especially those who work in the service industry with the no tax on tips, no tax on overtime,” Deleon said, referencing Trump’s proposals. “That’s huge. That’s a huge win for young voters.”
A pair of students stop to talk with Thomas Pyle and Korina Thomas at the UW-Madison College Republicans table about their upcoming event with Republican U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde on Oct. 23, 2024, in Madison, Wis. (Hallie Claflin / Wisconsin Watch)
Bobrowicz said she and her colleagues are trying to make Republican politics more fun, akin to how young women have engaged with the Harris campaign through the vice president’s appearance on Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” podcast and Charli XCX campaign merch. From friendship bracelets to catchy stickers, the GOP Eau Claire campus group is trying to make its conservative message appealing to young women.
Meanwhile, Trump appeals to young men on his own, Bobrowicz said.
“(Trump’s) personality is a personality that attracts young men. He has that business-like personality,” she told Wisconsin Watch in an interview. “You can tell he was a former celebrity and has that catchy type personality that I think young men look up to in a sense, and find kind of fun.”
The UW-Eau Claire College Republicans also recently started a podcast called “Right on Campus” to attempt to reach young listeners. They discuss current issues and what it’s like to be conservative students on a liberal campus.
The student groups have also hosted events with Republican speakers, including former Gov. Thompson, Hovde, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, to get young voters engaged and energized.
Finally, given the competitive nature of Wisconsin, Bobrowicz said, College Republicans often encourage out-of-state UW-Eau Claire students to vote in Wisconsin instead of in their home states, and they even try to get in-state students to vote in Eau Claire instead of their hometowns.
Swirling political environment
The 2024 race comes at a politically unique time among young voters, who have exerted meaningful influence in recent high-profile elections in Wisconsin.
In 2022, young voters helped fuel Gov. Tony Evers’ reelection, which, at 3.4%, was a landslide by Wisconsin standards. Wisconsin had the highest young voter turnout in the country in 2022, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, with 48.7% of 18- to 24-year-olds casting a ballot in the election.
In April 2023, during a nationally watched Wisconsin Supreme Court race, turnout on certain college campuses exploded, according to a Washington Post analysis. The energy among young voters that spring, at least in part, helped fuel Justice Janet Protasiewicz’s commanding 11-point victory — which flipped the high court to liberal control.
But this year’s contest between Harris and Trump could feature a twist: America’s youngest voters, 18- to 24-year-olds, report being more conservative than voters even just a few years older than them.
In a Harvard Youth Poll released in September, 23% of 18- to 24-year-olds identified as conservative compared to 29% who identified as liberal. By comparison, just 19% of 25- to 29-year-olds identified as conservative while 33% identified as liberal.
There’s also a growing gender gap among young voters, according to a Gallup analysis. Between 2001 and 2007, 28% of women and 25% of men ages 18 to 29 identified as liberal. Jump ahead to the period between 2017 and 2024, and a 15-point gap appears: 40% of young women identify as liberal while just 25% of young men say the same thing.
The shifts could mean campaign messages from past cycles might not resonate on campuses the same way today.
Joey Wendtland, 21, chair of College Democrats of UW-Madison, canvasses with stacks of literature supporting Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris and U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin on Oct. 17, 2024, in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
The 2024 campaign is unfolding as many Wisconsin Republicans have become increasingly hostile toward the UW System and college students.
During the state’s most recent budget negotiations, Republican lawmakers cut the system’s funding by $32 million in an escalation of a fight over diversity, equity and inclusion programs and sendings on college campuses. They set funding aside for programs aimed at growing the state’s workforce and eventually provided it to the UW System in February 2024.
Late last year, some Republican lawmakers also signaled they didn’t want out-of-state students to vote in Wisconsin: They proposed legislation that would have required the UW System Board of Regents to provide first-year out-of-state students with an application to request a ballot to vote in their home states.
When asked whether Republican policies affecting the UW System impact students’ votes, Pyle and Bobrowicz, the College Republicans leaders, said most students likely aren’t aware of it. Deleon agreed, adding that he spoke out against the party’s attempts to discourage out-of-state college voters from voting in Wisconsin because it sends a bad message to young people.
“These hostilities are happening because of their love for the state and because of their love for this institution,” Pyle said. “I think they’ve seen some issues with it in the past, and they want to do more to protect it, ensure our institution remains a world class institution… and that our taxpayers aren’t being stuck with a burden.”
‘Margin of victory’
In the waning days of the campaign, the focus on Wisconsin campuses has increased.
During a recent trip to Wisconsin, Harris held two events on UW campuses. First, she and billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban met with a class of UW-Milwaukee business students to discuss the vice president’s proposed economic policies. Then, later that day, she and Cuban held a UW-La Crosse rally that drew a crowd of 3,000, according to an estimate from her campaign.
Earlier this month, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic candidate for vice president, made a campaign stop at UW-Eau Claire with U.S. Sens. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin, and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota.
Kai Brito, College Democrats of Madison College treasurer, helped start a new chapter at the Madison technical college last spring. He says it felt like students on the campus had been forgotten in previous cycles, but now they have a voice. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Walz, who spoke to a group of students, was introduced by Kirsten Thell, president of the UW-Eau Claire College Democrats. Standing in front of a wall of “BLUGOLDS FOR HARRIS-WALZ” signs, Walz declared, “We need you. This is not a hyperbole. I think it’s very realistic to believe that this race will be won going through Wisconsin and going through some of these counties.”
On Wednesday, Harris will hold a get out the vote rally on UW-Madison’s campus, a campaign official confirmed to Wisconsin Watch. She’ll be joined by Gracie Abrams, Mumford & Sons and other musicians.
Prominent Republican voices have also zeroed in on college campuses. Conservative commentator and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk made a fiery visit to UW-Madison in September on the first stop of his “You’re Being Brainwashed” tour. He made another appearance over the weekend with the NELK Boys, a right-wing influencer group on YouTube.
Kirk said 120 new voters were registered in just two hours during his first visit to the UW-Madison campus.
On Tuesday, Hovde will join American Conservation Coalition Action on UW-Madison’s campus for a campaign event focused on energy policy and the economy. Tony Wied, a Republican businessman who is running for the U.S. House in the Green Bay area, will hold an early voting event on the campus of St. Norbert College, a small Catholic college in De Pere.
And while the approach from both sides is different — a centralized, coordinated effort from Democrats while Republicans rely on grassroots and allied organizations — the flurry of recent campus events underscores how valuable the votes of college voters can be.
“College students will be the margin of victory in 2024,” Lehner, the UW-Eau Claire student and College Democrats leader, predicted. “So I think young people are enthusiastic about making their voice heard.”
Wisconsin Watch reporter Khushboo Rathore contributed reporting to this story.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Public education funding, child care affordability and tax cuts are key issues in the race for the 85th Assembly District — a toss-up district in north central Wisconsin that encompasses Wausau and Weston.
Rep. Patrick Snyder, R-Schofield, faces a challenge from Yee Leng Xiong, a school board and Marathon County Board member who also serves as executive director of the Hmong American Center.
Snyder has served in the Legislature since 2017. Prior to serving in the Assembly, he was a morning radio host for WSAU, and he served as outreach director for U.S. Rep. Sean Duffy. Snyder was drawn into the 87th Assembly District under new voting maps approved by lawmakers in February, moving him out of the 85th by a couple of blocks. If he wins, he said he and his wife plan to continue renting an apartment in the district.
The district is among the most closely divided in the state, according to a Wisconsin Watch analysis of recent voting patterns, and could be influential in determining which party controls the Assembly at the start of the next legislative session in January. Xiong has knocked on 7,000 doors in an area where Democrats are hoping not only to win an Assembly seat, but help Vice President Kamala Harris and U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin improve their margins in rural areas.
Here’s where both candidates stand on important issues in the district.
Yee Leng Xiong, a school board and Marathon County Board member who also serves as executive director of the Hmong American Center, is running as a Democrat in the 85th Assembly District race. (Courtesy of Yee Leng Xiong campaign.)
Rep. Patrick Snyder, R-Schofield, is seen at the State Capitol on Jan. 22, 2020 in Madison, Wis. He has served in the Legislature since 2017. (Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Watch)
Education funding
In an interview with Wisconsin Watch, Xiong said the state needs to provide additional funding to public schools in the state.
“When we invest in our teachers, when we invest in public education, we’re investing in the future of our nation,” he said.
In particular, he said the state should fund programs that help recruit and retain teachers and provide additional dollars for students with special needs.
He also said lawmakers “need to look at the funding formula (for public schools). We need to look at it, reevaluate and see if it’s actually still effective.” Xiong noted with concern that almost half of all Wisconsin school districts will have gone to referendum by the end of the year to pay for capital projects and operating expenses.
“That means that something’s not working,” he said.
In the short term, Xiong said, the state could tap into its sizable budget surplus to provide some immediate aid, but he added that’s not a sustainable solution. Instead, the state needs to reconsider the funding formula as a whole and determine if additional revenue streams need to be considered in order to bring long-term financial relief to public schools.
During the most recent legislative session, Snyder supported a bill that increased funding for public K-12 schools by $1 billion. The funding was tied to $280 million in new funding for private voucher schools. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers signed it.
Snyder did not respond to multiple interview requests for this story.
Child care affordability
The state should be doing more to address the shortage of child care providers in Wisconsin, and it should also be working to bring down the cost of child care, Xiong said.
In the immediate term, he said the state should be investing in Child Care Counts, a program created by Evers using federal COVID-19 funds to provide payments to child care providers on a regular basis to help keep their doors open. The program is credited with keeping thousands of child care facilities open during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
In October 2023, Evers extended the program through June 2025 using $170 million in federal funds. He has previously sought to include $340 million in the state budget to support the program, but that plan was scrapped by Republican lawmakers.
“Right now, the cost for child care is more expensive than tuition at (UW-Madison),” Xiong noted, a nod to a September 2023 Forward Analytics report that found that the average annual cost of infant child care in 2021 was $13,572. For the 2024-25 academic year, tuition at UW-Madison for a Wisconsin resident is $11,606.
He pointed to recent action from the Marathon County Board, which approved $200,000 to train 30 child care providers and open 240 additional child care slots in the county, as an example of a program the state should consider.
Snyder supported a slate of Republican-authored child care bills during the most recent legislative session. During the floor session, Democrats attached extending Child Care Counts as amendments to one of the bills. Snyder voted against the extension.
The GOP-backed package included bills that would have allowed parents to contribute $10,000 in pre-tax money to an account to pay for child care, created a $15 million loan program to help child care centers pay for renovations, established a new category of child care centers that could serve between four and 12 children, and increased the child-to-child-care-worker ratio allowed in some child care centers. None of the proposals became law.
Tax cuts
Lawmakers need to reduce taxes for middle class Wisconsin residents, Xiong said in an interview, criticizing Republicans for supporting a tax cut in the state’s most recent budget that would have largely benefited the state’s highest earners.
“We need to look into ensuring that what we’re doing is we’re supporting the middle class,” he said, noting that people should not have to worry “whether they can afford groceries this weekend, or whether they can afford the utilities.”
Snyder has supported significant tax cuts during his time in office. During the 2021-23 legislative session, he backed reducing the state’s third-highest tax bracket from 6.27% to 5.3% — a $2 billion cut. That rate covers income between $27,630 and $304,170 for single filers and between $36,840 and $405,550 for joint filers.
Snyder co-sponsored another plan that would have raised the annual amount of tax-exempt withdrawals from a retirement account from $5,000 to $75,000 for single Wisconsin residents age 65 and older and up to $150,000 for joint filers. It was vetoed by Evers, who said it would reduce revenue by $658 million in 2024-25 and $472 million in each subsequent fiscal year.
During the most recent budget cycle, Snyder backed a $3.5 billion income tax cut that would have focused its largest reductions on the state’s highest earners. The plan would have cut the top tax rate from 7.65% to 6.5% — a 15% reduction for high-earning joint filers who make $405,550 or more annually. It would have reduced the second-highest rate from 5.3% to 4.4%, a 17% decrease.
Evers vetoed those cuts from the budget but left in place reductions to the state’s bottom two brackets.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
A flood of television ads. Regular visits with door knockers on your front porch. A mountain of campaign mailers jammed into your mailbox. The signs of a rapidly approaching Election Day are everywhere.
Another major sign of just how close the election is started Tuesday: Early in-person voting.
As of Friday afternoon, more than 300,000 Wisconsin voters have already cast their absentee ballots. But early voting — known officially as in-person absentee voting — where voters can go and submit their ballots in person, really makes it feel like the election is here.
Are you interested in casting your ballot before Nov. 5? Here’s what you should know.
In-person absentee voting
The availability of in-person absentee voting varies by municipality. The best way to determine when you can vote early in person in your community is by visiting this page on the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s MyVote website.
Punch in your address, and MyVote will show you the locations, days and times that in-person absentee voting is available in your community. In Madison, for example, there will be as many as 21 early voting sites spread across the city, depending on the day.
How do I vote by mail?
Wisconsin voters don’t need a reason to vote by mail/be an absentee voter. Every registered Wisconsin voter has the ability to request an absentee ballot by mail. You can request an absentee ballot on MyVote Wisconsin here.
Once you’ve submitted your request for an absentee ballot, you can track your ballot here.
Before you begin filling out your absentee ballot, make sure you have a witness who can verify that you filled out your own ballot. The witness needs to be an adult U.S. citizen who is not a candidate in the upcoming election. Once you’ve completed your ballot, place it in the certified envelope that comes with your absentee ballot. Seal and sign the certificate envelope and then have your witness sign the certificate and include their address.
The next step is to mail it back to your municipal clerk. The United States Postal Service recommends mailing your ballot back at least seven days before Election Day, according to the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
If you’re worried about your ballot being returned in time, you can deliver it to your municipal clerk’s office or deliver it to your polling place on Election Day. In some municipalities, you may also be able to return your absentee ballot using a drop box, though the availability of drop boxes is up to your municipal clerk.
How do I know if I’m registered to vote?
You can check your registration status on the MyVote Wisconsin website here by entering your name and date of birth.
The deadline to register online or by mail has already passed. But the deadline to register in person at your municipal clerk’s office is Nov. 1 at 5 p.m.
If you haven’t registered to vote before Nov. 5, don’t panic. You can register to vote in person at your polling place on Election Day. You’ll just need to bring an accepted form of photo ID and proof of residence.
Where do I get information about the candidates on my ballot?
Wisconsin Watch has you covered. For months, our team has been hard at work assembling a 2024 voter guide. Check it out to learn more about the candidates running for president, U.S. Senate, U.S. House, state Senate and Assembly. We also have information about the constitutional amendment voters are being asked to consider.
Forward is a look ahead at the week in Wisconsin government and politics from the Wisconsin Watch statehouse team.
Next to the presidential race, the biggest Nov. 5 election in Wisconsin is for the U.S. Senate, and Wisconsin Watch is following it closely.
We’ve published fact briefs on more than 20 statements made by and about the incumbent, Democrat Tammy Baldwin, and her Republican challenger, Eric Hovde.
The pair square off for their only scheduled debate Oct. 18 at 7 p.m. — a high-stakes event as some polls and analysts suggest the race is tightening.
The nonpartisan Cook Political Report last week shifted the race from “Leans Democratic” to “toss up” for the first time this cycle.
A recent Cook Political Report poll found Baldwin ahead by two points, and internal polling from both campaigns reflects that number. However, a recent poll from Marquette Law School, the gold standard in Wisconsin, found Baldwin leading 53% to 46%.
“This tightening, as Hovde has further consolidated Republicans behind him and brought independents over to his side, is largely predictable,” wrote Jessica Taylor, who tracks U.S. Senate races for Cook. “Wisconsin is one of the most evenly divided states in the country, and the 2022 Senate race was decided by one point.”
She noted that Baldwin still leads among independent voters, though there has been movement toward Hovde among the bloc — a group of fickle voters who in 2022 reelected both Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.
Baldwin directed $400,000 in 2024 federal spending to Briarpatch Youth Services, a Madison, Wisconsin-area nonprofit that provides counseling, shelter and other services to runaway and homeless youths. It is not a transgender clinic, but has a program that supports “queer youth ages 13-18.”
Hovde alluded to the earmark in claiming that Baldwin “gave all of our money to a transgender clinic … that does this without notifying parents.”
Baldwin cosponsored a 2021 bill, which did not become law, that would have offered legal status — under certain conditions — to an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, by Baldwin’s own estimate.
The dark-money group One Nation branded Baldwin’s cosponsorship as blanket amnesty, an imprecise immigration term.
That’s per a brief we published in May 2023 on a statement made by Wisconsin Republican Party chair Brian Schimming. The analysis was by the news website FiveThirtyEight.
That was according to an April 2023 check we did of a social media post. Several ratings, including one by FiveThirtyEight, put Baldwin in that category.
A Baldwin TV ad mischaracterized what Hovde said in a 2012 interview when he described historical changes in U.S. occupations.
“We don’t engage in hard labor like we did, we don’t have as many accidents on the job, most of us now are involved in some type of white-collar profession, or even professions that are involved with manual labor,” Hovde said. “It’s much safer, much more protective. Think of farming. Look at the old physical toil that it would take on your body, now you’re largely driving around on a tractor.”
The claim was made in a TV ad by WinSenate, a liberal super PAC.
Hovde described in an April interview what he claimed were voting irregularities involving Wisconsin nursing home residents in the 2020 presidential election. A partisan investigation produced no evidence of malicious intent behind a few cases of mentally incompetent people voting. Hovde said: “If you’re in a nursing home, you only have five, six months’ life expectancy. Almost nobody in a nursing home is in a point to vote.”
Baldwin made that claim in a TV ad. During his 2012 run for the U.S. Senate, Hovde lamented the number of children “born out of wedlock,” saying it is “a direct path to a life of poverty. There’s been numerous studies that show that it leads to higher drug rates.”
Hovde said in 2012 he was totally opposed to abortion rights, but has changed his position, contradicting a claim that Baldwin made in an interview.
Hovde said in February he supports exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. In April, he said that “women, early on in a pregnancy, should have a right to make a choice.” And he said that Wisconsin voters should decide when in a pregnancy abortion should be illegal.
Anti-immigrant messaging featured prominently at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this summer.
Convention goers waved “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” signs. The party’s 2024 platform declared that with a second term former President Donald Trump would “CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY.”
But even as immigration remains a top issue for the Trump campaign and voters — it was tied for the second most important issue for voters in a recent Marquette Law School Poll — new survey results suggest a majority of Wisconsin Republicans might not be sold on one of Trump’s top campaign pledges.
The poll, conducted by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, which has been conducting in-depth surveys on key issues in six battleground states, found that 63% of Wisconsin residents would prefer finding a pathway to citizenship for “undocumented immigrants who have been living in the US for some years and have not committed a serious crime. They would pay a penalty and any taxes they owe. After several years, they would be allowed to apply for citizenship.”
Only 25% in Wisconsin support mass deportation, described as an effort “with the goal of finding, detaining and deporting most or all of the 11 million people who have been living in the US without legal status. States would be asked to use their local law enforcement or National Guard, and the Federal government may use the military.”
More than three in four Democrats and 51% of Republicans in Wisconsin prefer a path to citizenship over a mass deportation program. Thirty-six percent of Republicans in this crucial battleground state preferred mass deportation. Nationally, 58% prefer a path to citizenship while just 26% favor mass deportation.
So why, then, is there a disconnect between what voters favor and what Trump is campaigning on?
First, it “is not uncommon that majorities find the pro arguments and the con arguments convincing, so the same person can find both sides convincing,” said Steven Kull, the Program for Public Consultation’s director.
That’s why, in a rally or group setting, a message of “this is going to be dealt with” resonates with voters, he said. But, when voters “actually reason through” the pluses and minuses of each option, they are able to shift their views on something they initially like when hearing surface-level details, Kull said.
Trump’s signature proposal to build a wall along the southern border was supported by 59% of Wisconsin respondents, including 76% of Wisconsin Republicans. Meanwhile, 54% of Democrats in the state opposed the idea. Nationally, 55% are in favor of building the wall, according to the poll.
There was bipartisan consensus on a few immigration-related policies. For example, 74% of Wisconsin residents supported a proposal that would increase the number of border patrol agents from 20,000 to 22,000.
There was also support for increasing “the number of migrant workers who enter the US legally by increasing the number of work visas available, provided there is a demand for such workers.”
Respondents were informed that the “work visas are only granted if the employer has tried and failed to fill the position with an American worker; that employers must pay migrant workers the same wages they would to American workers; and that currently offering more visas would substantially increase the number of legal migrant workers.”
It was backed by 71% of respondents, including 58% of Republicans and 84% of Democrats.
Trump’s threats of mass deportation have rattled Wisconsin’s dairy industry, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. Given that some estimates say upwards of 80% of workers at large dairy farms are immigrants, many of them in the country illegally, their removal could threaten the day-to-day operations of dairies across the state.
A proposal to hire hundreds of additional immigration judges to speed up the processing of asylum cases is favored by 61% of Wisconsin residents, though with 76% support from Democrats. Among Republicans, 54% oppose adding judges.
If you’re interested in going through the policymaking simulation, you can do so here.
Forward is a look ahead at the week in Wisconsin government and politics from the Wisconsin Watch statehouse team.
Wisconsin Watch is previewing legislative races in toss-up districts ahead of the Nov. 5 election by focusing on key issues for voters and what candidates say they will do to address them.
Housing and child care affordability, abortion rights and public school funding are key issues in the race for the 61st Assembly District — a toss-up district encompassing portions of southwestern Milwaukee as well as Greendale, Hales Corners and parts of Greenfield.
The race is a rematch from 2022, pitting incumbent Rep. Bob Donovan, R-Greenfield, a longtime GOP office-holder in the Milwaukee area, against Democrat LuAnn Bird, a former executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin. Donovan won the 2022 contest by just 525 votes.
The partisan makeup of the district is an almost identical split between Republicans and Democrats, according to a Wisconsin Watch analysis of recent voting patterns.
The district is one of 15 that Democrats are targeting this cycle, with hopes of flipping control of the Assembly for the first time in more than a decade after the Wisconsin Supreme Court last year threw out the state’s Republican-gerrymandered maps.
Here’s where both candidates stand on important issues in the district.
Housing and child care affordability
Bird said a top priority to address burdensome costs facing Wisconsin families is to make child care more affordable.
“It doesn’t make sense when you have to spend half your salary on child care,” Bird said in an interview. She said she supports Gov. Tony Evers’ Child Care Counts program, which provides payments to child care providers on a regular basis to help keep their doors open. The program is credited with keeping thousands of child care facilities open during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
In October 2023, Evers extended the program through June 2025 using $170 million in federal funds. He has previously sought to include $340 million in the state budget to support the program, but that plan was scrapped by Republican lawmakers.
Bird said she would support an extension of the program. “If we want to strengthen our economy, we’ve got to make it affordable to go to work for everybody,” she said.
Bird also expressed support for tossing a state law that prevents local governments from implementing rent control programs.
“We could let local governments have more control over their communities,” she said. Giving local officials additional control could help address rent hikes that have been seen in many Wisconsin communities, she said.
Donovan supported a package of Republican-authored child care bills during the most recent legislative session. During the floor session, Democrats attached extending Child Care Counts as amendments to one of the bills. Donovan voted against the extension.
Donovan did not respond to interview requests for this story.
The GOP-backed package included bills that would have allowed parents to contribute $10,000 in pre-tax money to an account to pay for child care, created a $15 million loan program to help child care centers pay for renovations, established a new category of child care centers that could serve between four and 12 children, and increased the child-to-child-care-worker ratio allowed in some child care centers. None of the proposals became law.
Rep. Bob Donovan, R-Greenfield, talks to the media Jan. 24, 2024, at the State Capitol in Madison, Wis. (Andy Manis for Wisconsin Watch)
Abortion rights
Bird and Donovan offer starkly different views on what Wisconsin’s abortion laws should look like.
“The government should have no say in the decision,” Bird told Wisconsin Watch. “Women should be able to make their decisions without government interference.”
She criticized many of the state’s existing laws that make accessing the procedure more cumbersome, such as requiring women to wait 24 hours after an initial appointment and requiring physicians to perform an ultrasound before having an abortion.
The waiting period, in particular, disproportionately affects low-income women, Bird said, given that they likely have to take time off of work to access abortion care.
“Women should be able to choose if and when and how to start a family,” she added. “No politician can know what’s going on in a woman’s life who’s in that situation.”
Donovan joined all 62 of his Republican colleagues in the Assembly in June 2023 in voting against repealing Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban. Democrats attached the repeal provision to the state budget, forcing GOP lawmakers to vote on the issue. The 1849 law, which had been unenforceable because of Roe vs. Wade, was believed at the time to outlaw most abortions in the state. The 19th-century statute contains a vaguely defined exception for an abortion that is determined to be medically necessary to save the mother’s life, but does not make exceptions for cases of rape, incest or the mother’s health.
In January 2024, Donovan voted in favor of legislation that narrowly passed that sought to ban abortions — besides those for medical emergencies — after 14 weeks of pregnancy. Under current law abortion is prohibited after 20 weeks. That bill included a provision that would have required the 14-week ban to be approved via referendum before it took effect.
“I struggled with this legislation here before us today,” Donovan said during debate on the Assembly floor. “But I am supporting it because I believe, if enacted, it will help reduce the loss of life.”
“I am pro-life and I am Catholic,” he added. “And I believe that abortion is the taking of a human being.”
“There are objective truths in this life. And one of those objective truths is any abortion is the taking of a human life,” he said.
Public school funding
Bird said “absolutely the state should be doing more for public education.”
“I think the state should concentrate on making sure that our schools, the public schools, are well funded and producing the kind of education that we want,” Bird said in an interview. She also expressed concerns about lawmakers directing more funds toward private voucher schools, as they did in the most recent budget, when they tied $1 billion in public K-12 school funding to an additional $280 million in voucher school funding.
Bird, who has served on two school boards in Wisconsin, said she would bring her understanding of how public school funding works to the Legislature and be a “champion for what we need to do for public education.”
Donovan voted in favor of the deal that boosted funding for both public schools and voucher programs.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Wednesday in a lawsuit challenging Gov. Tony Evers’ last-minute budget maneuver increasing funding for Wisconsin school districts for the next 400 years.
Yes, you read that correctly.
The state’s most recent budget included a provision increasing the revenue limit for school districts by $325 per pupil for “the 2023-24 school year and the 2024-25 school year.” Using his partial veto authority, Evers changed the line to read, “for 2023-2425.”
He did so by striking a handful of characters: “121.905 (3) (c) 9. For the limit for the 2023-24 school year and the 2024–25 school year, add $325 to the result under par. (b).”
The revenue limit controls the amount of funding school districts can raise through a combination of state aid and local property taxes. Evers’ veto allows school districts in the state to collectively increase revenue by almost $270 million each year, allowing an already record increase to be duplicated every year for four centuries.
Evers’ veto-authored provision, by the time it expired in 2425, would add $130,650 per pupil to a district’s revenue limit, according to a Cap Times analysis. The revenue limit for Madison schools in 2022-23, for example, was $14,254 per pupil.
Evers’ move, which garnered national attention, was condemned by GOP leaders. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said a week after the change that Wisconsin Republicans were preparing to sue over the increase. In April, their allies at the WMC Litigation Center, a 501(c)(3) affiliate of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state’s powerful business lobby, filed an original action with the state Supreme Court.
The court agreed to hear the case in June, teeing up Wednesday’s hearing.
Filed on behalf of two Wisconsin residents, the lawsuit argues Evers’ partial veto was unconstitutional for two reasons.
“First, Wisconsin’s governor may approve an appropriation bill ‘in part,’ but Gov. Evers’s 402-year increase of the school-district revenue limit is not ‘part’ of the legislatively approved two-year increase,” attorneys wrote in a brief with the court.
Rather, attorneys for WMC argued that since the 400-year increase was not included in the budget, but instead created by the governor, it runs afoul of the state constitution’s provision allowing governors to approve, but not create, budget bills “in whole or in part.”
“Second, in 1990, Wisconsin voters amended our state constitution to prohibit the so-called ‘Vanna White’ or ‘pick-a-letter’ veto,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys said in their brief. “(Evers’ veto) is a Vanna White veto.”
A Vanna White veto — named for the “Wheel of Fortune” star — is when a governor uses partial veto authority to strike “phrases, digits, letters, and word fragments” in order to “create new words, sentences, and dollar amounts,” according to a report from the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau.
The constitutionality of Vanna White vetoes was tested in the 1980s after then-Gov. Tommy Thompson employed them to make changes to the budget bill in 1987. Miffed by Thompson’s actions, the Democratic leaders of the Legislature filed a lawsuit with the state Supreme Court. The high court upheld the vetoes, finding “the governor may, in the exercise of his partial veto authority over appropriation bills, veto individual words, letters and digits, and also may reduce appropriations by striking digits, as long as what remains after veto is a complete, entire, and workable law.”
A few weeks after the ruling, the Democratic-controlled Legislature held an extraordinary session to pass a constitutional amendment outlawing Vanna White vetoes, which was eventually approved by a wide margin in a 1990 referendum, according to LRB. The amendment included the following language in the state constitution: “In approving an appropriation bill in part, the governor may not create a new word by rejecting individual letters in the words of the enrolled bill.”
Attorneys for Evers, meanwhile, argued in legal briefs that he did nothing wrong.
Precedent established in the Thompsoncase “merely requires the governor’s vetoes to leave behind a complete and workable law,” they wrote.
“The partial vetoes at issue undeniably yield such a law, and so they are valid,” attorneys for Evers continued.
The governor also said he did not violate the amendment banning Vanna White vetoes.
“The vetoes at issue comply with this provision because they deleted digits, not letters,” his attorneys wrote. They noted the amendment bars a governor from “rejecting individual letters in the words” but doesn’t say anything about digits.
“Because this Court’s precedent and the amendment’s history confirms the common-sense understanding that ‘digits’ are not ‘letters,’ Petitioners’ challenge … also fails,” attorneys for the governor argued.
Some independent legal experts, though, are skeptical of Evers’ position. In an amicus brief filed with the court, Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor and expert on state and local government, said Evers’ veto flies in the face of the constitutional requirement of bicameralism and presentment.
“The partial veto power was designed to restore balance in (the legislative) process — not to subvert it by giving the governor capacious unilateral lawmaking authority,” he wrote.
We’re watching to see if the court’s liberal majority, which has so far been friendly to Evers, will once again rule in his favor, or instead rein in one of his key budget victories.
Forward is a look ahead at the week in Wisconsin government and politics from the Wisconsin Watch statehouse team.
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Baldwin has consistently led Hovde in polling, but neither side is ready to concede that the election is over.
Baldwin has won two terms by appealing to voters outside of traditional Democratic strongholds. She has kept an edge this year by defining Hovde early and focusing on his past controversial statements.
Hovde sees an opening in defining 2024 as a change election year and tying Baldwin to President Joe Biden.
Hovde and Baldwin provide stark differences in policy, though Hovde has moderated his position on abortion since his 2012 run for Senate.
The race between U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Republican businessman Eric Hovde has reached a sort of stasis.
For months, the two campaigns have traded the same attacks. Baldwin has knocked Hovde for comments he made questioning the voting capabilities of nursing home residents and his suggestion that overweight people should pay more for health insurance. She also has argued that Hovde’s extraordinary wealth — he owns a real estate development company and at least part of Sunwest Bank, which is valued at $3 billion — leaves him incapable of looking out for everyday voters.
Hovde has tried to tie the senator to President Joe Biden, an unpopular incumbent whose own electoral woes forced him out of the presidential race. He blames Baldwin for the inflationary pains felt by Wisconsin residents in recent years and for an unsecured southern border, which Hovde says threatens the country’s domestic security. Hovde’s campaign has also argued that the work of Baldwin’s partner, a financial adviser, is a potential conflict of interest.
But in a political cycle focused on change, Wisconsin’s U.S. Senate race hardly feels like a referendum on Baldwin — despite her nearly 26 years in Washington. Most of the time, it seems like the two candidates are talking past one another, even as they court Wisconsin’s fussy independent voters, who have helped elect and re-elect both Baldwin and Ron Johnson, two senators with starkly different world views.
Baldwin’s message discipline has been on full display, talking up her own record while tearing Hovde down. Hovde, on the other hand, has committed considerable time to trying to dispel the senator’s attacks, and his campaign messaging, at times, gets bogged down by policy minutiae.
Baldwin has consistently had the advantage in a recent round of state polls. A recent Wisconsin Watch poll conducted by The MassINC Polling Group found Baldwin leading Hovde 52% to 44%. A Marquette Law School Poll released Wednesday showed a similar 53% to 46% lead for Baldwin.
Still, neither Democrats nor Republicans are ready to call the race. And, as a dozen politicos of all stripes interviewed for this story pointed out, anything can happen in a Wisconsin election.
U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., center, tours the Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry on Sept. 4, 2024, in Manitowoc, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Safety glasses on and ear plugs in, Baldwin stepped onto the buzzing factory floor of Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry’s expansive facility in Manitowoc on a recent September afternoon smiling and full of questions.
Walking through the roughly 300,000-square-foot facility, she asked about the wide range of metal products sitting in bins and on shelves around the foundry. Along the way, she stopped to shake hands with workers, waved at a forklift operator and intensely studied a high-tech 3D printer.
Days spent touring Wisconsin businesses help inform her work as a senator in Washington, she told a group of WAF employees after the tour. And those tours, many of which occur during her frequent visits to parts of the state outside the Democratic strongholds of Milwaukee and Dane County, have helped her remain relatively well-liked among rural and blue-collar voters while their support for many other Wisconsin Democrats has waned.
As if to punctuate the point, as she left the foundry, a man driving an 18-wheeler rolled down his window and shouted, “We love you Tammy!”
“The way Tammy Baldwin keeps winning, and winning by more than the average Democrat, is by refusing to write anyone or anywhere off and refusing to take anyone or anywhere for granted,” said Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.
“One of her great strengths is being able to disagree without being disagreeable,” Wikler said. That quality, he added, helps her win support from voters who back Republican candidates in every other race on the ballot but cross partisan lines to vote for her.
Gov. Tony Evers, who himself has won five statewide elections, told Wisconsin Watch in an interview that it’s important for Baldwin to talk to voters even if they aren’t going to back her.
“Having a conversation with someone (who isn’t going to vote for you) isn’t going to change their mind,” Evers said. “But it may mitigate them going to their neighbor and saying, ‘She’s a jackass,’ or ‘He’s a jackass.’ They’ll probably say, ‘she’s wrong on this issue, but at least she’s talking to me.’ I think that’s being … a Wisconsinite.”
Baldwin has proven tough to beat. She’s never lost an election, dating back to the 1980s when she was first elected to the Dane County Board. And she’s faced formidable opponents, like former Gov. Tommy Thompson, whom she handily beat to win her Senate seat in 2012.
Baldwin attributes her success, at least in part, to two things.
“First of all, it’s a question of whose side you’re on, and voters have a choice for somebody who’s on their side,” she said, referring to herself, “or somebody who’s for the Wall Street and rich and connected.”
“Secondly, I think (it’s) partly because I do show up,” she said in an interview at Bronzeville Kitchen and Lounge in Milwaukee. “And while you can’t meet all 5.7 million Wisconsinites, if you show up over and over and over again, word gets out that I’m up there and that I’m fighting for folks who tell me what it is that challenges them.”
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde addresses the crowd Sept. 21, 2024, during the 9th annual Rally for Liberty at the Manawa Rodeo Grounds in Manawa, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Sporting his now-signature mustache and a red “USA” baseball hat, Hovde hovered at the edge of a barn at the Manawa Rodeo Grounds while he waited his turn to take the stage at the Waupaca County Republican Party’s “Rally for Liberty.” He shook hands with a few eager voters; the crowd murmured as more people realized he had arrived.
He was greeted on stage — flanked by cardboard cutouts of former Presidents Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan and Abraham Lincoln — to hearty applause from members of the party faithful, many of whom were sporting red MAGA hats.
“I’m standing here for the same reason you are all here today — it’s because I love my country,” Hovde said.
The Republican businessman listed four reasons for why he’s running.
First, increased federal spending — which Hovde says inflated prices — needs to be pared back. If it’s not, “we’re bankrupting and jeopardizing our future.”
Second, Hovde said, Democrats have threatened the nation’s domestic security. He blamed the Defund the Police movement for understaffed police departments and argued Democratic immigration policies have allowed millions of people to enter the country illegally, straining the country’s housing, health care and justice systems.
Next, Democrats have threatened international security, Hovde said. “We have wars all over the world,” Hovde told the crowd in Manawa, arguing the U.S.’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan showed adversaries the United States was weak. “Their incompetence has put the whole world at greater risk,” he said.
And finally, “the Democratic Party has done a great job of, just like all socialist governments, dividing us,” Hovde said. “We’ve got to come together. We have too many big problems in this country.”
He received a standing ovation from the crowd. After taking a couple of questions from the audience, he greeted a line of voters. It was here, and not on the stump, that he was most comfortable — an important quality in a race against a seasoned veteran of retail politics.
With voter after voter, he happily shook hands, looked them in the eyes while they gabbed about the issues that mattered the most to them and then posed for a photo.
That’s the formula some of the state’s top Republicans believe he needs to employ to close the gap with Baldwin.
“Eric Hovde just needs to continue to deliver the message that he’s going to look out for (Wisconsin residents),” U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany recently told reporters.
Brian Schimming, chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, said Hovde has to contrast himself with Baldwin and “get voters comfortable with him.”
“He does those two things and I think he can win,” Schimming said.
U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., said passing the Women’s Health Protection Act is one of her top priorities if she is re-elected to a third term. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Her status as the incumbent, strength among rural voters and prior electoral success put her ahead of Hovde, said J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball. In Baldwin’s 2018 reelection campaign, she won 29 Wisconsin counties. In 2020, President Joe Biden carried just 14, and in 2022, Gov. Tony Evers won only 16.
“It would be a pretty decent surprise if Baldwin ended up losing,” Coleman said in an interview with Wisconsin Watch. But he noted, Wisconsin almost always features close elections.
“We’re way past the days where (former Democratic U.S. Sen.) Herb Kohl would win two-to-one,” he added.
Baldwin’s significant fundraising advantage — even though Hovde has considerable personal wealth that he has spent on the campaign — allowed her “to get out and define Hovde early,” said Jessica Taylor, U.S. Senate and governors editor for the Cook Political Report.
The race has been about Hovde, not Baldwin, Taylor said, presenting a challenge for a candidate who wants to make the race a “change” election.
“I think he needs to chip away at Baldwin,” Taylor said of Hovde. She said she’s been hearing in recent voter focus groups a “sort of distrust with career politicians,” which gives Hovde an opening.
“He can say, ‘I don’t come from this world,’” Taylor said of Hovde.
“I think his biggest weakness is all of these things that he said, about people in nursing homes, about single moms, about obese people paying more for health care,” Taylor said. “He’s said a lot of things, whether it’s recently or whether it was in his 2012 run for Senate that (Democrats) have been able to clip and run effectively.”
Taylor said she would be watching to see if outside groups, especially on the Republican side, would start to spend more heavily on the race. That could help Hovde, she said, but the resources could be better spent elsewhere, given that Wisconsin is not a top-tier pickup opportunity for Senate Republicans this cycle.
But, Taylor added, given “the nature of Wisconsin elections,” the race is not over.
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde wants to cut federal spending to pre-COVID levels to rein in inflation. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Both Democrats and Republicans still believe that their respective nominees can win.
Democratic confidence is rooted in Baldwin’s record in Washington. Evers, for example, said Baldwin has “done a lot for Wisconsin.” During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Baldwin pushed to bring federal dollars back to Wisconsin, the governor said. He also said her work to establish the simplified 988 suicide prevention hotline and secure funding to replace Blatnik Bridge between Superior and Duluth, Minnesota, shows she’s focused on addressing Wisconsin residents’ pressing needs.
Democrats also have leveled near-nonstop attacks against Hovde, even before he entered the race.
“Hovde’s central challenge is that he has this track record of looking down his nose at regular folks,” Wikler said in an interview. He claimed Hovde doesn’t believe farmers still work hard (Wisconsin Watch has debunked that claim) and has disparaged nursing home residents by saying they’re not “at a point to vote.”
“And the sense that a candidate doesn’t really view you as an equal is a big turnoff to voters,” Wikler said.
Hovde made those comments over the past year and in 2012, when he ran for the U.S. Senate but lost the Republican primary.
Democrats’ favorite line of attack, though, is charging that Hovde isn’t from Wisconsin, reminding voters frequently of his multimillion-dollar home in Laguna Beach, California.
“The thing about Tammy is that she’s authentic,” said state Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, comparing the two candidates. “She’s not a Californian pretending to be a cowboy in a commercial one day and then pretending to be a Wisconsinite the next day.”
That dig is a reference to a series of TV commercials Hovde has filmed for Sunwest Bank, in which he plays the role of a cowboy.
Hovde bristles at those attacks. Sitting at The Outpost Pub & Provisions, a restaurant in Sherwood, he said “every single one of (Democrats’) ads is just a complete, fabricated lie.”
“The biggest constant lie is trying to tell people I’m a Californian,” Hovde said. “Are you kidding me? Do you think I sound like a Californian?”
“How can I be running for the U.S. Senate from Wisconsin if I’m a Californian?” he exclaimed in a Midwestern accent. “I live here. I vote here. I pay my taxes here.”
He further noted that he’s a fourth generation Wisconsin resident, was born and raised in the state, graduated from Madison East High School and earned his bachelor’s degree from UW-Madison.
U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., talks to the press after touring the Bronzeville Kitchen & Lounge in Milwaukee on Sept. 4, 2024. Baldwin points to her opposition to an Indo-Pacific trade deal as an example of a disagreement with the Biden administration over the effect it would have on American workers. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Republican confidence is rooted in Baldwin’s record in Washington.
Baldwin is having to run away from her record, Schimming said. “That’s a challenge.”
“Tammy has a fairly unremarkable track record in the Senate in terms of achievement — that’s putting it generously,” Schimming continued. “She basically doesn’t have any big legislation to her name.”
Her voting record is also to the left of the state, Schimming said, something that makes her even more vulnerable.
“I would not want to be a 95% or 96% vote with Joe Biden right now,” Schimming said of Baldwin’s support for the current administration’s agenda. “That is not something you want to be.”
Tiffany emphasized “this is a change election.”
“She was groomed from the very beginning to have a long career in politics, and she certainly has. And look at the results in Washington, D.C.,” Tiffany said. “Tammy Baldwin is a Harris-Walz sycophant, and that’s ultimately what is going to get Eric Hovde across the finish line.”
Hovde agreed Baldwin’s time in office works in his favor.
“Has Sen. Baldwin, who’s been in Washington for 26 years, made your life better?” he asked in an interview. “I think the answer is pretty clear. If you look at where our country has gone, by any measurement and means, it has not gone in the right direction under her tenure.”
“I am very proud of my record,” Baldwin said when asked about the GOP attacks.
She pointed to a provision she authored in the Affordable Care Act that allows Americans to stay on their parents’ health insurance until they’re 26; her support for Buy America rules, which mandate that American-made materials be used for certain federally funded projects; and her work to bring down the costs of inhalers, something she says has had real results over the past year.
Baldwin also pushed back on GOP assertions that she’s been a rubber-stamp vote for Biden’s agenda.
“I work for only Wisconsin,” she said. “I don’t work for a president. I work for the state.”
The senator was among a group of Democrats who pushed Biden to halt talks of a trade deal with a series of Indo-Pacific nations over concerns it would be perceived as bad for American workers. She also highlighted that she led a bipartisan effort to get the Food and Drug Administration to stop allowing imitation “dairy” products — almond milk, etc. — to be mislabeled.
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde has moderated his position on abortion since his 2012 U.S. Senate run when he was anti-abortion. He now supports a referendum that would allow abortions sometime before 12 to 18 weeks of pregnancy and exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
In a race that has focused more on personal attacks than policy, both Baldwin and Hovde offered windows into their policy priorities in interviews with Wisconsin Watch.
Hovde outlined his plans to fight inflation and secure the U.S.-Mexico border.
Broadly speaking, Hovde said, to rein in costs, lawmakers need to “pull spending back to pre-COVID levels.”
“Our population didn’t grow by 40%, so why are we spending 40% more?” Hovde said. “Once you do that, prices will come back.”
Then the country needs to implement “pro-economic growth policies,” the Republican said, namely reducing regulations and cutting back on government mandates, like requirements that a certain percentage of energy production comes from renewable sources.
The same applies to housing costs, said Hovde, a real estate developer.
“Twenty-five to 30% of the cost of any new home built today is tied in with taxes and regulations, impact fees, things of that nature,” Hovde said. If you cut back on the fees developers have to pay, fewer costs will be passed on to the consumer, he said.
On border policy, the Republican businessman said the U.S. should revert to Trump-era rules, such as reinstituting the former president’s so-called “remain in Mexico” policy, which forced non-Mexican asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their U.S. court dates.
Hovde also said the U.S. needs to change its laws providing broad rights to migrants once they set foot on American soil. Finally, he said the U.S. should finish building a wall along its southern border.
One issue he doesn’t believe the federal government should be involved in is setting abortion policy. Hovde said abortion laws should be established through state referendums.
He said he personally believes in exceptions to abortion bans for rape, incest and medical emergencies and that women should be able to access abortion services early on in a pregnancy. When should abortion be able to be outlawed? Hovde pointed to some countries in Europe, which range from after 12 weeks to after 18 weeks, and said “those all seem like reasonable ranges to me.”
He also attacked Baldwin, whom he charged supports allowing abortions even after fetal viability.
She disputed the premise in an interview.
“The type of abortion that Eric Hovde describes does not happen in America,” she said. “If there is a woman presenting late in her pregnancy for care, it is because something has gone catastrophically wrong, and that’s the only circumstance under which that happens in America.”
She pointed to her Women’s Health Protection Act to demonstrate her stance on abortion policy, which would restore protections established under Roe v. Wade but would still allow states to ban abortion “after fetal viability” with exceptions for medical emergencies.
With another term in the Senate, getting the bill passed would be one of Baldwin’s top priorities — though it would likely face an uphill battle with Republicans expected to retake the majority.
She also would continue to push policies like the Dairy Business Innovation Act, which created a grant program aimed at helping dairy farmers expand their operations and diversify their businesses, or another bipartisan bill she helped author that would provide funding for rural communities to test their wells for so-called forever chemicals.
“I think too many people are probably drinking contaminated water and don’t even have that knowledge,” she said.
So, a month out from Election Day, with the race’s sole debate looming on Oct. 18 at 7 p.m. and many voters finally starting to pay attention, how are both candidates feeling about the race?
“It’s going to be a jump ball right down to the final wire,” Hovde said.
“We have a lot more to do,” Baldwin said.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin holds a commanding lead over Republican businessman Eric Hovde in Wisconsin’s U.S. Senate race, according to a new Wisconsin Watch poll conducted by The MassINC Polling Group and released on Monday.
Baldwin led Hovde 52% to 44% among 800 likely voters. That’s outside the survey’s margin of error of +/-3.8% and is her largest lead in recent polling of the battleground state. Only 2% of respondents said they were undecided.
The poll was conducted Sept. 12-18 by The MassINC Polling Group on behalf of Wisconsin Watch. Voters were reached via text message invitation to an online survey and by live telephone interviewers calling landline and cell phones. It was funded by a grant from the Knight Election Hub.
Baldwin has had the advantage consistently in a recent round of polls of Wisconsin. An Emerson College poll recently found her at 49% among likely voters and Hovde at 46%. The senator received 51% support compared with Hovde’s 48% in a Marist College poll, and Baldwin got 51% to Hovde’s 47% in a Quinnipiac University survey. In the most recent Marquette University Law School poll — the most closely watched poll in Wisconsin — Baldwin had 52% support among likely voters while Hovde received 47%. A Morning Consult poll has Baldwin leading Hovde 50% to 43%.
“Certainly you’d rather be in (Baldwin’s) position, given where the race is,” said Steve Koczela, president of The MassINC Polling Group. “She’s doing well among independents, and both her and Kamala Harris are actually drawing a few Republicans.”
The poll found Baldwin getting support from 12% of Republicans and 54% of independent voters. In comparison, Hovde had the backing of 39% of independents and just 2% of Democrats.
But, Koczela cautioned, “just because someone’s lead is outside the margin of error doesn’t definitely mean that they’re going to win.”
The MassINC Polling Group’s polling operation is rated 2.8 out of 3 stars by poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight, ranking it among the top 20 most reliable polls in the country.
Baldwin also had a significant lead over Hovde among women (54% to 39%) and was neck and neck with Hovde among men (47% to 50%), the poll found. Baldwin has the advantage over Hovde among voters in all age groups: 18- to 29-year-olds (50% to 45%), 30- to 44-year-olds (58% to 37%), 45- to 59-year-olds (53% to 43%) and 60 and older (50% to 47%).
Among voters without college degrees, 49% of respondents backed Hovde, and 47% backed Baldwin. But among voters with a bachelor’s degree or more, Baldwin led 63% to Hovde’s 33%.
The poll also found Baldwin performing well with voters of all income levels. Among respondents earning less than $50,000 annually, Baldwin received 50% support, and Hovde had 48%. Among voters earning between $50,000 and $100,000, Baldwin led 50% to 44%. She led 52% to 42% among voters earning $100,000 to $150,000 per year and 61% to 39% among respondents earning $150,000 or more annually.
Baldwin is also viewed favorably by substantially more voters than Hovde. Among those surveyed, the senator was viewed favorably by 51% and unfavorably by 43%. Hovde was viewed favorably by 40% of respondents and unfavorably by 51%.
Baldwin maintained an even larger advantage among women, 57% of whom viewed her favorably while 38% viewed her unfavorably. Only 35% of women viewed Hovde favorably while 55% viewed him unfavorably. Among men, 45% viewed Baldwin favorably while 49% viewed her unfavorably; 45% viewed Hovde favorably and 48% had an unfavorable view of him.
Hovde’s lagging favorability should be a concern for his campaign this close to the election, Koczela said.
“For other elections where both candidates have a 35% to 40% favorability rating, then you can both target so-called ‘double haters,’ where someone’s got to win the voters who turn out who don’t like either one,” Koczela explained. “But when you’re minus 11 and your opponent is plus (8), then that is definitely a problem.”
“It’s not a 100% guarantee that you’re going to lose that way,” Koczela continued. “There might be other reasons why someone would vote for you, but it’s definitely not the state that you would want.”
Baldwin and Hovde will have their sole debate on Oct. 18 at 7 p.m.
Toplines from the poll can be found here. Crosstabs from the poll can be found here.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
A slight majority of Wisconsin voters want Democrats to control the state Legislature after the Nov. 5 election, according to a new Wisconsin Watch poll conducted by The MassINC Polling Group and released Monday.
The survey also found strong distrust of state government, with only 24% saying they think Wisconsin state government operates in an open and transparent way, 46% saying it doesn’t and 28% saying they’re unsure.
The survey of 800 likely voters found 51% of respondents would prefer if Democrats controlled the Legislature in January, while 44% prefer Republicans. The seven-point difference was almost outside the poll’s margin of error of +/-3.8%.
Notably, 48% of independent voters said they would prefer if Democrats controlled the statehouse while 42% of independents backed Republicans. Democrats had a significant lead among women, the poll found, 56% to 39%. Republicans had a small advantage among men, 50% to 45%.
The poll asked voters if they would “prefer to see Democrats or Republicans in control of the Wisconsin state legislature after the November elections?” It did not ask about specific races and candidates by name, noted Steve Koczela, president of The MassINC Polling Group.
But the pollsters did weight the results geographically based on expected turnout, Koczela said.
Respondents were also asked about the fairness of the state’s new legislative districts, which were implemented after the liberal majority Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out the state’s old, Republican-gerrymandered maps on a technicality. Those districts — and another similarly gerrymandered set of districts — heavily favored Republicans, helping the GOP maintain large majorities in the Legislature over the past decade.
The new maps were approved by the Republican-controlled Legislature and signed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. Analyses of the maps showed they could yield narrow Democratic majorities in the Assembly and state Senate in a November election with a strong showing for Democrats statewide, though only half of the Senate seats are up for election this year. Democrats are not expected to have a chance of winning the Senate until 2026.
Among those surveyed, 33% said they believed the new boundaries were more fair, 25% said they were less fair, 13% said they were about the same and 29% didn’t know. There was a sizable partisan split on the question of fairness, with 61% of Democratic respondents saying the new districts were more fair compared to just 9% of Republicans.
Among the issues that mattered the most to voters in determining their vote in legislative races, the economy and jobs led the way (60%). That was followed by the “future of our democracy” (58%), election integrity (52%), ending government gridlock (50%), and access to affordable health care (50%).
Once again there were meaningful differences depending upon party affiliation. Among Republicans, the economy and jobs (69%), election integrity (64%) and ending government gridlock (44%) were the top issues. For Democrats, abortion rights (79%), the future of democracy (76%) and access to affordable health care (73%) were most important.
Independent respondents prioritized the economy and jobs (61%), the future of democracy (58%), election integrity (51%) and ending government gridlock (51%).
The poll was conducted Sept. 12-18. Voters were reached via text message invitation to an online survey and by live telephone interviewers calling landline and cell phones. It was funded by a grant from the Knight Election Hub.
Toplines from the poll can be found here. Crosstabs from the poll can be found here.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Vice President Kamala Harris has grown her lead over former President Donald Trump in Wisconsin following their Sept. 10 debate, according to a new Wisconsin Watch poll conducted by The MassINC Polling Group and released on Monday.
Among 800 likely voters, Harris led Trump 53% to 46%, her largest lead in recent polling from this crucial swing state and nearly outside the survey’s +/-3.8% margin of error. In a multi-candidate race, Harris received 51% support to Trump’s 45%. Both independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who has dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump — and Green Party candidate Jill Stein each received about 1% support.
The Wisconsin Watch poll comes amid a flurry of post-debate swing state polling in recent days — mostly showing a too-close-to-call race. The latest Marquette Law School Poll, the most closely watched poll in the state, showed Harris up four points over Trump, but it was conducted before the debate, which post-debate polls show Harris won.
Among post-debate polls, an Emerson College poll found Trump at 50% and Harris at 49% in Wisconsin; a Marist College poll found Harris at 50% and Trump at 49%; and a Quinnipiac University poll found Harris at 49% and Trump at 48% — all statistical ties. A Morning Consult poll found Harris ahead 50% to 44%, larger than but still within the margin of error.
“If the election were held today … we’d be expecting to find (Harris) with a low single-digit lead (in Wisconsin),” said Steve Koczela, president of The MassINC Polling Group. He said “if that’s true, then we should expect the polls to range from somewhere a few points above that to a few points below that” when asked if he was concerned the poll found Harris receiving more support than in other polls.
But, Koczela cautioned, “it’s always possible that surges in turnout or lagging turnout from one group or another could change the results from what the polls show.”
“We don’t have to look very far back in history to see where that happened in the state of Wisconsin,” he continued. “So, we do the best we can, and then we’re waiting for Election Day like everybody else.”
The MassINC Polling Group’s polling operation is rated 2.8 out of 3 stars by poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight, ranking it among the top 20 most reliable polls in the country. Harris leads Trump in Wisconsin by about 2%, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average for the state.
Harris was also viewed more favorably by voters than Trump: 49% view her favorably while 48% view her unfavorably. For the former president, 44% view him favorably and 53% view him unfavorably. That represents a small improvement for both candidates compared to Marquette’s pre-debate poll.
The poll was conducted Sept. 12-18 by The MassINC Polling Group on behalf of Wisconsin Watch. Voters were reached via text message invitation to an online survey and by live telephone interviewers calling landline and cell phones. It was funded by a grant from the Knight Election Hub.
Head-to-head comparisons
In other poll findings, 44% of voters said the phrase “knows how to manage the economy” best describes Trump, while 43% of voters said the same about Harris.
That’s notable, Koczela said, because the economy “is the top issue in the election cycle.”
“If you’re going to only have one attribute that you’re doing well on, that’s the one you’d want to have,” he said. “I think that’s part of how Donald Trump is keeping the election close.”
More voters polled believed Harris will do a better job keeping America safe — 49% said the phrase “will keep America safe” best describes the vice president; 44% of respondents said the same about Trump. That comes as Trump and his allies once again try to make public safety a centerpiece of the campaign, as they’ve done in other recent elections.
Harris’ advantage here — still within the margin of error — bucks historical trends, Koczela said.
“Historically, (you) would very often expect to see Republicans winning by a fairly wide margin,” he said in an interview with Wisconsin Watch. “That’s a great number for Harris, to have perhaps a slight edge, but even to be in the same ballpark, I think is a great number for a Democrat when being compared to a Republican.”
A majority of respondents said Harris is “a person of strong moral character” (53%) and “mentally sharp” (54%). Just 26% said Trump “is a person of strong moral character,” and only 35% of respondents said he is “mentally sharp.”
Respondents also said Harris was more relatable than Trump, 50% to 33%; will better follow the law, 53% to 34%; and expresses a positive view of the future of America, 54% to 41%.
The poll also found that 59% of likely voters believed Harris did a better job in the debate; just 21% of those surveyed said Trump did a better job in the debate.
However, more respondents said Trump “will bring real change to Washington” than Harris, 41% to 37%, while 16% of voters said neither candidate would bring real change.
Among respondents to the poll, 32% said they were Democrats, 36% said they were Republicans and 32% identified as independent.
What issues matter most to voters?
Voters were asked to name any number of their top issues in the presidential race. The five issues mentioned the most were jobs, wages and the economy (64%), the future of democracy in America (62%), immigration policy (57%), Social Security and Medicare (50%), and abortion rights (49%), according to the poll.
Among Democrats, the five most important issues are the future of American democracy (81%), abortion rights (79%), the U.S. Supreme Court (69%), the character of each candidate (69%), and health care policy (64%). For Republicans, it’s immigration policy (78%), jobs, wages and the economy (71%), the national debt (61%), the future of American democracy (47%), and foreign policy (43%).
For independent voters, jobs, wages and the economy (69%) are the most important issues. That’s followed by the future of American democracy (60%), immigration policy (57%), Social Security and Medicare (51%), and the national debt (51%). Abortion rights (46%) were a close sixth.
Among men, the economy was the most important issue (65%), followed by the future of American democracy (58%) and immigration policy (57%). For women, the future of American democracy (66%) was the most important issue. The economy (62%) was second, and abortion rights (57%) were third.
Generally, 76% of those polled said they felt like their rights are being threatened. Just 15% said their rights are being well protected. Eighty-two percent of Republicans said their rights are being threatened, while 12% said they are being protected. Among Democrats, 71% felt like their rights are being threatened, and 19% felt they are being protected.
“Both sides have really put it on the table,” Koczela said. “The threats that they’re describing for their voters and using to motivate their voters are quite different. But it does make sense that both parties would see that as a key issue.”
Women, in particular, felt like their rights are being threatened — 81% said as much in the poll, with only 11% of women reporting they feel like their rights are being well protected.
Toplines from the poll can be found here. Crosstabs from the poll can be found here.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Wisconsin Watch is previewing legislative races in toss-up districts ahead of the Nov. 5 election by focusing on key issues for voters and what candidates say they will do to address them.
Abortion access, tax cuts and education funding are central issues in the race for Wisconsin Senate District 8 — a GOP-leaning toss-up district between Milwaukee and Port Washington that could help decide who controls the state Senate in the coming years.
The contest pits incumbent Sen. Duey Stroebel, R-Saukville, against environmental attorney and small business owner Jodi Habush Sinykin, a Democrat from Milwaukee. Stroebel has served in the Legislature since May 2011 and sits on its powerful budget-writing committee. Habush Sinykin previously ran for the state Senate in a special election in April 2023. She was narrowly defeated by Sen. Dan Knodl, R-Germantown.
The race is one of five Senate districts Democrats are targeting this cycle — hoping to tee themselves up to win a Senate majority in 2026 — and it’s one of only two flip opportunities in a district with a Republican incumbent, according to a Wisconsin Watch analysis of past voting patterns.
Still more than six weeks out from Election Day, groups on both sides are already running attack ads — an unusually early development for a state legislative race. New Wisconsin Majority is running a commercial attacking Stroebel’s opposition to abortion. Meanwhile, the Republican State Leadership Committee is running an ad blaming Democrats for increased costs that seeks to tie Habush Sinykin to Democratic lawmakers.
Here’s where both candidates stand on key issues in their district.
Abortion access
Habush Sinykin and Stroebel offer starkly different perspectives on what the state’s abortion laws should look like, according to an interview with the former and the latter’s work in the Legislature. Stroebel did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.
“Wisconsin’s abortion laws should very much reflect, as in any democracy, including Wisconsin’s democracy, the will of the people and the values of our people,” Habush Sinykin told Wisconsin Watch in an interview, pointing to polling from Marquette Law School that suggests between 60% and 70% of Wisconsin residents believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
New polling from the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation also found that just shy of 80% of Wisconsin residents are against criminalizing the procedure before fetal viability in the state. That includes 57% of Republicans and 93% of Democrats. Criminalizing abortion was defined in the survey as “prison time or fines for the doctor or the woman.”
Habush Sinykin said reproductive freedom and health care access are the top issues she is hearing from voters when knocking on doors, especially from women. Voters have expressed concerns about restrictive abortion laws preventing them from accessing the health care providers they need, she said, with many doctors deciding not to practice in Wisconsin because of the state’s 1849 ban, which is currently unenforceable after a court order.
“To make women have to leave Wisconsin, or make us uncertain about the health care we can receive, it is just not OK,” Habush Sinykin said.
Jodi Habush Sinykin (Christopher Dilts / Jodi for State Senate)
Stroebel joined all 21 of his Republican colleagues in the state Senate in June 2023 in voting against repealing Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban. Democrats attached the repeal provision to the state budget, forcing GOP lawmakers to vote on the issue. The 1849 law, which had been unenforceable because of Roe vs. Wade, was believed at the time to outlaw most abortions in the state. The 19th-century statute contains a vaguely defined exception for an abortion that is determined to be medically necessary to save the mother’s life, but does not make exceptions for cases of rape, incest or the mother’s health.
In April 2020, Stroebel introduced a constitutional amendment that would have guaranteed a fetus at every stage of development a “right to life.” During his Senate race in 2020, Stroebel was endorsed by Pro-Life Wisconsin, an organization that supports “candidates who recognize the personhood of the preborn baby and hold the principled and compassionate no-exceptions pro-life position.”
State Sen. Duey Stroebel, R-Saukville, is seen at a June 2023 press conference at the Capitol in Madison, Wis. (Drake White-Bergey / Wisconsin Watch)
Taxes
Both candidates support cutting taxes, but largely for different groups.
“Strategic and intelligent tax cuts make sense for Wisconsin,” Habush Sinykin said.
As a business owner — she and her husband own a Janesville manufacturing company that produces paint rollers and other products — she said she has seen firsthand the “connection between our tax system and the ability to attract a strong workforce in Wisconsin.”
“We need Wisconsin to be able to keep and attract young families and a workforce,” Habush Sinykin said. She supports cutting taxes for middle class families while “ensuring that the highest earners pay their fair share,” according to her campaign policy platform.
“I very much think that we have to be competitive, not just in our region, but with the rest of the country, because that’s who we’re competing against,” she said.
Habush Sinykin said she would like to reduce taxes on Wisconsin seniors and retirees.
Too many people living on fixed incomes leave for other states with more favorable tax systems, Habush Sinykin said. She added that “Wisconsin can do far more to dissuade them from leaving the state.”
She declined to endorse a GOP-authored bill from the most recent legislative session that would have made retirement income for certain Wisconsin residents tax-free, but did say the proposal “certainly sounds to be a step in the right direction.” Habush Sinykin said she’d need to see the long-term financial implications for the state before endorsing any tax cut plan.
That plan would have raised the annual amount of tax-exempt withdrawals from a retirement account from $5,000 to $75,000 for single Wisconsin residents age 65 and older and up to $150,000 for joint filers. It was vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers, who said it would reduce revenue by $658 million in 2024-25 and $472 million in each subsequent fiscal year. Stroebel voted in favor of the legislation.
Stroebel has been a proponent of cutting taxes during his time in the Legislature. During the 2021-23 legislative session, he voted for reducing the state’s third-highest tax bracket from 6.27% to 5.3%, a $2 billion cut. That rate covers income between $27,630 and $304,170 for single filers and between $36,840 and $405,550 for joint filers.
During the most recent legislative session, Stroebel supported a number of tax cut provisions. He co-sponsored legislation that would have implemented a flat income tax system in Wisconsin by reducing income taxes for all filers to 3.25%. That proposal did not receive a vote in either the Senate or the Assembly.
Instead, during the most recent budget cycle, Stroebel backed a $3.5 billion income tax cut that would have focused its largest reductions on the state’s highest earners. The plan would have cut the top tax rate from 7.65% to 6.5% — a 15% reduction for high-earning joint filers who make $405,550 or more annually. It would have reduced the second-highest rate from 5.3% to 4.4%, a 17% decrease.
Evers vetoed those cuts from the budget but left in place reductions to the state’s bottom two brackets.
School funding
Habush Sinykin told Wisconsin Watch the state needs to be spending more on its public K-12 schools, noting that more and more districts around the state are turning to referendums to “maintain the quality and caliber of education that we have always been able to achieve in Wisconsin.”
U.S. Census Bureau data show that in 2022, Wisconsin’s per pupil spending was 7.21% lower than the national average. Wisconsin’s spending on schools ranked 25th among the 50 states in 2022, according to the data. That’s a drop from 11th in 2002 and 21st in 2012.
The state should kick in more for K-12 schools, Habush Sinykin said, to help address teacher shortages, reduce class sizes and improve education.
During the most recent legislative session, Stroebel sponsored a bill that increased funding for public K-12 schools by $1 billion. The funding was tied to $280 million in new funding for private voucher schools. Evers signed it.
The legislation helped close “the funding gap for private schools participating in the parental choice programs and gives parents more opportunities to decide which school best fits their child’s needs,” Stroebel said in a statement after the bill passed. “Wisconsin is making great strides towards establishing funding parity for all K-12 students with the passage of this piece of legislation.”
Editor’s note: This story was corrected to reflect that this district is one of two flip opportunities for Democrats in a Senate district with a Republican incumbent.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
With a mostly quiet summer break in the books, the Wisconsin Supreme Court returns Tuesday to hear oral arguments in a pair of cases that once again ask the justices to answer a slate of politically charged questions.
The first case was originally filed by conservative activists seeking to gain access to sensitive health information about people judged mentally incapable of voting. The second involves the use of a mobile voting van by the city of Racine’s clerk during the August 2022 partisan primary.
Here’s why it’s worth paying attention to both cases.
Wisconsin Voter Alliance v. Kristina Secord
The intrigue of this case extends beyond just its practical implications — it also highlights the growing partisanship of Wisconsin’s judiciary after a conservative branch of the Wisconsin Court of Appeals took the unusual step of contradicting a binding ruling issued by another, liberal division of the same court.
The case before the court on Tuesday stems from a lawsuit filed by Wisconsin Voter Alliance, a conservative group seeking information about Wisconsin residents who have been deemed by a court to be incapable of voting. The group filed lawsuits seeking the information in 13 counties.
A judge in Walworth County dismissed WVA’s request to require county officials to provide the group with certain documents — known as “notice of voting eligibility” forms — related to adjudicated incompetent voters. The group then appealed the case to the 2nd District Court of Appeals, based in conservative Waukesha County.
In a 2-1 decision late last year, the 2nd District reversed the Walworth County ruling, concluding that WVA had a “clear legal right” to the records because “access to public records is a vital and integral factor of Wisconsin’s avowed presumption towards open government.” The majority also found that WVA demonstrated a “need for the information.”
“Here, WVA asserts it has an interest in seeing that the voter rolls in Wisconsin are accurate so that our elections comport with constitutional guarantees (of fair elections),” wrote Judge Maria Lazar in an opinion joined by Judge Shelley Grogan, both of whom are conservative jurists. “If maintaining accurate voter lists — as statutorily required by the Legislature — is not a sufficient need, we are hard-pressed to articulate another.”
That ruling, though, contradicted a decision from the Madison-based 4th District Court of Appeals, which earlier last year upheld a Juneau County judge’s ruling in a nearly identical case filed by the same conservative group. The 4th District concluded that WVA does not have a “clear legal right” to obtain the information because the forms are “pertinent to the finding of incompetency” and, therefore, closed records under state law. That 4th District ruling was published by an obscure judicial committee six weeks after it was issued — and before the judges in District 2 issued their opinion — making it legal precedent in Wisconsin.
Lazar and Grogan, of District 2, insisted in a footnote in their ruling that “at no point is the unified voice of this court fractured by this opinion.” Judge Lisa Neubauer, a liberal, wrote in a dissent that her conservative colleagues disregarded “this court’s obligation to adhere to prior precedent.”
Walworth County officials appealed the District 2 ruling, teeing up the state Supreme Court to settle the matter. In a brief filed with the court, attorneys for Walworth County asked the court to consider two questions: First, whether the judges in District 2 were bound by the precedent established by District 4; second, whether the notices of voting eligibility are subject to public disclosure.
As Wisconsin Watch reported in February, legal experts believe this case highlights the increasing partisanship in the state’s judiciary. We’ll be watching during oral arguments to see if the justices’ questioning falls along partisan lines, or if they can reach some sort of consensus, like they did in a recent case involving the Joint Finance Committee.
Kenneth Brown v. Wisconsin Elections Commission
The second case focuses on the city of Racine’s use of a mobile voting van during the August 2022 partisan primary.
Kenneth Brown, a registered voter from Racine represented by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission challenging the city’s use of the van, arguing it violated state law. After WEC dismissed the case, WILL filed a lawsuit challenging the commission’s ruling in Racine County Circuit Court.
The circuit court found that the city’s use of the voting van violated state law because no statute authorized its use. The judge also found that the mobile voting site violated state law because the locations where the van was parked “clearly favored members of the Democratic Party or those with known Democratic Party leanings.” The statute in question declares that early voting sites besides the clerk’s office cannot afford “an advantage to any political party.”
The Racine County ruling was appealed, and the Wisconsin Supreme Court agreed to bypass the Court of Appeals and take the case directly. The high court will hear arguments Tuesday morning about whether the use of a mobile voting van is permitted under state law. The court is also being asked to determine whether or not the Racine County judge’s interpretation of the statute’s “partisan advantage” language was correct.
The justices will also consider whether Brown had standing to bring the lawsuit in the first place — specifically whether he was “aggrieved” under Wisconsin law. If the court rules he did not, that could have major implications for who is allowed to file lawsuits challenging election laws — potentially making it harder for just any concerned voter to bring a legal challenge.
It’s that last point that we’re most interested in, given that judges have become increasingly involved in Wisconsin elections in recent years. Some of the court’s conservative members were part of an opinion when they were in the majority that backed a broad definition of standing. We’re watching to see if this case will be decided along ideological lines.
Forward is a look ahead at the week in Wisconsin government and politics from the Wisconsin Watch statehouse team.
Buoyed by new districts and a wave of enthusiasm generated by Vice President Kamala Harris’ rise over the past four weeks, Wisconsin Democrats at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week were confident they could channel national energy into winning a slew of state legislative races.
For the first time in a decade, Democrats have a shot at winning an Assembly majority in November. Republicans currently hold a 64-34 advantage (the sole vacancy is a safe Democratic seat). They also have a chance to chip away at a 22-seat GOP supermajority in the Senate.
Party leaders are projecting confidence less than three months out from Election Day. Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer, D-Racine, told reporters in Chicago that her party would win a 52-seat Assembly majority in the fall. Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein, D-Middleton, said Democrats would pick up four Senate seats, bringing their caucus to 15 members — just two shy of a majority.
“I absolutely believe that we can win a small majority,” Gov. Tony Evers, who has grappled with the GOP-controlled Legislature for six years, told Wisconsin Watch on the convention floor.
Flipping 17 Assembly seats is a tall order (15 would give Democrats a majority). While there are a few easy pickups, like a seat in the Racine area where a Democrat is the only candidate, there are only 15 Assembly seats where both parties appear to be competitive, according to an analysis of previous voting patterns. There are five such Senate seats, including one Democratic incumbent.
The Democratic plan to accomplish both goals is rooted in door knocking, Neubauer and Hesselbein told Wisconsin Watch in separate interviews. That effort has been supercharged since Harris took over the top of the ticket from President Joe Biden, who dropped his reelection bid last month after weeks of pressure from fellow Democrats. Neubauer said before the switch it was a challenge to get volunteers to go out in the Racine area, but since then the local Democratic Party office has signed up 100 shifts each weekend.
“People are showing up because they are so excited about the momentum, the hopefulness and the joy of this campaign, the opportunity, and that, of course, is hugely helpful to our folks as well,” Neubauer said.
Democrats’ fundraising advantage in recent years will also help, Neubauer, Hesselbein and Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Ben Wikler told Wisconsin Watch.
In previous cycles, “Republicans were able to significantly outspend us, and they were able to define our candidates before we could do that about our own folks,” Neubauer said. “The dynamics have shifted now, and we do have incredible partners in the state party, in the governor and many others who are making sure that we are going to have the resources to communicate about our candidates.”
The money is likely to continue to flow. Wikler told reporters in Chicago that he was proud of the state party’s multimillion-dollar investments in legislative races so far and that his goal “is to raise and invest millions more.” He declined to share specific figures about the state party’s fundraising and spending goals on legislative races this cycle.
“We will not be outcommunicated by the Republicans,” Wikler added. “We will not be outspent by the other side. We’re going to fight with everything we’ve got, and we’re going to organize them everywhere in the state of Wisconsin.”
Democrats’ efforts are also being aided by outside groups, such as the national Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which committed $10 million to supporting legislative candidates across the country. A modest amount of that money has so far been directed toward Wisconsin, but DLCC President Heather Williams told Wisconsin Watch the group is “continuingly making investments in our battleground states,” including Wisconsin, and is “making a large national rally cry” for additional support from donors.
Democratic candidates are feeling the momentum. “I haven’t seen this energy since I’ve gotten into running for office,” Rep. Jodi Emerson, D-Eau Claire, told Wisconsin Watch. “It’s truly amazing. I’m excited about it. It’s great to be on the ticket.”
Emerson said she and her colleagues running in close races plan to focus their campaigns on the issues they hear the most about from voters, which vary depending on where you are in the state, but often include things like abortion rights and health care access.
Republican Party of Wisconsin chair Brian Schimming pushed back on the idea that the current enthusiasm can carry Democrats in November, saying “Democrats know how to burn money and Republicans know how to win votes.”
“If Wisconsin Democrats are counting on a hasty rebrand to distract voters from the impact of record inflation and skyrocketing rent, they are both delusional and hopelessly out of touch with the concerns of working families,” Schimming said in a statement to Wisconsin Watch.
“Voters have consistently rejected left-wing extremism and embraced common sense conservative leadership in the State Assembly and Senate,” he added. “We are confident that trend will continue this November.”
Forward is a look at the week in Wisconsin government and politics from the Wisconsin Watch statehouse team.
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