Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg) announced Thursday that he will not seek another term in the state Senate this year — marking the departure of yet another top leader in Wisconsin state politics. 

LeMahieu, 53, was first elected to the state Senate in 2015. He has served as the Senate majority leader since 2020, when he was chosen by his caucus to succeed former Senate Majority Leader and now-U.S. Rep. Scott Fitzgerald. 

LeMahieu said in a statement that he made the “difficult” decision after “careful reflection and prayer.” He said that serving in the body was “the privilege of a lifetime” and said he was proud of the work that he’s done, including passing the REINS Act, a 2017 law that limited agencies’ rulemaking power, and income tax cuts.

“The time has come for a new chapter in my life,” LeMahieu said. “I am looking forward to spending more time with my wife in our new Madison-area home and, for the first time since 2006, rooting for bold conservative reform from the sidelines.”

During his first two terms as Senate leader, LeMahieu led an increasingly large Senate Republican caucus which at one time had 23 out of 33 members. Those margins allowed the Senate to reject Gov. Tony Evers’ nominees and also at times override vetoes, though those votes did not lead to any vetoes being blocked as Assembly Republicans never held a supermajority.

New legislative maps adopted in 2024 led to slimmer margins in the body, which currently has 18 Republicans and 15 Democrats. 

LeMahieu has not always been able to gather a majority of his caucus members to support legislation and has at times turned to Democrats to get bills across the finish line, especially after the Republican majority shrank.

During the Senate’s recently concluded final floor session, LeMahieu faced criticism from some of his caucus members for passing bills to legalize sports betting and help the University of Wisconsin pay student athletes for their name, image and likeness without majority support from  Republicans and with the help of Democrats. Sen. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater), who is also retiring this year, said that the passage of the “unpopular bills will help pave the way to minority status for Republicans come November.”

Prior to his election to the state Senate, LeMahieu served on the Sheboygan County Board for nine years. His time in the Legislature followed the path of his father, former Republican Rep. Daniel LeMahieu, who served in the state Assembly from 2003 until 2015.

LeMahieu joins three other Senate Republicans who recently announced their retirements including Sen. Van Wanggaard (R-Racine), Sen. Rob Hutton (R-Brookfield) and Nass.

LeMahieu’s decision means there will be completely new leadership in the state government when lawmakers return in January 2026 after the fall elections. Evers announced his retirement last year and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester), the state’s longest serving speaker, announced his retirement last month. Vos has said he thinks Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August (R-Walworth) would be a good person to succeed him. 

Evers said in a statement that he appreciated working with LeMahieu and his “quiet and polite but frank approach.” 

“While we haven’t always seen eye to eye on every issue all of the time, I’ve never doubted his commitment to doing what he believes is best for the folks and families in Sheboygan County and across our state,” he said. “For the past five years he’s served as majority leader, we’ve navigated difficult issues facing the state of Wisconsin, and we’ve gotten good work done together by putting politics aside and staying focused on doing the right thing.” 

Evers noted their work together on tax cuts for working families and retirees, investments in the state’s child care industry, investments in shared revenue and an investment in the Milwaukee Brewers’ stadium.

“We’re not done yet, and I look forward to getting more good bipartisan work accomplished before our time together in office comes to an end,” Evers said. 

While lawmakers have wrapped their regular session work, leaders are still discussing ways to use the state’s $4.6 billion budget surplus to provide tax relief to Wisconsinites and additional funding to the state’s public schools. 

Negotiations were stalled on that effort last month after LeMahieu said he was cut out of negotiations between Vos and Evers, then his caucus proposed providing tax rebates to Wisconsinites instead of property tax relief or school funding. Vos and LeMahieu then came up with a compromise, but Evers rejected that. 

Vos said in a statement that he has enjoyed working with LeMahieu and repeated his assessment that “being Senate Majority Leader is the hardest job in the Capitol.”

“Devin approached each challenge deliberately and with the goal to move our state forward. We accomplished a lot during our time leading our respective chambers that I am proud of and — even when it was difficult —he always wanted to do what was right and best for the people of Wisconsin,” Vos said.

Control of the Assembly and Senate will be at stake in the November election. Democrats would need to win two additional seats in the Senate and five additional seats in the Assembly to flip the chambers for the first time since 2009. 

Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein (D-Middleton) said in a statement that LeMahieu was “a dedicated public servant” who has provided “tireless service to his constituents.” She has expressed confidence that her party will be able to win a majority in the Senate, which would open a path for her to become the top Senate leader. 

“I have found him to be a man of his word and I wish him and his family the best as he begins this next chapter,” Hesselbein said.

Assembly Speaker Pro Tempore Kevin Petersen (R-Waupaca) and Rep. Rick Gundrum (R-Slinger) also announced their retirements on Thursday. Rep. Dave Murphy (R-Hortonville) is also retiring.

Brian Schimming, chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, called LeMahieu in a statement a “tireless advocate for our shared conservative values and a key force in maintaining Republican majorities.” He said that they “look forward to continuing the fight and keeping a majority in the Senate this November.”

Devin Remiker, the chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, said in a statement about LeMahieu’s retirement that other Republicans should “consider retiring alongside your colleagues before you are voted out in November.”

“All potential Republican candidates should take note: Both of your leaders have abandoned you. Your policies are causing working people to turn against you in droves as the Trump administration crashes and burns,” Remiker said.

Update: This story has been updated to include comment from Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Brian Schimming. 

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Public concern about rising costs is fueling hopes for a blue wave in the November midterm elections, as well as Democratic wins in Wisconsin that could deliver trifecta control of the Legislature, governor’s mansion and state Supreme Court.

But even if the would-be autocrat in the White House does not find a way to disrupt the midterms, the rise of affordability as the dominant public issue is a both blessing and a trap. The intense focus on micro (household) economics neglects a bigger battle Democrats must fight. 

It’s dangerous to make too narrow a response to President Donald Trump’s authoritarian threat. Democracy is menaced on two fronts: first the immediate attack on its institutional bedrocks — fair elections, equal justice, constitutional checks and balances — and second by the underlying cause of the civic emergency: a profound crisis in legitimacy arising from a chronic failure of government to deliver on the most pressing problems affecting peoples’ lives and futures. 

The long-term failures of the U.S. government to promote and protect a decent life for most people have  produced combustible political kindling, exploited by an authoritarian movement and its charismatic leader, to seize power  and ignite the most profound crisis in democracy since the darkest days of the Great Depression.

Thousands of our neighbors in Minnesota and Illinois, thrust into the first front of the struggle, are responding with courage and discipline. They are demonstrating the power of organized people and civil society groups with active members, aided by the elected officials they inspire to action, to hold the line for democracy. Grassroots defenders of democracy must continue to peacefully resist every authoritarian offensive, but if we fail to also address the underlying drivers of the crisis, victory will be fleeting.

Wisconsin’s crucial role

As a state that will determine the outcome of the 2028 presidential election, Wisconsin may be fated to play its most important role on the second front: the challenge of demonstrating that democracy is up to the task of meeting the challenges of 21st century life. To meet this charge we must come to terms with the depth of public discontent that has opened millions to the scapegoating rhetoric of authoritarian demagogues while demoralizing and disengaging still more who have come to believe, through embittering experience, they have no stake in democracy.

The affordability crisis is not transitory, it is a symptom of a long-term decoupling of the general economy, and democratic government itself, from the bread-and-butter worries of working people. The widespread realization that the economy is stacked against most people casts a pall over American politics. According to a recent New York Times/Siena poll, two-thirds of respondents believe the middle class is beyond the reach of most Americans. 

Until the late 1970s, majorities of voters could believe that a thriving economy would benefit them personally, and that most had a pathway to the middle class. There were glaring inequalities along racial, gender and geographic lines, yet for millions of working class people, including immigrants from around the globe and Black refugees from the Jim Crow South, macro and micro economics were conjoined.

After 50 years of economic rigging orchestrated by the ultra wealthy, the most rapacious corporations, and pliant politicians from both parties, this faith has been dashed. While lacking the suddenness of the 1929 crash, the cumulative effect is like a slow motion slide towards depression for the working and middle classes. In the richest country on Earth a stunning 60% of Americans worry about affording the basics of life, while in Wisconsin 35% of all households, and 60% of Black households, make less than a survival income.

This is no accident. As Harold Meyerson details in The American Prospect, through a half century of deliberate policy choices most of the benefits of growth have been funneled to the privileged few, resulting in a $79 trillion shift in assets to the top. If national income were distributed now as equally as in 1975, each wage earner would make an astounding $28,000 more per year on average. Combined with the deliberate encouragement of massive corporate monopolies with the power to jack up prices, this immiseration is pushing people to  a breaking point, making affording health care, housing, energy, food and education more and more challenging for the less than rich.

Despite its effectiveness in abetting the largest wealth transfer in history, government at all levels has been rendered stunningly inept when it comes to public works, social policy, and almost everything else that benefits the working and middle classes. 

A parallel crisis in the 1930s

In the New Deal economic order, there seemed to be nothing the government could not accomplish, from the work programs of the 1930s, to the economic mobilization against fascism, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and the moon mission. Now everything from high speed rail to rural broadband, affordable housing, health care, child care, public education and cheap, renewable energy is tied up in knots.

While much of the blame can be placed on  the deliberate sabotage of government by an unholy alliance of grasping billionaires, big corporations, and right wing ideologues, a growing chorus of social critics also point the finger at a major shift in liberalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Recent books by Paul Sabin, Marc Dunkelman, Richard Kahenberg, Yoni Appelbaum, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and to significant degrees Bill McKibben and Gary Gerstle, make parts of a compelling case that the reaction against abuses of administrative power provoked liberals to overcorrect by creating so many regulatory and legal hurdles that government struggles to get anything big done that benefits the working and middle classes.

Further tarnishing public trust, this impotence does not apply to oligarchic power. The only force with the political and economic resources to cut through all the landmines and bottlenecks to bold action are the giant corporate monopolies, as we are seeing with the reckless buildout of highly unpopular AI data centers without guardrails to protect the public interest in affordable energy, clean air, and the stability of the climate on which we all depend.

The most useful historical analogy to our perilous situation is what Franklin Roosevelt confronted after Herbert Hoover’s futility in responding to the calamity brought on by that era’s economic royalists. Jonathan Alter and Eric Rauchway show that top opinion leaders of the era such as Walter Lippmann and William Randolph Hearst believed democracy too paralyzed to succeed, and openly advocated for Roosevelt to suspend Congress and assume dictatorial powers. 

Roosevelt was reportedly quite taken with the movie Gabriel Over the White House, a Hearst-funded production about a president seizing dictatorial power and curing the Great Depression. Ultimately, Roosevelt refused to take this path, although he fretted that failure would make him the last president. Democracy’s last near death experience in the 1930s has passed from collective memory only because Roosevelt did not fail. 

Drawing on reforms developed over three decades of progressive and labor organizing, Roosevelt amassed sufficient power to take radical action within the constitutional order to restructure and democratize the economy. Despite atrocious racial discrimination baked in by segregationist Democrats, the reforms tangibly improved material circumstances enough to restore the public’s belief that democracy could deliver. Despite receiving only half a loaf, even Black voters defected from the GOP in droves.

A difference between 1933 and 2026 is that authoritarians had not yet seized power, and despite sharp policy disagreements, Hoover and Roosevelt were committed to democratic norms. Today’s political crisis, like the crisis of the 1930s, is driven by economic elites capturing public policy and destroying democracy’s capacity to deliver what people need to thrive.

Divided Democrats

Within the big tent of the current pro-democracy coalition there is a comparable division to that of Roosevelt’s time on the necessity of structural reform. The division is even more dangerous now, in the face of an actual authoritarian takeover. This fissure is exemplified by the vast gulf between two of the most successful “blue wave” candidates of 2025: New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani, and Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, who gave the Democratic response to Trump’s State of the Union. 

Spanberger’s affordability agenda focuses on the cost of health care, housing, and utilities. Although strongly messaged, substantively she offers a series of opaque technocratic fixes and small bore policies that will not shift pricing power away from monopolies, nor raise the incomes of workers. For example, she nibbles around the edges of health care, yet keeps the foxes in the henhouse, leaving hospital monopolies, big insurance and Big Pharma in control of setting grossly inflated prices.

This contrasts sharply with Mamdani, who offers remarkably clear and understandable solutions — a rent freeze, fast free buses, a $30 minimum wage, free universal child care, paid for with a wealth tax — which would make one of the world’s most expensive cities more affordable for working and middle class New Yorkers. While Mamdani’s agenda is challenging to achieve in a system stacked against bold action, in contrast to Spanberger’s suite of solution-ettes, its clarity means voters can fulfil their democratic role by holding either the mayor or those who block his agenda accountable.

This divide among Democrats does not necessarily map on a left to center axis but on whether the affordability crisis requires small adjustments to an otherwise healthy system or structural reform that democratizes power and tangibly improves material circumstances. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA), the co-chair of the centrist Blue Dog Democrats, declares: “You do not save democracy by running around, yelling about saving democracy. You do it by demonstrating that democracy and Democratic values deliver better quality of life for normal people.”

Springing the affordability trap

Donald Trump is feeling the brunt of public outrage for his false sales pitches on affordability. If he actually had a program to lower prices and raise wages he would have built greater support for his authoritarian project. We may not be so fortunate if a more effective autocrat is elected in 2028.

This is why affordability is a trap for Democrats: winning elections on empty promises will only deepen the crisis in democracy, setting the table for future authoritarians. Josh Bivens writes for In These Times that creating a more equal and affordable economy requires a “sharp change” in the “policy path” of the last half century.

The only solution to the ails of democracy is deeper and more robust democracy. As I wrote in the Wisconsin Examiner after Gov. Evers ignored public pressure to fight for a better state budget, the future of multiracial democracy does not depend on elected officials alone. It depends on more people organizing effectively to push them towards compelling and forceful action. Movements make leaders, not the other way around. 

We have already seen this happen on the first front of the fight to save democracy. Democratic leadership in Congress is fighting harder and using the power they have to more assertively check Trump’s lawless usurpations only because of immense pressure from organized people and everyday Americans. We must now apply this same pressure to demand that candidates and electeds fight to transform the rigged economy and ossified governing structures stacked against effective action. 

Because of Wisconsin’s enormous influence in presidential elections, we have a special obligation to light a fire under Democratic candidates for the Legislature and governor in a crowded primary field. We need more people to push the candidates, and more to join with organizing groups that are working to impel them to fight for bold and impactful reforms that a beleaguered and disillusioned people will feel in their daily lives. How Wisconsin Democrats run in 2026, and especially how they govern in 2027, will have a tremendous influence on how presidential contenders run in 2028, a year that could be democracy’s last best hope.

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