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As Election Day looms, Harris makes pitch to Wisconsin union members

By: Erik Gunn

Vice President Kamala Harris addresses union supporters Friday at a rally held in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union hall in Janesville, Wisconsin. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)

If the speech Vice President Kamala Harris delivered one week before Election Day on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., was her presidential campaign’s closing argument, her talk Friday to a packed Wisconsin union hall was a sequel — a closing argument directed at the working class.

Harris made an unapologetic pro-union message that equaled the one President Joe Biden has delivered  throughout his four years in the White House. In the process, she set herself — and the Democratic ticket — apart from Republican former President Donald Trump.

“We have an opportunity in this election to turn the page on a decade of Donald Trump, who has spent full time trying to have the American people point fingers at each other. Full time trying to divide us, have people be afraid of each other. And folks are exhausted with this stuff,” Harris said.

The shoulder-to-shoulder crowd inside the headquarters of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 890 in Janesville clapped and cheered.

“That’s who he is — that’s not who we are,” Harris continued. “Nobody understands better than a union member that as Americans we all rise or fall together.”

By the time Harris took the stage, just before 3 p.m, the standing-room-only audience was thoroughly warmed up.

Peter Barca, the Democratic candidate mounting an uphill challenge to U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, the Republican 1st District congressman, urged the crowd not to be  complacent.

He reminded the union members of Act 10, former Republican Gov.  Scott Walker’s surprise attack on labor that stripped public employees of most union rights. And he warned that Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation proposal for the next Republican administration, threatens to end unions for public workers nationwide and cripple private-sector unions.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers speaks to union members in Janesville, Wisconsin, Friday, Nov. 1. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers also spoke, giving a shout-out to union workers who built Milwaukee’s baseball stadium 25 years ago and who are refurbishing it with state funds. He highlighted new legislative maps — drawn by Evers’ team and enacted by Republican lawmakers — that have undone a 13-year GOP gerrymander in Wisconsin and which will get their first test at the ballot box on Tuesday.

“We can flip the state Assembly,” Evers declared, adding that a Democratic resurgence would set the stage for undoing Act 10 and other union-restrictive legislation enacted when Republicans controlled all the branches of state government. Evers urged the audience to call, text or otherwise connect to friends and family “and tell them your ‘why’” for making their choices at the polls.

Following Evers in the Janesville union hall, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, in a close race for reelection, evoked Wisconsin’s “long and rich history as a pro-union stronghold of the Midwest” where unions and workers are now fighting to restore labor rights lost in the last decade. Baldwin pointed to her push for “buy American” requirements in legislation such as the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law.

“Now, when we’re building roads all across this country, we’re using American steel and American concrete to do it,” Baldwin said. “That means union jobs in our state — but all of that progress is absolutely on the line right now with this election.”

A full-throated pro-union message

When Harris addressed the crowd in Janesville, she held up union members as leaders for fair pay, benefits, workplace safety, the five-day work week, paid vacation and family leave, “because it is union members that work and put blood, sweat and tears into raising the conditions of the American worker, wherever they work.”

In contrast to “the disparity in power” between workers with no unions and their employers, collective bargaining enables workers “to join together, as a collective, and then negotiate to better ensure one simple thing — that the outcome is fair,” Harris said.

International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union members wait to hear from Vice President Kamala Harris Friday, Nov. 1. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

Harris outlined an industrial policy agenda building on themes that have been central to the Biden administration’s economic policy: continuing federal investment in domestic manufacturing, with local hiring and union participation, particularly to build up technology and clean energy.  She vowed to strive for “good paying jobs that do not require a college degree,” to remove by executive order “unnecessary degree requirements for federal jobs” and to challenge private employers to do likewise.

Harris reiterated her promise to sign the PRO Act, legislation that unions have been seeking to remove obstacles to union organizing, and to oppose threats to retirement benefits.

She cited economic analyses that have said Trump’s economic plans “would bankrupt Social Security in the next six years.” And she contrasted Trump’s claim when he ran in 2016 that he would restore American manufacturing jobs with his record in office.

“America lost nearly 200,000 manufacturing jobs when he was president, including thousands of jobs right here in Wisconsin,” Harris said. “And let’s be clear — those losses started before the pandemic, making Donald Trump one of the biggest losers of manufacturing jobs in America.” The crowd hooted and cheered.

Those losses, Harris observed, included six U.S. auto plants, after Trump had run promising the industry “would not, quote, lose one plant during his presidency.”

She paused. “Janesville” — where General Motors shut a plant in 2008 that had been the city’s industrial mainstay for 90 years — “you know what those closures mean,” she said, describing the loss of well-paid union jobs and the ripple effects bringing down small businesses in the community.

‘Union-buster his entire career’

Harris mocked the Foxconn project in Mount Pleasant that failed to live up to Trump’s promotion and charged that the 2017 tax cut Trump signed “cut taxes for corporations that shipped 200,000 American jobs overseas during his presidency.”

Trump “has been a union-buster his entire career,” she said, mentioning a Trump description of union leaders as “dues-sucking people,” his support of right-to-work laws that weaken unions, and a conversation Trump had with Elon Musk in which Trump affirmed Musk’s suggestion that striking workers should be fired.

“While he was president, he lowered labor standards and made it easier for companies to break labor laws and then get federal contracts,” she added.

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Harris tacitly acknowledged that Trump’s supporters appear to include a swath of working-class voters, some of them union members.

 “And so part of why I’m here is to ask all the leaders here — let’s remind all the brothers and sisters of Labor about who Donald Trump really is. Because he’s got a lot of talk, but if you pay attention to what he’s actually done, if you pay attention to who he actually stood with when people needed a defender and a friend, you’ll see who he really is. And we’ve got to get the word out about this,” Harris said.

“Donald Trump’s track record is a disaster for working people and he is an existential threat to America’s labor movement.”

After the rally, Stacy Farrington, a Rock County employee, said acknowledgement of how public sector union rights had been lost resonated with her. “We don’t have a voice,” she said, adding that the rally invoked “hope that we have to get back to that.”

Tom Brien, who worked for 43 years at the Janesville GM plant until its 2008 shutdown, said the warnings about Trump’s likely labor agenda were important to hear.

“Kamala supports unions, and we’ll be a whole a lot better off with her versus her opponent,” Brien said. Nevertheless, he’s cautious about the outcome.

“It’s definitely going to be close,” Brien said. “I don’t think it’s going to be a runaway. But we’ll hope for the best.”

A standing-room-only crowd of union members wait to hear from Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)

Democrat Barca challenges Republican Steil for 1st District seat that’s been GOP for 30 years

By: Erik Gunn
U.S Capitol

The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. (Jennifer Shutt | States Newsroom)

In Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District, a Democratic political veteran is trying to accomplish what a string of newcomers have failed at for three decades: to unseat the Republican incumbent.

Republican U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, a former corporate lawyer from Janesville, has held the seat in the U.S. House of Representatives for three terms, following in the footsteps of his one-time boss, former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan.

Democrat Peter Barca (Photo courtesy of Barca campaign)

Steil’s challenger, Peter Barca, a former Democratic Assembly leader from Kenosha, is seeking to return to the House in the seat he held for one term. With two stints in the Wisconsin Assembly under his belt — first in the 1980s and early ‘90s, then again from 2008 to 2019 — Barca also served as secretary for the Wisconsin Department of Revenue from 2019 until earlier this year.

In the Assembly, Barca led the Democratic caucus, but he’s also billed himself as a pragmatist open to bipartisan cooperation, both as a lawmaker and as Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ revenue secretary.

“In my career, I’ve always worked across the aisle, even when I didn’t need to,” Barca said in an interview. “Even when I left the governor’s cabinet, there was an article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that quoted prominent Republicans saying, ‘Barca gets it. He knows how to work across the aisle.’”

Barca said that in conversations, voters across the district have told him “they’re very disappointed with their government. They feel like [lawmakers are] not accomplishing anything.”

The Wisconsin Examiner reached out to Steil’s campaign seeking an interview with the GOP incumbent and was referred to the communications director. Three requests via email received no response.

U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil
U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Janesville)

In a newspaper column published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Steil emphasized higher prices for groceries, gas and housing. He also called for cuts in federal spending, in federal regulation and in “wasteful government programs.”

In addition, Steil in his column called the U.S. southern border “unsecure” and that an increased flow of migrants has “allowed dangerous individuals to enter our country illegally.”

“Right now, our country is headed in the wrong direction,” the three-term congressman wrote. “I’m committed to getting us back on track.”

Republicans have had a lock on the 1st District for 30 years — ever since Barca,  after serving in the House for one term, narrowly lost to a Republican in 1994. In 1998, Republican Paul Ryan of Janesville won the seat and easily held it after the district lines were redrawn twice in the GOP’s favor following the census in 2000 and 2010.

Ryan, who rose to become U.S. House Speaker, chose not to run again after 20 years. Steil, a corporate attorney who had worked for Ryan from 2003 to 2004 before law school, won the 2018 Republican nomination to succeed his former employer and was elected to the seat that November. He has been reelected twice since then.

Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District (U.S. Congress map)

The 1st District, meanwhile, was redrawn again before the 2022 election to include the industrial city of Beloit, making it more competitive, according to political analysts. Nevertheless, Steil won by 11 points after spending $2.4 million while Democratic challenger Ann Roe raised and spent about one-third of that amount.

At the start of 2024, two political newcomers were in the running for the Democratic nomination to challenge Steil. Then the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee put the 1st District on its target list and recruited Barca to run. After Barca entered the race in April with an immediate list of high-profile endorsements, the other hopefuls dropped out.

Even with more money to spend than the previous Democratic candidate, Barca heads into Election Day out-funded. As of Oct. 16, according to Federal Election Commission records, Steil has raised $5.3 million and spent $4.5 million. In the same period, Barca raised just under $2 million, spending $1.85 million.

High prices and the economy

Both campaigns center economic issues, but from contrasting vantage points.

In the first two years of the Biden administration Democrats enacted four major pieces of legislation. Two passed with only Democratic votes: the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), enacted in Biden’s first 100 days, and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The other two, the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law and the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, passed with some Republican support.

Steil voted against all four measures. In his Journal Sentinel column he didn’t name any of the bills but alluded generally to them, blaming the Biden administration for the inflation spike that started in 2021 and continued into 2022.

“Costs are too high,” Steil wrote. “When I’m out talking to workers, families, and seniors across Wisconsin they are struggling with higher costs due to inflation. Whether it’s prices at the grocery store, the gas station, or the cost of housing.”

Accusing the Biden administration of “reckless spending and a regulatory agenda that dramatically increased costs,” Steil asserted, “By cutting red tape, restoring energy independence, and ending wasteful government programs, we can make prices affordable for everyone.”

Mainstream economists have disputed the argument that places all the blame for the inflation spike on federal spending.

Menzie Chinn

Menzie Chinn, an economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an interview that COVID-19 pandemic relief checks — issued in the last year of the Trump administration as well as after the passage of ARPA under Biden — could be responsible for about a third of the 2021 price spike.

Chinn said worldwide supply chain clogs are as much to blame for driving up prices as the federal spending infusion, however.

In late 2021 and early 2022, he said, ships were backed up at ports, businesses such as restaurants were “having a hard time getting people to come back” because of fears of catching COVID-19, and oil prices were pushed up as a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“Inflation jumped way up to 9% by mid-2022,” Chinn said. “But then you look at it after that, it came down very quickly without lots of unemployment and without lots of cuts in government spending, even before the Fed started raising interest rates.”

Inflation is now back down below 3%. And while the pandemic relief funds may have contributed to the short-term inflation spike, the money they brought to households “were necessary to support the economy,” Chinn said. “And the fact that they were more generous is probably the reason that we’re [now] growing faster than Western Europe on the average.”

Attacking ‘no’ votes

Barca and Democrats are highlighting Steil’s votes against the four bills.

The infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act both included provisions aimed at boosting clean energy to help curb climate change.

At a September news conference in Racine, Mayor Cory Mason praised both bills for funding investments that enabled the city to increase its clean energy and address climate change at the local level. A reporter asked Mason, who has endorsed Barca, about Steil’s votes against the legislation.

“Having federal partners that believe investing in communities like Racine is really critically important,” said Mason. “I think it’s unfortunate that he didn’t take the opportunity to make those investments.”

Medicare card money
The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act includes provisions to limit out-of-pocket expenses on prescriptions for Medicar recipients. (Photo by Getty Images)

Barca said that while campaigning, he has heard “a lot about middle class [people not] being able to afford things.” He criticized Steil’s vote against the Inflation Reduction Act in that light, particularly because of provisions in the law that lower Medicare drug costs.

The Inflation Reduction Act instituted a $35-a-month cap on the cost of insulin for Medicare patients. It also capped their out-of-pocket drug costs at $2,000 a year starting in 2025. And for the first time it empowered Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies on the prices of prescription drugs.

Pointing out Steil’s vote against the bill, Barca said, “If I’m in the Congress, I’ll help work to negotiate prescription drug costs for everybody, not just for Medicare.”

In his Journal Sentinel column Steil didn’t address the law directly, but wrote that he favors “more price transparency” by drug companies, including proposed legislation that would require TV drug ads to list the prices of the drugs they’re advertising.

Steil also mentioned his support of a bill nicknamed the SPIKE Act that would require drug companies “to publicly disclose why they jacked up prices.”

That legislation was introduced by Democrats in 2019 and again in 2021, but did not pass, and has not advanced in the current Congressional term.

Federal taxes

Steil was elected after the passage of a signature piece of legislation during Donald Trump’s presidential term: the 2017 tax cut.

The bill permanently cut the corporate income tax rate to 21% from 35%. It also included temporary measures — marginal tax rate cuts across the board, doubling the federal child tax credit and nearly doubling the standard deduction — which will expire Dec. 31, 2025.

Whether to extend or rewrite the 2017 law is expected to be a top issue for Congress in the coming year.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the legislation’s corporate tax rate cut only benefited the highest-paid 10% of employees. The nonprofit center also found that the overall law “was skewed to the rich,” giving the top 1% of households by income an average tax cut of more than $60,000 in 2025 and the bottom 60% of households an average tax cut of less than $500.

Steil has said he would support an extension and has cosponsored U.S. House legislation to make its cuts permanent.

“He’s voted to go along with the old system of giving all the tax breaks to the top 1%,” Barca said. “I would work to give middle-class tax relief.”

As an example, he cited a provision included in the ARPA pandemic relief bill that temporarily expanded the federal child tax credit. Attempts to revive the expanded credit after it expired at the end of 2021 foundered.

Barca has also cited his experience in the Small Business Administration, where he was a regional administrator in the 1990s after leaving Congress, as an additional qualification, along with his success in passing economic development legislation in Wisconsin. “Small businesses need help. They need technical help. They need access to capital,” he said. “Those are things I know a lot about.”

Reproductive rights and immigration

As in many state and national races this year, Barca and the Democrats are also leaning into reproductive rights.

When the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the 49-year-old Roe v. Wade decision that established a federal right to abortion, Steil praised the ruling on social media, declaring himself “proudly pro-life” on Twitter (now renamed X).

Iowa anti abortion rally
Supporters of restrictions on abortion rally July 11, 2023, in the Iowa Capitol rotunda alongside supporters of abortion rights. (Kathie Obradovich | Iowa Capital Dispatch)

Steil was among a group of Republican members of Congress who signed an amicus brief urging the Court to overturn Roe.

“Today’s decision will bring this important issue back to the states. This is a great victory for life,” Steil tweeted.

Steil has said he favors permitting abortion in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother, according to Wisconsin Public Radio.

Interviewed on WISN-TV, Steil dismissed the prospect of a national abortion ban. “Speaker [Michael] Johnson has made clear that a national abortion ban is not going to move forward in the House,” he told the television station. “And I would not support such a move in the House, either.”

Nevertheless, Democrats and reproductive rights advocacy groups have charged that, if Republicans win the White House and both houses of Congress, a national abortion ban would be on the agenda. They’ve also pointed to anti-abortion advocates who oppose making exceptions for rape or incest.

Barca has also cited Steil’s endorsement of House legislation declaring that a fetus is a “person” under the U.S. Constitution. Advocates for in-vitro fertilization (IVF) have said the law, if enacted, would threaten the technology that many couples have used to enable them to conceive children.

Steil has said he does not oppose IVF. Barca, however, said that the congressman has not signed on to legislation that would explicitly guarantee the legality of the procedure.

Steil’s campaign, and his priorities in the House in the last year, have also highlighted immigration. He has spearheaded legislation banning noncitizens from voting in all elections — they’re already excluded from voting in federal elections — and joined other Republican candidates in decrying the surge in migrants at the Southern border.

In November 2023, Steil and Republican Sen. Ron Johnson held a news conference in Whitewater to call attention to an influx of migrants that had led to strained resources in the community and blame the Biden administration’s management of the border.

Local officials and residents, however, said that event as well as publicity in right-wing media falsely connected the community’s immigrant population, which had been growing for years, to the short-term surge at the border. The city’s police chief also debunked claims of an immigrant-driven crime wave.

Barca has criticized Steil for joining other Republicans in Congress who disavowed a border security bill that the White House negotiated with a group of conservative GOP senators.

Congressional Republicans abandoned the deal at the urging of former President Donald Trump, who has built most of his campaign to return to office around attacking immigration.

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Does Wisconsin Congressman Bryan Steil support ‘surveillance of pregnancies’?

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Wisconsin Watch partners with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Read our methodology to learn how we check claims.

No.

U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, a Republican who represents southeastern Wisconsin, has not said he supports “surveillance of pregnancies.”

The surveillance claim was part of a Sept. 3, 2024, attack ad on Steil about abortion. The ad was from Democrat Peter Barca, who is running against Steil in the Nov. 5 election.

Barca’s spokesperson cited no evidence to back the claim, only Steil’s endorsement of former President Donald Trump and Trump’s statement that states should decide whether to monitor pregnancies.

Steil’s spokesperson said he doesn’t support “any such type of surveillance including pregnancy surveillance, whatever that term means.”

A policy initiative with contributions from many former Trump administration officials, Project 2025, calls for the federal Health and Human Services Department to “ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place” and “ensure that statistics are separated by category,” including spontaneous miscarriage.

Trump has distanced himself from the plan.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

Peter Barca for Congress: Different Styles

X: Bryan Steil post

Time: How Far Trump Would Go

Wisconsin Watch: Donald Trump: Plans to force states to report miscarriages?

Does Wisconsin Congressman Bryan Steil support ‘surveillance of pregnancies’? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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