An aerial view of the The Pentagon, May 12, 2021. (Department of Defense photo by Air Force Tech. Sgt. Brittany A. Chase)

This story mentions suicide. If you or a loved one are suffering from thoughts of self-harm, dial 988 or visit 988lifeline.org to live chat with a mental health professional.

WASHINGTON — House Democrats will face a tough vote this week on the final compromise annual defense bill that includes pay raises for troops but also bans coverage for U.S. service members’ children who seek transgender care.

All Democrats present Tuesday opposed a procedural vote, 211-207, to advance the historically bipartisan legislation, but will need to contend with a final vote as early as Wednesday. Congress has enacted the annual package for the last 63 years.

Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Armed Services, said in a statement he plans to vote against the massive defense policy bill.

The Washington state lawmaker said that “blanketly denying health care to people who need it — just because of a biased notion against transgender people — is wrong.”

“The inclusion of this harmful provision puts the lives of children at risk and may force thousands of service members to make the choice of continuing their military service or leaving to ensure their child can get the health care they need,” Smith said following the procedural vote.

President Joe Biden has not indicated whether he will sign the bill into law.

Pay raise, housing upgrades

The nearly $900 billion National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2025 is set to green-light an across-the-board 4.5% pay raise to troops, plus a 10% pay hike in April for the military’s most junior soldiers.

The bill would also pave the way for upgrades in military housing and new protocols for preventing and assessing traumatic brain injuries caused by blast exposure.

Also making it into the bill’s final version were a few far-right wishlist items, including a hiring freeze on diversity, equity and inclusion positions, and a prohibition on any federal dollars used for so-called “critical race theory” in military education — though the section carves out academic freedom protections for instructors.

Trans coverage prohibition

Gaining the most attention is a four-line provision in the 1,800-page package that would expressly prohibit coverage for minors under the military’s TRICARE health program for “medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria that could result in sterilization.” The bill does not define which interventions would be prohibited.

Gender dysphoria is defined by the medical community as incongruence between a person’s expressed gender and their sex assigned at birth. The experience often leads to mental distress, including increased risk of self-harm, according to the medical literature.

The chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, urged Democrats to vote no on the final package.

“For a party whose members constantly decry ‘big government,’ nothing is more hypocritical than hijacking the NDAA to override servicemembers’ decisions, in consultation with medical professionals and their children, about what medical care is best for their transgender kids,” Pocan said in a statement Tuesday afternoon.

Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, one of the bill’s managers, spoke on the House floor Tuesday, decrying the provision that “fails to acknowledge that the lack of care leads to death, leads to suicide.”

The New Mexico Democrat accused House Republicans of thinking they know “better than the parent and the doctor as to what care your child should get. That is insulting to our Marines, to those who serve in our Navy, to those who are deployed overseas and in our bases around our own country.”

Speaker praises TRICARE ban

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, during his weekly press conference Tuesday, praised “landmark investments” and the pay increase included in the bill.

“It’s really important right now. We improved housing for our military families and other benefits, and it’s also why we stopped funds from going to CRT in our military academies. We banned TRICARE from prescribing treatments that would ultimately sterilize our kids, and we gutted the DEI bureaucracy,” said the Louisiana Republican.

A Democrat-led effort to strike the transgender coverage provision failed Monday in the House Committee on Rules.

Smith told the committee that the provision is “fundamentally wrong” because gender dysphoria is widely recognized by medical professionals.

“The treatments that are available for it, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy, and also psychiatric help, have proven to be incredibly effective at helping young people, minors, who are dealing with suicidal thoughts, dealing with causes of massive confusion that have led them to have anxiety and depression,” said Smith.

Treatment options include mental health therapy, hormone therapy and surgery, though the World Professional Association for Transgender Health only recommends adolescent surgery under narrow circumstances that must meet numerous criteria. Some gender-affirming surgery causes sterilization, and the association recommends counseling for adolescents and their families about limited options to preserve fertility.

Smith told the committee Monday that anywhere from 6,000 to 7,000 children of U.S. service members are currently receiving treatment for gender dysphoria. The House Armed Services Committee did not respond to a request for further explanation of that number.

Gender-affirming care was not covered by military health insurance for service members’ children until September 2016. A statistical analysis published in JAMA Pediatrics in March 2019 concluded that just over 2,500 military-affiliated youth received the treatment between October 2009 and April 2017 during roughly 6,700 separate office visits.

The U.S. Capitol. Five incumbent U.S. House members from Wisconsin have retained their seats in Tuesday's elections. (Jennifer Shutt | States Newsroom)

In five Wisconsin congressional seats, incumbents easily prevailed over challengers Tuesday. None of the races were considered close in advance of Election Day, and all of them were called by the Associated Press before 10 p.m.

In the 2nd Congressional District, Democratic incumbent Mark Pocan defeated Republican Erik Olsen by a margin of more than 2 to 1, with 87% of the vote counted. The district is centered on Madison and covers south central Wisconsin.

In Milwaukee’s 4th District, Democratic incumbent Gwen Moore easily bested two challengers, Republican Tim Rogers and Independent Robert Raymond.

In the 5th District, covering suburban and rural communities west of Milwaukee, Republican incumbent Scott Fitzgerald sailed to a third term, defeating Democrat Ben Steinhoff. With nearly 80% of ballots counted, Fitzgerald had almost 65% of the vote while Steinhoff had just under 36%.

In the 6th District, which extends west from the lower Fox Valley, Republican incumbent Glenn Grothman had a 2-to-1 lead over Democrat John Zarbano.

In the 7th District, covering northwest Wisconsin, Republican incumbent Tom Tiffany easily defeated Democratic challenger Kyle Kilbourn by a margin of about 2-to-1 with half the ballots counted. 

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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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Former President Barack Obama and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz at a rally in Madison on the first day of early voting. (Baylor Spears | Wisconsin Examiner)

Former President Barack Obama, on the first day of early voting in Wisconsin, encouraged people in one of Wisconsin’s major liberal strongholds for Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

Dane County is one of two major liberal hubs in Wisconsin, a critical state that could swing the presidential election. The importance of the area this year has been highlighted by recent visits from Harris herself last month, and from former President Donald Trump, who visited Dane County earlier this month following Wisconsin Republicans’ advice to work to eat into Democratic margins in the state’s fastest growing county.

“If you haven’t voted yet, I won’t be offended if you just walk out right now,” Obama said to an energetic crowd at Alliant Energy Center. “Go vote.” 

Gov. Tony Evers, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan and vice presidential candidate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz also spoke at the rally.

Throughout his speech, which lasted about 40 minutes, Obama made the case that electing Harris and Walz would help improve the lives of Americans, while also criticizing former President Donald Trump. 

“We know this election is going to be tight, it’s going to be tight because a lot of Americans are still struggling,” Obama said. Harris, he said, “knows what it’s like to scrap and to work hard — to see her mom worry about the bills, so does Tim. So if you elect them, they will be focused on your problems.” 

“Kamala Harris and Tim Walz don’t have concepts of a plan,” Obama said, referencing Trump’s comment during the September debate about his vague ideas for replacing the Affordable Care Act. “They have an actual plan to make your life better.”

Obama said the plan would include cracking down on corporations for price gouging, making it more affordable to build or buy a home, limiting out of pocket health care costs and cutting taxes for middle-class Americans.

Obama highlighted the Trump administration’s decision to not follow the pandemic playbook that his own administration left during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“If somebody tells you it does not make a difference whether you elect someone who’s competent, somebody who cares about you, somebody who listens to experts and listens to ordinary people and knows what their lives are like and what they’re going to do, it makes a difference,” Obama said. 

The election is about more than policy, he added, saying that it’s also about “values.” To Trump and his “cronies” freedom  means getting away with whatever they want, he said. “We believe true freedom means we get to make decisions about our own life.” 

“Do not boo! Vote,” Obama told the crowd. “They can’t hear you boo. They can hear you vote.” 

Walz had a similar theme in criticizing Trump ahead of Obama. 

“There’s something, not just nuts, but cruel about a billionaire using people’s livelihood as a political prop,” Walz said about Trump’s recent shift working at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania. “His agenda lets corporations not pay people for overtime and diminishes those very people that he was cosplaying as… That restaurant wasn’t even open. It was a stunt… That five minutes he stood next to the deep fryer I’ll guarantee you that’s the hardest that guy’s ever worked.” 

Walz also took some jabs at Elon Musk, a tech billionaire and owner of social media platform ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) who has been campaigning for Trump.

“I’m gonna talk about his running mate — his running mate, Elon Musk,” Walz said. “Elon’s on that stage jumping around, skipping like a dipsh*t.”

Walz accused Musk, who recently offered people $1 million to sign a PAC petition, of trying to buy the election. 

Walz ended his speech by saying that they are still the “underdogs” in the campaign. 

“We know we’re going to leave it all in the field, Wisconsin. We got same-day voter registration and it’s open today,” Walz said. “We need you door knocking. We need to call.” 

The rally’s message resonated with Carey Medina, a 28-year-old from Madison. 

“[Walz] just really seems like a relatable guy and like some of those speakers were saying it — what you see is what you get…,” Medina said. “That’s amazing. We need that. We need leaders for the country that are working for the people, not for themselves.”  

Medina said that she was planning on trying to go to vote early after the rally, and she learned some information that could help her make the case to undecided voters. One piece of information she said she learned is that elections in Wisconsin are decided by a few votes per voting ward — a point made by Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes Conway who also addressed the crowd. Both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections were decided by a little over 20,000 votes in Wisconsin, or about three votes per precinct.

Medina said the issues at stake in the election made her want to go canvas this year — this would be her first time. She said one of her top priorities is reproductive rights as well as the separation of church and state.

Reproductive health issues were a focal point at the rally for speakers and attendees alike. 

Cindy McCallaster, who moved to Madison earlier this year to be close to her family, said reproductive rights are important to her because of her six grandchildren. Hope Bank of Madison, who attended the rally with McCallaster, said she benefited from Roe v. Wade because she was able to decide not to have children.

Bradley Whitford, the former West Wing actor and Madison native, gave an impassioned speech that highlighted the issue. He spoke about how his dad used to serve as the president of Planned Parenthood in Dane County. 

“He was just a dad. Loved his wife and his daughters, and thought they deserved agency over their own bodies and access to the health care they need,” Whitford said. “But now the guy who brags about sexual assault is also bragging about the fact that he overturned Roe v. Wade and stripped those fundamental rights away.”

Whitford named some of the women who have faced devastating consequences under abortion bans. One of the women, Amber Nicole Thurman, died after she took abortion pills, encountered a rare complication and was denied emergency medical care due to Georgia’s abortion ban. 

Obama pointed out Trump’s conflicting statements on abortion access, saying he has “tied himself into a pretzel.” 

“When [Trump] ran for the first time, he said he’d support punishing women who got abortions. Then a few weeks ago, he says, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be your protector,’” Obama said. 

With two weeks to go, rally goers expressed anxiety about the presidential election. Bank of Madison said she is “a little bit terrified, hopeful, but terrified for sure.” 

“It seems unthinkable that [Trump] could be elected again, but we were also confident in 2016. There’s a sense of horror and dread,” Bank said.

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Flanked by Marcia Kasieta, left, and U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, right, FTC chair Lina Khan describes her agency's work in a conversation with reporters Thursday. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)

As consumers continue to face higher prices for groceries and other goods, the Federal Trade Commission is looking at whether some of those price hikes are driven by profiteering.

The agency is “using all of our tools to make sure that no American is paying more because of illegal business practices, be it at the grocery store, be it at the pump, be it at the pharmacy, on food and groceries in particular,” FTC Chair Lina Khan told reporters Thursday during a visit to Wisconsin.

Khan was in the Badger State for stops that included a round table discussion about a recent nursing home sale and a chat with reporters at the Madison office of Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan.

That conversation included a quick rundown of issues at the forefront of the FTC’s agenda. The agency enforces federal antitrust and consumer protection laws, “which are really about making sure that our markets are fair and honest and competitive, so that people can get a fair shake,” Khan said.

State price-gouging laws are intended to address momentary surges in the price of goods that take advantage of circumstances such as natural disasters. But the FTC focuses on “a broader set of corporate practices that we think may be unlawfully hiking up prices,” Khan said. 

Marcia Kasieta, business director of the Badger Prairie Needs Network, a nonprofit serving Dane County, said that the group’s food pantry has been pinched by soaring demand and soaring costs.

“This year my pantry is providing food assistance to 7,000 individuals a month,” Kasieta said — up from 2,200 a month just two years ago.

“Our purchasing budget has more than doubled in the last two years,” she said. “At today’s prices, with demand for food assistance continuing to climb, our budget next year will be eight times more than it was before the pandemic, and three times more than just two years ago.”

Khan said the FTC is looking at inflation in consumer prices from several angles.

One example is price discrimination. “Sometimes we hear from independent grocers they’re not able to get the same terms as the big retailers,” Khan said.

Some small retailers have reported that the prices wholesalers are charging them for an item exceeds the shelf price at a big chain store. “So, there seems to be potentially some discrimination going on there, maybe in unlawful ways,” she said.

The FTC has also opened a market inquiry to look at reports of “surveillance pricing — when companies may be able to charge each person a different price based on what they know about you,” she said.

For example, she suggested the possibility that based on consumer data that retailers collect from shoppers, a family whose child has a peanut allergy could be charged a higher price for a nut-free granola bar.

The FTC has ordered eight companies to submit information about their use of consumers’ personal information in setting prices. 

Business consolidation is another trend leading to higher prices, Khan said — whether by directly limiting competition, or by secretly and illegally colluding so that supposedly competing firms don’t undercut each other’s prices.

“We’ve seen some really serious allegations around this in housing, where some lawsuits have been brought, noting that different landlords have all been using the same algorithm to set their rents and they may effectively be engaging in price fixing,” Khan said.

In the food and agriculture sector, “more and more markets are controlled by fewer and fewer players,” she said. “We hear from a lot of farmers that they’ve seen their incomes go down even as consumers are paying more. That would suggest that it’s the entities in the middle that are taking a bigger and bigger cut.”

While prices spiked in the pandemic as supply chains were disrupted, prices have not come down on some products even as the costs to produce them have fallen again, Khan said. “So there’s a question — is it that the companies have the ability to keep prices inflated because there isn’t enough competition in the market?”

Because of concern it would reduce competition, the FTC is challenging the pending merger of supermarket giants Kroger and Albertson’s in federal court.

Khan said she couldn’t comment on details of the case because it remains in litigation, but Pocan observed Kroger and three other supermarket giants “control 70% of the grocery market in the United States.

It’s the FTC’s aim, Khan said, “to make sure that markets are not becoming further consolidated through mergers and acquisitions in ways that will further deprive people of choices that would result in lower prices.”

Before visiting Pocan’s office, Khan was in Baraboo Thursday morning for a community discussion about the recent sale of a county-owned nursing home to a for-profit company. The session was organized by a community group opposed to the sale.

Khan told reporters that while the transaction was in the purview of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, which is reviewing the matter, and not the FTC, it raises issues about private equity that are on the FTC’s agenda.

“We are more generally concerned about the growing role of private equity, in particular, in parts of health care [and] nursing homes,” Khan said. “There has been some troubling research showing that mortality rates have actually increased after nursing homes have been bought by private equity.”

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An employee adds a stack of mail-in ballots to a machine that automatically places the ballots in envelopes at Runbeck Election Services on Sept. 25, 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona. The company prints mail-in ballots for 30 states and Washington D.C. (Photo by Rebecca Noble/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — United States Postal Service Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testified before Congress on Thursday that voters can “absolutely” trust their mail-in ballots will be secure and prioritized, though he emphasized they must be mailed at least a week ahead of the various state deadlines to be delivered on time.

DeJoy’s testimony to House lawmakers became heated at times, as members questioned whether delays in general mail delivery and previous issues with mail-in ballots in swing states could disenfranchise voters this year.

DeJoy also brought USPS’s facilities into question, calling them “ratty” twice during the hour-long hearing.

His various comments about the management of the USPS and how the agency plans to handle election mail appeared to frustrate some members of the House Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Subcommittee.

For example, in response to a question from Wisconsin Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan about the pace of mail delivery in his home state, DeJoy responded that “the first rockets that went to the moon blew up, OK.”

Pocan then said: “Thanks for blowing up Wisconsin,” before DeJoy gave a lengthier answer.

“We’re going to do a series of transactional adjustments and service measurement adjustments and service metric adjustments as we move forward with this that are going to get your service to be 95% reliable,” DeJoy said.

Millions of ballots in the mail

The hearing came as state officials throughout the country are preparing to, or have already, sent out millions of mail-in ballots that could very well decide the results of elections for Congress and potentially even the presidency.

Mail-in voting surged during the COVID-19 pandemic as a central part of the 2020 presidential election and has remained a popular way for voters to decide who will represent their interests in government.

Voters can also cast ballots in person during early voting and on Election Day.

Lawmakers focused many of their questions during the hearing on how USPS keeps mail-in ballots secure and whether the agency can deliver them on time, though several members voiced frustration with DeJoy’s plans to change operations at USPS.

When asked specifically whether Americans could trust in USPS to handle their election mail, DeJoy said, “Absolutely.”

“I don’t know why you wouldn’t,” he testified. “We’ve delivered in the heightened part of a pandemic, in the most sensationalized political time of elections, and … we delivered it 99 point whatever percent, I mentioned earlier.”

DeJoy had previously said USPS delivered 99.89% of mail-in ballots within seven days during the 2020 election.

DeJoy wrote in testimony submitted to the committee ahead of the hearing that not all state laws consider the speed of the USPS when deciding when voters can request mail-in ballots and when those are sent out.

“For example, some jurisdictions allow voters to request a mail-in ballot very close to Election Day,” he wrote. “Depending on when that ballot is mailed to the voter, it may be physically impossible for that voter to receive the ballot mail, complete their ballot, and return their ballot by mail in time to meet the jurisdiction’s deadline, even with our extraordinary measures, and despite our best efforts.”

‘I see horror’

DeJoy brought up the state of USPS facilities on his own at several points during the hearing, implying that they aren’t clean or up to his standards as a work environment.

“I walk in our plants and facilities, I see horror. My employees see just another day at work,” DeJoy said.

Following a question about whether USPS employees had the appropriate training to handle and deliver mail-in ballots on time, DeJoy said leadership was “overwhelmingly enhancing our training,” before disparaging the facilities.

“We’re on a daily mission to train over 600,000 people across 31,000 ratty locations, I might say, on how to improve our operating practices across the board and at this time most specifically in the election mail area,” he testified. “We’re doing very well at this, just not perfect.”

No members of the panel asked DeJoy to clarify what he meant by “ratty” or followed up when he said separately that he was “sitting on about $20 billion in cash.”

A USPS spokesperson said they had nothing to add to DeJoy’s characterization when asked about the “ratty” comment by States Newsroom.

“If you are listening to the hearing, you just heard him describe the condition of postal facilities further,” Martha S. Johnson wrote in an email sent shortly after DeJoy made his “horror” comment. “I have nothing to add to that.”

Deliveries for rural Americans

Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Matt Cartwright questioned DeJoy during the hearing about how plans to “consolidate resources around regions with higher population densities” under the so-called Delivering for America plan will affect delivery times overall for rural residents.

DeJoy disagreed with the premise of the question, saying he believed it was “an unfair accusation, considering the condition that the Postal Service has been allowed to get to.”

DeJoy said the USPS had committed to a six-day-a-week delivery schedule and pledged that it would not take longer than five days for mail to arrive.

“It will not go beyond five days, because I’ll put it up in the air and fly it if I have to,” DeJoy said.

Cartwright mentioned that 1.4 million Pennsylvania residents requested to vote by mail during the 2022 midterm elections, a number he expected to rise this year.

The commonwealth has numerous competitive U.S. House districts, a competitive U.S. Senate race and is considered a crucial swing state for the presidential election. Several of those races could be determined by mail-in ballots arriving on time.

Ohio Republican Rep. David Joyce, chairman of the subcommittee, asked DeJoy about issues with the Cleveland regional sort facility during the 2023 election. The secretary of state, Joyce said, found that some mail-in ballots sent as early as Oct. 24 didn’t arrive until Nov. 21.

“These voters are disenfranchised because of the USPS failures,” Joyce said. “How specifically have you enhanced the all clear procedures you referenced in response to the National Association of Secretaries of State? And can you assure us that these procedures will ensure that that doesn’t happen in this upcoming election?”

DeJoy responded that he would “need the specifics of Cleveland,” but said that USPS procedures are “extremely enhanced.”

Georgia primary problems

Georgia Republican Rep. Andrew Clyde, who isn’t on the panel, submitted a question for DeJoy about how a new regional processing and distribution center in Atlanta had “a negative impact” on mail delivery just weeks ahead of the GOP presidential primary earlier this year.

DeJoy said the USPS was investing more than $500 million into the region, but conceded “what went on in Georgia was an embarrassment to the organization, okay, and it should not have happened.”

“We are correcting for it aggressively,” DeJoy said. “Specifically with regard to the primary election, we got through that because I put a whole bunch of people down there and a whole bunch of double-checking processes in place.”

DeJoy added that “the performance was good on election mail for Georgia” and that USPS would deliver Georgia’s mail-in ballots in the weeks ahead “just fine.”

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Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Lafayette County Democratic volunteer irene kendall. Shapiro campaigned in rural Wisconsin for Sen. Tammy Baldwin's reelection Saturday. | Wisconsin Examiner photo

Two-term U.S Sen. Tammy Baldwin got a boost Saturday from a fellow Democrat, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, in her tight reelection race against Republican challenger Eric Hovde. The incumbent senator from Wisconsin and the governor — who attracted national media attention when he was recently considered as a possible vice presidential candidate — toured rural Richland and Lafayette counties, meeting with farmers and small town residents in sparsely populated areas of the state. In both counties, most voters chose former President Donald Trump in the last two presidential elections. But they also voted for Baldwin by more than 10-point margins in 2018. 

The night before embarking on the rural Wisconsin tour, Baldwin spoke from the same stage as Democratic nominee Kamala Harris to a cheering crowd of 10,000 people who packed the Dane County Coliseum, a frequent venue for rock concerts in deep-blue Madison.

Since both population growth and voter turnout are sky-high in Dane County, Democrats are focusing heavily on the area as key to winning elections in this closely-divided swing state. But Baldwin, like Shapiro, who made inroads with rural voters in Pennsylvania, makes a point of campaigning in rural and suburban areas that lean Republican. 

Appealing to voters in areas where other Democrats don’t often show up is a big part of both politicians’ formula for success. In their joint, rural campaign stops in Wisconsin they modeled an approach to politics that refuses to take the urban-rural political divide for granted, and that reconnects with voters the rest of their party has often overlooked. That approach dovetails with the Harris campaign’s effort to appeal to disaffected Republicans and to present the Democratic party as a “big tent.”

Lafayette is among the most rural counties in Wisconsin, and one of only two counties in the state that doesn’t have a traffic light, according to U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, a Democrat, who represents the area in Congress. Voters there chose Trump by 9 percentage points in 2016 and by 13.7 points in 2020 — but Baldwin won the county by 10.6 points in 2018. 

“It really does feel like home,” Shapiro told the Examiner, standing outside a big, red barn at the Iowa and Lafayette County Democrats’ picnic. “There’s a sensibility, and there’s a desire from the people I’ve met to just have elected officials work together to get stuff done,” he said.

Getting stuff done — Shapiro’s trademark phrase — was the theme of his speech endorsing Baldwin’s 2024 reelection bid. He touted her work to bring agriculture innovation grants as well as her work on rural broadband and expanding health care access.

In her own speech at the county picnic, Baldwin also focused on specific accomplishments. She told a story about meeting with executives of a handful of medical device companies and “shaming” them into agreeing to set a cap of $35 per month on the price of inhalers, after hearing from constituents who were struggling to pay hundreds of dollars per month to treat their asthma. 

While Shapiro and Baldwin described themselves as pragmatists, they also espoused progressive values, denouncing Republican “extremism” and threats to democracy and vowing to work to claw back abortion rights after the demise of Roe v. Wade. 

Baldwin warned that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which held that there is no fundamental constitutional right to privacy, poses a threat to other precedents besides Roe, including protections for access to contraception as well as interracial and same-sex marriage. She described the skepticism she encountered from journalists who did not believe she would be able to get enough Republican votes to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, which codified federal recognition of same-sex and interracial marriages. 

“I said, ‘Just you watch,’ ” she told the audience of rural Democrats, adding she was sure at least 10 of her Republican colleagues had a loved one who would be hurt if same-sex marriage was overturned. In the end she found 12 Republicans to join all 50 Democrats in the Senate to pass the bill.

Baldwin added that she is proud to be the lead author of the Women’s Health Protection Act, “which would restore Roe, make it a part of our national laws, and tell states like Wisconsin and Texas and Florida and Idaho that you can’t pass a whole bunch of laws at the state level that interfere with those rights and freedoms.”

“I don’t have 60 votes yet, but I do have a plan,” she told her rural constituents. “That plan involves all of you working super hard to get me reelected to the United States Senate.”

Democrats are working harder than ever in Lafayette County, said Democratic Party Chair Nancy Fisker, who added that the group has doubled its membership in the last year and a half after opening a new office, with help from the state party. The chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, Ben Wikler, also gave an impassioned speech at the picnic. A prolific fundraiser, he has helped to open new Democratic Party offices all over the state.

Still, county residents are often afraid to put up yard signs or otherwise publicly identify themselves as Democrats, Fisker said. “We have to be aware of it, and we have to not push our agenda at people who don’t want to hear it,” she said. “We don’t just take a bunch of Democrats to a restaurant in Darlington to have a meeting unless we talk to the owner first, or they’ll throw us out on our ear. It’s serious.”

This year, after pushing for a long time, county volunteers are putting up more yard signs. And, after opening the new party office, “We started to have some successes,” Fisker said. Lafayette County voted for liberal state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz, whose victory over conservative former Justice Dan Kelly changed the ideological balance on the court. Most voters in the county also rejected a pair of constitutional amendments drafted by the Republican-controlled Legislature that would have taken away the governor’s power to give out federal emergency relief funds. Fisker attributes both results to her group’s stepped-up voter education effort.

Fisker said she meets a lot of split-ticket voters. “I have a couple of friends who just said, ‘Oh, well, you know, I’m going to vote for Baldwin, but I don’t know about that Harris person. So then there’s lots of conversations, and it’s your neighbors.”

“We care about reproductive rights. We care about the environment. We care about ensuring that our rights are not taken away. But you have to come to us in the way that we want to engage with you,” said Lafayette County Democrat irene kendall (she spells her name in all lower-case letters), who helped organize the event. She credited Baldwin and Pocan with coming to the area frequently and listening to people. “They understand what happens in the rural communities, because they’re out there, right? And so we know we matter to them. So showing up is a huge part of it, I think.” She has relatives, she said, who split their tickets, voting Republican in most races, but making and exception for Baldwin.

Steve Pickett, now retired, described himself as the first Democratic county clerk elected in Lafayette County since Reconstruction. He agreed that Democrats could do a lot better just by showing up.

“In rural Wisconsin, probably more so than in the cities, people want to know who the candidate is,” he said. “It’s hard for people to say, ‘Well, yeah I want to vote for someone I don’t even know.’”

The working theory for a long time has been that you have to be a Republican to win in Lafayette County, he said. Now that’s starting to change. “You can be a Democrat and win, but you have to work at it,” he added.

“It isn’t that it’s so Republican,” he said of the area. “It’s that we haven’t given people a reason to vote for the Democrats.” Baldwin and Pocan “gave you reasons” in their speeches, he added.

“We have to get the party to understand,” Pickett said, “that these are the races that are going to make them, as opposed to spending money in the really safe districts.”

Shapiro and Baldwin both seem to understand that point — and not just on the state level.

Shapiro told the rural Democrats in Wisconsin the same thing he said he tells voters in Pennsylvania: Because of the way national elections are structured, as swing state voters they have enormous power.  “You’ve got the power to shape the future,” he said, “not just of this state, but of this entire country.”

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