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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A scene on tariffs from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in 1986 is getting some extra attention. (Paramount Pictures.)

Fans of the movie, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” will remember the scene. Ben Stein plays a famously boring high school teacher giving a lecture about economics to a room full of teenagers fighting to stay awake. In about a minute, he covers the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and the Laffer Curve, fundamental economic topics, desperately trying to get the students to engage with him.

“Anyone? Anyone…” is the memorable device Stein uses, to no avail, to engage an audience who couldn’t care less.

Some analysts say the economy is the reason voters chose Donald Trump for a second term in last month’s election. His economic plan is rooted in the broad and cavalier use of tariffs on imports from friends and foes alike. Last week, he announced his plan to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico. The announcement prompted a surprise visit from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and a phone call from Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.

Meanwhile, the American public, particularly Trump voters, remain in an economic daze much like Ben Stein’s class.

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was passed in 1930 in an attempt to thwart the impacts of the Great Depression. It was legislation initially designed to provide relief to the American agriculture sector but became “a means to raise tariffs in all sectors of the economy.” It also marked the end of an entrenched Republican platform of protectionist policymaking during that era. The policies ended because they were…anyone…anyone? Failures.

The details

Ignorance has become a vital asset in the political space these days. Yes, it is an asset in politics, but it is the devil in economics.

As a political asset, there are voters who believe that simply throwing a tariff at any nation they are mad at has nothing but benefits. Mad at Mexico because of migration? Slap them with a tariff and border crossings will go down, right? A good number of voters believe the answer is yes. Though this is almost entirely wrong, politically speaking, that ignorance served the pro-tariff candidate in November.

Economically however, the only real certainty that a 25% tariff on Mexico will have, is a 25% price increase in America. There actually is no disagreement on how tariffs functionally work, but I will refer to PBS for a simple explanation. Importers here pay the tariff, otherwise known as a tax, and remit that payment to the U.S. Treasury. How they pass that increase in costs along may vary a little from merchant to merchant, but ultimately it ends up in the price the American consumer pays.

Yes, a tariff program, in the most basic sense, is government imposed price increases. So, if high prices are the reason why an American voted against the current party in power, voting for higher prices seems, well, ignorant.

Now, does a tariff hurt who the angry American is mad at? Sure. In our example, Mexican goods become less affordable if a tariff is applied to them. In that sense, a tariff can hurt who it is designed to hurt. But that doesn’t change the fact that Americans pay the tariff, not the other country.

Many voters have the perspective that Trump imposed tariffs during his first term, and everything worked out fine. The Associated Press reports, “When Trump first became president in 2017, the federal government collected $34.6 billion in customs, duties and fees. That sum more than doubled under Trump to $70.8 billion in 2019, according to Office of Management and Budget records.” That sounds like a lot of money, until it is put in the context of the current $29.3 trillion gross domestic product.

The tariffs Trump is discussing in 2024 are wildly bigger and are being threatened toward virtually every country. But that’s not the only thing different between 2024 and 2017.

What else is different?

Anyone? Anyone?

The economy that Trump inherited in 2017 is sharply different than the one he will inherit in January. Inflation eight years ago was low and had been for a long time. Interest rates were also low and had been for a long time. The 2016 election wasn’t about inflation, and those rather small tariffs weren’t either. But times have changed.

For the life of me, I cannot find any credible theory as to how raising prices on imported goods will have the effect of lowering prices. I’ve written that sentence six times, and I know it reads like gibberish, but I just can’t help it.

Simply put, tariffs raise prices. After a bout with historic global inflation, consumers are exhausted with high prices. We can all agree with that part.

But there is a word for thinking that raising prices will actually lower them.

Anyone? Anyone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dogecoin. In the week after the 2024 presidential election, the coin’s value jumped 250%. (Image: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Rockets aren’t the only thing Elon Musk is sending into the stratosphere.

After a three-year plummet, dogecoin is blasting off again, jumping 250% since the election of Donald Trump – part of a broader wave of optimism in the industry, due to Trump’s courting of crypto advocates during his campaign.

Trump’s informal appointment of Musk to what he calls the Department of Government Efficiency – D.O.G.E for short – also helped pump the dog-themed meme coin.

This isn’t the first time Musk, who styles himself as “the Dogefather,” has fueled interest in dogecoin.

In May 2021, its price shot up in anticipation of Musk’s guest appearance on “Saturday Night Live.” During one skit, Musk played a financial analyst in conversation with a Weekend Update host, who repeatedly asked him, “What is dogecoin?” After some obfuscation, Musk’s character finally admitted that it was a hustle. The price of the coin went into a freefall. Just over a year later, it had shed over 90% of its peak value.

The losses hit small investors hard. In 2022, one of them filed a class action lawsuit against Musk for market manipulation and insider trading, though the case was dismissed in August 2024.

Why has dogecoin – a meme coin that was never meant to be taken seriously as an investment – seen such extreme swings in value?

We’re all in this together

Dogecoin was launched in 2013 to spoof bitcoin and a slew of other cryptocurrencies that were claiming to disrupt the traditional world of finance. Two strangers from across the globe met online, copied the code of an existing coin, and branded it with the already popular Doge internet meme – a picture of a Shiba Inu dog surrounded by fragments of broken English: “wow much coin.”

Although their main goal was to make the coin pointless and undesirable, it became one of the most popular and enduring cryptocurrencies on the market.

Following dogecoin’s previous surge in 2021, I studied how its fervent network of influencers and everyday investors worked together to draw tremendous attention – and capital – to the joke currency.

Elon Musk’s 2021 appearance on ‘Saturday Night Live’ caused the price of dogecoin to tumble.

To understand the appeal of these absurd investments, you have to look at the time and energy that users invest into these networks and the rewards, both financial and social, they get in return.

Meme coins are collaborative enterprises. Members of these online communities have an economic incentive to become outspoken boosters: The more the value of dogecoin rises, the more their investments grow. But they also receive social validation from other meme coin investors when they pump up the coin.

In other words, behind every meme coin is a collective of strangers on a communal mission to make more money.

Dogecoin and its imitators have been described by their leadership as crypto movements, shared journeys and community-owned projects. Beyond branding the assets with culturally resonant images, whether it’s a Shiba Inu dog or Pepe the Frog, successful crypto ventures are characterized by complex webs of trust. Trust in the technology. Trust in its potential for future appreciation. And trust that those holding power in the networks won’t exploit the rest.

This loyalty is woven among a global network of users who collaborate around the clock to promote their coin and demonstrate their unwavering commitment to its success.

In times of price appreciation, the collective buzzes with elation.

During price dips, community members mutually reinforce their comrades’ – and their own – beliefs that this is just a bump in the road and that their collective efforts will eventually lead to a handsome payoff. Even in the coldest of crypto winters, this ritualistic behavior helps these speculative communities endure. Community serves as a substitute for financial loss.

The investment strategies in these communities – and the conviction in their payoff – involve repeating and reposting what others have said, like any traditional internet meme.

Trolling traditional valuation

The real value of meme coins cannot be understood in the same way as traditional assets, such as stocks and physical commodities. These types of assets have fundamentals, such as a company’s financial statements, or public demand for basic goods, from coffee to oil.

Conversely, the fundamentals of meme coins are reflected in their network activity, such as daily active users, and less concrete metrics, such as social sentiment and mindshare – how much public awareness a coin has generated compared with its rivals.

Of course, the valuations of traditional assets are also affected by these social factors. The difference is that meme coins offer little by way of productive activity. They add nothing to the economy. Occasionally, their leadership will build financial services around them, but these are generally added as afterthoughts, especially as a way to drum up more speculative excitement.

Meme coins troll the traditional conventions of valuation and mock the edicts and dogmas of mainstream investors.

And that’s exactly the point.

Participation in meme coin communities – or any crypto community, for that matter – entails embracing an alternative economic experience. They are speculative sandboxes for playing outside of the conventional rules of investment.

Who let the Doge out?

Musk is the quintessential meme coin influencer.

As the richest man in the world, he’s viewed by many as a paragon of savvy investing. His massive following extends far beyond dogecoin’s social network. And his promotional efforts are playful – so playful that the judge in his class-action case dismissed his dogecoin tweets as mere “puffery” and that “no reasonable investor could rely upon them.”

Dogecoin previously reached the peak of its memetic momentum when Musk appeared on “Saturday Night Live.” Now, instead of sitting at the Weekend Update news desk cracking jokes, he’s sitting in Trump’s office advising the president-elect. In other words, dogecoin’s memetic resonance has ascended from pop culture to politics, helping it capture a bigger slice of the public’s mindshare.

While dogecoin has specifically benefited from Musk’s proximity to Trump, the broader crypto market is leaping with optimism for a crypto-friendly administration. Speaking at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in July, the GOP candidate ensured he’d make the United States “the crypto capital of the planet.” After pouring $131 million into this election cycle, the crypto industry can now claim 274 pro-crypto members of the U.S. House of Representatives and 20 pro-crypto U.S. senators.

Between Musk buddying up with Trump and a shifting regulatory environment, the dog can once again run free.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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An anti-racism protest. The election results shake our faith that the U.S. is a country that cares about basic justice. | Getty Images

A policy tweak here. A change in messaging there.

This, apparently, was what had to happen to thwart Donald Trump and elect Kamala Harris president on Nov. 5, according to the experts’ election post-mortems.

Sorry, but there is an elephant in the room. Policy? messaging? It goes far deeper than that.

We had a Republican candidate who campaigned by checking all the ism boxes. He bet heavily on racism, white nationalism and toxic masculinity that channeled his long history of misogynistic anti-feminism. 

And voters preferred even that to a Democrat. Perhaps any Democrat. We don’t know if  the outcome would have been any different if Trump hadn’t faced a woman of color this election.

This is not solely a party problem. It’s a national one that lays bare our majority identity.

Few are owning up to it, neither the Republican voters who embraced Trump’s message nor the Democrats who dare not speak the isms lest they further alienate voters whose support they covet for the next election.

We must grapple here with a distasteful probability. 

This is who we are.

We say voters simply preferred Trump’s policy prescriptions to Harris’. We say that Harris projected weakness and Trump strength.

And we refuse to acknowledge the deeply retrograde impulses that underly  many of Trump’s prescriptions, particularly those dealing with immigration. And we refuse to accept that many assign strength and weakness according to gender, misunderstanding both true strength and weakness.

Yes, we heard Trump plainly vilify undocumented immigrants as rapists and killers. We heard his condescension on protecting women whether they want it or not. We were savvy to his actions that led to upending Roe v. Wade. We know of his bromances with the world’s authoritarians. We bought that this election was about fixing an economy that wasn’t really all that broken. Voters bought the  fear Trump was peddling  not of just immigrants who supposedly suck up tax dollars for benefits they have no chance of accessing, but transgender people in bathrooms and locker rooms. We even knew of Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, of his felony convictions and the charges still pending.

But people  dismissed the news about Trump’s  corruption, racism, anti-democratic goals and misogyny as politically correct whining.

Many delude themselves about who and what Trump is. So, we can all delude ourselves about who we are, the nation that elected him..

A fear: Democrats will draw a faulty lesson from Harris’ failed bid, refusing to acknowledge the party’s own culpability in not forcing President Joe Biden to withdraw from the race far earlier.

The lesson I fear they will draw is that the nation – primarily the nation’s males – are just not ready for a woman president much less a woman of color. 

Too risky to let this happen again, they will say – which amounts to tacit acknowledgment that this is who we are.

Right, this vote couldn’t possibly be an expression of racism. After all, Trump attracted sizable numbers of Latino and Black men though Harris won the majority of those voters. 

The shift toward Trump  might say more about those  voters as men than it does about  voters of color. We still have  a national problem if a sizable minority of  men of color equate women with weakness.

Pander to or ignore these sentiments for the next election or deal with them in patient, straightforward fashion? This is the question Democrats face.

If it’s pander, voters of color may very well start believing that there really is no difference between the major parties.

We won’t go back. That was Harris’ failed pitch to voters. But what if this vote is a sign that we haven’t moved as far forward as we thought?  

This is who we are.

The question moving forward: Is this who we have to be?

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Wisconsin State Flag | Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A scene from the nine-day march to the Wisconsin State Capitol in 2022. Marchers, organized by Voces de la Frontera, demanded immigration reform from the federal government. (Photo | Joe Brusky)

As an undocumented American I have been holding my breath throughout this campaign season. I am fortunate to have Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status, but like millions of other immigrants, I’m not just worrying about health care reforms or economic policies. We are fighting for our lives, our loved ones, and the dream of one day belonging to the only place millions of us call home. This election feels like a perilous moment in time where everything is hanging in the balance. 

Each campaign rally, debate, and potential policy change announcement feels personal. Each candidate’s words either threaten or bring solace. 

There is a blend of excitement and fear but overall dread. The deep lingering fear of deportation on the horizon and the impact of living in constant uncertainty, but on the other hand there’s a spark of possibility that finally one of these candidates will do right by us. That maybe, just maybe a pathway to citizenship is within reach. Every time that hope grows, it is shadowed by the possibility that things might never change or worse, regress.

We can’t take a day off from  the dreadful reality of living day-to-day as an undocumented person in a country that has increasingly polarized views on immigration regardless of who’s in office. Many of us have been here for years, working hard, contributing to Medicaid and Social Security funding with no security for ourselves. Yet in some corners of this nation we are still viewed as outsiders. We live in constant fear of our families being separated, and the grumbling feeling that we are somehow “illegal” and as if our existence is a crime.  We hope to finally be seen  as human.

The heaviest burden is waiting for the next administration to change everything for us, not knowing if whoever is in office  will truly follow through for better or worse. There’s a part of us that wonders if we’ll ever be able to celebrate a concrete win. And so we wait, quietly and carefully, trying to believe that hope will be justified. 

Watching from the sidelines, we know that a path to citizenship would not only change our lives but would be an affirmation that we are finally a part of American history. And so we wait, with a knot in our throats, our future hanging on the outcome. Knowing that no matter what happens, we will keep fighting to belong in a place where we call home.

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The track record of “citizen forecasting” of U.S. presidential election results is sort of startlingly good. (Photos: Jim Vondruska/Getty Images; Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Are you still scouring the internet for new polls and routinely checking polling averages hoping for fresh reassurances but finding precious few?

Are you poring over daily turnout reports from the Nevada Secretary of State’s office – and scanning news on turnout in other battleground states too – hoping scattered gobbets of inconclusive information will alleviate your angst, even though it is just as likely to aggravate it?

Maybe you should stop doing those things.

Alas, if you’ve read this far, you might be one of those souls – the highly engaged voter – for whom polling and turnout data at this point in an election cycle are like an automobile accident or a burning building: looking away is hard.

Sorry.

But there is a thing which, while it can’t rid you of your anxiety and fear and Sturm und Drang, might at least add a different perspective to it.

Yes, of course it’s another poll.

Or more specifically a series of polls.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a long-time highly regarded political handicapper connected with the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, on Wednesday summarized a series of polls conducted during this election cycle that asked respondents not who they will vote for in the presidential election, but who they think will win.

Why? Let’s let the Crystal Ball gazers explain:

“A growing body of evidence indicates that ‘citizen forecasting’ (CF)…makes for more accurate predictions of the winner. Indeed, studies of CF in the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as work on other democracies (such as Canada, France, or Germany) have demonstrated that voter expectations outperform voter intentions in terms of predictive accuracy.”

In other words, “wisdom of crowds” is a thing that’s a thing.

The Crystal Ball’s first survey asking respondents who they thought would win the 2024 presidential election was conducted way back in April, 2023, when Ron DeSantis still looked like a going concern, and when a lot of people hoped Biden wouldn’t run after all (he officially announced his reelection bid near the end of that month).

In the April 2023 polling, 52% of respondents said they thought the Republican candidate would win the presidential election, and 48% said the Democratic candidate would.

The second round of polling wasn’t taken until a year later, in April 2024. By that time, poor DeSantis had been vanquished, Nikki Haley had distinguished her resume by finishing second to “none of these candidates” in the Nevada Republican primary, and the main thing Democrats were saying to each other was “whoa, Biden’s super old but we are stuck with him and we are doomed,” or words to that effect.

Everybody, or almost everybody, assumed it would be a Trump-Biden rerun of 2020. Asked who they thought would win the presidential election, 50% said Trump, and only 38% said Biden, with a mysterious “someone else” or the Kennedy oddity picked by the rest.

The Crystal Ball’s project concluded with a wave of four polls in June, July, August, and September-October.

The June survey, conducted before the June 27 debate that crushed Democrats’ souls and would ultimately end Biden’s candidacy, indicated a close contest – 46% said Trump would win, 42% said Biden would.

The next survey was conducted July 20-22, a week after Trump’s ear got grazed in Pennsylvania, and coinciding, though only partially, with Biden’s announcement he would step aside (June 21). It was the only one of the polls in the series taken after the debate debacle and while Biden was still in the race, and not surprisingly 54% said Trump would win, while only 32% thought Biden would.

The project’s next polling was conducted between August 20-26, about two weeks after Harris had secured the nomination and otherwise astounded a lot of folks by turning out to be very much more of a boss than was widely thought. The script was flipped: Harris would win, said 56% of the August survey respondents, compared to 40% saying Trump would.

The fourth and last wave of polling, between Sept. 20-Oct. 2, had Harris at 55% to Trump’s 42%.

“This current citizen forecast points to a Harris victory in November,” concludes the Crystal Ball’s “Last Sounding” summary published Wednesday.

“Of course, close races are hard to call,” the summary adds, and citizen forecasting isn’t perfect. The Crystal Ball mentions the elections of 2000 and 2016 as examples.

In both those elections the person who won the presidency lost the popular vote. So this year’s surveys, in addition to asking voters who they thought would win, specifically asked them who they thought would win the electoral college, and the majority still expected a Harris victory.

And on the whole, the track record of citizen forecasting of U.S. presidential election results is sort of startlingly good.

The Sabato Crystal Ball and the American National Election Survey combined encompass a record of citizen forecast polling that stretches back to 1956. In every presidential election since then, “whenever the expectation percentage has exceeded 50%, as is the case with the Harris-Trump race, the forecast of the presidential winner has always been correct,” states the summary released Wednesday.

While the most recent polling in the series was conducted roughly a month before Election Day, that’s been the case throughout the history of the polling series, the report adds.

So Democrats can … take a breath?

Fat chance.

What might be considered a variant of citizen forecasting – betting markets – are also often viewed as being a more reliable predictor than traditional polls, and they indicate a much tighter race than the Crystal Ball citizen forecast, with Harris ahead in some, and Trump in others. (There are also segments of the presidential betting market indicating a generous advantage for Trump, though that may not reflect the wisdom of crowds as much as the machinations of crypto-bros.)

About the same time the last polling in the Crystal Ball series was being done, the Cook Political Report also asked voters in battleground states not who they were voting for, but who they thought would win. Harris was ahead in that poll too – 46% said she would win, compared to 39% for Trump. But that’s below the 50% benchmark history cited by the Crystal Ball.

And even given the aforementioned impressive historical track record of citizen forecast polling, if any modern presidential campaign cycle in the modern era has already proven to be wildly different from all the others, it would be this one.

In other words, let the Democratic hand-wringing continue.

Harris would probably approve. She seems like a leader with a zero tolerance policy for complacency.

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Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com. Follow Nevada Current on Facebook and X.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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People attend a "Fight4Her" pro-choice rally in front of the White House at Lafayette Square on March 29, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Astrid Riecken/Getty Images)

We knew what would happen when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. 

We knew women would be denied access to abortion in many states, including here in Wisconsin. We knew patients would be forced to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to get care. We knew there would be people who would be forced to stay pregnant against their will. We knew doctors would be put in impossible positions, knowing they had the skill and knowledge to help their patients but fearing incarceration and the loss of their careers due to state laws. 

In Wisconsin, abortion was suspended immediately after Roe was overturned due to an 1849 law that prosecutors threatened to use to ban abortion in the state. This forced 9 in 10 people to travel out of state for care, putting people’s health and lives at risk. Fortunately, 15 months later, after thousands of Wisconsin women were denied care, a Dane County judge ruled that Wisconsin’s pre-Roe statute does not ban abortion. Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin has resumed providing abortion care, but women’s health has suffered, confusion remains, and the threats to reproductive care and freedom continue in the Legislature, Congress and the courts. 

Today, 21 states have banned abortion, and 29 million women and people across the gender spectrum who are of reproductive age are living under those bans. That number includes 44% of all women of reproductive age, and 55% of Black women. 

And we knew women would die because of these bans. We didn’t know how many, or where, or who they would be. But now we have names. Two women — both Black women, both mothers — in Georgia died in 2022, in the first months without a federal constitutional right to abortion. According to Georgia’s Department of Public Health maternal mortality review committee, Amber Thurman and Candi Miller died preventable deaths, as a direct result of Georgia’s abortion ban. 

Women and families have been telling their stories everywhere anyone will pay attention — on social media, on national television, in local newspapers. They are telling the world that abortion is essential health care, that women, trans and nonbinary people are suffering under these bans. They’re reminding us that access to sexual and reproductive health care is not a luxury to be awarded to the few: it is essential if we call ourselves a free country. 

The stories are piling up, some of them heartbreaking, some of them enraging, some of them achingly familiar to our own experiences or those of people we love. After all, one in four women will have an abortion in their lifetime, which means we all know someone who has had an abortion, whether they’ve shared that story or not. 

And we know what will happen if politicians against reproductive freedom take power this election. We know because they’ve already shown us what they will do, and they continue to pursue additional restrictions on our freedom to access needed information and health care.

Our democracy and basic human rights are on the ballot in November. What we can do is vote.  

We can elect leaders who will protect our right to make our own decisions about our bodies. Because there is no politician, of any party, who is more qualified, at any point in pregnancy, to make decisions about your pregnancy than you and your doctor.

And people know this. Nearly 80% of Americans believe the decision whether to have an abortion should be left to a woman and her doctor, rather than regulated by law. 

Every ballot cast in every election is a nudge toward a different future. Those nudges, taken together, determine the path our country will follow. The moral arc of the universe only bends toward justice and freedom if we all pull together.

So fight for the future you want, the future we all deserve. Vote for freedom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disappearing factories and farms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaking to working class voters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So cheer up, Wisconsin. 

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

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Residents of a Milwaukee neighborhood about a mile from the Republican National Convention gather after a police shooting at King Park. Photo by Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner.

In 2023, grassroots activists led by the Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Police Repression (MAARPR) succeeded in their long campaign to win the public release of footage of critical incidents involving police officers.  Almost immediately, Milwaukee Police Association (MPA) initiated a lawsuit against the policy, and a few months later, the Fire and Police Commission (FCP) suspended the policy for the duration of the Republican National Convention.  The police killing of Samuel “Jah” Sharpe during the RNC resulted in a quick release of body camera footage by the police. The next day, the MPA dropped its lawsuit. 

On May 30, 2021, the Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (MAARPR) responded to a fatal officer-involved shooting on Milwaukee’s South Side. Roberto “Touch” Zielinski, age 49, was having a mental health crisis when Milwaukee police officers opened fire on him. As with other officer-involved shootings, Zielinski’s family and community members wanted to know what happened and why the police resorted to deadly force. Once the MAARPR met with Zielinski’s family, their demands became quite clear — they wanted the release of footage of the incident and the names of the officers involved. 

Upon investigation into the policies regarding the public release of names of police officers and footage, the MAARPR discovered that Milwaukee had no formal policy requiring the release of that information. The MAARPR, which works closely with and includes the families of victims of the frequent police killings here, began advocating for a policy that would require the release of names within 24 hours and footage within 48. 

When the MAARPR launched that campaign, the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission (FPC), the oldest civilian police oversight group in the U.S., had policy-making power over the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD). Once the path forward was clear, the MAARPR called for and facilitated meetings between the FPC and families of police crime victims. 

The campaign took more than two years. Finally, in April of 2023, the FPC voted to adopt Standard Operating Procedure 575, which mandates the public release of all footage related to officer-involved critical incidents within fifteen days. Moreover, the MAARPR was able to pressure the FPC to include a provision that would guarantee families access to the footage within 48 hours.

The adoption of SOP 575 was a rare victory for the movement against police crimes in Milwaukee, but it was short lived. The day after its adoption, the Milwaukee Police Association (MPA) filed a lawsuit against the city over the SOP. Then,  a month after the victory of this grassroots campaign, the FPC met and declared that SOP 575 would not be effective for the duration of the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee in July, 2024. Rather than provide opportunity for public testimony, as is customary in FPC meetings, the FPC decided to vote on this suspension first. Not only did the decision go against the good faith efforts of community activists to engage with the FPC, but it also sent a message to the people of Milwaukee to anticipate little to no transparency during the RNC. 

In January 2024, the FPC lost its policy-making powers under a shared revenue bill passed by the state Legislature. The commission still has the power to hire and fire police and fire chiefs and advocate for the city’s residents, but civilian oversight was gutted by the state.

As many had feared and actively warned, the RNC brought with it police violence.  Over 4,500 additional police descended on the city, recruited from area officers working in the Milwaukee Area Investigative Team, and from around the country. Gov. Tony Evers declared Milwaukee to be in a state of emergency for the duration of the convention. On the second day of the convention, officers from Columbus, Ohio, shot and killed an unhoused Black man, Samuel “Jah” Sharpe Jr., from a block’s distance, while Sharpe was in an altercation with another person and holding a knife.  Almost immediately, the Columbus Police Department (CPD) released body camera footage, following it up with more extensive video two days later. 

That next day, members of the MAARPR received confirmation that the MPA had dropped its legal challenge to SOP 575. This timing wasn’t a coincidence. CPD’s decision to release the footage within hours of the critical incident contradicted the MPA’s claims and demonstrated the lack of merit in their arguments. Such a quick release of footage made it obvious to the MPA that their arguments would not hold up in court. 

Police body camera footage of the killing of Sharpe Jr. allowed the public to see the event for themselves, and gave Sharpe Jr.’s relatives traction to argue that this was an inappropriate use of fatal force. Against widespread condemnation of yet another unnecessary use of deadly force, Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman defended the police involved, saying that the video indicated that the officers had made difficult decisions quickly, and that there were no violations of police protocol.

But to many in the community, the footage of the killing of Sharpe Jr. clearly indicates that the police shot him from far away, neglecting to attempt to intervene in the situation in less violent ways. What the video does not show is that the Columbus police were a mile away from the convention they were supposedly in town to protect. Their presence in the neighborhood was an invasion that endangered its residents and public safety in general.  

Access to footage won’t put an end to police crimes, but it allows impacted communities to shape the narrative about these incidents and to organize against them. The end of police crimes will come when the community wields the power to have control over the police. Such power would ensure that out of town police aren’t allowed to patrol areas a mile away from the RNC. Samuel “Jah” Sharpe Jr. would be alive today if such resources were available to all.

The achievement of SOP 575 emerged out of the grief, rage, and demand for better from the relatives of those killed by police, and it highlights what diligent grassroots organizing against police crimes can accomplish. As the MAARPR reminds people, the struggle continues. The struggle for greater transparency and accountability from the police in Milwaukee is far from over, and SOP 575’s success marks an important step forward.

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