The state’s most devoted Democrats are scheduled to gather in Madison this weekend for the party’s annual convention where the seven-way race for the Democratic nomination for governor is likely to take center stage.
Democratic caucus and county party leaders told Wisconsin Watch they are hopeful the convention could be a clarifying moment in the primary campaign on who has enough support to make it to the August primary. None of the main contenders dropped out ahead of last week’s filing deadline, so seven names will appear on the Aug. 11 Democratic primary ballot.
When Democrats convene at the Monona Terrace Convention Center on Saturday, there will be less than 45 days until early voting starts in late July.
“If their message does not ring true to the delegates at the convention, they better listen to the applause because people will be honest with them,” said Susan Chandler, the 1st Congressional District chair and vice chair of the Walworth County Democrats. “Everybody who goes to the convention is a highly engaged Democrat, and for every one of those highly engaged, we all know 10 people who are not. We’re bringing a lot of background to that convention and critically listening to these candidates.”
After Democratic Gov. Tony Evers decided not to run for a third term, seven Democratic candidates submitted the signatures to make the ballot. They include former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, former Department of Administration Secretary Joel Brennan, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, Madison state Rep. Francesca Hong, former Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. Secretary Missy Hughes, Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez and Madison Sen. Kelda Roys.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin Republicans have coalesced around U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, who received the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s endorsement at their annual convention in May and was endorsed by President Donald Trump in January. Tiffany has just one primary opponent, Andy Manske, a 27-year-old medical service technician.
“We want to know who is best situated to make bold sweeping change here in Wisconsin to provide a better life for Wisconsinites, and who is best situated to beat Tom Tiffany in a head-to-head,” said Brett Timmerman, the chair of the Milwaukee County Democratic Party. “I think that people are going to the convention looking for somebody to stand out in a meaningful way to deliver that message of why they think they are the best person to carry the torch forward.”
The closest comparison to this year’s field is the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary when 10 candidates ran for the opportunity to unseat then-Republican Gov. Scott Walker. Two dropped out in June before the primary that year.
Evers, who had statewide election experience as the superintendent of public instruction, won the Democratic primary that year with 42% of the vote and later defeated Walker in the general election. Evers didn’t win a majority of primary voters, but his closest opponent only mustered 16.4% of the vote.
A large primary, like the one in 2018, forces candidates to explain why voters should support their campaign, said Martha Laning, who served as the chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin during the 2018 election cycle.
At the 2018 state Democratic convention, the candidates all had the opportunity to make a three-minute pitch to party die-hards on what they would do for Wisconsin, Laning said. A spokesperson for the state party said all seven of the Democrats who made the ballot will also have a chance to speak this weekend.
“I think it’s great to put all of the candidates up there and to just let people know what their options are,” Laning said. “Again, any of them will be better than Tom Tiffany, so the more people talking about how they would do things and how they would improve people’s lives in Wisconsin is a good thing for us.”
Negativity and consolidation
It’s been a quiet primary among the slew of Democratic candidates over the last six months, with few events that set the campaigns apart. Hong led the field with 14% in the most recent Marquette University Law School Poll in March. The poll also found that 65% of voters were undecided on who to vote for in the primary.
It’s worth watching if the convention is a place where candidates take negative swipes at each other with the August primary on the horizon, said Anthony Chergosky, an associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.
“This has been a remarkably chill campaign, and I’m wondering if we’re going to see things heat up a little bit,” Chergosky said.
Hints of discord are emerging in the primary. Hughes last month was the only candidate to publicly support the failed $1.8 billion bipartisan surplus deal negotiated between Evers and Republican legislative leaders. After the deal failed in the Senate, Hughes posted unnamed criticism of “certain self-serving Democratic candidates for governor who would rather boost their own personal political ambitions than serve our kids and taxpayers.”
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last week reported that Hong was sued in May by Capital One for nearly $30,000 in credit card debt, which her campaign said had already been paid. Hong in a video posted on social media said the story showed her “opponents are scrambling.”
“They are scared of what we’ve built, our platform that’s resonating with working class people all across the state who feel left behind, our organizing infrastructure that’s being built stronger every day,” Hong said. “They want to pull me off track and how dare they.”
The convention could also serve as a milestone for consolidation in the race in the coming weeks, Chergosky said. A fractured field means one of the candidates could win with just 30% of the vote, but the math changes if someone drops out, he noted.
For Gloria Hochstein, the chair of the party’s Rural Caucus, the circumstances of a large field of candidates make her wish ranked-choice voting was an option for this primary.
“The problem is that there are some really good people running, and the thoughtful voter is really going to have to decide where his or her vote should be,” Hochstein said.
But the convention could “turn the tide” for some candidates who might drop out if they see they don’t have the statewide reach among the party’s most faithful, she said.
“I think that’s the realization, some of the candidates, I hope they come to sooner rather than later,” Hochstein said.
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U.S. Reps. Tom Tiffany and Derrick Van Orden were hyped on Friday afternoon, yelling to the crowd at a Chippewa Falls “farm roundtable” about how great President Donald Trump is for American farmers and how thrilling it was to have him here in Wisconsin. Was that flop sweat on their glistening foreheads?
Trump’s approval rating hit a new low of 38% according to a Marquette poll released two days before his rural Wisconsin visit, with most respondents saying Democrats do a better job handling the economy. In rural Wisconsin, the Northern Ag Network reports, high fuel and fertilizer prices have been weighing heavily on farmers ever since Trump began his protracted military entanglement in Iran, while farm income is down and projected to drop further this year.
Van Orden, who is trying to hold onto his 3rd Congressional District seat and Tiffany, who wants to be Wisconsin’s next governor, have been faithful to Trump, voting for his “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” with its historic cuts to Medicaid and food assistance that will fall especially hard on rural areas. The five-year, $50 billion rural healthcare fund added to the bill in the U.S. Senate — which Van Orden touted at the Chippewa Falls event — will not come close to making up for the OBBA’s $137 billion in permanent Medicaid cuts to rural areas, according to KFF health policy research. Those cuts will lead to the closure of rural hospitals and, combined with the rollback of the Affordable Care Act, will leave an estimated 30,000 Wisconsinites without healthcare.
Trump’s visit to Wisconsin was a kind of Hail Mary. “Who’s excited that Donald J. Trump is here?” Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins shouted hoarsely. “Can I get an amen?”
President Trump listens to U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden as he praises Trump administration ag policy at a forum Friday June 5, 2026 in Chippewa Falls (Screenshot via the Official White House Rapid Response account on X)
It was not an intellectual appeal. As Henry Redman reports, the so-called roundtable mostly consisted of a meandering speech by Trump, who insulted Democrats, mocked former President Joe Biden and showed pictures of his revamp of the Washington, D.C. reflecting pool. Instead of policy, the event offered vibes. But vibes can only do so much to overcome the cold, hard economic reality confronting rural voters.
Tiffany and Van Orden, who helped inflict Trump’s disastrous policies on rural Wisconsinites, are hoping Trump’s star power will propel them to victory.
Wisconsin GOP Chair Brian Schimming took a stab at justifying the cognitive dissonance that will require of Republican voters, telling the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Trump is forcing them to go through pain now so that he can fix long-term structural problems and bring them future prosperity.
It was a pretty good try. Wisconsin farmers have demonstrated tremendous resilience in the face of brutal economic cycles. Those who are still around have persevered as more than half of the state’s dairy farms disappeared over the last two decades, through both Democratic and Republican administrations. Trump has denounced the global trade deals embraced by both political parties and promised to stop global trade from harming U.S. workers and farmers. For people who lived through massive consolidation, vertical integration and the commodification of farm products that sent prices plummeting, major structural change, even if it involves some short-term pain, sounds good. But how much longer can those early promises stay fresh? And how much faith do voters have that Trump really has a long-term plan?
In Chippewa Falls, Trump spent a lot of time bragging about better than expected recent jobs numbers and ignoring underlying weaknesses in the economy that are a danger sign. He complained that the stock market didn’t share his rosy outlook. And he crowed about stopping illegal immigration, telling Wisconsin farmers who rely heavily on immigrant labor that he has stopped “people from mental institutions” and “murderers” from coming across the border. Wisconsin farmers are the wrong crowd for that red meat.
The most significant thing Trump said, before rushing through the brief “roundtable” section of the program, leaving just enough time for the assembled Republican politicians, two athletes, a beer company executive and one farmer to shower him with praise, was a promise of a massive farm subsidy. “I got $28 billion for the farmers in the first term,” he said, referring to the Market Facilitation Program that paid out big checks to farmers just before the 2020 election, to offset the effects of tariffs and trade wars. Once again, he said, he’s “working on something” to help farmers, “because what happened to you was artificial.”
Van Orden and Tiffany are hoping that will be enough to stave off reality a little bit longer.
Riders of all-terrain vehicles in Wisconsin have some new requirements after new rules took effect at the start of this month.
Changed rules include include prohibitions against towing objects with people onboard, restrictions on window tinting — and a seat belt requirement.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources said under the new law “ALL occupants of a UTV including the driver and passengers have to wear a seat belt.”
These regulations were approved by a unanimous vote of the Wisconsin Natural Resources Board, which updated the administrative codes.
Wisconsin has seen a surge in ATV and UTV activity in the past few years and an accompanying increase in fatal crashes.
As of January, the DNR reported more than 528,000 registrations for the trail-ready vehicles. The Wisconsin ATV/UTV Association says it has more than 40,000 members and about 130 local chapters across the state.
Randy Harden, the group’s president, said the association was included in talks with lawmakers about the regulation updates. The old ATV/UTV regulations were inconsistent, and behavior seen on trails was also part of the reason for the updated regulations.
A previous version of the law required seat belts, and Harden says its intention was always for it to apply to everyone in a vehicle. But when a rider in southwest Wisconsin challenged a ticket in court, it revealed an inconsistency in the way the policy was worded.
“The judge looked at the wording that was drafted, and it said all passengers must wear a seat belt, (but) didn’t say the driver,” Harden said. “This (new rule) corrects that and says all passengers and the driver must wear a seat belt.”
Last year, there were at least 300 ATV or UTV crashes reported to the DNR, resulting in 277 reported injuries.
“The majority of our serious injury and fatal crashes occur because of occupants choosing to not wear a seat belt or helmet,” said Lt. Jacob Holsclaw, DNR off-highway vehicle administrator.
In 2025 alone, the DNR reported a total of 41 deaths. In 32 of those fatal crashes, the people involved were not wearing seat belts. Only four of those deaths were in vehicles other than a UTV, DNR data shows.
It was the second-deadliest year for Wisconsin UTVs and ATVs on record.
With changes on June 1, 2026, UTV/ATV riders have new requirements on eye protection, towing and window tints. (Courtesy of DNR)
While the new seat belt requirement is clear, advocates are realistic about its use.
“Will everybody do it? Absolutely not,” Harden said. “Does everybody wear their seat belts in the car? No, but that doesn’t mean you stop trying, and that’s really what this effort is.”
The DNR says enforcement will be handled through normal patrols by conservation wardens, sheriff’s offices and police in some areas.
“Officers will often use education and even citations if operators are found in violation of the new laws,” the DNR said in an email with WPR.
DNR data for 2024 shows 115 citations for operators not wearing seat belts.
Towing, tinting rules among other requirements
Under the new restrictions, it is now illegal for a UTV/ATV to tow people on a roadway or trail. The restriction has exceptions for private lands and on ice while going under 10 miles per hour, the DNR says.
“It excludes if your machine breaks down,” Harden said. “That’s a common sense exclusion,” he said.
Other changes include making it mandatory for riders younger than 18 to have a DOT-approved helmet and requiring eye protection if the machine does not have a windshield. The new law also limits window tinting.
The DNR says there are now fines for causing intentional damage to an ATV/UTV, which could be up to three times as much as the cost to repair it.
Children at Forever Young childcare center in suburban Green Bay engage in "parachute play." (Photo courtesy of Cindy Veeser)
In the eight years that Cindy Veeser has operated her childcare center in the Green Bay suburb of Bellevue,Forever Young, she has provided an essential service — but she has also faced almost constant challenges.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic a few years ago, things got a little easier. Federal pandemic relief funds gave childcare providers like Veeser a new safety net — support and stability that they hadn’t known previously.
In Wisconsin the money went to thousands of providers, including Veeser, through Child Care Counts, a $20 million-a-month childcare stabilization fund that paid providers a monthly stipend.
The money helped childcare centers stay open and increase pay for childcare teachers, all without increasing costs for the parents depending on childcare so they could work.
“Federal stabilization funding prevented system collapse, supporting 5,762 programs, 75,740 educators, and more than 430,000 children, while helping reverse a decade long decline in licensed child care,” the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association states ina report issued in May.
“It made everything possible,” Veeser says of Child Care Counts. “My teachers were getting paid a little bit closer to what they should have been making at that time.”
The money didn’t just go to wages. “There wasn’t one thing that it didn’t help cover,” Veeser says.
At the end of this month, however, providers will lose the last vestige of that support. One year of “bridge” funding from the 2025-27 Wisconsin state budget ends June 30, and childcare providers across Wisconsin are unsure what happens next.
“We’re holding things together the best we can now,” Veeser says. “I just see us falling behind.”
One in four centers could close
More than a year ago one out of four Wisconsin provides told researchers that without Child Care Counts funding they could close down entirely.
More than one in three said they would probably reduce the number of hours they could provide child care. And nearly three out of four said they would have to increase the fees they charge parents.
The survey resultswere reported in March 2025 by the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty. At the time, Wisconsin child care experts were looking ahead to June 2025, when the federal funds that paid for Child Care Counts would run out.
2025-27 state budget childcare funds
In addition to the $110 million one-year childcare bridge program, the 2025-27 Wisconsin state budget included $66 million from general purpose revenue that will go to providers in a new preschool program for 4-year-olds starting later this year.
Another $123 million was directed for increases in the Wisconsin Shares childcare subsidy program for low-income families. Smaller amounts were funded to offer centers bonuses for infant and toddler care in return for agreeing to higher ratios of children to teachers, to provide grants to centers expanding their capacity and additional funding for childcare resource and referral agencies.
Providers, advocates, Gov. Tony Evers and Democrats in the Legislature hadhoped for $480 million in the 2025-27 state budget to continue the stabilization program. What they got was less than 25% of that:$110 million for one year of stabilization funds that ends June 30.
WECA’s May report looked to the 2025 UW survey to forecast what could follow, and solicited new comments from providers.
“I believe that the numbers we reported on, which are the most recent data we have, are going to be much higher in reality,” says Paula Drew, WECA’s director of early care and education policy and research.
“Every provider is talking about the cost of what they’re paying for everything.” in comments submitted to WECA, Drew says. “Many, many, many of them said, ‘I will price parents out and I will likely close,’ or ‘I’m planning on closing because there’s no way I can pay my teachers less.’”
Increased fees and families dropping out
As fees rise, some families drop out of childcare programs. “There’s a huge, growing trend of under-enrollment due to parents not being able to afford the increases that they already have in tuition,” Drew says.
“Child Care Counts was a huge difference in our operations,” says director and owner Beth Markut. “We were able to give the staff a minimum of a $2-an-hour raise. We were able to afford new supplies. It was a game changer for us.”
It also helped Markut and her husband, Patrick, open the center in Dodgeville, where they live, in 2023. “I don’t know if we would have done that if we hadn’t had Child Care Counts, but my guess is probably not,” Markut says.
When Wisconsin cut Child Care Counts payments in half in 2023, In The Beginning increased tuition by 2.5% to 3%, Markut says, and she expects a similar increase after the bridge payments end.
In The Beginning’s increases have been modest compared with those in a state survey, which reported increases for infant care ranging from 11% to 14%, according to WECA.
Nevertheless, Markut says, “I’ve had four families leave our Dodgeville center because it’s cheaper for them just to stay at home” instead of both parents working.
Markut says she’s confident that In The Beginning can keep operating, but she also hopes that lawmakers will come around to the need for ongoing childcare support.
“I don’t think they understand what our profession does through day in and day out,” she says. “If they really understood they would support us, but they don’t. It doesn’t just affect us, it affects the broader economy.”
Shelly Boelter has operated a family child care program in the community of Hager City in northwestern Wisconsin for 23 years.
The family care license is limited to eight children at a time. Boelter built her home with the lower level as childcare space designed into it from the start. “When I was 12, this was what I dreamed of doing,” she says.
Child Care Counts enabled her to take a better wage, cover expenses and put some money away for retirement. That ended when the stabilization stipend was reduced.
To keep going, “I’ll be spending less on things that we could use, to try to just keep it affordable,” Boelter says.
She says she tries to avoid raising rates for families who already have children enrolled, however, because “I don’t want money to be an issue for them to leave.”
As a result, fees vary from one family to another. In the coming months, she expects to raise her rates for new clients, however. “Probably a 25% increase would not be unrealistic,” Boelter says.
She would need even higher increases to fully cover escalating costs, “but families would not be able to afford it,” she says. “I have some families with three children here. They can’t afford that cost for themselves and actually make a living, either.”
‘It’s going to get worse’
With the bridge funding ending and a significant number of programs at risk of shutting down, advocates say their focus now is on the 2027 state budget, which will be hammered out by a new governor and a new state Legislature.
And the childcare economy is likely to become even more precarious.
“The stabilization funding in Wisconsin did some really remarkable things, and it’s really, really sad that we’re just going to see those things roll back,” Drew says.
“There’s a lot of different ways to approach the next budget,” says Ruth Schmidt, WECA executive director — from a new system of direct payments like Child Care Counts to new tax policies or tapping a revenue source, such as legalizing cannabis and then taxing it as a dedicated childcare funding stream.
“The bottom line is, this all is revenue. There’s no way to fix childcare to make it affordable for families, to make it stable within an economy without paying for it,” Schmidt says.
“So, is it going to get worse? We anticipate it’s going to get worse,” she says. “We anticipate it getting significantly worse. And every possible strategy needs money. We can’t just rely on providers to continue to sort of take this on their backs, and it’s not good for them, and it’s not good for kids and families.”
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
The former Madison deputy clerk who claimed responsibility for the 23 late-arriving ballots in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election has been reassigned within the clerk’s office to non-election tasks.
Jim Verbick — the election office’s former second-in-command who was previously scrutinized and sued for the clerk’s office losing 200 ballots in the 2024 election — admitted to losing track of the absentee ballots that didn’t end up arriving at several polling places until after 8 p.m. on Election Day in April, according to public records obtained by Votebeat.
He told Votebeat that he’s only partially to blame, that understaffing and a lack of communication led to the mistake and that it’s unfair that he got reassigned away from elections. Verbick is now the city clerk’s office’s lead worker for licensing.
“I do admit that I had forgotten about the ballots I secured when I left the post office,” he said, adding that he said the error was exacerbated by unexpected absences and mistakes made by others.
The issue went to court after the Wisconsin Elections Commission ordered Madison not to count the ballots because they arrived after the 8 p.m. deadline in Wisconsin law. A court reversed the commission’s decision, and the ballots were counted in the final canvass.
Verbick’s reassignment was part of a set of personnel changes designed to improve how the clerk’s office manages “the many logistical tasks of administering elections,” Madison Clerk Lydia McComas said in a statement. The city is also hiring two new deputy clerks and a lead employee for absentee voting. But this move doesn’t amount to a net gain of three election positions because one election staff member recently left the office and Verbick was reassigned.
Madison officials said after the election that the clerk’s office — not voters — was responsible for the ballots’ late arrival. Election officials had received and sorted the ballots in time to be delivered: They arrived on the Monday before Election Day and were sorted that same evening, then put on a shelf to be delivered in the afternoon of the following day, records show.
Emails, spreadsheets and Microsoft Teams messages obtained by Votebeat show that Verbick was in charge of absentee ballots and accepted some blame for their late arrival.
Around 4 p.m., Verbick sent a message on Microsoft Teams that he realized he sent out officials to deliver ballots that afternoon without the batch of absentee ballots including the 23 votes that would end up arriving late, former clerk’s office staff member Bonnie Chang said in an email to McComas.
Per that same email, Chang said that about an hour later, she scanned a spreadsheet that showed polling sites were still missing absentee ballots. She then contacted Verbick to find out how many ballots were in the late-discovered bin and whether he needed help delivering them. She wrote that he wouldn’t say how many ballots were found or whether more staff were needed to deliver ballots.
At around 6 p.m., Chang said, the clerk’s office sent additional staff to help deliver the ballots as early as possible. She said most got reassigned to other tasks.
By the time that additional help arrived, Verbick told Votebeat, the ballots had already been sent out for delivery. He said he didn’t think the couriers who were already dispatched to deliver the ballots would have trouble delivering them on-time.
In hindsight, Verbick said, he would have used those additional staff to lighten their load. But he also said he could have planned for the additional staff better had anybody told them that they were en route to help him out.
That night, Verbick sent an email to McComas taking blame for not putting the batch containing the 23 ballots on the planned afternoon drop-offs to polling places.
“Missing the bin of envelopes with the initial afternoon route is my fault,” he emailed McComas at about 10:45 p.m. on Election Day. “I had all of them reviewed this morning and ready to be run with the mail delivery.”
Verbick told Votebeat he forgot about the ballots because election workers in the clerk’s office hadn’t told him about a planned USPS delivery around noon that Tuesday. Believing the delivery had not happened, he went to the post office to investigate.
Before leaving, he said, he moved the batch of ballots that later arrived late into a secure area because there were no other full-time clerk’s office staffers available to watch them while he was gone. It was there that he forgot the ballots.
The error, Verbick told Votebeat, reflected chronic understaffing in the clerk’s office — a problem exacerbated by the increase in absentee voting since the 2020 election.
In an email to McComas, Verbick said he didn’t get additional staff that he thought would help process ballots and that he didn’t intentionally ignore messages from office staff.
Relying on hourly and temporary workers to fill those gaps is not enough, he told Votebeat.
In an email to Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway sent the night of the incident, McComas said that she would “firmly address the lack of communication” and would have more staff in August and November, including the new deputy to oversee absentee ballots.
Wisconsin Elections Commission chair Ann Jacobs called the latest error “absurd” at a commission meeting in late April. The commission voted to investigate Madison over the error, meaning the agency’s first two authorized investigations in its history both center on Madison: one for the 2024 ballot snafu and one for the latest one.
Ultimately, the votes affected by this year’s error were counted. Officials said these 23 ballots were correctly, legally cast, counted and checked into the pollbooks just like any other valid absentee ballots — the only problem was that they were delivered and counted after polls formally closed. The Wisconsin Elections Commission voted that the city and county erred in counting the ballots since state law held that ballots must be delivered to polling places “no later than 8 p.m. on election day.”
A Dane County judge, however, reversed that order, ruling that the ballots should be counted because they were properly cast, and precedent held that voters shouldn’t be disenfranchised because of clerk errors.
Verbick scrutinized for 2024 election snafu
This was the second time in about two years that Verbick has faced scrutiny over allegations that he failed to act decisively when absentee ballots were at risk of being left uncounted.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission previously scrutinized Verbick for his inaction after the 2024 presidential election, when nearly 200 voters were disenfranchised.
Verbick, on the other hand, “testified that he is generally in charge when Clerk Witzel-Behl is not in the office, but that he is ‘not always the point person on everything in the office’” and wasn’t sure who the point person would have been, according to the commission investigation.
The commission stated that Verbick’s involvement was “minimal” by his own account and that nobody took responsibility for those ballots: “It was always someone else’s job.”
After learning about the ballots, the commission stated, Verbick “did not instruct anyone to determine how to get the ballots counted.”
Verbick was sued in his personal capacity for his role in the error and declined to comment about the 2024 snafu. The case is ongoing, and the plaintiffs are demanding financial damages for being disenfranchised.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
President Trump listens to U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden as he praises Trump administration ag policy at a forum Friday June 5, 2026 in Chippewa Falls (Screenshot via the Official White House Rapid Response account on X)
President Donald Trump held a roundtable discussion Friday at Custer Farms in Chippewa Falls to tout his administration’s efforts to help farmers.
Trump’s visit is his first to Wisconsin during this year’s election season. First to take the stage on Friday were U.S. Reps. Derrick Van Orden and Tom Tiffany, signaling the importance of the 3rd Congressional District and the Wisconsin gubernatorial contest for Republicans this year.
Despite Trump’s waning approval ratings, Van Orden and Tiffany tied themselves to the president, effusively praising him.
Trump appeared on stage for the roundtable with both congressmen as well as U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, farm owner Ken Custer, Jake Leinenkugel, Olympic speed skater Jordan Stolz and Joe Thomas, a Hall of Fame former NFL player who played for UW-Madison and now owns a western Wisconsin beef farm.
Despite its billing as a roundtable discussion of agriculture policy, Trump spoke for more than 40 minutes straight, at times appearing to read from a script and at others riffing on a number of favorite topics including former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, “Dumbocrats in Congress,” the allegedly “rigged” 2020 presidential election, transgender people, his multi-million dollar D.C. renovation projects and the southern border.
“These are some very sick puppies that I’m looking at that are running for office and on the other side,” Trump said. “I call them the Dumocrats, D-U-M, you take out the B, a lot of people don’t know, dumb has a b, a lot of people don’t know. You take out the b and change the E, you put the you and you have a Dumocrat, but they are, their policy is just outstandingly bad, and it’s really bad for the farmer, because we were having record stuff, and then we had to put out a fire, we had to extinguish a nuclear weapon.”
With six months until November’s midterm elections, many of Trump’s signature policies have directly affected the bottom line of Wisconsin farmers. Trump’s tariffs and war in Iran have greatly increased the cost of essentials such as fertilizer and gas while limiting access to foreign markets for corn and soybeans. In western Wisconsin communities close to where he appeared on Friday, Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota’s Twin Cities extended into the Dairy State, directly striking the undocumented migrant labor the region’s farmers rely on.
“If anybody you hear says that Donald Trump doesn’t care about the farmers, you can look him straight in the eye and tell him that’s a pile of manure, because the man is right back there,” Van Orden said. “We’re going to make sure our farmers don’t have to wring their hands at night because they’re worried about paying bills.”
Trump and other speakers promised that the administration and congressional Republicans are working to ease the burden on American farmers, but offered little in the way of concrete proposals for how fertilizer, seed, gas and equipment will get cheaper or how milk, corn and soybeans will get easier to sell.
“Your fertilizer prices are going to go way down, just like they were four months ago,” Trump said. “Your fertilizer is down, your energy’s down, your oil, your gas is all coming way down. And frankly, I thought it would go much higher than it did.”
In the days leading up to Friday’s event Democratic politicians and Democratic-aligned groups rolled out a series of tours, roundtables and online events to highlight complaints about administration policies on all manner of things.
“Wisconsin farmers do backbreaking work to produce world-class products that feed the world and drive our rural economies. President Trump came into office promising to support our farmers, but instead has taken every opportunity to jack up their costs, limit their customers, and cut into their margins,” U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) said in a statement. “Between Donald Trump’s trade war, unnecessary war in Iran, and attacks on our health care system, Wisconsin farmers are paying more for everything, and Donald Trump has no solutions to the problems he’s caused. As President Trump visits Wisconsin, he owes our farmers more than lip service – they need real relief from the high costs they are paying.”
The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents approved a 2% tuition increase for the 2026-27 academic year and elected Regent Kyle Weatherly to serve as its president this week.
Weatherly to serve as UW Regent president
Weatherly, whose day job is serving as the president of Alta Medical, has been on the Board since May 2020. He is a graduate of UW-Madison. He succeeds Regent Amy Bogost, who served two terms as president starting in June 2024.
“I owe so much of what I have achieved to my family and to the Universities of Wisconsin,” Weatherly said. “As Regent President, my priority will be to help ensure that students in every corner of our state have access to the opportunity, excellence, and upward mobility that public higher education can provide.”
The Board president is responsible for deciding Board committee membership, signing diplomas and contracts issued by the Board as well as speaking on behalf of the Board to the governor and lawmakers. Bogost, alongside Regent Tim Nixon, was recently questioned by Wisconsin Senators over the firing of Jay Rothman, who had served as the system president since 2022, in April.
The Board also elected Regent Ashok Rai to serve as vice president, taking over the role from Weatherly. Rai has served as a regent since May 2021.
Tuition increase
The board announced the proposed increase earlier this week and approved it on a 15-1 vote, with Nixon the only opponent.
The increase will support university operations, including utilities and facility maintenance, employee salaries and benefits and student services. It’s the fourth consecutive year of increases since a 10-year tuition freeze that was lifted in 2023.
Bogost called the increase “a balanced and measured approach to addressing the rising costs” in the UW system.
“It helps preserve affordability for students while ensuring the UWs have the resources needed to maintain the high-quality education they provide,” she said in a statement.
The board had characterized the increase as “modest,” less than the current 3.8% inflation rate and less than last year’s tuition increase of 5%.
“Our universities are facing inflationary increases, an obligation to help fund state-mandated pay increases for our hard-working employees, and other cost pressures,” Weatherly said in a statement. “Our universities have done a great job in recent years managing expenses, but the financial environment remains challenging. We have a fiduciary duty as regents to ensure quality and the long-term success of our universities.”
Before the vote, Nixon said he wouldn’t support the increase due to the “lack of open and honest communication” by Rothman’s administration and the burden that it could mean for students and their families. He noted that state senators knew about the increase before regents were informed.
At an April confirmation meeting when lawmakers questioned Bogost and Nixon about Rothman’s firing, Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara (R-Appleton) asked the regents about the proposed tuition increase. Bogost, at the time, said the increase was not set in stone.
“That was disturbing to me,” Nixon said Thursday.
Regents in the past were “expected to rubber stamp proposals without necessary information to public discussions,” he said.
“We’ve increased tuition four years in a row. I personally have not been provided with sufficient information to believe it is again necessary. No matter how reasonable the increase, the burden on students, parents and the public is real,” Nixon said. “It should not be undertaken without a clearly demonstrated need.”
Nixon also said the tuition increase could “cost” the system in the next budget cycle “no matter who is in control.”
Republican lawmakers have criticized the increase, arguing that recent tuition increases and increases in state funding should have been enough to avoid an increase this year. The about $250 million that the system received in the 2025-27 state budget fell well below the amount that Rothman at the time said was necessary to avoid tuition increases.
In a statement after the proposal was announced, Sen. Patrick Testin (R-Stevens Point), who sits on the powerful committee responsible for writing the state budget every two years, said that he and his colleagues “certainly will not forget this betrayal when the regents and UW officials come begging to us for more money during next year’s state budget deliberations. This is simply unacceptable.”
The increase will add $210 to the annual tuition cost for in-state students at UW-Madison, $184 at UW-Milwaukee, and between $147 and $175 at other campuses, according to Board meeting documents.
Students from out of state will see an increase of 4.0% — about $1,700 a year.
The regents also approved a 3.5% increase — about $56 annually — in segregated fees, which help cover student services, activities, programs and facilities. The combined increase in tuition, segregated fees and cost of room and board for in-state students would average 2.5%, or $477 annually. UW-Stout has the highest yearly increase, $666, and UW-Oshkosh the lowest, $296.
“It is easy to say we are only taking a few hundred dollars,” Nixon said. “That is, however, a lot of money for many people when they do not have it, especially with skyrocketing costs of almost everything. We should lean a little in the direction of the students. We inherited these problems. We need to look at creative fixes.”
The combined annual tuition and segregated fees for in-state students at each campus are:
The manufacturer of a firefighting foam that contaminated the water supply in northeastern Wisconsin with PFAS chemicals for decades agreed to a $10 million settlement with the state, the governor and attorney general announced on Thursday.
The settlement comes as residents, communities, regulators and environmental activists across the country are struggling with how to address contamination from PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals.”
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers hailed the settlement with Tyco Fire Products as a “historic and important milestone” in the fight for clean water. The lawsuit filed in 2022 alleged that Tyco, a subsidiary of Johnson Controls, had contaminated the area around a firefighting training center since the 1960s and did not do enough to address it.
“Today’s a key step toward making sure polluters are held accountable, take responsibility for their actions, and ensure Wisconsinites don’t have to foot the bill for cleaning up the messes that others made,” Evers said in a statement announcing the deal.
But residents of the affected city of Marinette were hoping for more.
“The word of the day is underwhelming from our perspective,” said Doug Oitzinger, a former mayor of Marinette and current president of the advocacy group Save Our Water. “The dollar amount disappointed us. Ten million is kind of a drop in the bucket.”
Tyco ended outdoor training sessions with the foam containing PFAS chemicals in 2017. Also that year, the company first started providing bottled water and water purification systems to affected residents. The company says it has spent more than $100 million addressing the contamination.
Tyco said in a statement Thursday that it was pleased to have reached the deal, saying it “reflects the extensive work Tyco has undertaken” to address PFAS pollution.
“We’ve been part of the Marinette community for over 100 years and the spirit of doing what is best for our neighbors and the environment will continue to be our priority,” the company said.
PFAS are often referred to as forever chemicals because they resist breaking down, whether in well water or the environment. In the human body, they accumulate in the liver, kidneys and blood. Research has linked them to an increased risk of certain cancers and developmental delays in children.
The chemicals were developed as coatings to protect consumer goods from stains, water and corrosion. Nonstick cookware, carpets, outdoor gear and food packaging are among items that contain the chemicals. They also are an ingredient in firefighting foams.
Government estimates suggest that up to half of all U.S. households have some level of PFAS in their water — whether it comes from a private well or a tap. It is a widespread problem in Wisconsin and spawned numerous lawsuits.
Under the terms of the settlement announced Thursday, Wisconsin will put the $10 million from Tyco into a trust fund earmarked for PFAS cleanup. Tyco also agreed to continue to provide for replacement wells to provide clean drinking water to affected residents, conduct required monitoring and reporting, and implement further measures for the long-term remediation of the area.
The lawsuit, filed by Democratic Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, alleged that the company violated state law when it failed to notify regulators about a PFAS discharge and did not investigate or remediate the contamination around the Fire Technology Center in Marinette, a city of about 11,000 people that borders Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Tyco officials said at the time the lawsuit was filed that the company has invested “considerable resources” on investigating and remediating PFAS pollution from the Marinette firefighting training facility, including offering bottled water and in-home filtration systems to affected residents as well as building a groundwater pollution extraction system.
A second lawsuit filed by the state against Tyco and more than a dozen other companies over PFAS contamination in Wisconsin remains active.
The settlement announced Thursday will take effect if it’s approved by the judge overseeing the case.
Oitzinger, the former Marinette mayor, said Tyco was getting off too easy.
“Legally you may have gotten off of some hooks, but morally you’re not there,” he said. “You’re not there by a long shot.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
This story was produced in partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Investigative Journalism class taught in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
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Wisconsin still allows 16- and 17-year-olds to marry with parental consent even though they aren’t legally adults.
The number of child marriages has gone down significantly over the past 30 years, but there are still a couple dozen per year.
A Democratic bill that would ban the practice hasn’t moved out of committees controlled by Republicans, who say the current law respects parental rights.
Whether the bill passes next session will likely depend on who controls the Legislature after the November election.
Last month deep red Oklahoma became the 17th state to ban child marriage — the practice of allowing minors, typically 16- and 17-year-olds, to marry with parental consent.
“Oklahoma has a responsibility to protect children and make sure they have the opportunity to reach adulthood before making decisions that will shape the rest of their lives,” Republican state Rep. Nicole Miller said in a press release.
Most states that have banned child marriage to date are led by Democrats. Wisconsin, where Republicans control the Legislature, is not following their lead.
In Wisconsin 16- and 17-year-olds can still be married with written parental permission submitted to a county clerk along with a standard marriage license. Between 2015 and 2024, 297 minors were married in Wisconsin, according to the Legislative Reference Bureau.
Notably, these teenagers can be married not just to other minors, but also to adults. State law also provides an exception to its rules on statutory rape: Sexual relations between an adult and a teenager are not a crime as long as they are married.
“These are marriages between a minor woman and an older man,” said state Rep. Ann Roe, D-Janesville, a co-author of recent legislation to ban the practice. “The behavior outside of marriage would be a felony. … Using this old law that’s still on the books that allows for child marriage is incredibly disturbing and incredibly dangerous for young women.”
In the 2025-26 legislative session, Roe joined Sen. Mark Spreitzer, D-Beloit, in his yearslong campaign to end child marriage in Wisconsin. Each time, the legislation has died in committee. It has never received a public hearing, much less reached a floor vote. Republican leadership has refused to move it, saying the proposed law infringes on the rights of parents to decide what’s best for their children.
Incremental changes
The rules for child marriage in Wisconsin have changed throughout history. The 1849 Wisconsin statutes set the minimum marital age for males at 18, and 15 for females. Males under the age of 21 and girls under the age of 18 still needed parental consent. By 1959, the minimum age for females was raised to 16. The law was amended again in 1971 to allow all men 18 or older to marry without parental consent, and girls under 18 but at least 16 to marry with parental consent.
A change to the law in 1959 allowed a man under 18 to obtain permission from a judge to be married if it would prevent a child he fathered from being born out of wedlock. That allowance was quickly repealed in 1961.
The distinction between sexes was eliminated in 1975, and no changes have happened since.
In 2018, as the #MeToo movement against powerful, abusive men was gaining momentum, Delaware and New Jersey became the first states to ban child marriage. Fifteen more states have since followed suit, including Minnesota and Michigan. Bans on child marriage have been introduced multiple times since 2019 in Wisconsin.
Numbers decline, but not to zero
Statistics paint a picture of how this practice has declined over time in the state.
According to the nonpartisan Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau, 27 minors were married in Wisconsin in 2024: eight 16-year-olds and 19 17-year-olds. That figure represents a steep drop from a peak of 421 child marriages in 1995.
Between 2010 and 2022, the vast majority of minors who married did so with adult spouses. From 2017 through 2019, every single minor who married in Wisconsin did so with an adult.
And from 1995 through 2013 (the last year for which gender data is available) girls made up the overwhelming majority of minors who married. In 2013, 23 16-year-old girls married, compared to just two boys the same age. Among 17-year-olds that year, the ratio was 39 girls to eight boys.
According to advocacy group Unchained At Last, those numbers are consistent with nationwide trends. The vast majority of minors married in the country are girls. Most of those girls married an adult male with the man on average being four years older.
“One of the things we wanted to look at is that, you know, is this young love? Is this two teenagers getting married?” Spreitzer said. “The answer seems to be primarily no. Primarily this is men over the age of 18, marrying girls under the age of 18. So that really heightened the concern.”
The law also includes a surprising twist: You can get married under 18, but you can’t get divorced.
Current law gives some provisions for minors to get an annulment, but there is no explicit statutory right for a married minor to file for divorce. Spreitzer and Roe’s proposed legislation would allow any minors married before their proposal takes effect to get a divorce.
Republicans oppose ban based on parental rights
Spreitzer and Roe’s legislation would prohibit marriage under 18 in all circumstances. More than a dozen states have passed similar outright bans over the years.
The Wisconsin effort was once bipartisan. Republican Reps. Ken Skowronski, R-Franklin, and Chuck Wichgers, R-Muskego, were co-sponsors of the bill as recently as 2020. That support has since evaporated.
In February 2024, former state Rep. John Macco, R-Ledgeview, sent a 2:59 a.m. reply-all email to fellow legislators linking the child marriage ban with restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors — a conflation that bill authors and advocates rejected.
“If you’re really serious about protecting minors I’ll add an amendment to also protect them from sex altering drugs and surgery and then cosponsor with you,” Macco’s email read.
Wichgers declined to comment on his previous support.
For a bill to pass into law, identical versions must pass the Assembly and Senate. After a bill is introduced, leadership in both chambers refers their respective versions to a relevant committee where it may receive a hearing and vote. If a committee chair never schedules a bill hearing, it can wallow until the legislative session ends.
Majority of minors who married did so with adult spouses
Percentage of minors married to adults and to other minors in Wisconsin, 2010–2021.
89% married to an adult
11%married
to a minor
Source: Legislative Reference Bureau
Hongyu Liu / Wisconsin Watch
Majority of minors who married did so with adult spouses
Percentage of minors married to adults and to other minors in Wisconsin, 2010–2021.
89% married to an adult
11%married
to a minor
Source: Legislative Reference Bureau
Hongyu Liu / Wisconsin Watch
Majority of minors who married did so with adult spouses
Percentage of minors married to adults and to other minors in Wisconsin, 2010–2021.
11%married
to a minor
89% married to
an adult
Source: Legislative Reference Bureau
Hongyu Liu / Wisconsin Watch
During the most recent legislative session, the Senate and Assembly child marriage bills sat in committees led by state Sen. Chris Kapenga, R-Delafield, and state Rep. Patrick Snyder, R-Weston. The bills died without a committee hearing, just like in past sessions.
Kapenga said he sees no reason to act.
“I cannot recall one constituent phone call or interaction where this issue has come up. I don’t have a problem with the current law that allows a 16- and 17-year-old to marry in the state of Wisconsin as long as there is consent from the parent or guardian. Parents know what’s best for their child — not the government,” he said.
Kapenga’s staff confirmed he has not received constituent contacts opposing child marriage, but other Wisconsin legislators, both Republicans and Democrats, have been contacted, according to public records.
Kapenga invoked a broader political philosophy to explain his position. “Frankly, we’ve seen an erosion of parents’ rights over the years by those on the left who believe that it’s the job of government to parent children,” he said. “Given the very low numbers of minors impacted, I do not believe this warrants the passage of this legislation.”
Cathy Myers, a spokesperson for Zonta of Janesville, a women’s advocacy group that worked with Spreitzer on the bill, said the decline in child marriage over time doesn’t justify ignoring the issue.
“We believe this is a pretty easy issue to wrap your head around,” she said. “One child married is one too many.”
Snyder didn’t respond to a request for comment. Senate President Mary Felzkowski, R-Tomahawk, deferred to Kapenga’s comments. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, did not respond to requests for comment.
Advocates say they hear from supportive Republicans
Spreitzer and Roe said they have heard privately from Republican colleagues who agree
with the goal of ending child marriage, but will not say so publicly.
“I think there are many people across the aisle on several different issues, this being one of them …they nod their heads, they look at me, they’re like, ‘We get it, this is an issue,'” Roe said. “And I think when hopefully they feel less obligated to fall into lockstep with their current leadership, I think that offers us an opportunity to have better conversations and figure out how we can work together.”
Spreitzer said he hopes that some of the Republicans who believe in banning child marriage “would start moving that conversation forward within their own party. That’s how we build progress.”
Myers said her organization heard from supportive Republicans during a lobby day at the Capitol this year.
“Several legislators said they didn’t know that children could be married until we met with them,” Myers said. “However, several also said that until they get the green light from their leadership, the bill would not get to the floor and would not become law.”
Child marriage has long-term consequences
Advocates say the consequences for girls are lasting. Roe described a possible trajectory: a teenage girl, newly married to an older man, denied the normal social activities of a 16-year-old and cut off from educational and career opportunities.
“The intentions of that older man are not to establish more freedoms for this young woman,” Roe said. “This is a form of potentially trafficking. This is a form of dominance. That’s just not healthy.”
Lauren Papp, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of human development and family studies who studies intimate relationships and family dynamics, said adolescence is the wrong time to make a permanent legal commitment to another person — not because teenagers are incapable, but because they are still becoming who they will be.
Papp disagreed that parental consent provides a safeguard because parents may not be privy to all of the relationship dynamics. She, Roe and Spreitzer all noted there can be an imbalance in power dynamics between a child spouse and an older partner who is legally an adult.
“That is certainly just an extra layer of dependence on others,” she said. “There’s a whole host of ways that the younger person could be disadvantaged.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Barnes, an avid runner and biker, told the Examiner in an interview that politics is an “endurance sport” and that “sometimes you face setbacks” — adding that he faced setbacks every day in the Assembly and views his w loss to Johnson as another setback. There is too much on the line, however, to give up and stop working toward his goals, he said. Barnes speaks to a bike shop owner in Madison. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)
At a forum hosted by the Madison West High School civics club, former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes told students that he would be the strongest Democratic candidate for governor because of his previous statewide experience.
“This will be an incredibly competitive race. It already is. The general election is going to show up fast and furious,” Barnes said in April. “I am the only person who has ever competed at that level.”
Barnes was referring to his 2022 U.S. Senate race, which he lost to Sen. Ron Johnson by about one percentage point. Barnes is now seeking Wisconsin’s top executive office and arguing that nearly winning that Senate seat combined with his statewide experience has uniquely prepared him to take on U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, Republican candidate for governor endorsed by President Donald Trump.
Barnes entered the race in December and he’ll need to get through a crowded Democratic primary to make it onto the November ballot. It’s unlikely the rest of the Democratic candidates will drop out to clear the field for him as they did in the 2022 Senate race. Other Democratic candidates on the ballot include state Rep. Francesca Hong (D-Madison), Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, former Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. CEO Missy Hughes, former head of Gov. Tony Evers’ Department of Administration Joel Brennan and State Sen. Kelda Roys.
Putting in the work
Barnes, 39, grew up in Milwaukee the child of a public school teacher and an auto worker who was a member of United Auto Workers (UAW) union and worked third shift for decades. He first ran for office at 25, winning a seat in the state Assembly. He served two terms in the Legislature before launching a failed campaign for the state Senate.
“I felt that there weren’t enough people who understood what it meant to be born in our state’s poorest and nation’s most incarcerated ZIP code,” Barnes said of his motivation for seeking political office. He came back in 2018 to run for lieutenant governor, winning a spot on the ticket with Gov. Tony Evers in 2018. He served as the state’s first Black lieutenant governor before he challenged incumbent U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson.
Barnes, an avid runner and biker, told the Examiner in an interview that politics is an “endurance sport” and that “sometimes you face setbacks” — adding that he faced setbacks every day in the Assembly and views his loss to Johnson as another setback. There is too much on the line, however, to give up and stop working toward his goals, he said.
“In order for us to truly make Wisconsin the place that it can and should be — not just to catch up to our Midwest neighbors, but to lead this entire country in terms of progress — I have put in that work. I have put in that fight, and there’s nobody who’s put in their work in the advocacy space,” more than he has, Barnes said. “I see becoming governor as the best opportunity to continue that focus, to continue that work.”
Barnes has made it his campaign motto that he will do things the “Wisconsin Way” instead of the “Washington Way.” He criticizes Trump and his ally Tiffany as being “out of control.”
The Barnes campaign is focused on the rising cost of living for Wisconsin families.
“There is an affordability crisis that affects almost every household in this state, whether it’s healthcare, whether it’s groceries, whether it’s energy bills, or whether it’s housing, and it feels like there’s no sign of things letting up,” Barnes said. He added that voters are looking for leaders who understand those pressures firsthand.
Barnes spoke with the Examiner about two weeks after the failure of a bill negotiated by Wisconsin’s soon-to-retire Democratic governor and Republican legislative leaders who are also about to leave office that would have spent down the state’s $2.5 billion projected budget surplus to provide tax cuts to Wisconsinites and additional special education funding to schools. He expressed opposition to the deal, which most legislative Democrats along with a handful of Republicans rejected. He said policymakers need to “be more deliberate about negotiating big tasks.”
An organizer’s mindset
Over the last three years, Barnes has led Power to the Polls Wisconsin, a grassroots voting rights organization dedicated to mobilizing voters, combating voter suppression and advocating for underserved communities of color and working-class families. He also founded Forward Together Wisconsin, a clean energy nonprofit. He brings an organizing mindset to the legislative process.
“People shouldn’t feel like they’re rushed to get legislation passed… I think that there should be more public hearings,” he said, adding, “There’s not a whole lot of public input.”
Barnes said the projected surplus “didn’t just come out of nowhere; it’s because Republicans have withheld investments in our future.” He, like the Democrats who are hoping to win control of at least one chamber of the Legislature in the fall, would like the opportunity to reverse years of Republican budget policy without facing a looming budget deficit, which analysts predicted would result from the tax-cut and school funding deal.
“The answer to most of our problems is simple,” Barnes said. “It’s just a tax on billionaires, tax the wealthiest, tax large corporations that have every tax advantage at their disposal.”
“Ultimately, if a state like Wisconsin is a place that fully funds our schools, puts more support into higher education, tech schools, and university system, invests in public transportation,” he added, “that’s how you make the state a much more attractive place.”
Closing tax loopholes
Barnes said he would focus on closing tax loopholes that allow large corporations and wealthy individuals to reduce their tax burden. One example is Wisconsin’s manufacturing and agriculture tax credit, which provides a credit of 7.5% on income from eligible qualified production activities — reducing the effective corporate tax rate on qualifying income from 7.9% to about 0.4%.
Barnes wants to change it so “it benefits our family farmers, not these factory farms, corporate farms” and the “primary benefit also goes to Wisconsin very small businesses versus out-of-state corporations.”
He said he would not seek to raise income taxes on families making $400,000 or less, but those making more should pay more. He didn’t offer specifics, but said that the income tax brackets could change, mentioning Minnesota as an example. Wisconsin’s neighbor’s top income tax rate is currently 9.85%, while Wisconsin’s is 7.65%.
“I’m not saying we’re taxing people into poverty, right? That’s not the case. We’re not taxing people out of the state,” Barnes said. “We’re just looking for a little bit of parity.”
Barnes said that Wisconsin “shouldn’t be left behind anymore.”
Barnes has said he supports increasing state funding so it covers two-thirds of public school costs and has called for repealing Act 10 to restore collective bargaining rights for public employees, including teachers. He also backs increased investment in the University of Wisconsin system and technical colleges, though he has not outlined a specific number.
Barnes, if elected, will need to win support in the Legislature to advance his agenda. He said he is optimistic about Democrats’ chances of winning the majority, but he would be open to negotiating with anyone should he win office.
“I’m willing to play ball,” Barnes said, though that negotiation commitment would not extend to one of his top promises — Medicaid expansion. He has promised to veto any budget that doesn’t include it, even as candidates have argued over whether an expansion would be the best way to address costs in light of federal changes made by the Trump administration.
Barnes said an ultimatum would not inhibit his ability to negotiate with lawmakers because the issue shouldn’t be partisan.
“It is a politicized issue,” Barnes said, noting that Republican-led states including Louisiana have taken the expansion.
Republican lawmakers who hold the majority in the Legislature, have refused to expand Medicaid since 2010. Barnes said during the student forum that he finds it “very hard” to find common ground with Republicans because the party has become “essentially the Republican party of one person” and he doesn’t want to find himself “in a place where I am validating bad behavior.”
Making a comeback
Barnes argues that his gubernatorial candidacy has the support he needs to win, although there was some public skepticism even before he entered the race. He was the subject of a New York Times article comparing his loss to Johnson in 2022 to former Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss in 2024. The Milwaukee Courier, a prominent Black-owned newspaper, urged him in an opinion piece not to enter the race.
Barnes said of the criticism that people have “gotta have something to write about.” Asked whether he needed to build back trust with Wisconsin Democrats ahead of running statewide again, he said he didn’t think it was about that.
“People know how much money was spent against me. People know that I was the most targeted Democrat in the entire country, the target of the largest anti-Democratic candidate super PAC in the country. People know what I was up against and the relationships I built over the course of that race. People know that I was counted out from the very beginning,” Barnes said. “People know how Republican billionaires are willing to spend big, and this is a moment for us to fight back against those corporate interests that have held Wisconsin back, and they’re ready to see this through.”
Barnes’ campaign finance report from December included a mix of donations from Wisconsin-based donors, including those who live in Milwaukee and Madison as well other towns and cities across the state, and many from other states including California, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York and Virginia as well as Washington D.C. Barnes also received a donation from the Long Run PAC, a group he launched to support progressive candidates. He has a goal to raise $50 million over the course of the campaign.
In the first half of the year, Barnes has also received a mix of endorsements from Wisconsin Democrats, including State Reps. Angelina Cruz and Amaad Rivera-Wagner and Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich and from national political players including California Sen. Adam Schiff, and most recently, the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, a leading environmental advocacy organization.
Climate change and utility costs
“No one in Wisconsin has done or will do more to tackle the climate crisis while lowering costs for working families than Mandela Barnes,” Jed Ober, managing director of Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, said in a statement.
Barnes has made reducing utility rates one of the key parts of his affordability platform. He says that he’ll seek to freeze rates as governor by appointing commissioners to the Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities and approves rates, who will do so. Utility experts have criticized the plan and said its unclear whether he could carry it out, though Barnes said that criticisms of that plan are being levied by “the industry itself.”
Barnes has said he would appoint commissioners who have a “demonstrated commitment” through a “thorough interview process” and they will need to have worked alongside the industry and have a “real deep understanding of how we can actually benefit the public to make sure that the PSC is doing its job to represent the public interest.” He added that he would like to increase staffing at the PSC as well.
Barnes said environmental policy will be a priority. He chaired a climate change task force as lieutenant governor that he noted produced a slate of policy solutions that were later introduced by Democratic lawmakers as a package of 18 bills.
The Senate race as well as his time serving as the state’s second-in-command helped him enter the race with the most name recognition, according to polling by Marquette Law School. On the other hand, Charles Franklin, the Marquette Law School poll director, looked at the track record of five statewide candidates, Republican and Democrat, who lost an election and ran again for statewide office. He found that name identification and previous campaign experience, including established donors, did not significantly improve the percentage of votes they got in the general election in their second statewide campaign. The last successful “second act” was the 1970s, he said.
Barnes is working to convince enough voters that he can overcome the historical pattern and is the best candidate to compete in November. He is reaching people in a variety of ways, including traveling the state to attend forums and county Democratic Party meetings, where he said he’s been glad to reconnect with people across the state whom he hasn’t seen in a while.
Through his @MandelaHQ account on X, Barnes has adopted a rapid-response social media style reminiscent of national campaign-style accounts like @KamalaHQ during the 2024 cycle. The account highlights poll results, including a recent one that showed Barnes winning in a matchup against Tiffany, targets Tiffany with humor and memes — one post featuring Tiffany at a farm joked that “cows can smell DC stink” — while also promoting policy proposals through short videos. In one video on banning AI-driven dynamic pricing and hidden fees, a group of children raise the price of lemonade after Barnes passes by on a run.
Barnes told students that one of the biggest misconceptions about him is that he doesn’t “get to be as funny” as he’d like.
“It’s tough because in politics, if you crack a joke or people aren’t able to translate sarcasm, like the story’s getting written the wrong way,” Barnes said. “I can’t be as funny as I want to be… sometimes my humor is a little dry. It’s not for everybody.”
Editor’s note: The Examiner is running periodic profiles of the contenders in the Aug. 11, 2026 gubernatorial primary as well as the candidates in the general election Nov. 3.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court chambers. (Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)
The Wisconsin Supreme Court voted Thursday to create a committee that will study and assess the state’s recusal rules for judges and justices — delaying immediate action on an issue that has gained public prominence as the cost of the state’s Supreme Court elections has risen.
The Court voted after holding a public hearing and open conference on a petition from a group of retired judges to update the state’s recusal rules, which currently put the decision of recusal in the hands of each individual judge or justice.
The existing rules were adopted in 2010 and largely written by two powerful lobbying groups, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce and the Wisconsin Realtors Association. In 2017, the Court’s then-conservative majority voted 5-2 to reject a petition to enact stricter recusal rules.
In recent years, as the Court’s liberals worked year by year to gain a majority, the conservative justices and many Republican officials in the state have complained that they were in league with the state Democratic party and called for the recusal of justices on high profile issues. Those accusations continued Thursday.
“I oppose the creation of this committee, because I think it will ultimately waste the time of all of the members,” Justice Rebecca Bradley said. “Because if the committee proposes anything that represents true reform in the recusal arena, the court, as currently constituted, will never adopt anything that will interfere with the successful formula for electoral success in recent elections, which is to telegraph how you will rule on cases and receive up to $10 million from a party, and then sit on that party’s cases. So I ultimately think it’s going to waste a lot of people’s time.”
During the public hearing, the petition authors were among the speakers pushing for a committee to study the issue rather than adopt the suggested new rules because of the complexity involved. Speakers questioned how recusal rules might conflict with the First Amendment, whether they would adhere to existing state law, the state of Wisconsin’s legal culture and Supreme Court campaigns were questioned.
“We want to have the correct rule, the best rule,” said retired Dane County Judge Richard Niess, one of the petitioners. “There is no one single rule that is demanded by the circumstances. There are a number of options, but they all need to be vetted within the context of Wisconsin and within the context of the constitutions, both state and federal.”
Throughout the day, Justice Brian Hagedorn was especially vocal, pushing speakers to say what they hoped to accomplish with a new rule. He noted that every member of the Supreme Court has decided cases in which one of the parties spent money campaigning for or against them.
“A lot of this feels like PR cover to me that doesn’t really do anything, and so I’m trying to figure out what problem you’re trying to solve,” Hagedorn said. “Who should have recused that’s not recusing, that you think this rule is meant to resolve. Like your petition is described as something ‘toughening recusal.’”
He added that it “goes both ways. From my perspective, I don’t know whether it matters whether somebody campaigned for or against somebody, so for example, SEIU [the Service Employees International Union], they spent, according to public records, under $40,000 campaigning against me. I sat on the case. They gave $400,000 plus to the Chief Justice [Jill Karofsky]. She sat on the case. Is that problematic? None of us, neither of us seem to think it was under those circumstances.”
The justices also debated how modern campaigns have affected the issue of recusal — with political parties and their allies spending millions of dollars to elect their preferred candidate while the candidates themselves more directly reference their personal views on important issues.
“There’s this question about what kind of legal culture we want in the state of Wisconsin,” Hagedorn said. “What kind of judicial elections we want in the state of Wisconsin. When I travel around the country, frankly, judges of all stripes kind of aghast at what has become of Wisconsin’s elections. We’re kind of considered a bit of a national disgrace about how elections are run nowadays, and part of that’s the resources that flow into these races. Part of it’s the nature of how campaigns have played out, because they’re no longer about often the legal questions.”
Karofsky said that those frustrations about Wisconsin’s system also go the other way, noting that observers are just as annoyed by nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court telling senators they’ll just “call balls and strikes” when clearly they will bring a political frame to the Court.
“The utter frustration of members of the Senate, members of the public, members of the legal community who know that’s probably — and as it turns out, in many cases — just not the truth, and that there’s this veneer that they hide behind and say that they are just going to be fair and impartial,” she said.
During the hearing, Ann Jacobs, a former president of the Wisconsin Association of Justice and chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said that whatever the rule is, the Court needs to be careful that it doesn’t punish attorneys for being politically involved.
“It appears that in considering recusal, a judge has to consider a lawyer’s or a litigant’s prior political activities, and what does that mean? Door knocking, signature gathering, fundraiser holding, social media posts, hours spent on behalf of a campaign, meetings attended,” she said, referring to the draft rule written by the petitioners.
“How does a judge ascertain this?” she asked. “Does a lawyer have to divulge this as a matter of course, does the judge have to question lawyers about their political activities? Is a judge required to search the internet looking for political activity?”
Jacobs warned against the prospect of “a system where parties, litigants, their lawyers, etc. are cross examined” about their political activity and possibly excessive partisanship.
She said she has a “selfish interest in this” because she’s a co-chair of a Democratic party caucus, a partisan appointee to a state commission and sits on the board of a political organization.
“I’m sort of the definition of politically active, and what I can’t tell from this proposed rule is whether and when and how my political activity that I am proud of, within the party of my choosing could cause the recusal of a judge,” she said. “We must be extraordinarily careful not to penalize lawyers and litigants for being politically active. That’s the heart of our democracy. It’s what we want people to do.”
A warning sign in Marinette, photographed in 2019, cautioning people not to drink surface water contaminated with PFAS chemicals. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)
The state of Wisconsin and Tyco Fire Products have reached a settlement agreement to help clean up the environment and provide clean drinking water in Marinette, where the company’s actions have caused PFAS contamination in the city water supply.
Under the settlement, Tyco agreed to pay $10 million into the state’s PFAS remediation trust fund, provide clean drinking water to residents in the affected area and work with the Department of Natural Resources to clean up the contamination. The agreement concludes a lawsuit filed by the state Department of Justice against Tyco in 2022 in which the state accused Tyco of failing to notify the state of the PFAS discharge and then failing to properly remediate the pollution.
A separate legal action in which the state sued the manufacturers of products containing PFAS, including Tyco, is still pending.
Officials on Thursday celebrated the settlement as a historic first for the state in its efforts to hold polluters accountable for the PFAS pollution that has affected communities across Wisconsin.
“Today is a historic and important milestone in our fight to make sure every Wisconsinite has access to clean and safe drinking water, whether they live in Marinette or Stella or on French Island or anywhere in between,” Gov. Tony Evers said in a statement. “While today is an important victory, we know our work cannot stop. For the folks in Marinette, this day has been a long time coming, but we know that for so many families and communities across our state, dealing with PFAS pollution is still a daily reality. Here in Wisconsin, we must keep working to tackle PFAS head-on, and that includes continuing to hold PFAS polluters accountable for the damage they’ve caused and are causing across our state.”
PFAS are a group of manmade chemical compounds commonly called “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down in the body or environment. They’ve been used in household goods such as non-stick pans and fast food wrappers, as well as certain kinds of firefighting foam. PFAS have been connected to health problems, including birth defects and certain types of cancer.
The settlement marks another action by the state this year to address the state’s PFAS problems. In April, Evers signed into law a bill that will release $125 million to help communities test for and clean up PFAS contamination in the local water.
The enactment of that law ended a multi-year legislative saga to reach bipartisan agreement on how to best structure the clean up programs and who should be held responsible for the pollution.
“Municipalities like Marinette and Peshtigo have waited far too long for this day to come. Now, the work begins to turn this settlement into relief for pollution victims,” Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Gillett), the PFAS law’s main author, said in a statement. “Now, every single dollar from the Tyco settlement will go into the PFAS Trust Fund and be used to support affected victims and communities.”
But clean water advocates in the area said in a Thursday evening press release they’re disappointed in the settlement — mostly due to the state’s agreement to reduce the area for which Tyco is being held responsible. SOH20, a Marinette-based group that has pushed for better protections of PFAS-affected communities across the state, said that the boundaries the state agreed to means that 80 households with contaminated private wells won’t get the support they need.
“Safe drinking water should never become a competition between contaminated communities,” said SOH2O. “By placing these funds into a statewide PFAS trust fund, impacted residents across Wisconsin are now forced to compete against one another for limited resources, despite all communities being equally deserving of clean, safe drinking water.”
This report has been updated with a statement from SOH20 in Marinette.
President Donald Trump salutes as a U.S. Army carry team moves a flag-draped transfer case containing the remains of Sgt. Declan J. Coady at Dover Air Force Base on March 7, 2026 in Delaware. Six soldiers from the 103rd Sustainment Command were killed in action by an Iranian drone strike on March 1 in Port Shuaiba, Kuwait. (Photo by Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The U.S. House passed a resolution Wednesday to force President Donald Trump to withdraw from the war with Iran and require congressional approval for further military action in the country.
The 215-208 vote, in which four Republicans voted with all Democrats to adopt the resolution, is the strongest rebuke to date against Trump’s handling of the months-long war that has left more than a dozen military troops dead, killed thousands of Iranian civilians and disrupted global supply chains of fertilizer and oil with the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz.
Republican Reps. Tom Barrett of Michigan, Warren Davidson of Ohio, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Thomas Massie of Kentucky voted in favor.
The War Powers Resolution nearly passed the House last month, but failed on a 212-212 tie. The measure is a tool for Congress to limit the president’s ability to initiate or escalate military actions.
Several similar efforts in the Senate have failed. However, following the Republican primary loss of Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisianan joined with Democrats and several GOP senators in a vote to move the measure forward. A vote on final passage on the Senate measure has not been scheduled.
Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, sponsored the resolution in that chamber.
Michigan Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib has a separate War Powers Resolution that would force the president to withdraw troops from Lebanon. Israel, with weapons and funding from the United States, has launched an assault on that nation.
The passage of the resolution in the GOP-controlled House was the latest sign of growing dissent against Trump among congressional Republicans.
Senate Republicans balked at Trump’s effort to create a nearly $1.8 billion fund to pay people who believe they were wrongly prosecuted by the Justice Department, including those who were convicted and later pardoned by the president for attacking the U.S. Capitol in January 2021.
The Trump administration backed away from the fund after disputes over it halted work on legislation to fund immigration and deportation activities for the rest of the president’s second term.
A total of 333 people filed nomination papers with the Wisconsin Elections Commission to run for office in Wisconsin this fall — the first official act in a campaign season that will see the state elect a new governor and potentially change the balance of power in the state Legislature.
In the races for statewide offices such as the governor’s race, candidates are required to collect at least 2,000 signatures. Candidates for Congress must file at least 1,000 signatures while state Senate candidates must file 400 and Assembly candidates 200.
Any member of the public can challenge the sufficiency of a candidate’s nomination papers. To challenge a candidate, a person must make a verified complaint to WEC by 5 p.m. Thursday. The candidate will get an opportunity to respond, and the commission will meet June 9 to certify or deny ballot access.
The seven major candidates in the Democratic primary for governor all filed enough signatures to ensure ballot access, according to WEC records.
Minocqua Brewing Company owner and political gadfly Kirk Bangstad did not reach the 2,000 signature threshold after listing the wrong date on a number of signature forms — writing the date of the Aug. 11 primary rather than the Nov. 3 general election. Circulators who gathered signatures for Bangstad also omitted information on the forms such as the municipality they live in.
Bangstad, who did not announce his run for governor until early May, will have until Sunday afternoon to file affidavits seeking to fix the errors on the forms.
“Bangstad is NOT DEAD YET,” a post on the Minocqua Brewing Facebook page stated.
Former Democratic state Rep. Brett Hulsey, who has regularly turned up at political events around Madison in recent months to draw media attention and tout his run for governor, did not file any signatures with the commission, records show.
On the Republican side, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany filed nearly 4,000 signatures. Tiffany cleared the field of serious contenders after he was endorsed by the Republican Party of Wisconsin and President Donald Trump earlier this year. But 27-year-old medical services technician Andy Manske filed 2,040 signatures to get on the Republican primary ballot.
In the race for lieutenant governor, Democrat Sarah Godlewski and Republican Will Martin filed enough signatures. But WEC only counted 1,977 valid signatures from Republican David Varnam.
In the state’s congressional races, the once-crowded Democratic primary in the 1st Congressional District to unseat Rep. Bryan Steil will have four candidates: Miguel Aranda, Mitchell Berman, Peter Burgelis and Lorenzo Santos.
Randy Bryce, an ironworker who previously ran for the seat in 2018 and was the first to announce his intention to challenge Steil for 2026, did not file any signatures and announced he was suspending his campaign.
In the 3rd Congressional District, where Democrats are again focusing their attention in an effort to unseat Rep. Derrick Van Orden, Democrats Rebecca Cooke and Emily Berge both filed enough signatures to gain ballot access. Berge was the first candidate in the entire state to file her signatures with WEC. Two independents, Alexander Valiensi Kent and Rustin Provance, also filed to run in the race.
Democratic Rep. Gwen Moore in the Milwaukee area’s 4th Congressional District is set to face a primary challenge from Democratic Socialist Amy Donahue.
Six potential challengers filed to run in the 6th Congressional District, held by Republican Rep. Glenn Grothman. Seven candidates, including three Democrats and four Republicans, filed enough signatures to run in the 7th District to replace Tiffany, and three candidates filed to run in the 8th District Democratic primary to challenge GOP Rep. Tony Wied.
In four races, candidates were given an extension until 5 p.m. Thursday because Tiffany, Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, state Rep. Dave Murphy (R-Hortonville) and state Rep. Jenna Jacobson (D-Oregon) did not file declarations of non-candidacy. Murphy is retiring while the other three are running for higher office.
A dozen Wisconsin state lawmakers are urging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to reject a utility coalition’s request to pause competition for major electrical transmission projects in the Midwest.
The lawmakers — eight Assembly Republicans and four Senate Republicans — argued in a letter to the commission that competition for electrical transmission is a net positive for ratepayers, who stand to benefit from lower costs and increased innovation. That outcome, lawmakers wrote, “is even more urgent today given the rising issue of customer affordability.”
The utilities requesting a pause dispute whether competition truly lowers final costs for customers, but that argument is secondary to their primary concern: Powering the Midwest’s data center boom will require vast electrical transmission upgrades, and major regional utilities argue that competition only slows down projects needed to bring data centers online before international competitors overtake the U.S. in the artificial intelligence race.
Among the utilities behind the request are Xcel Energy, owner of Northern States Power Company-Wisconsin, and American Transmission Company (ATC), Wisconsin’s largest electrical transmission operator.
The state lawmakers cast the utilities’ request as the latest stage of a long-standing fight over transmission market competition — one that has unfolded in the Assembly over the last five years.
Data center boom intensifies transmission competition
Ratepayer advocacy groups successfully lobbied FERC, which oversees utilities nationwide, to introduce competitive bidding for regional transmission projects in 2011, arguing that the previous model — allowing local monopolies to build all projects planned within their territories — all but guaranteed inflated costs.
The shift triggered a nationwide gold rush for transmission projects. Regulators pre-approve developers’ “return on equity,” or profit on each dollar invested, for transmission construction, so winning a project means picking up a reliable revenue stream.
Dozens of developers have since bid on transmission projects planned by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), the nonprofit that manages the wholesale electricity market for much of the Midwest. MISO has approved more than $32 billion in new transmission projects since 2022 — projects largely planned before the region’s data center boom reached full swing.
The rush to win projects has placed well-established local utilities like ATC in competition with powerful national utilities venturing outside of their traditional territory, international developers venturing into the U.S. market, and startups backed by private equity firms.
As data center developers rapidly scale up Midwest operations, the pace of transmission upgrades could become a choke point.
In March, MISO reversed its decision to award substations in Fond du Lac, Ozaukee and Sheboygan counties to private-equity-backed startup Viridon, instead handing the projects to ATC.
ATC’s initial bid was more expensive than Viridon’s, but the company successfully argued it alone could build the substations in time to serve the nearby Vantage data center campus in Port Washington. Viridon had not yet secured Public Service Commission permission to operate in Wisconsin — a hurdle ATC does not face.
MISO initially aimed to complete the substations by 2033; the Port Washington data center plans to come online in early 2028. Though ATC emerged victorious, it told FERC that the 15-month delay between MISO’s initial approval of the substations and the reversal was “completely unnecessary.”
Utilities say competition slows projects needed for AI growth
In the utility coalition’s initial request to FERC, it cast competition-related delays as a national security threat.
“These projects — expressways for power — are as critical to meeting today’s challenges as the Eisenhower interstate highway system was to prevailing in the Cold War,” the utilities argued in their initial filing. “China has devoted itself to overtaking America as the world’s AI leader and is just months behind.”
In this video, Paul Kiefer explains why Wisconsin’s grid buildout is a “gold rush” for utility companies.
The utility coalition proposed two options: Allow MISO, along with the grid operator for parts of the Great Plains and Southwest, to exempt transmission projects from competitive bidding on a case-by-case basis or suspend competition entirely for the next five years — “when our country must begin building the infrastructure that will decide which nation wins the AI race,” the utilities wrote.
Ratepayer advocacy groups immediately pushed back. Paul Cicio, chair of the nationwide Electricity Transmission Competition Coalition, called the request “tone deaf.”
“Suspending competition for five years,” he wrote in a press release, “would expose consumers in these regions to unchecked cost escalation for years, guaranteeing higher utility bills.”
In a protest filed with FERC in late May, Wisconsin’s Citizens Utility Board pointed to the Cardinal-Hickory Creek transmission line in southern Wisconsin as an example: The 102-mile project was not subject to competitive bidding, and construction costs came in roughly 40% over budget by the time ATC, Dairyland Power Cooperative and ITC Midwest completed the line in fall 2024.
Opponents of the utilities’ request recognize that the data center boom complicates the playing field for transmission competition.
“Timelines are looking different than the industry is used to,” said Caitlin Marquis, managing director of Advanced Energy United, a trade group representing an array of clean energy and energy efficiency industries. “Transmission competition has been facing curveballs and challenges since it was introduced,” she added. Many challenges result from lobbying by incumbent utilities, and data centers’ speedy construction cycles are only the latest addition.
Her organization opposes the utilities’ request, arguing that incumbent utilities have a long track record of delaying non-competitive transmission projects — and that regulators should streamline the bidding process rather than forego competition entirely.
But utilities argue competitive bidding has yet to prove its worth. While MISO generally favors lower-cost bids, an ATC spokesperson wrote in an email to Wisconsin Watch, “evidence of a low bid is not evidence of cost savings.”
Bid prices often do not match the final project cost, they added, and substantial overruns are common, even on projects with competitive bidding.
Federal fight echoes years of debate in Wisconsin
As regional grid operators introduced competitive bidding for transmission projects a decade ago, utilities turned to state legislatures for right-of-first-refusal, or ROFR, laws.
Those laws give local utilities first dibs on transmission projects within their territories, including those planned by regional grid operators like MISO.
Michigan and Minnesota adopted such policies; Iowa’s Supreme Court struck down a ROFR law in 2023.
Construction unfolds at the 350-plus-acre Beaver Dam Commerce Park, the site of a Meta data center, Jan. 20, 2026, in Beaver Dam, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Utilities have backed similar proposals in Wisconsin each year since 2021, including a 2025 bill introduced by outgoing Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester.
Those proposals would have “insulat(ed) incumbents from market discipline” and left ratepayers holding the bag, the Wisconsin lawmakers argued to FERC.
“Having failed repeatedly to persuade the Wisconsin Legislature,” they continued, “the same incumbent entities are now pursuing an end-run at FERC.”
ATC maintains that options before FERC would “not operate as a substitute” for a ROFR law, “even temporarily.”
The utilities don’t stand alone before FERC. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, a union representing the tradespeople who build and maintain transmission lines, also backs the request to pause competition.
Editor’s note: This story was updated June 4, 2026 to include comments from Caitlin Marquis, managing director of Advanced Energy United.
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The Wisconsin Legislature’s budget committee authorized $7 million in state funds Tuesday so that a state agency that supports Wisconsinites with disabilities entering the workforce can draw down a waiting list of more than 7,000 people.
The Joint Finance Committee voted unanimously for the funding, but members first argued over why the panel didn’t act sooner to provide the money.
The Division of Vocational Rehabilitation in the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Developmentreported in November that it faced a shortfall under the current state budget.
For people with disabilities who are seeking work, DVR provides career services including training as well as technical assistance for employers. The agency typically works with about 19,000 clients at a time, according to DWD. DVR receives federal funds to cover 78.7% of its annual costs, with the state required to cover the remaining 21.3% under federal law.
The 2025-27 state budget added $3.8 million for the agency, bringing state funding to $21.3 million, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
In November, the agency announced it was $4.6 million short of what was needed for the 2025-26 fiscal year. Because of that shortfall, the agency instituted a waiting list for people needing the DVR’s services.
“While we’ve been able to support existing program participants, all new applicants have been forced to wait for services, leaving over 7,600 Wisconsinites with disabilities currently on the waitlist to receive career services,” said DWD Secretary-designee Amy Pechacek in a statement Tuesday from the department. About 1,000 people seeking services are added to the waitlist each month, according to DWD.
DWD asked the finance committee for $4.6 million for the budget’s first 12 months, 2025-26, and another $6.4 million for the second 12 months, 2026-27.
Tuesday, the budget committee’s Republican majority on a 4-11 vote rejected a bid by the committee’s four Democrats to honor that request.
“It just stuns me that this committee wouldn’t take every opportunity to make sure that we have a zero waitlist opportunity so that people with disabilities can enter the workforce, pay taxes, and contribute to our economy,” said state Rep. Deb Andraca (D-Whitefish Bay) after the vote. “Are we really saving money by preventing people from working and not doing everything we can so that there’s no waitlist for this program?”
Instead, the majority proposed a $600,000 appropriation for the first year, which ends June 30, and the full $6.4 million sought for the second year. The Legislative Fiscal Bureau projected the appropriation would enable the waitlist to be closed by the end of June 2027. The proposal passed 15-0.
The funds were made possible in part because a $20 million appropriation for dairy farm aid that passed the Senate died in the Assembly, said Sen. Rob Stafsholt (R-New Richmond).
DWD will draw down the waitlist by first giving priority to people with the most serious disabilities, followed by people with less severe but significant disabilities and finally people whose disabilities do not seriously limit their functional capacity or require people with multiple services.
State Rep. Francesca Hong (D-Madison) speaks at a candidate forum hosted by the Wisconsin Technology Council. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)
Wisconsin State Rep. Francesca Hong (D-Madison), one of the leading candidates in the Democratic primary for governor, is being sued by Capital One Bank over nearly $30,000 in credit card debt, court records show.
The lawsuit was filed May 26 in Dane County Circuit Court by the bank due to Hong “failing to make the minimum payment” on her Discover credit card — which the records show she’s had since September of 2011. The suit alleges breach of contract and account stated, meaning Hong was notified of the total balance due of $29,344.48 and did not object.
Hong’s campaign manager Becky Cooper said in a statement that the campaign “will have a letter shortly confirming this debt is paid in full.”
Since she entered the race last year, Hong, a member of the Legislature’s Socialist Caucus, has emerged as a surprise contender. With two and half months until the Aug. 11 primary, she’s been leading or at the top of a number of polls, picking up early support and energy through an active social media campaign and non-traditional events across the state.
Hong has centered her campaign on issues of affordability and income inequality, focusing especially on increasing taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents and protecting people from rising utility bills caused by the proliferation of hyperscale data centers in Wisconsin. A chef and former restaurant owner, she was first elected to the Legislature in 2020 after highlighting the toll the COVID-19 pandemic took on working class people.
Cooper said Hong’s debt is emblematic of the struggles many Wisconsin residents have faced recently.
“Like 80% of Americans, Rep. Hong has debt, specifically from business expenses that rose astronomically during the pandemic,” Cooper said. “She leads from a place of knowing the endless struggles with bills and the stress that places on families every day. Her policies will help Wisconsin residents develop greater economic stability and success.”
The UW-Madison tuition will increase to $12,416 a year under the proposal. UW-Madison Engineering Hall. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)
The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents will vote this week on a 2% tuition hike that would go towards supporting university operations, including utilities and facility maintenance, employee salaries and benefits and student services.
In a release, the Board characterized the increases as “modest,” noting that it’s less than the current inflation rate of 3.8%. The Board said the increase follows years of “significant financial restructuring across UW universities, including reductions in structural deficits, operational changes and campus-level cost containment efforts designed to strengthen long-term financial stability.”
UW Interim President Renée Wachter, who took up the position on May 8, said in a statement the system recognizes that “Wisconsin families are managing rising costs in every part of their lives, and that reality informed this proposal.”
“This is a measured increase that helps our universities continue providing strong student support and high-quality academic experiences while keeping a UW education among the most affordable in the Midwest,” Wachter said.
The change would also include a 3.5% increase — or about $56 annually — in segregated fees, which help cover student services, activities, programs and facilities. The combined increase in tuition, segregated fees and cost of room and board would average 2.5%.
Over the years the state’s investment in the system has declined. In 1984-85, state revenue made up 41.8% of the UW System’s budget, while in recent years, state funding has made up less than 20% of the system budget. The change has meant the system has had to rely more heavily on tuition and fees.
It’s the fourth year of increases following a 10-year tuition freeze that was adopted under former Gov. Scott Walker and ended in 2023. The tuition hike in 2025 was the maximum of 5%.
Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, who is running for governor, said in a post on X that he would institute another tuition freeze and “restore accountability” to the universities if elected. He noted the previous increases and the recent investment in the state budget.
The system received a $250 million boost for operational costs under the biennial state budget adopted in 2025, but it was well below the $855 million operational budget increase that former UW President Jay Rothman said would be needed to avoid tuition increases.
Republican lawmakers also expressed irritation at the proposed increase.
The prospect of a 2% increase came up in April during a Senate Technical Colleges and Universities committee hearing as lawmakers questioned UW Regent President Amy Bogost and Regent Timothy Nixon about the firing of Rothman. The regents told lawmakers at the time that there was “nothing written in stone.”
“I don’t know if it’s going to happen,” Bogost said then.
In a statement, Sen. Patrick Testin (R-Stevens Point), who sits on the powerful committee responsible for writing the state budget every two years, claimed the regents lied.
“Unfortunately, students and their families are the ones who will be paying the price for this dishonesty,” Testin said. “At least we now know that we can no longer take the UW Board of Regents at their word. My Joint Finance Committee colleagues and I certainly will not forget this betrayal when the regents and UW officials come begging to us for more money during next year’s state budget deliberations. This is simply unacceptable.”
Sen. Rob Hutton (R-Brookfield) chairs the Senate Universities and Technical Colleges committee, did not respond to a request for comment from the Examiner. Hutton is retiring and will not be in the Legislature when lawmakers return in 2027 to write the next state budget.
It is unclear whether Republicans will hold control of the state Senate and Assembly or to the governor’s office in 2027.
The regents are scheduled to meet on June 4 and 5 in Milwaukee.
The per-year tuitions at each campus under the proposed increase are:
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
Ahead of the Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April, Green Bay election officials accidentally sent duplicate ballots to 150 voters, prompting an administrative complaint before the Wisconsin Elections Commission and conspiracy theories online.
In a slightly different example from this year, some voters in Maryland initially received primary ballots for the wrong party. Election officials then intentionally issued new ballots for the correct party to all voters who had requested a mail ballot, and the original ballots were voided. Nonetheless, President Donald Trump falsely suggested that nobody knew what was happening with the original ballots and that “any Republican running in Maryland doesn’t have a chance” because voters who received them, who were disproportionately Democrats, would be allowed to vote twice.
Despite the heightened attention, election officials accidentally sending duplicate ballots — or sending out an erroneous batch before intentionally sending corrected ballots to the same voters — is a rare but well-understood mistake nationwide that hardly ever results in the type of double voting Trump has warned of.
“Once any ballot is received and accepted, it locks down that voter’s record, so that a second ballot could not be accepted for that same voter,” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer of the National Association of Election Officials. “That’s the way it works everywhere.”
Two primary mechanisms keep these accidental duplicate ballots from getting counted: proper record keeping and deterrence, said David Levine, an election security expert and the election director in Richmond, Virginia. Generally, that record keeping is done by putting unique barcodes on absentee ballot envelopes, which prevent people from voting more than once.
“It’s usually not an issue because, one, election officials are pretty good about contingency planning and having procedures in place, so if something like this happens, they know how to either void ballots or segregate them appropriately, so that they’re not going to be counted,” Levine said.
Second, he added, most voters understand that double voting is a crime, and it’s not a practice they want to engage in. A study of 2012 election results found that, at most, one in 4,000 votes cast could be a double vote, but that clerical errors in marking turnout records — not actual double voting — may account for most if not all of that number.
Some of the attention on these mistakes comes from people who are genuinely unaware of the protections that keep double votes from being counted, Levine said. But, he said, there’s also scrutiny from people who are familiar or should be familiar with those safeguards but “choose to try and make a lot of hay out of something that’s largely much ado about nothing.”
Why do duplicate ballots get sent out?
Simply put, election season is an extraordinarily busy time for clerks and the vendors that print their ballots. Sometimes amid their multitasking, they mistakenly send two batches of absentee ballots to the same group of voters, or send an incorrect batch and have to send a second, correct one.
In the Green Bay instance, City Clerk Celestine Jeffreys said election officials were scrambling because a mid-March blizzard closed much of the city, and her staff faced a time crunch to send ballots out on time. The city sent notices to the 152 affected voters before Election Day. Ultimately, just one voter returned two ballots, and both were voided after Green Bay officials alerted the voter about it.
In Maryland, the State Board of Elections said the initial batch of ballots was erroneous because of a coding error with the board’s mail ballot vendor. Since the vendor couldn’t identify which voters received the wrong ballots, the board decided to send new ballots to everyone who had requested a mail ballot in that election and void the old ones in the state’s registration database, so they wouldn’t count even if voters returned them.
What keeps those erroneous ballots from getting counted?
One of the best tools election officials in Wisconsin and elsewhere have at their disposal are unique barcodes printed on the absentee ballot certificates that voters receive.
Those barcodes in Wisconsin connect to the statewide voter registration database and are unique to each voter. Other states have similar systems, with unique identifiers tying an absentee ballot to each voter. If an election official scans a duplicate ballot, the system shows that the voter already returned one, and one of the ballots is rejected.
That’s a “very, very established process,” Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe said after the Green Bay incident.
In examples like Racine, when voters receive a ballot missing a race or containing another error that can be corrected before Election Day, officials will intentionally send another, correct ballot to the voter. The first ballot becomes known as the “A” ballot, and the second one is known as the “B” ballot.
If a voter returns just one ballot, that vote will count — including only valid votes from the erroneous ballot, if that’s the one submitted. If a voter returns both ballots, officials will scrap the “A” ballot and count the “B” since the latter is the correct form.
That’s different from Maryland, where election officials voided all of the original ballots and reissued new ones.
How specific instances of duplicate ballots get resolved — whether that’s canceling out all the original ballots or planning for “A” and “B” ballots like in Racine — can depend on state laws, officials’ discretion and court rulings, Patrick said. How close the error is to election day and the jurisdiction’s budget can also influence how election officials handle duplicate ballots, she added.
Patrick also drew a distinction between officials sending out duplicate absentee ballots and the rare but occasional instances of double voting.
“More often than not, the rare instances where we see it, it’s an individual voting in two different jurisdictions or two different states,” she said. “It’s not so much that a single person is voting in the same election, in the same jurisdiction, under the same name.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court is scheduled to hear from members of the public this week on a request to require judges to recuse themselves if past donations to or support of their judicial campaign could affect their impartiality in a case.
But it appears unlikely changes to the court’s recusal rules will happen right away.
In letters to the court over the last month, some legal organizations and research groups have argued that the justices should reject the proposal, including the five retired circuit court judges from Dane, Milwaukee and Monroe counties who proposed the changes in the first place.
Instead, the former judges, representatives of Law Forward, the Wisconsin Association for Justice and directors of the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggest the Wisconsin Supreme Court should establish an advisory committee to study what process would work best in Wisconsin.
The groups said the proposed rule changes before the court on Thursday stem from valid concerns about an impartial judiciary, but could have unintended consequences, such as chilling speech of attorneys who want to participate in elections.
“Having solid judicial recusal standards is very important, and so it seems that the best way to move forward is to pull together a variety of different perspectives to come up with the best solution,” said Rachel Snyder, policy counsel for Law Forward. “More brain power and more thoughtful consideration … could produce a better workable recusal standard that meets the goals of ensuring confidence in the judiciary and ensuring that conflicts are addressed when they need to be, without going too far in the other direction, and chilling speech that we wouldn’t want chilled or opening the door to recusal being something that can then be weaponized.”
The Wisconsin Supreme Court is expected to hold an open conference following the public comment period Thursday morning at the Capitol in Madison to decide next steps, a spokesperson said. The high court could vote on the proposal, decide to form an advisory committee or make other related decisions, the spokesperson said.
Opting for further study would keep the current rules in place ahead of the next state Supreme Court election in 2027. Two candidates already launched campaigns for the April election after Justice Annette Ziegler in March said she would not seek another term on the bench.
Snyder said it’s understandable some people want changes sooner rather than later, but expediency should not supersede reaching the best policy. In the meantime, judges can still voluntarily recuse themselves, she said.
“If we’re going to do it, we should try to get it right to the best of our ability,” Snyder said.
Former Dane County Judge Richard Niess, one of the retired judges who petitioned for the change, said the group had not considered a study committee as a possibility, but thought it was a “terrific” suggestion. To balance concerns about timing for a study, Niess said his colleagues asked the justices to put a deadline on when an advisory committee would share any recommendations.
“We were delighted to receive the responses that we did, all of them, because it was precisely the type of discussion that we want to have, and we want to have it in public, so that whatever is decided upon by the Supreme Court, the public will know what the reasoning is,” Niess said.
Current rules written by business lobby
The debate is part of a decades-long battle over what to do about increasing spending in Wisconsin’s nonpartisan, but increasingly political state Supreme Court races.
“Broadly the question of recusal is important because it gets to the sort of core feature of our judiciary, which is the right to a fair and impartial tribunal,” said Derek Clinger, senior counsel and director of partnerships for the State Democracy Research Initiative, who has studied judicial recusals in and outside of Wisconsin. “That kind of independence and fairness is what gives the courts legitimacy, and so just the fact that the court is considering this shows that they’re taking this issue quite seriously.”
It’s also significant that the court is debating recusal rules given the history of the issue in Wisconsin over the last 15 years, Clinger said.
The rules were crafted after record spending in the 2007 and 2008 Wisconsin Supreme Court elections led to conservative control of the court. State Supreme Court election spending has exploded since then as liberals gained control. The 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court race drew $144.5 million in spending, topping Wisconsin’s 2023 race as the most expensive high court election in U.S. history.
The former conservative-majority Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2010 adopted the existing rules drafted by Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce and the Wisconsin Realtors Association. The rules state judges do not have to recuse from a case because a party or an attorney donated to their political campaigns. WMC did not respond to questions from Wisconsin Watch about whether the rules should change.
The conservative-majority court in 2017 also rejected a petition from 54 retired judges who sought tighter recusal rules.
Nearly a decade later, the five former circuit court judges submitted their petition in January and were granted a hearing in early April. In a memo tied to their petition, the former judges noted that since the 2010 rules were adopted, “the amount of money contributed to Supreme Court elections, and even to some of the state circuit court elections, has exploded.”
“It is not a stretch to conclude some cause and effect relationship,” they wrote.
Niess said he recalled ongoing debates around recusals with Chief Justice Jill Karofsky and Justice Susan Crawford while they were all on the Dane County Circuit Court.
“We were just kind of shaking our heads about how did we get to this point,” Niess recalled. “And since … these two individuals have joined as justices, it seemed the perfect time for us to just serve up a petition to get a discussion going.”
At a WisPolitics event in October, Karofsky committed to holding a public hearing about establishing a recusal rule for the court.
“We need to bring people into the Supreme Court hearing room and we need to hear about what kind of rule and what kind of parameters on a rule people think that we should have,” Karofsky said at the time.
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