Republicans gained a majority of 218 seats in the U.S. House late Wednesday, based on calls by The Associated Press. The Capitol is shown on Oct. 9, 2024. (Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — Republicans will hold on to their majority in the U.S. House and regain control of the Senate when Congress convenes in January, setting the party up to potentially make major policy changes during the next two years.
The GOP hadn’t clinched the 218 House seats needed for a majority until late Wednesday, when The Associated Press, the news organization that States Newsroom relies upon for race calls based on decades of experience, called control of the chamber. The AP called 208 seats for Democrats so far, with nine yet to be decided as of early Thursday.
When combined with President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the election results will have sweeping implications for the country’s future and could give the former president the chance to add one or more justices to the Supreme Court.
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said during a press conference Tuesday before the AP projected the GOP would retain its majority that he’s been talking with fellow GOP lawmakers for months, setting up a plan for unified control of government, though he declined to share specifics.
“Over the past year, I’ve been working with our committee chairs and our Senate colleagues to lay the groundwork for this America first agenda,” Johnson said. “It will grow our economy and reduce inflation. It will secure our borders. We will restore America’s energy dominance once again. We’ll implement educational freedom and we will drain the swamp. And that’s just the beginning of the agenda.”
The AP projected Republicans would hold 53 Senate seats after flipping Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia’s seats from blue to red. There was, however, an extremely small chance the Keystone State could shift back to Democrats.
Incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey had yet to concede Pennsylvania’s Senate race to Republican Dave McCormick, and the contest was heading to a recount.
Who ultimately wins the outstanding races will determine how often GOP leaders need to rely on Democrats for votes during the next two years and how often they can go at it alone.
Republicans in the House faced hurdles during the last two years when they tried to move bills through that chamber without Democratic support, mostly due to strong differences of opinion between centrist and far-right members of the GOP Conference.
That isn’t likely to change during the next Congress, especially with Republicans on track to continue their razor-thin House majority.
Tax cuts a priority
GOP lawmakers are likely to use unified control of Congress to address core aspects of their 2017 tax law that are set to expire or have already done so and make significant changes to the country’s health insurance marketplace, namely by overhauling the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
Leaders will likely use the complicated budget reconciliation process for those tasks, and possibly others, getting them around the Senate’s 60-vote legislative filibuster and ensuring they won’t need Democratic support.
Republicans will also need to keep up with the annual to-do list in Congress, including drafting the dozen annual government funding bills and the yearly defense policy bill known as the National Defense Authorization Act.
Republicans, who regularly campaign on the annual deficit and cumulative national debt, must figure out a way to raise or suspend the country’s debt limit, which is set to expire on Jan. 1.
They’ll have a few months of what are known as “extraordinary measures” for the debt limit while they hash out an agreement, but need to reach some sort of deal if they want to avoid defaulting on the country’s debts for the first time in history and starting a global financial crisis.
Johnson is on track to remain at the helm in the House after aiding the party in keeping the majority, though he’ll need to go through the formality of a floor vote in January.
The two GOP leaders, as well as committees with jurisdiction, will embark on a two-year sprint to address as much as they can before voters head to the polls again in November 2026, possibly changing the balance of power once again.
Voters mark their ballots on Nov. 5, 2024 in Tryon, North Carolina. (Photo by Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Despite more Latino men shifting more Republican, a majority continued to vote Democratic in 2024, new polling released Tuesday reveals.
The findings from the 2024 American Electorate Voter Poll came a week after the historic presidential race in which Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris to win his second White House term. Both heavily targeted Latino voters throughout their campaigns.
“The national exit polls are wrong about Latinos in general and Latino men in particular,” said Matt Barreto, co-founder of Barreto-Segura Partners Research, during a Tuesday media briefing on the poll’s findings.
Among voters in the poll, 56% of Latino men said they voted for Harris, compared to 43% who selected Trump.
Roughly two-thirds of Latino women voters voted for Harris, while about one-third chose Trump.
Some exit polls, in contrast, emphasized the movement of Latino voters toward Trump.
Data scientists and polling experts at Barreto-Segura Partners Research, the African American Research Collaborative and Harvard University conducted the survey, which several national organizations sponsored.
Battleground states
Between Oct. 18 and Nov. 4, the survey targeted more than 9,000 Latino, Black, Native American, Asian American and white voters in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The survey also provided additional data for California, Florida and Texas, given the large share of minority voters in those three states.
“We’re extremely confident that our sample is accurate, that it is an accurate portrait of Latino men and Latino women, and that it is balanced to match their demographics, and that it was available in Spanish at every stopping of the survey,” added Barreto, who was a pollster and adviser to the Harris campaign.
“Young voters in particular of every racial and ethnic group shifted to be more Republican as compared to 2020 — this was not driven by any individual particular racial group, but all young voters shifted compared to 2020,” he added.
A shift of all groups towards the GOP
Henry Fernandez, CEO of the African American Research Collaborative, said “this election was not about one group moving towards the Republican Party, but instead a shift of virtually every group towards the GOP by relatively small but consistent margins, largely due to concerns about the cost of living.”
“While voters of color voted majority for Harris and white voters, majority for Trump, this shift towards the GOP occurred across almost all groups, even those like younger voters that the Democratic Party has relied on for its future success,” Fernandez said.
He added that “this weakening of support for Democrats occurred even as key issues championed by Democrats did extremely well, both in ballot initiatives across the country and in our poll.”
Among all Latino voters, more than 6 in 10 said they voted for Harris, compared to a little over one-third who chose Trump.
Meanwhile, more than half of all Latino voters felt that Democrats would do a better job at addressing the issue most important to them, compared to about one-third who felt Republicans would.
Inflation, health care cited
Across all racial and ethnic groups of voters surveyed, inflation, health care costs and jobs and the economy proved to be the most important issues.
Abortion and reproductive rights also proved to be an important issue for voters across all groups, followed by housing costs and affordability and immigration reform for immigrants already in the United States.
Roughly three quarters of voters across racial and ethnic groups were in support of a federal law that would “guarantee access to abortion and give women control over their own private medical decisions.”
The majority of Black, Latino, Native American and Asian American voters also expressed worry about Project 2025 — a sweeping conservative agenda from the Heritage Foundation.
Trump has sought to distance himself from the platform, though some former members of his administration helped write it.
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.
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.
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.
U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin (Screenshot | Democratic National Convention YouTube channel)
Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin has won a third term, defeating Republican California bank owner and part-time Wisconsin resident Eric Hovde in a contest characterized by relentless attacks on the part of both candidates.
With 99% of the ballots counted, Baldwin won with 49.4% of the vote and a margin of just under 30,000 votes, less than 1 percentage point ahead of Hovde, who finished with 48.5%. The Associated Press called the race for Baldwin at 12:42 p.m. Wednesday.
Baldwin declared victory eight hours earlier. “It is clear that the voters have spoken and our campaign has won,” she said in a statement released at 4:30 a.m. Wednesday.
Baldwin built on a continuing track record of success across Wisconsin, including carrying counties generally dominated by Republicans. In this year’s campaign, she also became the first statewide Democratic candidate to receive the endorsement of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau.
Tuesday’s election concluded a grueling campaign dominated by attacks in which Baldwin started with a lead of about 7 percentage points that dwindled in the final months.
Democrats early on painted Hovde, who was raised in Madison, as a California carpetbagger, pointing to his ownership of a bank based in Orange County and a multimillion-dollar mansion in Laguna Beach. Team Baldwin also highlighted numerous past statements from Hovde that they portrayed as denigrating nursing home residents, college students and farmers, among others.
Hovde, meanwhile, characterized Baldwin as a career politician with little to show for her two terms in the Senate and a tenure that included more than a decade in Congress and before that in the Wisconsin Assembly and the Dane County Board.
Baldwin was also likely helped by one of her core messages, focusing on reproductive rights in the post-Roe era. Baldwin has authored a bill to codify federal protections for abortion. Her campaign highlighted Hovde’s past anti-abortion statements and his championing the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ended the federal right to abortion that had been declared in the landmark decision Roe v. Wade.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) speaks to reporters on the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building following a vote on July 25, 2024 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images)
U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden declared victory early Wednesday in the race for Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District seat, saying he defeated Democratic challenger Rebecca Cooke in his quest for a second term.
With 99% of the ballots in the district counted, Van Orden led with 51.4% of the vote to 48.6% for Cooke. The Associated Press called the race at 11:10 a.m. Wednesday.
“I’m truly thankful and humbled the people of Wisconsin’s Third Congressional District decided to send me back to Congress so I can continue my bipartisan work for western Wisconsin,” Van Orden said in a statement released early Wednesday.
Van Orden, a former Navy SEAL, campaigned on the two main Republican focuses of the election, immigration and inflation, while also touting his service on the House agriculture committee in the largely rural district that covers much of western Wisconsin. At a campaign stop in October, he asked if voters of the district are better off than they were four years ago when President Joe Biden was elected while saying he was focused on making policy “where the rubber meets the road” for the district’s farmers and residents.
In his victory statement, Van Orden said he would “continue our work to ensure we are putting an end to the southern border crisis so the scourge of the fentanyl crisis no longer affects our communities or criminals aren’t allowed to wreak havoc on our families.”
While Cooke carried the district’s three urban counties, La Crosse, Eau Claire and Portage, Van Orden racked up sufficient majorities in the remaining counties to gain an advantage of about 10,000 votes over Cooke.
The purple district has now re-elected its incumbent representative in every election since Democrat Ron Kind took office in 1996. Van Orden’s win comes despite heavy Democratic spending in the race after local Democrats blamed a lack of national support on Van Orden’s defeat of state Sen. Brad Pfaff (D-Onalaska) in 2022. Democrats have now lost to Van Orden in back-to-back elections despite frequently highlighting perceived character flaws of Van Orden due to a number of public and headline-making outbursts.
Both candidates ran campaigns that sought to claim the title of “political outsider.” While Cooke ran a campaign that attempted to paint herself as a moderate, Van Orden won re-election despite his attendance at the rally that led to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
This report has been updated with AP’s final call of the race.
Wisconsin Rep. Bryan Steil | Screenshot via C-SPAN
Republican U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil won a fourth term Tuesday night in Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District, defeating Democrat Peter Barca’s attempt to recapture the seat Barca lost three decades ago.
Steil’s victory kept the 1st District seat in GOP hands for another term after three decades of Republican control that began when Barca himself lost reelection in a 1994 Republican wave that flipped the U.S. House that year.
With 76% of the votes counted, Steil cleared 55% of the vote to Barca’s 42%, according to unofficial election results. The Associated Press called the race at 11:07 p.m.
Steil’s campaign emphasized the inflation sparked by supply chain clogs during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Republican’s messaging attributed inflation solely to the legislative agenda of President Joe Biden — sweeping bills for pandemic relief, infrastructure repair, high-tech industrial policy and more.
The Democratic campaign focused heavily on Steil’s votes against those measures, including his ‘no’ vote on the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The legislation included provisions to address climate change as well as provisions to rein in prescription drug costs for Medicare patients.
The message, however, proved inadequate in countering Steil’s advantages, both incumbency and a campaign war chest that was nearly three times the size of Barca’s.
Steil also in the last year has focused on immigration, picking up on a Republican theme that blamed the Democrats for a surge in migrants at the southern border of the U.S.
Barca countered by hammering Steil and the congressional Republicans generally for not taking up an immigration bill that the White House had negotiated with a small group of conservative Republican senators. The bill foundered after former President Donald Trump called in GOP lawmakers to kill it and preserve immigration as an issue in his presidential campaign.
Former gas station owner Tony Wied, who is running for Congress, with former President Donald Trump. (Screenshot via Tony Wied for Congress Facebook)
Republican businessman Tony Wied has defeated Democrat OB-GYN Kristin Lyerly in the race for Wisconsin’s 8th Congressional District.
The seat was open this year after U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher, who was first elected in 2016, resigned from Congress in April. Wied also won the special election, which happened concurrently with the general election to fill out the rest of the two-year term left open by Gallagher’s departure.
Wied had 60% of the vote to 39% for Lyerly, with 63% of the ballots counted, according to the Associated Press, which called the race at 10:54 p.m.
Less than an hour before AP called the race, Wied claimed victory in a triumphant speech at the Legacy Hotel in Green Bay, Wisconsin, not far from Lambeau Field.
“Tonight, the voters of District 8 sent a very clear message,” he told a crowd of supporters. “They’re ready to bring common sense back to Washington.”
He thanked his voters “for trusting me with this office” and promised to work for each one of them.
“And I spent my life raising my family and running our businesses right here in the district,” Wied said. “My wife and I are private people. But I could no longer stand by and watch the continuing dysfunction.”
Wied’s race against Lyerly tested the power of reproductive rights against an endorsement from former President Donald Trump, and Tuesday night Wied thanked the Republican presidential candidate, calling Trump’s support for Wied’s campaign “second to none.”
Democratic candidate for Congress Dr. Kristin Lyerly, center, with supporters at a watch party Tuesday evening in Green Bay. (Andrew Kennard | Wisconsin Examiner)
Before the race was called, Lyerly said at a Brown County election watch party that regardless of the election outcome, the campaign had built a foundation with volunteers “who have pitched in to help us that we can build on for years to come.”
Lyerly said she believed her campaign was “changing the converasation” around reproductive rights, and shared a story about a restaurant server who had confided in her and “was grateful for the work that I was doing.”
This will be Wied’s first time holding public office. The Republican-leaning northeast district covers the city of Green Bay and the rest of surrounding Brown County as well as Marinette, Oconto, Menonominee, Shawano, Waupaca, Outagamie, Calumet counties and part of Winnebago County.
Wied, who previously owned Dino Stop, a Green Bay-based gas and convenience store chain, won a three-way primary with Trump’s endorsement and leaned heavily on the Trump during his campaign.
While Lyerly sought to center reproductive health issues, Wied focused on economic issues, including taxes and immigration. He highlighted his support for lowering taxes and said he wants to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts which Democrats have complained unfairly benefited the rich. He has also said that government spending has led to inflation and he wants to work to decrease it.
Wied also highlighted his support for finishing Trump’s border wall and reimplementing the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which requires migrants seeking asylum to remain in Mexico until their U.S. immigration court date.
Signs posted inside the Wisconsin State Capitol during debate over redrawing the state's voting maps. The new maps, which created many more competitive legislative voting districts, are in use for the first time for the 2024 election.| Wisconsin Examiner photo.
Wisconsin Examiner reporters are posting live updates here throughout Election Day from polling places, victory parties and on the ground throughout the state. Check back for the latest election news.
Wisconsin elections administrator calls 2024 election a ‘great success’
By: Henry Redman- Tuesday November 5, 2024 11:12 pm
Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe at a press conference on Election Day | Screenshot via Zoom
Wisconsin’s election on Tuesday was a “great success,” according to Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe. At a news conference Tuesday night, Wolfe said that outside of bomb threats to polling places that were deemed non-credible, a few bits of disinformation posted online and an incident in Milwaukee that was quickly and transparently resolved, the election went smoothly. At Milwaukee’s central count location where city election officials were processing and tabulating absentee ballots, election observers noticed that the panels on the tabulating machines that cover the USB ports through which results are downloaded no longer had their tamper-proof seals keeping them closed. Election officials determined that the panels hadn’t been locked and “out of an abundance of caution” decided to restart the tabulating process.
Wolfe said every decision about the process was up to Milwaukee officials but that “no equipment malfunctioned, no ballots were compromised, and every step of the process was completed in the public eye by election inspectors from both the Republican and Democratic parties and under the watch of Republican and Democratic observers.”
Also at central count, a prominent election denier who has frequently spread baseless and nonsensical accusations about the state’s election system was posting on social media that Milwaukee election officials were allowing the acceptance of absentee ballots without the required witness signature. That never happened.
Wolfe also debunked videos circulated online that purported to show supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump fighting at a Wisconsin polling place. She said it was clearly disinformation and didn’t take place at an actual Wisconsin poll site.“[It] really serves as an important reminder to just be aware of these disinformation efforts that are ongoing, and to really think critically about the information about elections that you consume,” she said. “Certainly think before sharing information about elections.”
Earlier in the day, the FBI had reported that bomb threats had been made against polling sites in a number of states, including poll locations in Madison. Law enforcement officials deemed the threats non-credible. “At no point today was there an active or credible threat to a polling location that we’re aware of,” Wolfe said.
3 weeks ago
Milwaukee Elections Commission director says every ballot counted accurately
Milwaukee Elections Commission Executive Director Paulina Gutierrez addresses news media on election night. | Photo by Henry Redman
Milwaukee Central Count has processed and tabulated more than 80,000 absentee ballots out of the the more than 107,000 cast, Milwaukee Elections Commission Executive Director Paulina Gutierrez said at a news conference shortly after 9:30. Asked about U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson’s questions about the incident which caused the city to restart counting ballots, Gutierrez said it’s impossible to meet Johnson’s request to compare the exact tally of the more than 30,000 votes that had to be re-run through the machines before and after the recount, because votes are broken down by ward, not by total tally, but that every vote will have been tracked and a chain of custody will be publicly available.
“At the end of the day, every ballot that was here that was legitimate was counted and was counted accurately,” she said. “It was tracked, there is a paper trail, there is a chain of custody, and we are going to get this done.”
Johnson had also criticized the error, in which the sealed panels on voting machines became unsealed, as “sloppy.” Gutierrez countered that, saying a bipartisan decision was made to correct a human error transparently. “We have an extensive chain of custody, we have checks and balances, this is a bipartisan team,” she said. “The observers also play a big role. We have things here that we’re tracking, and this is, this is all of our community’s, City of Milwaukee residents, Democrats and Republicans, and we’re doing this together, and when we saw an issue that was brought to our attention, we reacted swiftly and we acted transparently. So there has been nothing to hide here. Everything is here and tracked. This is not sloppy. This is how we do things, to make sure that things are transparent.”
Last updated: 10:27 pm
3 weeks ago
Milwaukee Mayor: ballot recount ‘an issue that we’ve taken seriously’
Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson talks to reporters at the City of Milwaukee central count facility, (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson arrived at the city’s central count location shortly after U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson wrapped a live TV interview with Fox News from the convention center hall in which he called the error that caused about 30,000 absentee ballots to be recounted a “sloppy” error.
The senator has also been asking city election officials for the exact vote tally of the ballots that had to be recounted to make sure the vote total matches the second time. Officials have said, however, that an exact number doesn’t exist because the vote tallies aren’t tabulated until election workers are done feeding all the ballots into the machines.
The mayor said that it was “an issue that was caught, an issue that was addressed and an issue that we’ve taken seriously” before pointing out the Republicans in the state Senate had killed a bill that would have allowed the city to begin processing ballots on Monday.
“Folks want to have this as a wedge issue,” the mayor said, adding that Milwaukee’s elections are run with the “highest level” of integrity and transparency.
Election workers at central count have now processed and tabulated more than 63,000 votes, meaning it has made up for and doubled the total count from when the process had to be restarted.
Last updated: 9:10 pm
3 weeks ago
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson arrives to question Milwaukee election officials
Sen. Ron Johnson and Wisconsin GOP Chair Brian Schimming | Photo by Henry Redman
Updated: At Milwaukee’s central count location, where election workers had to recount more than 30,000 absentee ballots “out of an abundance of caution” because stickers sealing the panels protecting the USB slots on voting machines became unstuck, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson and Republican Party of Wisconsin Chair Brian Schimming questioned Milwaukee Elections Commission Executive Director Paulina Gutierrez about the incident. “We’ve got a lot of questions,” Johnson said, asking about the chain of custody on the security footage of the machines and if the Republican party would be able to test if the votes tallied would match after the ballots were recounted. “My concern is I want to know how it opened up.”
Gutierrez said she’s not the commission’s public records staff but everything would be available and that Republican Party attorneys can request everything they need. “We have nothing to hide, request all the records you want,” she said. “We run safe, secure and fair elections,” before telling the pair they could “knock themselves out” and go look at voting machines on their own as election observers. “Let’s go knock ourselves out,” Johnson said before walking to the machines.
Wisconsin Elections Commissioner Robert Spindell arrives at Milwaukee Central Count with Sen. Ron Johnson (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
Schimming, along with Wisconsin Elections Commissioner Robert Spindell, who also arrived to inspect Central Count, were involved in planning the fake electors scheme, in which Wisconsin Republicans cast fraudulent Electoral College ballots for Donald Trump after President Joe Biden won the 2020 election in Wisconsin.
As part of a legal settlement, Wisconsin’s fake electors agreed not to serve as Trump electors in 2024.
Johnson’s Senate office was involved in attempting to transfer Wisconsin’s fake Electoral College ballots for Trump to Vice President Mike Pence, whom Trump pressured to help him overturn Biden’s 2020 victory.
Last updated: 8:57 pm
3 weeks ago
Green Bay counts ballots at its central count facility, responds to concerns
At a press conference around 2:30 p.m., Green Bay City Clerk Celestine Jeffreys said workers at the city’s central count site will keep counting until all of the ballots are tabulated.
Green Bay’s central count site, where absentee ballots are consolidated and tabulated. (Andrew Kennard | Wisconsin Examiner)
“We will keep counting! And we will eat pizza,” Jeffreys said at a press conference this afternoon. “And eat delicious baked goods from one of our local bakeries. And drink coffee.”
Absentee ballots cast by city residents, including in early voting, are consolidated for counting at the central count facility in City Hall. At the end of the day Monday, the city reported having received 20,154 absentee ballots, 40% of the 51,630 registered voters in the city, as of Nov. 1 statistics from the Wisconsin Election Commission’s website.
As of about 4:00 p.m. Tuesday, 3,194 absentee ballots have been counted, the city of Green Bay reported on Facebook.
There have been problems with machines, Jeffreys said. If a machine is not functioning, ballots that were not able to go into the machine are placed in an auxiliary bin.
Asked if there have been complaints of electioneering or inappropriate behavior at the polls, Jeffreys said she received concerns from voters about the closeness of an observer at one location and the closeness of a poll worker at another location. Both voters were concerned about the secrecy of their ballot. Jeffreys said she addressed the issues with chief inspectors.
Jeffreys also said she deferred to the parks and police departments to handle certain complaints as those agencies felt were appropriate “given our guidelines and our access to public spaces.”
“So, there was a gathering over at Joannes Park,” Jeffreys said. “That has nothing to do with my office. There was a DJ who was playing music. That has nothing to do with my office.”
Jennifer Gonzalez, communications coordinator at the Green Bay Police Department, told the Examiner that the gathering at the park was reported due to a political signage. She said the signage was not considered electioneering and did not violate any other laws, so no enforcement action was taken.
Gonzalez said she was told the DJ was playing music near a polling site, and the volume had caused some concern. The person was cooperative and left, she was told.
Central Count in Milwaukee. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
Updated: Milwaukee Central Count is restarting its count of absentee ballots after the doors on its tabulation machines were mistakenly left open. According to CBS News reporter Katrina Kaufman, Wisconsin Elections Commission Chair Ann Jacobs said the recount is being done for transparency and so “people can have confidence in the results.”
A.J. Bayatpour of CBS 58 in Milwaukee reports that Milwaukee’s Republican Party Chair Hilario Deleon told CBS reporter Tajma Hall that he doesn’t think anything “nefarious” happened.
Jeff Flemming, spokesperson for the City of Milwaukee, said that votes are being re-counted at Milwaukee’s Central Count “out of an abundance of caution. “Roughly 31,000 ballots are being re-run to correct an error where 13 voting machines were not “fully sealed” due to human error, Flemming said. The development comes as Milwaukee County continues to count ballots, and residents continue heading to the polls. “It is going to extend the time that we will get the totals here,” said Flemming.
Jacobs, chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, has continued to provide updates from Central Count in Milwaukee, from the website X, formerly known as Twitter. “Following up on this from Milwaukee,” Jacobs wrote on Twitter. “Before re-scanning, the tabulators are zeroed out – meaning they show no ballots in the tally. ALSO – and importantly – NOBODY knows how the originally scanned ballots were voted. No results were available or created.”Jacobs went onto post, “so like everyone else, we all must wait until tabulation (and re-tabulation) is complete early tomorrow to know Milwaukee’s vote totals! This is as it should be and is the correct process.”
Last updated: 6:48 pm
3 weeks ago
Wisconsin voters face long lines, but have few problems, Common Cause reports
On a national election protection update for reporters Tuesday afternoon, there were reports of long lines in several states and what turned out to be false bomb threats in Georgia.
In Wisconsin there have been long lines as well, said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, one of the call’s panelists, but except for a glitch at the Milwaukee Central Count requiring 30,000 ballots to be retabulated, “we have not seen anything out of the ordinary.”
Jay Heck, Common Cause Wisconsin
Heck observed that nearly half of Wisconsin voters voted early this year, while about 1.7 million were expected to vote in person on Tuesday. Until 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic increased the interest in absentee and early voting, Wisconsin voters have in the past “preferred to vote on election day.”
“The big issue, for most people, has been… long lines,” Heck said, with the heaviest traffic when polls opened at 7 a.m., over the lunch hour and more expected in the evening before the polls close at 8 p.m.
The longest lines have been reported on college campuses, particularly for same-day voter registration, Heck said.
One notable change has been “that there are many more partisan election observers, not only at polling places but in central count locations” where absentee ballots are sent to be counted. Milwaukee and Green Bay are among the Wisconsin communities using central count sites.
Heck said he had received reports of some 50 Republican observers at the Milwaukee central count site, along with 10 or 11 Democratic observers. There are also nonpartisan observers from organizations such as Common Cause.
Last updated: 6:06 pm
3 weeks ago
UW-Madison first-time voters register and observe voting at Memorial Union
UW-Madison students vote. | Photo by Baylor Spears
“Our ward is basically all freshman dorms, so a lot of people registering, a ton of first-time voters, however, this is definitely the biggest volume of Election Day registrations in one morning that I have seen here,” said Izzie Behl, chief inspector officer at the polling location inside the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Union. Behl has worked as an election official for the last three years. By 2 p.m. 522 people had voted at the location.
Eric Sanderson, a UW-Madison freshman from Virginia, was one of those first-time voters. He said he decided to vote in Wisconsin because he figured it would be easier than mailing in his ballot. He said he had to call and ask on Tuesday morning for information about voting, but it was a “pretty easy, streamlined” process. He said he voted for Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats down the ballot because he thinks it will be better for the environment and women’s rights, and because of Trump’s age.“Trump’s really old,” Sanderson said. “I’d like a president that’s not at risk of, like, going senile during the presidential term.” He said the debate between Trump and Harris affirmed his decision. “A lot of that was just looking at which of them had their head in it more, and were not saying weird, f*cked up things,” Sanderson said.
Grace LeClaire, a UW-Madison freshman, voted early for Harris and U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin on Friday but was at the polling location to observe the voting process with her anthropology class | Photo by Baylor Spears
Grace LeClaire, a freshman and Madison-native, voted early for Harris and U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin on Friday but was at the polling location to observe the voting process with her anthropology class. LeClaire said she is pro-choice and supports reproductive rights.“This is my first presidential election and that’s the case for a lot of people in my class, so it’s really cool to see democracy in action,” LeClaire said.
Across the street from Memorial Union on Library Mall, UW-Madison College Democrats were standing in the rain encouraging students to vote. “I’m noticing a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of excitement. Students have either voted early, which is great, or they have a plan to vote or we’re helping them get that plan to vote,” Chair Joseph Wendtland said. “We’re answering questions about… what kind of ID do I need? What kind of proof of residence?”
UW-Madison College Democrats Chair Joseph Wendtland on Library Mall. | Photo by Baylor Spears
Wendtland said he is hearing a lot of enthusiasm for Harris in particular. For his part, he said he voted for Harris on the first day of early voting after a rally held by former President Barack Obama and vice presidential candidate and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Wendtland noted that others had come out to help on Tuesday including University of Chicago College Democrats, who were helping to knock doors, state Sen. Kelda Roys, who came to help put up their tents at 7 a.m., Wisconsin High School Democrats and Tennessee state lawmaker Justin Jones. “It’s really all hands on deck right now,” Wendtland said.
Students wait in line to vote at UW-Whitewater | Photo by Henry Redman
At UW-Whitewater’s on campus polling site, the line for students waiting to register to vote or update their address stretched to more than 4.5 hours at around 5 p.m. Orion Smith, who works with the university’s student government, told the Wisconsin Examiner the line had stretched for hours since about 9 a.m.
The line for student voters who didn’t need to update their registration was only about 20 minutes, Smith said. Outside of the University Center where voting was taking place, a group of Democratic students were encouraging their classmates to vote. Peter Johanneson, a 20-year-old junior, says it feels like students on campus are excited to vote for Democrats, including state Assembly candidate Brienne Brown — who Johanneson says made her presence felt on campus during the campaign. Audrey Hameister, also a 20-year-old junior, says she’s optimistic about the results for Democrats on Tuesday and that she believes a majority of student voters are supporting the Democratic ticket, especially since Vice President Kamala Harris became the party’s nominee.
3 weeks ago
Volunteers redirect Milwaukee voters arriving at now-closed early voting locations
UW-Milwaukee students who reside in the university’s Sandburg Hall streamed into the UWM Lubar Entrepreneurship Center Tuesday afternoon to cast their ballots. Around 3 p.m., Poll Chief Kelly Conaty told Wisconsin Examiner that 812 ballots had already been cast. Conaty said that the polling site, which handles two separate voting wards, had seen no problems of any kind all day. Still, Conaty said that many students arriving to vote are needing to register before getting into the ballot line.
“We’re registering a lot of people,” said Conaty, adding that this is not uncommon for the college. As Conaty spoke to Wisconsin Examiner, a line of about 40 students lined up near the front door. Down the street, a modest tent of volunteers were also hard at work making sure students and adults alike know where they need to go.
Members of the non-profit group Super Market Legends said they noticed a trend of people arriving at locations that had been open for early voting, but are no longer active on Election Day. While they explained the situation to the Wisconsin Examiner, four students walked up at different times to the nearby Zelazo Center, which had been an early voting location. The volunteers at the tent made sure that the students knew where to go. So far this voting season, the volunteers said they have redirected hundreds of Milwaukeeans to the correct voting places after they’ve arrived at now closed early voting locations.
UW-Milwaukee students are directed to different polling sites according to their residential halls. Students at Sandburg Hall go to the UWM Lubar Entrepreneurship Center, which is across the street from the campus on Kenwood Blvd. Riverview Hall students go to the Gordon Park Pavilion on Humbold Blvd, while students in the Kenilworth Square Apartments go to the Charles Allis Art Museum on Prospect Avenue. students in the Cambridge Commons go to the Urban Ecology Center on East Park Place.
The Kenosha Police Department is reporting minimal disruptions or calls for service to polling places so far on Election Day. A Kenosha PD spokesperson, Lt. Joshua Hecker, shared two summaries of police calls to polling places on Tuesday. At 7:01 a.m., police responded to the Senior Citizens Center for “a person playing music in a City owned parking lot.” The DJ was one of Wisconsin’s contingent from DJs at the Polls, which has over 100 members across Wisconsin. KPD’s summary describes the group as “a nationwide network of non-political DJ’s playing music to spice up election day.”
While the DJ’s actions were not overtly political, the department noted that the DJ was playing music over 100 feet from the main entrance. “City poll supervisors deemed the music to be a disturbance and due to the fact they were in a city lot, Officers asked them to shut it down and leave, which they did.”
The second call came in around 10:33 a.m. Officers responded to the Prayer Assembly House for “a man being disorderly over voter ID.” The report summary states that a middle-aged man was there with his 93-year-old mother, who did not have a current ID. When poll workers said that her ID was not valid, her son “became argumentative with poll staff and refused to leave.” The summary states that the man was also argumentative with officers, “and made bad faith arguments about police denying his elderly mother her rights and asked if we were proud of ourselves,” the summary states. The man wanted poll supervisors to answer his questions, which they hesitated to do because he was also allegedly recording them. Eventually when the poll workers said that a passport would be enough, the man went home, got a passport, and he and his 93-year-old mother were allowed to vote “after he threw it [the passport] at poll workers and cussed them out,” the summary stated. No arrests were made during this incident.
3 weeks ago
Fort Atkinson Dems turn out for Evers, Baldwin and new maps
U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Gov. Tony Evers address a group of about three dozen members of the Jefferson County Democratic Party on Election Day. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
In Fort Atkinson, more than three dozen members of the Jefferson County Democratic Party — as well as a few joining from the neighboring Dodge and Walworth counties — packed into the small county party office to welcome U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Gov. Tony Evers before kicking off some last minute canvassing.
Full of excitement at the prospect of electing Democrats Melissa Ratcliff and Joan Fitzgerald to its seats in the state Senate and Assembly (both in attendance at the event) after years of Republican representation under the old legislative maps, the Democrats from a rural county nearly mid-way between the urban centers of Madison and Milwaukee said they were expecting wins on Tuesday.
“I think our country has weathered the storm, and grown in the process,” Fort Atkinson Democrat Jim Marousis says. See more.
Last updated: 3:52 pm
3 weeks ago
Video: Sun Prairie, Wis. election official on why she does this work
VIDEO: Cindy Melendy – Election Officer at United methodist church in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin explains the ballot counting process and how the public can view it. She says that this election feels different because so many more people are coming out to vote and adds “it’s nice to feel part of process.”
3 weeks ago
Voters in western Wisconsin weigh in on Van Orden, Cooke race
Polling place in Independence, Wis. | Photo by Frank Zufall
Voters in Independence, Wisconsin — in the western part of the state encompassed by the 3rd Congressional District — are choosing between incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden and his Democratic challenger Rebecca Cooke.
Andrea Brandt voted for Cooke. She didn’t like Van Orden’s participation in Jan 6 pro-Trump rally protesting the 2020 election results in Washington, DC. “I don’t care for him,” she said.
Mary Bragger chose Van Orden. “It’s not one issue for me. I vote Republican because they tend to be more conservative and that is the way I lean.”
In Eau Claire, also part of the 3rd CD, Amanda Krueger, 26, voted for Cooke. “I know her personally. she’s a hard worker and she’s ambitious and she represents my needs and wants. Krueger said the critical issue was “Women’s rights ” and “the right to choose.”
Aaron Shaw also said he voted for Cooke because he didn’t like the “slander techniques used against her.”
Mary, who didn’t want to use her last name voted for Van Orden, but she voted for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, she said, even though she is opposed to abortion. After ticking Harris for president she voted mostly Republican dowballot as her way of balancing her concern. She had no issues with Van Orden and didn’t hold it against him that he went to the Jan 6, 2020 protest in Washington, DC, because he left before the violence started.
Did you know that if you’re living unhoused in Wisconsin, you can still vote?
The Wisconsin Elections Commission provides a voter guide for people who don’t have stable housing, or are living on the street.
In Milwaukee County, hundreds of people live without housing on the street, in vehicles, and in county and city shelters.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission states that anyone 18 years or older, who is not otherwise disqualified from voting, may do so in Wisconsin. Unhoused residents may designate a fixed location for their residence to vote, as long as it’s an identifiable location in the state of Wisconsin which could “conceivably serve as a temporary residence,” a voter guide from the Elections Commission states.
If you’re living in a shelter, you can claim the shelter as your residence for voting purposes, unless that shelter has any restrictions against doing that.
Proof of residency can be achieved by showing a document such as a letter from a shelter, or from a private or public social service organization which provides services to unhoused residents. The document must identify the individual and describe the location where they are living. Make sure the letter or document is also signed by a person affiliated with a social service organization.
People who are living unhoused but want to vote may contact the Wisconsin Elections Commission help desk at 608-261-2028 or email elections@wi.gov with any questions.
Last updated: 3:18 pm
3 weeks ago
DJ Reggie ‘Smooth Az Butta’ brings music to the polls
DJ Reggie “Smooth Az Butta” Brown at the polls in Milwaukee. | Photo by Isiah Holmes
Like many Wisconsin voters, Reggie “Smooth Az Butta” Brown chose to vote early this year. “I had to get that early vote in,” the Milwaukee radio personality told Wisconsin Examiner. “Made me feel good, too.”
For nearly 30 years, Brown has been a household voice and name in Milwaukee, especially for Black and brown communities.
Earlier this year, Brown was laid off from iHeartMedia and V100 radio. On Tuesday morning, Brown set up his DJ station and table outside Washington High School, in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood. Starting at ince 6:30 a.m. he joined a group of 20 people serving as “DJs at the Polls,” a nationwide organization with 180 members in Wisconsin alone.
One of the other DJs, a friend of Brown’s, was stationed at Rufus King High School in Milwaukee, which is actually closer to where Brown lives. Later today, Brown will head down to the suburban city of Greenfield to play music and lift spirits as people cast their ballots.
Brown said that although it seemed slow at Washington High School, voting had been proceeding steadily all morning. He needed to keep his comments non-partisan due to his affiliation with DJs at the Polls, he said, but Brown did speak to the issues on his mind when he voted.
“All the women’s issues,” said Brown. “I have sisters, I have a daughter, all those issues. Cheaper groceries, you know. I want somebody in there that’s going to do good for the nation,” Brown said. “We’re Americans, so let’s live it right. Let’s do it right.”
Sun Prairie, Wis. polling place | Photo by Henry Redman
In Sun Prairie, which traditionally sees incredibly high turnout in presidential elections, the polling place at city hall opened with a “steady stream” of voters all morning, according to chief inspector Greg Hovel.
Around 11:30, the lunchtime rush was just beginning and a team of seven poll workers used a second tabulator to process the 1,639 absentee ballots cast in the precinct. The team had already gotten about 1,000 of those ballots processed and tabulated.
Hovel said there had been no hiccups despite having five new poll workers to get up to speed with the early morning line waiting and that the poll has seen a number of new voter registrations.
Last updated: 2:07 pm
3 weeks ago
UW-Madison students arrive at polls on campus Tuesday
UW-Madison students line up to vote. | Photo by Baylor Spears
Voting was running smoothly for University of Wisconsin-Madison students at a polling location inside of Gordon Dining and Event Center on Tuesday morning. At 11:22 pm, about 622 voters had already cast their ballots.
Sam Schwalbach, a freshman from Hudson in the western part of Wisconsin, said he voted for Trump. | Photo by Baylor Spears
College students could be influential in deciding whether Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump wins Wisconsin. The last two presidential elections were decided by less than 20,000 voters. Students the Examiner spoke with said the process was smooth and also brought up an array of issues that influenced their decision.
Sam Schwalbach, a freshman from Hudson in the western part of Wisconsin, said he voted for Trump. It’s his first time voting and he said his top issues were lowering taxes and “keeping the border safe.”
“We want to keep a lot of jobs here, and we can’t do that if we’re having people come over the border illegally. I think it just makes the country not as safe as well,” Schwalbach said. “Obviously immigration is a good thing, but it’s better when it’s like legal.”
Emily Blumberg, a junior from Illinois, and Adrianna Garcia, a junior from Minnesota, are friends who ran into each other at the polls. | Photo by Baylor Spears
Emily Blumberg, a junior from Illinois, and Adrianna Garcia, a junior from Minnesota, are friends that ran into each other at the polls. They said the process was smooth. “It was a very simple process. The school made it very easy,” Blumberg said. She added that it was easy to find the polling location and that some classes were canceled to allow students to make time to vote.
Blumberg and Garcia both said they voted for Harris in the presidential election, and decided to vote in Wisconsin because of what it means to vote in a swing state. “It holds more weight here, especially like Illinois has been a blue state,” Blumberg said. “Same with Minnesota,” Garcia added. “You know that to make that difference here means a lot,” Blumberg said.
“Anything but Trump,” Garcia said in discussing why she voted for Harris. “Growing up in the household that I did, we have very strong beliefs that morals are more important than policies that could benefit the economy in anyway.”
“This is an election where human rights issues should take precedence over like preferences with whatever economic policies, not that mine would even align with his,” Blumberg said. She said that women’s rights were also important for her and that she thinks its time for the U.S. to have its first female president.
Syed Rizvi, a freshman from New York, said he cast his vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein. When President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, he said that he was initially excited because he thinks the U.S. “needs its first female president,” however he said Harris’ comments about pro-Palestinian protesters at rallies and other comments about the war in Gaza made him decide to vote third-party.
“My family has been a long-term Democratic family but I just feel like this election I wanted to vote for a candidate who represented my values, who has openly spoken against the genocide in Israel and Palestine,” Rizvi said. “I think Jill Stein is the only candidate that has openly and proudly spoken up for that, and so the moment Kamala Harris said that she would continue the weapons to Israel that is when she lost my vote.”
There are six third-party candidates on ballots in Wisconsin and Stein is seen as a potential spoiler for Harris.
Last updated: 3:23 pm
3 weeks ago
Watertown clerk expects to count ballots through early morning
Watertown, Wis. polling site | Photo by Henry Redman
In Watertown in Jefferson county, the library polling place has seen “steady” voting all morning, according to chief inspectors Kate Latin and RoxAnne Witte. The line had gotten the longest during the morning rush when voters waited about 15-20 minutes, but as of Friday, about 45% of the town’s registered voters had already cast a ballot.That high early vote means a massive amount of absentee ballots for poll workers to process and tabulate today. Witte said she anticipates it will take a long time to finish.“I’m expecting early morning,” she says of when the returns from the largely Republican community of about 20,000 people should be reported to the county.
Last updated: 1:26 pm
3 weeks ago
Police in Milwaukee area report ‘no issues’ with voting
The city police departments of Wauwatosa, West Allis, and Milwaukee are all reporting no issues so far this Election Day.
The updates, which came in just before 1 p.m., come as polling places report steady streams of voters. “We have not taken any reports of issues related to the election or poll sites today,” wrote Wauwatosa Police Department spokesperson Sgt. Abby Pavlik in an email statement to Wisconsin Examiner.
A spokesperson with the Milwaukee Police Department said they were “unaware of any major issues.”
Although many Milwaukee County residents voted early, others are still arriving at community centers, city halls, schools, libraries, and other polling sites to cast their ballots on Tuesday.
In the weeks leading up to the election, some Milwaukee-area communities experienced vandalism targeting Democratic candidate yard signs. Wauwatosa was one of them, with signs damaged across the city from the southeastern corner to the northwest.
Pavlik said that in recent days, no more reports of defaced yard signs were reported to Wauwatosa PD. “When these reports come into dispatch, we document the location and the damage to ensure a record is kept,” said Pavlik. “An officer is not automatically sent to every incident, we respond if the caller requests it.”
Last updated: 2:02 pm
3 weeks ago
Green Bay, Wis. has ‘very brisk start’ to Election Day, rotates election observers
Green Bay City Clerk Celestine Jeffreys said nine election observers are allowed at a time at Central Count, with rotations every hour. Whether they are Republican, Democrat, or other — such as someone with another party, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) or the League of Women Voters — they can watch at Central Count with rotations every hour, she said.
The city said on Facebook that 234 absentee ballots have been counted as of 10:30 a.m. At a press conference at City Hall at about 10:30 a.m., Jeffreys said the ballots must be opened and processed before they are put into the machine. As of the end of day yesterday, there were 20,154 absentee ballots returned, the city said. Absentee ballots can be returned to the clerk’s office at City Hall before 8 p.m. today.
In a press release Monday, the clerk’s office said the city would begin processing absentee ballots this morning at 7:05 a.m.“Voters should be aware that, even as some states report early voting turnout, our state does not allow pre-Election Day processing of any ballots,” the clerk’s office stated.
At the press conference this morning, Jeffreys said about 3,200 voters have gone through the polls, according to the polls that have reported in — 70% of polling locations. “A very brisk start to our Election Day here,” Jeffreys said. A couple of issues have come up. Jeffreys said a tech was sent to address an issue at Ward 41; she hasn’t heard back since and thinks everything’s fine. In a separate issue, she said she thinks a voter received a test ballot, and she’s looking into it. “I’m not sure how a test ballot got to polls, but I will be investigating that after this press conference,” she said. On Monday, Wisconsin Examiner spoke to Jennifer Gonzalez, communications coordinator at the Green Bay Police Department, about the election. She said there are no known incidents that have required a police response at that time. The Examiner reached out to Gonzalez this afternoon to request an update and is awaiting her response.
Last updated: 4:02 pm
3 weeks ago
Orderly election morning in Milwaukee as early voting cuts down on lines
Polling places In Milwaukee and surrounding suburbs did not have long lines Tuesday morning, unlike recent presidential elections, and poll workers said many voters had already cast their ballots during Wisconsin’s early voting period ahead of Election Day.
At West Allis City Hall, the chief poll worker told Wisconsin Examiner that 15,500 West Allis residents voted early. In contrast, by 9 a.m. Tuesday, 314 people had cast their ballotsacross the four voting wards covered by the city hall polling location.
By 9:30 am, the city hall in Wauwatosa had seen 375 voters. Wauwatosa also had high numbers of early voters, with poll workers telling Wisconsin Examiner that just over 60% of all registered voters in Wauwatosa voted early this year.
Standing in the middle of the room as people voted in Wauwatosa, cross armed and quiet, a man wearing an election observer sticker watched everyone who entered and exited.
Photo by Isiah Holmes
None of the poling sites Wisconsin Examiner visited in and around MIlwaukee had reported problems by late Tuesday morning, either from disruptions by citizens or with equipment failures.
In Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood, Washington High School had a steady stream of voters flowing in and out. Outside, poll workers helped an elderly woman and her two relatives register to vote at the curb, while they waited in the car, out of the on again, off again rainfall.
Both at Washington High School and the nearby Washington Park Library, poll workers loudly rejoiced each time someone came in to register as a first-time voter.
Two people who tried to register were turned away at the polling site because they did not have proof of their address. A handful of voters were directed to other polling sites since they’d arrived at the wrong location.
At Washington Park Library, the poll site’s chief told Wisconsin Examiner that he hadn’t seen so many people vote early at that location since the pandemic presidential election of 2020.
Outside the library, a Hunger Task Force mobile food pantry operated, void of any political signage, providing meals and groceries to local residents.
Just up the road at the Milwaukee Public Schools Administration Building, 457 people from two voting wards had cast ballots by 10:37 a.m. As at the other Milwaukee area sites, there had been no problems with long lines and no technical or safety concerns.
3 weeks ago
Progressive coalition leader: If Harris wins, credit students and women
If the Democratic Party does well in Wisconsin Tuesday, Greg Speed thinks students’ votes and women’s votes will be a major contributor.
Speed is the president of America Votes, an independent expenditure operation that raises money and funnels it to progressive voter engagement groups. Born in the 2004 election, America Votes works with about 80 organizations nationwide; across the states it has hundreds of coalition partners, including 60 in Wisconsin alone.
The 2020 election was unusual because the continuing COVID-19 pandemic kicked up absentee voting overall, but University of Wisconsin-Madison students who might have normally voted in the city cast their ballots back home, whether elsewhere in Wisconsin or out-of-state.
But that’s not the only reason for this year’s higher early voter turnout among Madison students, who are among the voters that America Votes coalition partners targets.
“It is evidence of a lot of work on voter registration,” Speed said — and isn’t necessarily automatic, because the state allows registration at the polls on Election Day. If it was its own city, however, the UW campus is fourth in the state in new voter registrations. (Milwaukee and Madison are the top two.)
“The fact that so many have gone ahead and registered this year prior to election day is, in and of itself, pretty significant,” Speed said.
The 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade and ending a federal abortion right remains at a top priority with the voters that canvassers in the coalition encounter.
“It’s electric — still,” said Speed. “It is the issue that in a conversation at the doors, you see a person light up when you mention abortion.”
He recalls door-to-door canvassing with environmental groups in 2022 and raising the issue of climate change “and they’d almost stop you and they’re like, ‘What about abortion rights?’”
Two years later reproductive rights have remained as potent as ever, he said. If Democrats win, “the Republican Party … they’re going to have to grapple with what they’ve [done] — hitching their wagon to Trump for as long as they have, but they’ve hitched their wagon to the anti choice movement for much longer. And it’s definitional.”
Speed predicts the issue won’t go away.
“It’s definitional like, and I think Democrats need to buckle up and double down. This is going to be the issue in ‘26 it’s going to be the issue in ‘28 that is not going away until Roe is restored.”
America Votes and its coalition partners don’t focus on traditional Republican voters, but Speed has been watching the Harris campaign’s courting of former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney and other Republicans such as the mayors of Waukesha, Wisconsin, and Mesa, Arizona. That’s “part of the path” to a Harris victory, he said.
Whether in Wisconsin, where Biden won by a little more than 20,000 votes four years ago, or Pennsylvania, where his margin of victory was about 80,000 votes, its not enough to rely on the core urban communities and students that make up so much of the Democratic base, he said.
‘”You’ve got to continue over-performing in Waukesha and Ozaukee [counties],” Speed said. “You’ve got to continue over-performing in Chester County, Pennsylvania, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. That’s those Cheney events and other things. That’s who that was aimed at — those suburban, exurban areas.”
If Harris does better than the polls showing her neck-and-neck with Trump, “it’s definitely going to be [thanks to] a lot of crossover support in suburban, you know, suburban Milwaukee, suburban Philly.”
Democratic candidate Rebecca Cooke cast her ballot in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District and took time out to chat with the Examiner’s Frank Zufall about turnout and the state of her race against Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden. “There’s no community too small or too red,” Cooke said of her campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort.
Voters enter a polling place at the Waunakee Public Library.| Photo by Henry Redman
In Waunakee, where former President Donald Trump held the Republican Party’s first campaign stop in decades in the deep blue Dane County in early October, the polling place at the local library had a line winding almost out the door at around 10:30 a.m.The poll’s chief inspector Bob Ohlsen says there have been no issues but the morning rush was incredibly busy with voters waiting about 30-40 minutes to vote.
The poll is where voters in half the city’s wards go to cast their ballot, with a large bank of four rows of voting carrels allow the process to move quickly.“People have been incredibly patient,” Ohlsen says. “It’s gonna take a while.”Two election observers representing the Democratic Party were watching voting take place, saying they’d be there all day.
Last updated: 10:49 am
3 weeks ago
Busy morning at downtown Madison, Wis. polling place
Voters cast their ballot in a polling place just blocks from the state Capitol in Madison, Wis. | Photo by Henry Redman
At a downtown Madison polling place just blocks from the state Capitol, voters from the 45th and 51st wards wound their way through an apartment building to vote in the 5th floor community center down the hall from the building’s dog run. Chief Inspector Ben Lebovitz says the location had a very busy early morning rush — causing 15-30 minute lines — that ended around 8:30.
“A lot of voting this morning, it’s gone smoothly,” he says. This polling place used to be at the Madison Municipal Building but has since been moved. Lebovitz, who has worked the polls for years, says voters have gotten used to finding where to vote. Around 8:45 a.m. poll workers began to process the around 700 absentee ballots cast in the two wards and shortly before 9:30, Lebovitz went to cast his own ballot only for it to read as unscannable by the tabulating machine.
It’s a “teachable moment” he said to poll workers as he walked them through how to document and issue a replacement ballot. Two election observers were monitoring voting at the polling place, saying it had gone smoothly all morning. One, Jonathan Fisher, is a staff member for Republican U.S. Rep. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald is a member of the House Committee on Administration, which is running an election observer program.
Spirit Lutheran Church, a polling place in Eau Claire , Wis. Photo by Frank Zufall
Spirit Lutheran Church voting site in Eau Claire was packed at 9 a.m. as voters cast ballots. Democratic U.S. congressional candidate Rebecca Cooke, who is challenging Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District, is set to speak at Spirit Lutheran at 10 a.m. today.
At a news conference Monday morning, Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe reminded the public about the absentee ballot counting process and that it will likely take hours after polls close on Tuesday before unofficial results are available.
Local election officials can’t begin processing and counting ballots until the polls open. In most communities across the state, absentee ballots are handled at the polling place where voters who used absentee ballots would have cast their ballots in person. In those places, the ballots are opened, processed and counted when poll staff can find the time in between assisting people who are voting in person.
In about 30 communities across the state, including some of the largest cities, absentee ballots are processed at central count locations, at which all of the community’s absentee ballots are sent to one location to be counted.
Central Count in Milwaukee. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
In most communities where absentees are counted at the polls, those ballots are treated like that of an in-person voter. The voter’s name is announced and confirmed in the poll book before being fed into the voting machine to be tabulated. Those results then get reported after polls close along with all of the day’s in-person votes from that precinct.
At central count locations, the absentees are kept separate and all of that work to process, confirm with the poll book and feed the ballots into machines happens there.
The central count results then get reported all at once, separate from the precincts where those votes come from, once they’ve all been counted.
Republicans in the state Senate killed a bill proposed earlier this year that would have allowed ballots to be processed, but not counted, starting on the Monday before the election. The change was proposed in the wake of Republican conspiracy theories that ballots were “dumped” in the middle of the night in Milwaukee to swing the 2020 election for President Joe Biden.
Without that proposed change, absentee ballots — especially in Milwaukee — will likely take hours to count and may not be reported until the early hours of Wednesday morning.
“Election officials are always going to prioritize accuracy, integrity and transparency over speed, and just because you’re waiting until the early morning hours doesn’t mean that anything has gone wrong, this just means that election officials, again, are prioritizing accuracy over speed in order to ensure that every legitimate ballot gets counted,” Wolfe said at the news conference. “Processing absentee ballots takes time, especially since Wisconsin is one of just a few states where poll workers and clerks can’t even begin processing absentee ballots until the polls open on Election Day.
“You may see unofficial results coming in from the individual polling places, but those don’t include the absentee numbers for these jurisdictions, because all the absentees are counted in one central facility, and when all the absentees are done being counted, then the absentees are added to their individual polling place totals,” Wolfe added. “So it doesn’t mean anything is wrong if the unofficial totals that you’re watching online or on TV increase once the absentees are added, that’s to be expected.”
More than 1.5 million people have already cast their ballots. Voters set a state record for in-person absentee voting this year, with 949,157 early votes cast. Another 645,477 absentee ballots were requested, which trails the number of mail-in votes cast in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic caused a surge in absentee voting.
Voting rights activists and others gather at the Midtown Center in Milwaukee on the first day of early voting in July 2022. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
Election observers hover around Bonnie Chang, a member of Milwaukee’s Board of Absentee Canvassers, as she reveals blank flash drives to download vote totals from tabulation machines on Aug. 13. (Matt Vasilogambros | Stateline)
Both federal and state law provide protections against voter intimidation but recent years of widespread Republican activism alleging voter fraud and calling into question the integrity of elections have raised concerns about the issue on Election Day here in Wisconsin.
The Republican Party has promised to station thousands election observers at polling places across the country. At a handful of poll locations during the August election in Glendale, Wisconsin, where there was a Democratic primary in a special election for the 4th Senate District, local officials had to call the police after observers with a history of spreading election-related conspiracy theories became disruptive. The group left after law enforcement was called, but promised to be back in November.
Local election officials are responsible for maintaining security at polling places and have received guidance from the Wisconsin Elections Commission on how to handle observers and what to do if they get unruly.
Under Wisconsin law, it is a felony to “compel, induce, or prevail upon” a voter to vote or not vote a certain way. It is also illegal for employers to prevent employees from taking time off to vote or to distribute printed material that contains “threats intended to influence the political opinions or actions of the employees.”
Additionally, state law provides that no person can “by abduction, duress, or any fraudulent device or contrivance, impede or prevent the free exercise of the franchise at an election,” or “make use of or threaten to make use of force, violence, or restraint in order to induce or compel any person to vote or refrain from voting at an election.”
Most violations of Wisconsin’s voter intimidation laws are class I felonies, which carry the punishment of a fine of up to $10,000, imprisonment for up to 3 years and 6 months, or both. Election officials convicted of voter intimidation are prohibited from acting as an election official for up to five years.
According to the Campaign Legal Center, common types of voter intimidation include:
Verbal or physical confrontation of voters by persons dressed in official-looking uniforms
Physical intimidation, such as standing or hovering close to voters as they attempt to vote
Flyers threatening jail time or other punitive action against persons who vote
Direct confrontation or questioning of voters or asking voters for documentation when none is required
Vandalism of polling places
Use of police officers to threaten or intimidate voters
Photographing or videotaping voters inside a polling place without their consent
Threats made by an employer to the job, wages, or benefits of an employee if he or she does not vote in a particular manner
Occupying the parking lot of a polling place in such a way that voters might be hindered from entering.
Election observers in Wisconsin may challenge any vote, arguing that it has been cast illegally due to ineligibility of the voter.
“Either election officials or fellow voters can challenge the qualification of a voter, but challenges should have reasonable and appropriate support,” the Campaign Legal Center said in a Wisconsin-specific guide on voter intimidation. “A voter can be challenged based on age, residency, citizenship, ability to sign the poll list or other disqualification from voting. A challenge based on an individual’s appearance, speech or inability to speak English is unacceptable. A challenger who abuses the right to challenge can be subject to sanctions.”
However a challenge only disqualifies a vote if “the municipal clerk, board of election commissioners or a challenging elector . . . demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that the person does not qualify as an elector or is not properly registered.”
Making baseless or frivolous challenges may constitute violations of the state and federal laws against voter intimidation.
Election observers must sign in when they arrive at a polling place and poll workers have the ability to limit where they’re allowed to be. Observers are also barred from electioneering, taking photos or videos, seeing confidential voter information, having conversations about what’s on the ballot and making phone calls while in the polling place.
Poll workers can remove an election observer for being disruptive.
Last updated: 6:18 am
3 weeks ago
WEC Administrator gives final Election Day reminders
Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe speaks at a virtual press conference after the state Senate voted to fire her on Sept. 14. (Screenshot)
For people going to the polls on Tuesday, state law requires they bring a government-issued ID. The ID is required to prove a voter’s registration, not their residence, so if the registration is up-to-date, the address on the ID does not need to be current, Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe said during a Monday a press conference.
Voters can register at the polls on Election Day, though they’ll need to prove their current residence.
“To register to vote at the polls, a voter will need to show a proof of residence document,” Wolfe said. “So this is something that has to contain your current name and your current residential address. So this could include something like a bank statement, a utility bill, or it could be a current invalid Wisconsin driver license or state ID card. If that ID card has your current name and address on it. Also remember that every single voter in the state of Wisconsin [who] head to the polls tomorrow has to bring an acceptable photo ID. This can include Wisconsin driver license, Wisconsin state ID card, a U.S. passport. It can also include a military or a veterans ID, a tribal ID, a certificate of naturalization and some student IDs.”
Polls close at 8 p.m. on Tuesday. Voters who are waiting in line at 8 should remain in line and they will be allowed to cast a ballot.
If a person still has an absentee ballot to return, it is too late to place it in the mail and have it arrive on time. Voters should now bring that ballot to their local clerk’s office, an absentee ballot drop box if they’re available in that community, their designated polling place, or to their community’s central count location.
After months of campaigning and numerous rally stops in Wisconsin from the two major party candidates, Election Day 2024 has arrived, with polls opening in the state at 7 a.m. Voters can find their polling place online at MyVote.WI.Gov.
On the ballot in the state are the two presidential candidates, the Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris and the Republican, former President Donald Trump. Wisconsin voters will also vote for the race in the U.S. Senate between Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin and Republican banker Eric Hovde.
The state also has a few closely watched races for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives; a constitutional referendum on barring non-citizens from voting in the state and the balance of power is up for grabs in the state Legislature under the first elections with newly un-gerrymandered maps. Finally, in local elections across the state voters will decide on school referenda, property tax hikes and who will serve in important county government roles.
Voters at the Wilmar Neighborhood Center on Madison's East side cast their ballots. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
A ballot measure in Wisconsin asking to change one word in the state constitution to prevent non-U.S. citizens from voting in any local, state or federal elections has passed. The effort was the Republican Legislature’s fifth attempt to amend the state constitution this year.
The Associated Press called the outcome at 9:42 p.m. Tuesday. With about 72% of the ballots counted by 11 p.m., “yes” was leading with 70% of the vote to 30% in opposition.
Republicans pointed to a handful of municipalities across the country that have allowed non-citizens to vote in municipal elections like school board races and said the amendment would prevent any Wisconsin communities from doing the same.
“Addressing this issue now will ensure votes are not diluted in the future,” Sen. Julian Bradley (R-Franklin) told Votebeat. “It’s best for the government to address this concern before it becomes a problem.”
Democrats and voting rights advocates said that non-citizen voting isn’t a real problem and that Republicans have shown no proof it is but continue to complain about it as part of their general anti-immigration push in this election. Plus, they said, making changes like this by trying to amend the constitution makes an end run around the normal legislative process and Gov. Tony Evers’ potential veto, while making the state vulnerable to future efforts to make it harder for legal voters to cast a ballot.
“First and foremost, we have a system that works, and I think this is a solution in search for problems,” T.R. Edwards, staff attorney at the voting rights focused Law Forward, said. “Secondarily, it shifts the burden to the voter. … But then third, I think it’s yet another vestige of our gerrymandered Legislature and an escape to actually go through the legislative process to do things that have an actual debate about what works for our state.”
Currently the state Constitution says that “every United States citizen age 18 or older” can vote. The amendment changes the word “every” to “only.”
“Shall section 1 of article III of the constitution, which deals with suffrage, be amended to provide that only a United States citizen age 18 or older who resides in an election district may vote in an election for national, state, or local office or at a statewide or local referendum?” the referendum asked voters.
Recently, Republicans have moved across the country to warn about large-scale non-citizen voting in ways that would swing elections. Yet studies of the voting system across dozens of communities involving millions of votes have found just a handful of cases of non-citizens casting ballots.
Earlier this year, Congress was unable to pass a federal budget over disagreements about a bill that would require citizens to prove their citizenship to register to vote.
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.
Democratic candidate Rebecca Cooke votes in Wisconsin's 3rd CD race | Photo by Frank Zufall
Democratic 3rd Congressional District candidate Rebecca Cooke held a short press conference at Spirit Lutheran Church in Eau Claire Tuesday morning after she cast her ballot.
The parking lot of the church was packed and Cooke was enthusiastic about turnout. “I think we’re going to see going to see some record turnout numbers here,” she said.
Several of young voters at the church said they had voted for Cooke. She was asked if the enthusiasm among younger voters was shared by older voters around the 3rd Congressional District.
“We’ve done a lot of work really … getting around all 19 counties throughout the congressional district, knocking on doors, communities the size of 300 people,” Cooke said. “So we’ve been doing the work outside of urban areas to really motivate people, show them that we’re willing to show up. There’s no community too small or too red that we’re not working to to get out the voting.”
Asked about critical issues in her 3rd CD race against incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, Cooke said: “I think the things that we focused on all the way along is increasing access to health care and making it more affordable, stopping wasteful spending, taking on the corporations that priced out consumers at the gas pump and at the grocery store and restoring reproductive freedoms — that’s something that I’m hearing about from people across the 3rd Congressional District.”
“The polling place was popping,” Cooke added. “I think people are energized to get out, to exercise their right to vote, but it’s still early, and so we’re going to be doing a lot of work throughout the day, really working to mobilize voters. We’re calling into the electorate, encouraging people to get out there if they don’t have a ride to the polls, helping them figure that out, and working to just, you know, pull out any barriers that might be keeping people from getting out to vote today.”
After voting in Eau Claire, Cooke said she was driving over to Menomonie to encourage students to vote at UW-Stout.
“There’s six UW campuses and universities in this district, and we have teams throughout the 3rd CD working to energize students in particular to get out to vote,” she said, “so I’ll be at UW Stout, then I’m going to hop on the phones and talk to people that we identified as undecided voters and encourage them to get out to vote for me, because it’s really going to come down to a small part of the electorate that’s going to be able to flip this seat.”
She was asked what is the key to appealing to undecided voters.
“When I’m talking to people, I encourage them and remind them that I’m a working-class candidate, that I grew up working class, that we need more regular voices like me in Congress, people that aren’t so far left or so far right, but really working to get things done for working families throughout the 3rd CD,” she said. “And I think when I talk to people about that, they’re excited to have a moderate voice to represent them in Congress.”
Several of those who voted at the church said they didn’t like the negativity of the campaign, especially remarks by Van Orden, who has taken to calling his opponent Rebecca “Crook.”
“Look, I’ve run a campaign that’s really authentic to myself, and I think Derrick Van Orden has sought to undermine that,” Cooke said, “But I think at the end of the day, people in the 3rd Congressional District know who I am, that I’m somebody that’s going to work to secure our border and make sure that our law enforcement has the resources that they need to keep our community safe. And when I’ve been out talking on doors, and some of our communication that we’ve also been putting up, I think that’s been really clear about where I stand on those issues.”
Concerning Van Orden’s charge that she supports “defunding the police,” Cooke responded, “I support funding police fully.”
Regarding why the two candidates never had a debate, and Van Orden’s criticism that she was avoiding him, Cooke responded: “There were opportunities for debates, but neither race could agree on a date that worked for everyone or a format that worked for everyone.”
Maya Rudolph and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris appear on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” on Nov. 2, 2024 in New York City. With only days to go until Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris is campaigning in battleground states along with making the appearance on SNL. (Photo by Jeenah Moon/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — On the final frantic Sunday of the presidential race, while Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at a Black church service in Michigan, former President Donald Trump told supporters at a Pennsylvania rally that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House after he lost the 2020 presidential election.
At a campaign rally at an airplane tarmac in Lititz, Pennsylvania, Trump again perpetuated the falsehood that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him and claimed that this year’s election would also be stolen because election results could take a while to be counted.
“These elections have to be decided by 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock on Tuesday night,” he said. “Bunch of crooked people.”
The comments came as new polls showed good news for Harris. A highly regarded pollster in Iowa showed a shocking lead for Harris there and New York Times-Siena College polls of the seven major battleground states showed slight leads for Harris in some Sun Belt swing states, while Trump made gains in the Rust Belt.
As the campaign dwindles to its final hours, here are seven key developments from this weekend:
Trump says he ‘shouldn’t have left’ White House
Trump spent much of his Lititz rally complaining about the election process and media coverage, seeming to repeat his false claim that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election.
“I shouldn’t have left, I mean, honestly,” Trump said. “We did so well, we had such a great — so now, every polling booth has hundreds of lawyers standing there.”
He pointed to protective glass covering him on two sides and noted a press section was on another side of him.
“To get me, someone would have to shoot through the fake news,” Trump said. “And I don’t mind that so much.”
In a statement that seemed to contradict the plain meaning of Trump’s remark, campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung denied Trump was encouraging violence against reporters.
“The President’s statement about protective glass placement has nothing to do with the Media being harmed, or anything else,” Cheung wrote. “It was about threats against him that were spurred on by dangerous rhetoric from Democrats. In fact, President Trump was stating that the Media was in danger, in that they were protecting him and, therefore, were in great danger themselves, and should have had a glass protective shield, also. There can be no other interpretation of what was said. He was actually looking out for their welfare, far more than his own!”
Harris heads to the Big Apple
Harris made an unscheduled trip to New York City Saturday, where she made a surprise appearance during the cold open of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” alongside actress Maya Rudolph, who portrays the veep in the live sketch comedy show.
In the three-minute opener, Rudolph approaches a vanity dresser and wishes she could talk to “someone who was in my shoes” as a “Black, South Asian woman running for president, preferably from the Bay Area.”
Rudolph turns toward the faux mirror, and Harris, on the other side, responds, “You and me both, sister.”
They wore identical suits and Harris turned to Rudolph and said that she is “here to remind you, you got this.”
“Because you can do something your opponent cannot do. You can open doors,” Harris said, joking about a recent campaign event where Trump tried to open the door to a garbage truck.
Rudolph cackled, doing an impersonation of Harris’ laugh, before the two women began a pep talk with puns of Harris’ first name.
“Now, Kamala, take my palmala,” Rudolph said. “The American people want to stop the chaos.”
“And end the dramala,” Harris said.
Harris and Rudolph then stood side-by-side and said they were going to vote for “us.”
Harris joked and asked Rudolph if she was registered to vote in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.
Harris headed from New York to Michigan, where she spoke Sunday at the historically Black Greater Emmanuel Institutional Church of God in Christ in Detroit.
Polling bombshell in a non-swing state
Polling in the latest Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll, reported a shocking lead for Harris in a state that Trump easily won in 2016 and 2020, with women and independent voters breaking for the Democratic presidential nominee.
The poll shows Harris leading with 47% of likely voters compared to 44% with Trump, according to the Register.
The Trump campaign quickly called the Iowa poll “a clear outlier,” and instead cited a poll by Emerson College as accurate, which showed the former president having 53% support compared to 43% for Harris.
Trump also took his grievances to his social media site, Truth Social.
“All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, BY A LOT,” he wrote. “I LOVE THE FARMERS, AND THEY LOVE ME.”
The New York Times/Siena College Sunday polls found that Harris is improving in North Carolina and Georgia while Trump has gained in Pennsylvania and maintains a strong advantage in Arizona. Harris is still ahead in Nevada and Wisconsin, according to the poll, but Michigan and Pennsylvania remain tied. The poll of Georgia showed Harris with a 1-point edge.
Both candidates were within the polls’ margins of error, meaning that the seven swing states could tip to either candidate.
While both Democratic and Republican politicians have expressed confidence in winning the election, polling experts said during a panel hosted by the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute in late October there’s no way to know for sure who will control the White House until all the votes are counted.
Kristen Soltis Anderson, founding partner at Echelon Insights, said there’s about a 60% chance that this year’s nationwide polling has been mostly correct, though she emphasized that the people who focus their careers on political polling are dedicated to providing a realistic understanding of where campaigns are headed.
“We are trying our very hardest to get it right,” Anderson said. “Even if you don’t believe in our altruism or even if you don’t believe in our academic and intellectual integrity, believe in nothing else than our financial incentives. You want to be the pollster who was right. It is very good business to be the pollster who is right.”
Jeff Horwitt, partner at Hart Research, said during the panel his firm has wrapped up its polling for this election year and expressed skepticism about the polls that emerge close to Election Day.
“Because our job, for our political clients, is to tell them the contours of the election,” Horwitt said. “How do we convince voters to vote for our candidate? What are the most effective messages? What do we have to think about? So the public polls are seeing now, they’re super interesting, and they’re important, but they’re not actionable.”
Trump welcomes sexist insult
As Trump spent his weekend in a campaign blitz across North Carolina, he welcomed a sexist remark from a rallygoer in Greensboro who suggested that Harris worked as a prostitute.
During the Saturday night rally, Trump questioned whether Harris’ previously worked at a McDonald’s. Her campaign has stated that she worked the summer job in 1983. In a campaign photo opportunity, Trump visited a closed McDonald’s in Pennsylvania where he handed fries to pre-screened people at the drive through.
“It’s so simple,” Trump said. “She’s a significant liar, and when you lie about something so simple, so she never worked there –”
“She worked on a corner,” a man from the crowd shouted.
Trump laughed at the crude comment.
“This place is amazing,” Trump said. “Just remember, it’s other people saying it, it’s not me.”
Harris has significantly gained support with women, according to the Pew Research Center. Trump has often dismissed criticism that he has lagged among women.
During a rally last week in Wisconsin, and in an attempt to win over women voters, Trump said that he would protect women and “I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not.”
Trump repeats ‘father of fertilization’ claim
At a Greensboro, North Carolina, rally Saturday, Trump again called himself “the father of fertilization,” a title he first gave himself during a Fox News town hall with women voters last month.
“I consider myself to be the father of fertilization,” he said Saturday.
The Iowa poll — and other late surveys — showed a stark gender gap, with women voters increasingly preferring Harris.
Nearly twice as many Iowa independent women voters, 57% to 29%, favored Harris. That represents a major gain for Harris since a September survey by the same pollster showed the vice president’s edge with independent women was only 5 percentage points.
Democrats have sought to exploit their advantage with women voters by emphasizing Trump’s record on abortion access. The former president appointed three of the U.S. Supreme Court justices who voted in 2022 to overturn the federal right to an abortion.
A flurry of state-level policymaking on reproductive rights has followed, including restrictions on in vitro fertilization, a common fertility treatment.
Trump has said he opposed an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that outlawed the treatment in the state, but had not previously taken a position on the issue.
Roughly half of those have come in states that track voters’ partisanship. About 700,000 — roughly 2% of the total — more Democrats have voted in those states than Republicans, but the numbers include California, where Democrat Joe Biden won more than 5 million more votes than Trump in the 2020 election.
Among the six states — Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Colorado, Idaho and Virginia — that track voters’ gender, women accounted for 54% of the vote, compared to 43.6% for men.
‘Election eve’ blitz
The candidates for president and vice president plan to sprint across the key swing states in the campaign’s final days, with particular focus on Pennsylvania, the largest of the contested states where polling has shown a deadlocked race.
The Harris campaign announced Sunday the vice president would be in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia on Monday, the night before Election Day, for rallies and musical performances. Scheduled entertainers and speakers included Oprah Winfrey, The Roots, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry.
Harris is also set to hold an event in Allentown, Pennsylvania, a majority-Latino city, on Monday. Part of Harris’ closing message has highlighted racist comments Trump and his supporters have made about Latinos.
After spending much of the weekend in North Carolina, Trump will also hold a rally in Pittsburgh on Monday evening.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, will be in Milwaukee on Monday.
Trump running mate Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance will hold events in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania on Monday.
Harris will hold an election night watch party at her alma mater, Howard University, in Washington, D.C.
Trump’s watch party will be at his Mar-a-Lago club in West Palm Beach, Florida.
People enter a voting precinct to vote in the Michigan primary election at Trombly School Aug. 7, 2018, in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan. (Bill Pugliano | Getty Images)
In Kenosha, the local Democratic Party office has received calls about residents who put up yard signs supporting Vice President Kamala Harris receiving letters, warning of reprisal and biblical hell fire if they don’t vote for former President Donald Trump.
Lori Hawkins, chair of the Kenosha County Democratic Party, said that people have been reporting the letters to the Kenosha Police Department. “There’s a couple different versions of it, but most people I know have gotten both of them,” Hawkins told Wisconsin Examiner.
One of the letters, images of which were shared with Wisconsin Examiner, opens with the line, “We see that you have Democrat signs on your property.” The letter asks, “are you not aware that when you die that you will be held accountable before almighty God for voting for an open border that allows millions of illegal immigrants to freely enter, many of which are felons and evil people that have been doing deadly harm and will continue to do so [?]” The letter goes on to warn that voters will be held accountable by God “for voting for communism to take over America,” ending that “we don’t want anyone going to horrible hell, but you are on a fast path to it.”
After receiving multiple reports about the letters, Hawkins said that the Kenosha County Democratic Party decided to make a social media post, to ensure that people knew that they weren’t alone. The letters are typed and unsigned. “We know that the people who are putting these letters in mailboxes really believe the topics or the issues that are in the letters, and they’re probably doing it because they are fearful,” said Hawkins. “We know that it’s a bigger organization that’s fomenting this kind of fear, and playing to people’s anxieties and worries.”
Hawkins feels that the letters are “twisting the platform of Democrats who are on the ballot in a way that is, you know, pretty vile and false.” Hawkins has also received reports of Democratic yard and barn signs being slashed, defaced, driven over, or stolen. “And let’s be clear, I have heard and seen none of that happening with the large political signs belonging to Republican Party candidates,” said Hawkins. “So this is just an attempt to silence people, and make people fearful.”
Still, hundreds of people turned out for recent canvassing days held by the Kenosha County Democratic Party. Nancy Locante, a volunteer with the Kenosha County Democratic Party, received one of the letters, mailed to her with no return address. “America is at a crossroads,” one of the letters she received stated. The letter described “transgender ideology infecting our children’s schools,” high grocery bills, immigration, and persecution of “Christian values.” The letter urged Locante to vote for “biblical truths.” Locante said, “that’s quite a bit of intimidation, but of course they don’t have the guts to put their names on it. It can be a little unsettling knowing that they are watching you. But it’s unfortunate that these people’s beliefs are so misguided.” Locante hasn’t been deterred. “I’m walking around with all my buttons and merch on,” she said.
Locante plans to continue helping the Kenosha County Democratic Party canvass neighborhoods ahead of Nov. 5.
In Milwaukee, Leaders Igniting Transformation (LIT) have knocked on over 600,000 doors urging people to get out and vote. LIT’s organizers said they have received reports of identical letters in communities between Milwaukee and Kenosha.
In early October, the Milwaukee suburban city of Wauwatosa experienced a string of sign vandalism, which targeted Democratic-endorsed yard signs. From Wauwatosa’s southeastern corner near 55th street and Wisconsin, all the way up to the northwestern corner of 81st street and Meinecke avenue, signs were defaced with red spray paint. The Republican Party of Milwaukee County denounced the vandalism in Wauwatosa, and said those responsible should be held accountable. In September, red spray paint was used to deface Democratic signs in Madison.
Both presidential campaigns continue to focus heavily on Wisconsin. Harris and Trump held competing rallies in Milwaukee Friday night ahead of Election Day on Tuesday.
Vice President Kamala Harris has made a dent in former President Donald Trump’s lead among likely Iowa voters in the most recent Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll. (Photos by Win McNamee and Megan Varner/Getty Images, photo illustration via Canva)
Vice President Kamala Harris has taken a narrow lead over former President Donald Trump in the latest Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll published Saturday, just days before the Nov. 5 election.
The results are a surprising development for the state, which has been largely written off as an easy victory for Trump. He won Iowa in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. The latest Iowa Poll showed Harris leading with 47% of likely voters and Trump with 44%, the Register reported.
The poll, taken Oct. 28-31 by Selzer & Co. with responses from 808 likely Iowa voters, has a margin of error of plus or minus3.4 percentage points.
While Harris’ lead falls in the margin of error, it’s a significant reversal from previous Iowa Polls. In September, Trump led the Iowa Poll with 47% to Harris’ 43%. Trump had the support of 50% of likely Iowa voters in June when President Joe Biden was expected to become the Democratic presidential nominee.
Women, independents shift toward Harris
The largest shift heading toward support for Harris has been Iowa women – particularly women who identify as independent voters as well as those age 65 and older, the Register reported. More independent likely voters as a whole now support Harris at 46% to Trump at 39%, despite the demographic favoring Trump in every earlier Iowa Poll.
Independent women favored Harris in the September poll, with 40% supporting her and 35% supporting Trump. That lead grew in the latest poll to 57% of independent women who support Harris and 29% who support Trump.
More independent men still favor Trump over Harris at 47% to 37%.
While likely voters 65 and older also support Harris as a demographic, 63% of senior women support the vice president compared to 28% who support Trump – a more than 2-to-1 margin. More senior men also support Harris but by a margin of 2 percentage points at 47% to 45%.
Iowa Republicans have stumped for Trump in swing states
Iowa Republicans have spent time on the campaign trail touting Trump’s popularity in the state and the expectation that the former president will win Iowa for the third election in a row — U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst and U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson, Iowa Republicans, have traveled to swing states like Pennsylvania and Georgia to rally voters in recent weeks, with Ernst saying Iowa was “in the bag” for Trump.
Though both Harris and Trump have spent most their time in key swing states ahead of the election, Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart told reporters Saturday that the poll results show that Iowa is a winnable state for Democrats in the upcoming election.
“We’ve been putting in the hard work, and it is paying off,” Hart said. “We’ve been educating our voters, recruiting volunteers, listening to friends’ and neighbors’ concerns, and we recognize that Iowans are looking for better leadership. The fact that Vice President Harris now leads Donald Trump in the latest Des Moines Register poll is obviously very exciting for us.”
Iowa GOP chair calls poll an ‘outlier’
But Iowa GOP Chair Jeff Kaufmann disputed the accuracy of the results, comparing the Des Moines Register’s poll results to one released by Emerson College earlier Saturday that showed Trump ahead at 53% to Harris at 43%.
“Des Moines Register is a clear outlier poll,” Kaufmann said in a statement. “Emerson College, released today, far more closely reflects the state of the actual Iowa electorate and does so with far more transparency in their methodology.”
House Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst argued that the Iowa Poll well respected, and should not be dismissed just because it does not show favorable results for one party.
“I’ve been in their shoes on a Saturday night before Election Day, where the Iowa poll results come out, and they don’t look like what we’d like them to (be),” Konfrst said. “And they can’t believe Ann Seltzer, one of the gold standard pollsters in the country, in 2020 and not in 2024.”
The poll also found Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate who remains on the Iowa ballot despite ending his campaign, still has the support of 3% of likely voters. Libertarian presidential candidate Chase Oliver earned less than 1% in the poll. Another 1% of respondents said they would vote for someone else, 3% responded that they were not sure who to support and 2% said they did not want to disclose who they supported.
Though the poll showed Harris in a favorable position for Tuesday, Hart said it was important to note that Iowa Poll results are not Election Day results. Konfrst said the poll is a welcome push giving “energy and enthusiasm and momentum” to Democratic voters and organizers leading up to Tuesday.
“We have three more days before this election, so remember, this is just a poll, and what really matters is that Iowans show up and make their voices heard,” Hart said.
Democrats say poll supports argument for more national help
In the final days before the election, Konfrst said that she and other Democrats are having conversations about the poll with the national party and supporting Democratic organizations, hoping to get support and surrogate visits ahead of Election Day.
“We’re going to be asking as many folks as we can to be surrogates here, but at the end of the day, we know that it’s the hard work of volunteers, our candidates up and down the ballot, the Congressional candidates and the party and all of our partners here in Iowa who are doing that hard work,” Konfrst said. “And so, surrogate or not, we think that we’re going to have a better night than expected for Kamala Harris and Democrats on Tuesday.”
Hart also said that Iowa’s decision in the 2024 presidential election could have major implications for the future of the Iowa Democratic caucuses. Iowa was ousted from its first-in-the-nation seat in the 2024 Democratic presidential nominating cycle and released its mail-in caucus results on Super Tuesday supporting Biden this year. The nominating calendar will be up for discussion again heading into 2028, and Hart said Nov. 5 results will have a crucial impact on Iowa Democrats’ argument to return to return as an early state in future elections.
“Once this election is over, we’re going to be having this conversation,” Hart said. “And the better we do here in November, the better case we can make. … The bottom line is that I hope this shows the rest of the country that Iowa is a good barometer for choosing good leadership.”
Iowa Capital Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on Facebook and X.
Former President Donald Trump speaks at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee | Photo by James Gould
The weekend before Election Day, former President Donald Trump brought his campaign to Milwaukee.
During a Friday night rally at the Fiserv Forum, the same venue where Trump formally accepted the Republican Party’s presidential nomination just a few months ago, Trump told the crowd that, if he’s elected again, he will bring America back to the “golden age.”
“America will be bigger, better, bolder, richer, safer and stronger than ever before,” Trump said.
Trump slammed the current state of the economy and also talked about his plan to impose high tariffs on imports. “You’re going to become so rich with the word tariff,” he told the crowd. That was met with a massive cheer.
The former president declared that his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, “has a low IQ.”
During the rally a section of the crowd in the upper deck began to shout that they could not hear what was being said on stage.
A clearly frustrated Trump ripped the microphone away from the mic stand and yelled, “Do you want to see me knock the hell out of people backstage?”
“I am up here seething. I’m working my ass off with this stupid mic,” Trump added. “I’m blowing out my left arm, now I’m blowing out my right arm and I’m blowing out my damn throat, too, because these stupid people.”
After the mic issues appeared to be fixed, Trump claimed he won Wisconsin twice, although actually, after winning the state in the 2016 presidential election he lost to President Joe Biden in 2020.
John Kettman displays his “Trumpkin” at the Milwaukee Trump rally | Photo by James Gould
John Kettman, a fan of Trump who attended the rally, held a pumpkin with the former president’s face on it while he waited to get into the Fiserv Forum for the rally. He called the prop a “Trumpkin.”
Kettman said the “middle-class people” are the ones suffering the most in America.
When it comes to foreign policy, Kettman said that Harris “can’t be trusted” and that Trump is the man who can “deal with” North Korea and Russia.
Another Trump voter who waited to enter the rally was Fernando Puente.
“All the polls say it’s coming out tight,” Puente said of the presidential election.“I’m here on the ground, I see that it’s going to be a landslide, Trump is going to win big.”
Puente added that he wasn’t always a big fan of Trump before 2016. He said he had felt Trump was “arrogant” and disliked the way he talked, but that all changed for him when Trump started talking about “the border and inflation.”
Wisconsin Republicans who spoke at the rally included former Govs. Scott Walker and Tommy Thompson, U.S. Reps. Scott Fitzgerald and Bryan Steil and candidate for U.S. Senate Eric Hovde, who is challenging incumbent Wisconsin Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin.
“This election is so consequential,” Hovde said from the stage, contrasting “what President Trump and I want to do versus what Kamala Harris and Tammy Baldwin want to do.” Trump and Hovde want to “make America great again” and “restore the American Dream,” Hovde said, while the Democrats “bankrupted our country, causing the worst inflation in 40 years. … jeopardized our safety by defunding the police and opening our southern borders,” and “divided our country … by gender, by race, by socio economic class, by religion.”
Senate candidate Eric Hovde speaks at the Trump rally in Milwaukee | Photo by James Gould
When Trump took the stage he praised Hovde, calling him “a great guy,” and joked, “He’s a great-looking guy, too, sometimes I say maybe he’d be better off without that mustache. I’m not sure.”
In recent TV ads Hovde’s campaign has been attacking Baldwin’s girlfriend, highlighting her work as an investment adviser on Wall Street and the couple’s same-sex relationship.
Hovde’s campaign has repeatedly mentioned Maria Brisbane, referring to her as Baldwin’s “life partner,” although Baldwin publicly refers to Brisbane as her girlfriend.
While Trump spoke, Harris held a simultaneous rally in Milwaukee just over five miles away at the Wisconsin State Fair Exposition Center. Harris spoke for 24 minutes, according to NBC News, while Trump gave a 90 minute speech. She described Trump as “increasingly unstable,” and said if elected he would walk into the Oval Office with an “enemies list” while Harris would walk in with a “to-do list.”
States Newsroom analyzed 238 of former President Donald Trump’s posts on X and Truth Social over 16 randomly selected days in August through October 2024. Out of 1,500 unique words, “comrade,” “fake,” “war,” “radical” and “lyin'” landed in the top 75. Reposts and direct quotes from others were not included in the analysis. (Ashley Murray/States Newsroom, image created using wordclouds.com)
WASHINGTON — Before a capacity crowd at Madison Square Garden late last month, former President Donald Trump bellowed that the United States is “occupied” by illegal immigrants and that he will “rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered.”
Day one, if he’s elected, will be the “largest deportation program in American history.”
On stage in Arizona Thursday night with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Trump proposed former U.S. House member Liz Cheney should face guns of war. Cheney, a Republican who’s campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris and who helped lead the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 riot, should have “nine barrels shooting at her” because she is a “war hawk,” Trump said.
“Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face,” Trump said.
These types of comments are exactly why political scientists and historians are sounding the alarm on the former president’s language. The experts have found that Trump, who is neck-and-neck with Harris for a second term in the Oval Office, is increasingly divisive and threatening. They warn Trump’s speeches and social media posts, laden with insults, have become darker and more violent since his political career began in 2015, and urge more examination of their consequences in the real world.
Trump’s speeches have also become longer over the years and more meandering and random — an approach he describes as “the weave.” An analysis by the New York Times found Trump’s speeches last on average 82 minutes, up from 45 minutes in 2016.
Robert C. Rowland, who studies political rhetoric at the University of Kansas, summed up Trump’s recent speeches, social media posts and interviews as essentially delivering “fear, anger, grievance, braggadocio.”
“‘Things are terrible here.’ ‘We won’t have a country left.’ ‘We’ll have a nuclear war.’ He said things like that at the very end of the 2020 campaign, but this is different than most of his time in politics, and with that, even stronger claims about his greatness — all untethered from any discussion of how any of (his proposals) would actually happen,” said Rowland, author of the 2021 book “The Rhetoric of Donald Trump: Nationalist Populism and American Democracy.”
When contacted for comment about the former president’s evolving language, Trump’s campaign provided a statement from a Republican National Committee representative who criticized the media for not giving “the same attention to the brutal rape and murder of victims like Rachel Morin, Laken Riley, and Jocelyn Nugary.”
The correct spelling is Nungaray.
The women, whose deaths Trump has spotlighted in his campaign, were respectively attacked and killed in 2023 in Maryland by a man from El Salvador, in 2024 in Georgia by a man from Venezuela, and in 2024 in Texas by two men from Venezuela. Nungaray’s mother has appeared with Trump on the campaign trail.
The RNC’s Anna Kelly said in an emailed statement, in which she provided links, that “President Trump says the truth: the Harris-Biden administration has allowed over 100 terror suspects who crossed the border into the country, nearly 16,000 illegal immigrants have been apprehended trying to cross the border, and over 5,000 unvetted illegal immigrants are being released into the U.S. everyday. Americans, including Hispanic Americans, overwhelmingly support President Trump’s plan to secure our country, and they are ready to Make America Safe Again on November 5.”
While Trump has focused on high-profile violent crimes perpetrated by immigrants who lack legal status, numerous analyses have shown that immigrants do not commit crimes at a rate higher than native-born Americans.
Graphic descriptions of killings
Increasingly, Trump describes gruesome scenes of rape and murder to his campaign rally audiences, warning them that “Kamala has imported criminal migrants from prisons and jails, insane asylums and mental institutions from all around the world.”
Before his arena crowd in Manhattan last month, the former president recounted the details of the September 2016murders by MS-13 gang members of two teenage girls on Long Island. “They didn’t shoot them. They knifed them and they cut them into little pieces because it was so painful,” he said.
University of California Los Angeles researchers Nikita Savin and Daniel Treisman analyzed 99 of Trump’s speeches from April 2015 to June 2024 and found an upward trend in the frequency of violent vocabulary. They published their results in a working paper in July.
“What’s significant is this very clear over time upward trend since 2015,” Treisman told States Newsroom in an interview in early October.
Savin and Treisman also inspected 127 speeches delivered by major party candidates in the 20 months prior to each U.S. presidential election since 2008. Trump’s and the others’ speeches were chosen by the same criteria: the last major public speech of each month.
The pair have continued to monitor Trump’s language as part of their working paper.
“I just analyzed the last speech in September in Wisconsin, and that speech contained a higher frequency, or as high a frequency, of violent words as in any of his previous speeches that we’ve looked at,” Treisman said.
‘They’
Using a specialized dictionary of 142 words related to violence, the pair studied Trump’s language for words like “crime,” “war,” “prosecute,” “prison,” “missile,” “death,” “massacre” and “blood.” They also scrutinized for markers of economic and populist content.
Since 2020, Trump’s negative language about “elites” has trended upward, but “the thing on which he’s most distinctive is his use of the pronoun ‘they,’ — and that he’s very high on that compared to other politicians,” Treisman said.
When the research duo expanded the parameters of comparison to various U.S. and world leaders, past and present, they found Trump’s frequency of violent language “exceeds that of any other politician in a democracy that we studied and falls just a little below the level in a selection of Fidel Castro’s May Day speeches.”
Savin and Treisman acknowledge the limitations of their study in that it does not explore why Trump’s speech has changed, or the specific consequences of it. Additionally, a dictionary-based text analysis only measures the frequency of words, “without delving deeper into meanings and contexts,” they wrote.
“It doesn’t pick up violent thoughts expressed with nonviolent words. So for instance, his January 6 speech in 2021 doesn’t rate particularly high on our violence measures because he didn’t use a lot of words like ‘kill,’ ‘death,’ ‘blood’ and so on. He said, ‘Let’s go and walk down to the Capitol,’” Treisman said.
The authors wrote that, “Given the troubling evolution of his vocabulary, more research along these lines is clearly warranted.”
States Newsroom fed 238 of Trump’s social media posts across X and Truth Social into two AI word cloud generators. The posts, from randomly chosen days in August through October, comprised 8,664 words, but boiled down to roughly 1,500 unique words when grouped by repetition.
Trump’s top five words were, unsurprisingly, “Kamala,” “Harris,” “great, “now” and “Trump.”
But making it into the top 75 most used words out of 1,500 were “comrade” in 15th place, “fake” at 23rd on the list, “war” as the 54th most used, “radical” at 61st on the list, and “lyin’” at 72.
‘The enemy from within’
Trump told his supporters in New York City Sunday they are fighting against a “radical left machine” who he said — not for the first time — is the “enemy from within.”
In an Oct. 14 interview, Trump told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that “the enemy from within” are a “bigger problem” than migrants who are “totally destroying our country.”
“We have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics … and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or if really necessary, by the military,” he responded when Bartiromo asked if he anticipated trouble on Election Day.
On Oct. 12, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform an ad celebrating Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film “Full Metal Jacket,” juxtaposing it with scenes of drag performers and a clip of Admiral Rachel Levine, a physician and, as head of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, the first openly transgender federal official. The message he posted with the video: “WE WILL NOT HAVE A WOKE MILITARY!”
Trump appears to disagree with any criticism that his campaign uses negative language or themes. On Wednesday, he wrote on Truth Social: “While I am running a campaign of positive solutions to save America, Kamala Harris is running a campaign of hate.”
Recently, his campaign’s personalized fundraising text messages to supporters declare Trump’s “love” for them.
‘Don’t let them eat us’
In the days following the Sept. 10 debate between Trump and Harris, the former president posted on his Truth Social platform a seriesofAI-generatedimages depicting cats begging voters to support Trump. “Don’t let them eat us. Vote for Trump,” read one sign held by a litter of orange tabby kittens.
The string of posts followed Trump’s false claim during the debate that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating pet cats and dogs. The rumor began to circulate among Trump supporters ahead of his matchup with Harris, and Trump continued to push the lie.
The small city in Ohio was the target of bomb threats for days afterward, to the point that the state’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine dispatched state troopers to 18 local school buildings.
Rowland, who spoke to States Newsroom in both September and October, pondered whether Trump’s all-in attitude on the cats-and-dogs lie would hurt the former president’s reelection prospects.
“He’s picked this meme that is just so absurd and obviously false,” Rowland said Sept. 13.
Just over a month later, Rowland told States Newsroom, “It hasn’t moved anything. If anything, it’s gone the other direction.” Polling has shown Trump and Harris nearly tied for several weeks.
Rowland said overall, Trump’s recent “lack of coherence and the negative emotions are the things that I think are most striking.”
“He never previously talked about policy in detail, but now there’s almost no discussion of policy at all. Insults have replaced it, in a way,” Rowland said.
“I juxtapose this against the most effective leaders of both parties, people like Ronald Reagan — they really made a case. Now, one could agree or disagree with it. And Barack Obama, when he was running he certainly laid out an agenda, and that’s not what I see at all (in Trump),” Rowland said. “I’ve never seen anything like it in American politics.”
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.
U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan
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.
Mandela Barnes | Photo Courtesy Power to the Polls
“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, Wisconsin Democracy Campaign
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.
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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