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JD Vance struggles to sell Van Orden and Trump to tariff-battered Wisconsin

Vice President JD Vance speaks in Plover, Wisconsin on Feb. 26, 2026 | Screenshot via The White House

Vice President JD Vance did not utter the word “tariffs” a single time during his upbeat speech at a Plover, Wisconsin, machining plant Thursday. The visit, aimed at shoring up vulnerable Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden ahead of the 2026 midterms, was part of a post-State of the Union victory lap Vance is taking to market the so-called Golden Age of prosperity President Donald Trump claims he and the Republicans have delivered to rural and blue-collar voters.

It’s a tough sell. 

The latest Marquette University Law School poll, released the day before Vance parachuted into Wisconsin, shows Trump hitting a second-term low with Wisconsin voters, with 44% saying they approve of the job he’s doing and 54% saying they don’t approve. Across partisan affiliations, the rising cost of living is voters’ No. 1 concern, while 55% of respondents told pollsters tariffs are hurting Wisconsin farmers. Manufacturers are not happy, either.

“I can tell you from my experience running our company, from everyone I talk to in my networks — 95% of people in manufacturing — 99% do not support the tariffs,” said Sachin Shivaram, CEO of Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry, a Wisconsin-based company with locations across the Midwest.

Shivaram spoke on a press call with Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin ahead of Vance’s speech Thursday. Many business owners, he said, are afraid to publicly share their criticisms of the Trump administration. When he meets other leaders of manufacturing companies in boardrooms, he said, “It’s like, look, we can’t say anything about how dumb the tariff policy is, because we’re going to be the next one whacked on X.” But, he added, “it’s costing all of them, all of us, a lot of money.”

Tariffs have caused “chaos and uncertainty” for businesses, agreed Kyle LaFond, owner and founder of American Provenance and Natural Contract Manufacturing, a small business that makes personal care products. “Last year, when these tariffs were first instituted, I absorbed those costs as much as possible. I did that for about eight months,” LaFond said. “But that is not a sustainable business practice.” Ultimately, he said, businesses have to pass along the cost to their customers:  “Tariffs are just attacks on the American consumer.” 

Trump 's failure to deliver the economic miracle he advertised, along with devastating cuts to health care and the safety net, pose a looming problem for Republicans ahead of the midterms. The solution they’ve hit on is a combination of bluster, bullying and straight up lies.

There’s a reason slim majorities of Wisconsin voters chose Trump in 2016 and 2024. Vance put his finger on it in his speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. “When I was in the fourth grade, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico.”

Wisconsin manufacturing workers and farmers suffered tremendously from global trade deals. Democrats and Republicans alike brushed aside their pain and tried to tell them that the booming stock market and increasing corporate profits were worth the crashing prices and job losses. Never mind the communities ruined and all the families that fell out of the middle class.

Trump and Vance spoke to those voters. In his convention speech, Vance cleverly tied global trade deals supported by both political parties to immigration.“Now, thanks to these policies that Biden and other out-of-touch politicians in Washington gave us,” he said, “our country was flooded with cheap Chinese goods, with cheap foreign labor.”

But the immigrants who make up 70% of the labor force on Wisconsin dairy farms did not drive the collapse of Wisconsin’s small-farm economy. They, too, were displaced by globalization that drove down prices and accelerated a “get big or get out” economy that has taken a heavy toll on working people on both sides of the border. The arrival of immigrants willing to work long hours for low pay on farms that were forced to expand rapidly to stay afloat was a blessing to farmers who simply couldn’t find American workers to fill those jobs.

Today’s increasingly virulent, demagogic attacks on those hardworking immigrants should make everyone queasy. 

Alex Jacquez, a former White House economic official in the Biden administration who also worked for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, sees Vance’s rise as a big win for the populist right. Vance’s criticism of global trade deals that hollowed out American manufacturing, and his appeal to the “forgotten” American workers who have never recovered from outsourcing, struck a nerve with voters across the industrial Midwest. 

“But I think the question is whether the actual policies put forward are having the outcomes that they intend here,” Jacquez said in a phone interview Thursday.

Trump ‘s failure to deliver the economic miracle he advertised, along with devastating cuts to health care and the safety net, pose a looming problem for Republicans ahead of the midterms. The solution they’ve hit on is a combination of bluster, bullying and straight up lies. 

In his Plover speech, Vance doubled down on Trump’s scapegoating of immigrants and Democrats in the State of the Union. Following up on Trump’s racist characterization of the entire Somali immigrant community in Minnesota as “pirates” responsible for plundering public aid, Vance  blamed “‘illegal aliens” for fraud in public benefits programs and voting. He brought up Trump’s lurid descriptions of crimes committed by immigrants and, like Trump, excoriated Democrats for not standing up and cheering as the president subjected grieving parents to a gory rehash of violent attacks on their children.

The reason Democrats didn’t stand up during Trump’s speech, Vance suggested, is that “they answer to people who have corrupted this country. They answer to people who opened the border. They answer to people who got rich off of illegal immigrant labor. … We want American workers to get rich for working hard, not illegal aliens.”

Today’s increasingly virulent, demagogic attacks on those hardworking immigrants should make everyone queasy.

Sucker-punching Democrats on immigration was a goal of the State of the Union speech. And Republicans will keep on punching. Their sanctimonious horror at the very idea of their colleagues not standing up and cheering for the victims of violent criminals is a way of changing the subject away from the spectacle of masked federal immigration agents spreading murderous mayhem in Midwestern neighborhoods, and, of course, the fact that none of this is making American workers better off. 

As Jacquez pointed out, “Certainly Trump has cracked down on immigration, but that doesn’t seem to be redounding to the benefit of native-born workers. We’ve seen the unemployment rate creep up even while fewer immigrants are working these days on the manufacturing side.”

“We lost manufacturing jobs in every single month of 2025,” he added. “There has been no resurgence whatsoever in actual people getting jobs in manufacturing and, in fact, in many sectors, some of the trade policies that Trump has advanced have been actively harmful.”

At the end of his speech, Vance took questions from local media that reflected the immediate concerns of voters in western Wisconsin. 

What can his administration do to stop the closure of rural hospitals that are creating a health care desert in the district he was visiting?

Vance blamed the problem on the Biden administration, although rural hospital closures did not begin under Biden and are severely exacerbated by Medicaid cuts under Trump. Vance also claimed the Trump administration is now turning things around with the rural hospital fund included in the “Big Beautiful Bill Act” — $200 million of which was awarded to Wisconsin in December.

Derrick Van Orden also pumped the rural hospital fund in remarks ahead of Vance’s speech, saying it’s “just a lie” that Democrats care about rural health care, because they didn’t vote for the massive tax- and spending-cut bill that contained the rural health care fund. 

KFF projects the fund will only make up for about one-third of the Republicans’ cuts to Medicaid in rural areas. And that offset is temporary. The rural health fund expires in five years. In Wisconsin, meanwhile, 250,000 people are losing their health care coverage because of the Medicaid cuts and changes to the Affordable Care Act passed by Republicans. Those losses are concentrated in rural areas, and have a cascading effect on rural hospitals and entire rural economies.

Van Orden, who has spent his whole political career calling for the elimination of the Affordable Care Act, reversed course and voted with Democrats to extend ACA subsidies last month — right after voting to block the same measure when Democrats brought it up the day before. 

In answer to a question on the health care worker shortage and the aging population of rural Wisconsin, Vance took a swipe at college students who major in women’s studies. The Trump administration — which has focused on repealing a pandemic-era pause on student loan repayment, resumed garnishing the wages of student debtors and imposed less affordable repayment plans — wants to make it easier for people to study to become doctors and nurses without getting “layered up with debt,” Vance declared.

Will the Trump administration withhold Medicaid money from Wisconsin as it recently announced it will do to Minnesota, as punishment for the state’s refusal to hand over the sensitive, personal information of food assistance recipients and of voters?

In answer to that question, Vance said it was outrageous that Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and the Wisconsin Elections Commission have refused to hand over the data Trump is demanding, and left the open the option of withholding federal Medicaid money, saying Democrats “like to cheat” in “voter rolls and welfare rolls.” 

Asked about farmers facing wildly fluctuating commodity prices, Vance celebrated the administration’s success in getting China to open up its market to U.S. soybeans. That’s a head-scratcher, since China was purchasing about half of all U.S. soybeans a year ago, before it stopped amid a trade war caused by Trump’s tariffs. That was a big problem for Wisconsin farmers who were suddenly stuck sitting on a bumper soybean crop after losing their biggest buyer. Even with the new deal, those farmers will not be made whole, Darin Von Ruden, president of the Wisconsin Farmers Union, told Wisconsin Public Radio, and China has now found new markets, setting up a long-term business loss.

Among Vance’s many preposterous claims, perhaps the most incredible was the picture he tried to paint of a caring, empathetic Trump, who wakes up every morning asking what he can do to solve the problems of the American people. Do even Trump’s supporters buy the idea that the man who made $4 billion off the presidency after just one year in office is driven by selfless concern for the needs of others? 

On one occasion, Vance said, during a discussion of the soaring stock market, Trump asked earnestly what could be done for people who don’t own any stocks. The answer, he said, was Trump’s brilliant plan to give low-income workers a $1,000 federal match for retirement. That idea was actually signed into law by Biden four years ago.

Asked for his further ideas for investing in rural communities, Vance said his administration will mostly “just listen” to voters. He held up Van Orden as the administration’s point man for keeping in touch with constituents in rural Wisconsin. Unfortunately, Van Orden is so notorious for avoiding in-person contact with voters, Democrats have made a regular practice of visiting his district to hold town halls from which he is reliably, notably absent. 

The claim that either he or the Trump administration is concerned about solving the problems of Wisconsin voters is the biggest lie of all. 

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Drama, anguish and incremental progress in the Wisconsin State Capitol 

Republican lawmakers watch Gov. Tony Evers’ final State of the State address, shaking their heads, making side comments and pulling their phones out during portions of the speech. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

Before Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) announced his retirement Thursday, it was obvious something had changed. The longest serving speaker in Wisconsin history, known for keeping Assembly Republicans on a tight leash, slipped out of a caucus meeting late Wednesday night. Capitol reporter Baylor Spears tracked him down at a fundraiser at the Madison Club, where, she reported, Vos told her his caucus was meeting without him. Later that evening, Assembly Republicans announced that Vos had suddenly dropped his yearslong opposition to letting Wisconsin expand postpartum Medicaid coverage for new mothers for one year. Vos’ last-minute change of heart allowed eight Republicans facing competitive reelection races to hold a late-night press conference proclaiming the news that they planned to pass postpartum coverage, along with another measure extending life-saving breast-cancer screenings that Vos was suddenly permitting to come up for a vote. Vos himself didn’t bother to attend. 

With both Vos and Gov. Tony Evers retiring, the two most powerful politicians in the state — and the often dysfunctional dynamic between them — are going away. It’s the end of an era characterized by toxic partisanship, although probably not the last we’ll see of divided government in our 50/50 state. 

Still, as Vos relaxes his grip, Wisconsin Republicans are starting to wrap their heads around the new reality that they no longer hold complete control over what was once, effectively, a one-party state. 

New, fairer voting maps have already eroded gerrymandered GOP supermajorities in the Legislature that previously endured even when Democrats won every statewide race. In the upcoming November elections, the new maps will, for the first time, take full effect.

The creation of more competitive districts has not immediately ushered in an atmosphere of productive bipartisanship in the Capitol. But it did cause enough of a thaw that Wisconsin could finally join the other 48 states that have already expanded postpartum Medicaid. Republicans running in newly competitive districts can campaign on this bit of belated progress. Two cheers for Wisconsin! We’re 49th!

At the Vos-less press conference Wednesday night, Republicans gave emotional testimony about “the women who need this protection.” They thanked the speaker for finally listening to their pleas. Then, instead of reaching across the aisle, they delivered a scorching rebuke to Democrats who had been pushing for months for a vote on both of the women’s health bills they were celebrating. When the bills were not scheduled, Democrats vowed to bring them up as amendments to other bills, holding up action on the floor and threatening to put their GOP colleagues in the embarrassing position of having to vote down their efforts.

“I’m very angry at what happened today — very angry,” Rep. Patrick Snyder (R-Weston) said. “I talked to my Democratic colleagues and told them that I was close, that it was going to get done, but then they throw this crap at us today. It almost blew it up.”

By speaking up, Democrats nearly ruined Republicans’ efforts to gain support within their own caucus, according to Snyder. That analysis caused Democratic Minority Leader Greta Neubauer to roll her eyes. “It seems that the bills are going to the floor after years of Rep. Pat Snyder telling us that these bills were going to be passed and them not being passed, so it does seem like our actions made a difference today,” Neubauer said. 

Partisan habits die hard. For much of the most recent legislative session, Republicans formed a Sorehead Caucus whose sole aims were rehashing grievances about their loss of power and trying in vain to recreate the dominance they enjoyed when they controlled every branch of government. 

Back in 2018, when Evers won the first time, breaking the GOP stranglehold by beating former Republican Gov. Scott Walker, Republicans held a lame duck session to claw back the incoming governor’s powers. Eight years later, as Evers is about to leave office at the end of his second term, they’re still at it. Motivated by spite over Evers’ line-item veto extending their modest, two-year increase in school revenue limits for the next 400 years, they have insisted on starving school districts of state funds, punishing not only Wisconsin schoolchildren but also the property taxpayers who, in the absence of state funding, are forced to pick up the tab. 

In a similarly spiteful vein, Republicans just killed off the popular, bipartisan Knowles Nelson stewardship program, setting up the 36-year-old land conservation effort to die this summer. Over and over in hearings on whether to renew the program or drastically cut it back, Republicans cited a state Supreme Court decision that held they cannot anonymously veto individual conservation projects. GOP legislators said the decision — written by the most conservative justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court — left them no option but to gut the program just to show who’s boss. 

As Henry Redman reports, a handful of conservation-minded Republicans could have joined forces with Democrats to save the program, but Republican bill authors insisted on negotiating only within their own caucus, ignoring Democratic efforts to make a deal and instead trying to please the program’s far-right enemies by making deeper and deeper cuts before finally giving up and letting the program lapse.

This style of governing — a hangover from the Walker era — might satisfy certain politicians’ hunger for power, but it’s ill-suited to getting anything productive done for the people who live in the state.

Let’s hope Vos’ departure marks the end of the petty partisanship that has blocked progress in Wisconsin for far too long.

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Wisconsin take note: Here’s how Minneapolis parents prepared for ICE

Faith leaders and community members gather Thursday, Jan. 8, 2026 at the site where an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good, 37, in south Minneapolis the previous day. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)

Before Operation Metro Surge sent thousands of armed federal agents into Minneapolis, terrorizing families and spreading chaos and violence in formerly peaceful residential neighborhoods, local parent organizations were already setting up networks to provide mutual aid and safely transport children of immigrants to and from school.

“My school group of friends formed our first network of communication in October, after we saw what had happened in Chicago,” the mother of an elementary school student in South Minneapolis named Elizabeth told me in a phone interview Wednesday. She asked that her last name not be published, because of the danger of reprisals

The encrypted neighborhood chat started chiming for the first time on Tuesday, Dec. 9, she recalls, when “there were two people abducted early in the morning within blocks of my kid’s school.” When her child asked what was going on, “I said, you know, people are concerned about the safety of coming to school today,” Elizabeth recalls. “And like a good Minnesotan, my child realized that it was foggy outside and said, ‘Well, fog creates ice, and so the roads are probably slippery …’ And I said, yeah, they’re worried about ice on the roads. And I really had hope in that moment of naivety that that would be the last time we’d have to have that conversation. But it wasn’t.”

Since December, when Operation Metro Surge began, Elizabeth said her child’s class has shrunk from 25 students to just five. The school district has offered a remote learning option to immigrant families who are afraid to let their children leave the house. Meanwhile, the neighborhood chat group, which began with five families whose children played soccer together, has connected with hundreds of volunteers, many of whom don’t have kids in the school.

Because most of the families at the school are people of color, “we really had to start relying on our neighbors around us to help us, because we don’t have enough families that are not in danger,” Elizabeth said. Residents of nearby neighborhoods joined to form a group of 200 people who patrol the playground in the morning and afternoon and during recess, guard the nearby bus stops, and drive children from home to school and back again. 

In addition, volunteers pick up laundry every other week from families that are shut inside, and bring groceries, shopping for food at local Hispanic markets, which have taken a heavy hit after losing employees and customers during the immigration enforcement surge. 

There are many similar mutual aid groups throughout the area, each doing things in different ways. “There are a lot of micro projects happening everywhere,” Elizabeth said. And things are constantly changing. “It’s a living process,” she said. “No two days are the same.” 

While she tries to avoid contact with federal agents, ICE is everywhere in their neighborhood, Elizabeth said. She no longer allows her child to walk to the corner store alone. 

“ICE is constantly driving through our neighborhoods. They’re not obeying traffic signals. They’re not obeying traffic laws. They’re running through stop signs. They’re going the wrong way on one-ways,” Elizabeth said. While she isn’t afraid that her child, who is white, will be snatched and sent to immigration detention, she worries about the possibility of her child stumbling upon a violent action, “or they could get tear-gassed, very easily.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s rationale for the federal immigration enforcement surge is to enhance public safety. But it’s very clear from talking to people in Minneapolis that armed agents speeding through neighborhoods, smashing car windows and dragging people out of their homes has shattered the sense of safety residents used to have. 

Elizabeth does not claim that her neighborhood group can overcome that, or effectively deter ICE. Instead, she describes its purpose as offering comfort to immigrant parents. And for the children, she says, “I really make sure that I’m there every day so they can see the same faces, so there’s some stability in their day.”

“We’ve got families that have been in hiding for nine weeks now,” she adds. “… I want them to know that we were here for them.”

As for her own child, “I have to be really honest,” she said. She’s had to give up her hope, before the surge, not to have to talk about the sickening danger all around them. “They live in a community, and they need to be part of their community,” she said. “Right now, their community is under attack, and so I think it is my responsibility as a parent to make sure that they see that, and that they understand that this is not how you treat your neighbors. That, like I said, our community needs love, help and support right now. And so we have lots of conversations about it.”

Her child misses the friends who aren’t coming to school, and makes an effort to stay in touch and fill them in on what is happening. And there are the daily car rides with the handful of kids Elizabeth drives to school and home again. 

Those car rides are important, she said. She has a bag of snacks and a playlist the kids get to curate. “We’ve listened to a lot of K-pop,” she said. “We try to have as much joy and fun as we can for them, and to create those safe spaces and make sure that there’s laughter.”

As Wisconsinites worry about whether we will be next, I asked Elizabeth about the reluctance of some public officials to make concrete community defense plans, for fear it might put a target on our so-called sanctuary communities, and draw the very ICE surge they dread. 

“It comes back to being a good neighbor,” she said. “I’m not sure that any organizing that we’ve done or did or will do is necessarily a flag calling attention to us. It’s just we’ve got neighbors that are hungry. How are we going to feed our neighbors? We have neighbors that can’t pay their bills. How are we going to help? … To some degree it’s somewhat selfish, right? Like, I need, in order for my child to succeed in school, there needs to be continuity … I care about my community.”

“I would recommend people not be scared and not think of it as organizing against the government, but organizing for the people in your neighborhood,” she added. “And if it’s not your neighborhood, if it’s a neighborhood next to you, know where those neighborhoods are that might be impacted, and find ways that you can support that neighborhood.”

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What Trump’s threat to nationalize elections means for Wisconsin

'Voters Decide' sign in Capitol

President Trump's statements that Republicans should take over and run elections in many states, the domestic deployment of armed agents who are shooting people in nearby cities, along with Wisconsin's long struggle over fair voting rules, makes for a tense election season. But voters still have the power to defend their rights. | Photo of an anti-gerrymandering sign in the Wisconsin State Capitol by the Wisconsin Examiner

Wisconsin was almost certainly on President Donald Trump’s mind when he said this week, “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

Our swing state was Ground Zero for the fake electors plot to overturn the results of the 2020 election after Trump narrowly lost here. Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson’s office was involved in the effort to pass off fraudulent Electoral College ballots cast by state Republicans for Trump. Our state Legislature hosted countless hearings spotlighting election deniers and wasted $2.5 million in taxpayer dollars on a fruitless “investigation” of the 2020 presidential results, led by disgraced former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who threatened to arrest the mayors of Madison and Green Bay.

So how worried should we be about Trump’s election takeover threats?

“I wouldn’t be overly concerned that the president could get anything done that’s directly contrary to the Constitution,” says John Vaudreuil, a former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin and a member of the nonpartisan group Keep Our Republic, which works to promote trust in elections.

Not only does Article I of the U.S. Constitution expressly delegate elections administration to the states, Wisconsin has one of the most decentralized elections systems in the country, with about 1,800 local clerks running elections in counties, municipalities and townships throughout the state. “And they are Republicans, they are Democrats, they are independent,” Vaudreuil says. “Most fundamentally, they’re our neighbors, they’re our friends.” 

Trump’s threats of a federal takeover would be both legally and practically hard to pull off in Wisconsin.

But there is still reason to worry. Sowing distrust in elections takes a toll on clerks and poll workers, who have become less willing to put up with the threats and hostility generated by Trump’s attacks. Vaudreuil urges people to support their local elections officials and poll workers and spread the word that the work they do is important and that elections are secure.

Then there’s the danger that Trump could use his own false claims about election fraud to send federal immigration agents to the polls on the pretext that it’s necessary to address the nonexistent problem of noncitizen voting.

Doug Poland, director of litigation at the voting rights focused firm Law Forward, has been involved in election-related litigation in Wisconsin for years, including a lawsuit to block the Trump administration from forcing the state to turn over sensitive voter information. 

Poland sees Trump’s threats to “nationalize” elections as part of a pivot from Republican efforts to make in-person voting harder — on the dubious theory that there’s a huge problem with voter impersonation at the polls — to a new focus on stopping absentee voting after many people began using mail-in ballots during the pandemic. But really, it’s all about trying to make sure fewer people vote.

Under former Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Wisconsin passed a strict voter ID law, which one Republican former staffer testified made Republican legislators “giddy” as they discussed how it would make it more difficult for students and people of color to vote. 

Like Vaudreuil, Poland sees the current threat from the Trump administration not as an actual takeover of election administration by the federal government, but as an escalation of intimidation tactics.

“Noncitizens generally don’t vote. So it’s a lie,” Poland says. “But it’s, of course, the lie that they’re going to use as a premise to send, whether it’s ICE or whomever it may be, to polling places, probably in locations with Black and brown populations, and that is purely for the purpose of intimidation. And at the same time, they’re pushing back very hard on absentee voting by mail.”

If the Trump administration is preparing to send armed federal agents to the polls to intimidate voters, absentee voting will be more important than ever in the upcoming elections.

Yet, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson recently told constituents that while he doesn’t think the federal government should take over elections administration, “I think we need to tighten up the requirements for absentee voting. I’m opposed to mail in register or mail in balloting.”

And as Erik Gunn reports, Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil’s Make Elections Great Again Act would restrict absentee voting, along with adding new layers of citizen verification steps while threatening to defund elections administrators who fail to comply with the bill’s onerous requirements.

“They’re going to do everything they can to try to make it harder to vote absentee by mail, to make it harder to vote absentee in person,” Poland says, adding, “They’re going to try to do it so they can put ICE agents around polling places and just try to intimidate people, to keep them away.”

So what can be done?

Voter intimidation is a crime, and specific instances can be addressed through lawsuits, Poland says. Still, he acknowledges (and Law Forward has argued in court) that once someone is deprived of the right to cast a ballot, there’s no remedy that can adequately compensate for that loss. That’s why it was so appalling when the city of Madison asserted that absentee voting is a “privilege” in response to a lawsuit brought by Poland’s organization over 200 lost ballots in the 2024 election.

Of course, in addition to worries about possible violations of individuals’ right to vote, there’s the fear that Trump could manage to subvert elections through heavy-handed tactics like the recent FBI raid to seize 2020 ballots from Fulton County. Both Vaudreuil and Poland think judges would step in to prevent such a seizure in the middle of an election, before the ballots were counted.

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, absentee voting remains legal and many municipalities are using secure ballot drop boxes. We need to keep on making use of our right (not our privilege) to vote, using all the tools we have in place.

As for the intimidating effect of armed ICE agents at polling places, local officials and perhaps local law enforcement could have a role in protecting the polls and reassuring voters it’s safe to cast their ballots. Neighbors who have been organizing to warn people of ICE raids, bring food to immigrants who are afraid to leave their homes, and form a protective shield around schools could become self-appointed polling place protectors.

If we are going to defend the core tenets of our democracy against an administration that has demonstrated over and over again its contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, it’s going to take massive public resistance and a flat refusal to give up our rights.

“What is it that will make them stand down from what they’re doing to break the law?” asks Poland. “I think the people of Minnesota have answered that for us better than anybody else can, which is that you have to stand up, you have to exercise your rights, First Amendment rights, the right to vote.”

Exercising our rights is the only way to make sure they are not taken away. Courage and collective action are the best protection we’ve got.

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