Reading Time: 3 minutes

If Democrats win a majority in one or both chambers of the Legislature in 2026, the party will have more power to govern than any time in more than 15 years. 

Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein, D-Middleton, said she saw a sign of what that future could look like during the state budget-writing process earlier this year. With just a three-seat advantage in the Senate, Republicans needed to work across the aisle to advance the budget, and Senate Democrats had a seat at the negotiating table, Hesselbein said. 

For the past 15 years of Republican majorities in the Senate and the Assembly, GOP lawmakers have been able to operate largely without input from legislative Democrats. In 2011, following the Republican midterm surge during President Barack Obama’s presidency, a GOP trifecta in the Legislature and the governor’s office advanced legislation aimed at cementing a permanent majority.

They passed laws such as Act 10, which dismantled Democratic-supporting public sector unions; strict voter ID, which made it harder for students and low-income people to vote; and partisan redistricting, which kept legislative Republicans in power with near super-majorities even after Democrats won all statewide offices in 2018. 

After years of being shut out of the legislative process, Senate Democrats won’t operate that way if the party wins control of the chamber next year, Hesselbein said. 

“We have an open door policy as Democrats in the state Senate. We will work with anybody with a good idea,” she said. “So we will try to continue to work with Republicans when we can and seek common values to really help people in the state of Wisconsin.” 

Newly redrawn legislative maps put into play during last year’s elections, when President Donald Trump won Wisconsin, resulted in 14 flipped legislative seats in favor of Democrats. Following those gains in 2024, Senate Democrats need to flip two seats and hold onto Senate District 31, held by Sen. Jeff Smith, D-Brunswick, to win a majority next year.

The party’s campaign committee is eyeing flip opportunities in seats occupied by Republican Sens. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green; Rob Hutton, R-Brookfield; and Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, which are all districts that former Vice President Kamala Harris won in 2024, according to an analysis last year by John Johnson, a Lubar Center Research fellow at Marquette University.

Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, in an email to Wisconsin Watch said a Democratic majority in the chamber “won’t happen.” 

With political winds during a midterm year typically favoring the party not in control of the White House, Democrats could see gains in the Assembly as well, although there are more challenges than in the Senate. All of the Assembly seats were tested under the new maps last year, but Democrats still made gains during an election year when Trump’s name on ballots boosted Republicans. Minority Leader Greta Neubauer, D-Racine, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel earlier this month that she is “optimistic” about chances to flip the Assembly, where five seats would give Democrats control of the chamber for the first time since 2010.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos did not respond to questions from Wisconsin Watch about how Republicans might work with Democrats if the party wins a majority next year. 

If there is a power shift in the Capitol in 2026, few lawmakers have experienced anything but Republican control of the Legislature. Just 11 of the 132 members across both political parties previously held office at a time when Democrats controlled both legislative chambers. 

Some of the longest-serving Democrats said they agree with restoring more bipartisanship in the legislative process if the party gains power in 2026. 

“I don’t want to repeat the same mistakes as the Republicans did,” said Sen. Tim Carpenter, D-Milwaukee, who was elected to the Assembly in 1984 and the Senate in 2002. “We have to give them an opportunity to work on things.” 

Carpenter and Rep. Christine Sinicki, D-Milwaukee, who was elected to the Assembly in 1998, said if the party wins one or both majorities they want to make sure members are prepared for governing responsibilities they’ve never experienced, like leading a committee. 

“It’s a lot more work,” Sinicki said of being in the majority. “But it’s very fulfilling work to actually be able to go home at night and say, ‘I did this today.’” 

Hesselbein said if Senate Democrats secure power in their chamber next year, members will continue to focus on affordability issues that they’ve proposed during the current session. Some of those bills included providing free meals at breakfast and lunch to students in Wisconsin schools, lowering the cost of prescription drugs and expanding access to the homestead tax credit.

LeMahieu, though, said Democrats have “no credibility” on affordability issues. 

“Senate Republicans delivered the second largest income tax cut in state history to put more money in Wisconsin families’ pockets for gas and groceries while Senate Democrats propose sales and income tax hikes to pay for a radical agenda nobody can afford,” he said. 

Senate Democrats in the meantime are holding listening sessions across the state and working on a list of future bills to be ready to lead “on day one,” Hesselbein said. “If we are fortunate enough.”

Wisconsin Democrats say they won’t act like Republicans if they win a legislative majority in 2026 is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 7 minutes

On a quiet Friday at Mo’s Bar, a lakeside dive where regulars gossip over beer and fried perch, Rep. Scott Krug blended in easily. 

He nursed a Miller Lite and gestured out the window toward Big Roche a Cri, one of the lakes that he said had taught him everything he needed to know about surviving the Capitol’s sharpest fights.

“I was the water guy in the Legislature for years and years,” said Krug, an eight-term Republican who represents a region of farms, lakes and rivers stretching south and west from Wisconsin Rapids. Instead of sticking to the party line, he said, he tried to balance the interests of farmers, the tourism industry and clean water — ultimately winning support from both conservation and agricultural groups.

“I don’t give a shit about getting my head kicked in by both sides,” Krug said. 

That willingness to buck party orthodoxy has mattered even more in recent years amid Wisconsin’s fierce battles over election administration. As many Republicans leaned into Donald Trump’s false claims about fraud, and the Assembly’s elections committee became a stage for conspiracy theories, Krug carved out a different role: the pragmatist trying to keep the system running.

He took over as chair of the committee in late 2022 after his predecessor’s hard-line tactics cost her influence. This session, Krug has moved up to assistant majority leader, a role that puts him at the center of GOP caucus strategy. That might mean winnowing 18 election ideas down to five bills, huddling with Wisconsin Elections Commission appointees, talking with clerks across the state, or working the halls to find a path for bipartisan proposals long stuck in gridlock.

It has been hard for Krug to overcome the conspiracy theories embraced by a small GOP faction and rally his colleagues behind his proposed election reforms. When Republicans do unite on election policy, their bills usually face Democratic opposition and a veto from Gov. Tony Evers.

Still, Krug has kept pushing for the policies that clerks have long asked for, like allowing absentee ballots to be processed the day before an election. 

He said he measures his success not only on whether he can get his proposals enacted, but also on whether he can change the tone of the debate, increase confidence in elections and cool the conspiracy talk on the elections committee and in his party, even as Trump and his allies help fuel it. 

“Messaging,” he said, “has become more important than actual policy.”

The era Krug replaced

Krug took over the election committee from Rep. Janel Brandtjen, a Trump loyalist who regularly invited conspiracy theorists to testify. Groups like True the Vote and people like Peter Bernegger, a prolific election litigant, used the committee’s platform to veer into unsubstantiated accusations of malfeasance or outright fraud by election officials.

Brandtjen also routinely exceeded her authority as chair, issuing invalid subpoenas to counties and other election offices. 

Brandtjen also embraced former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s partisan review of the 2020 election, which floated the idea of an unconstitutional decertification of the election, threatened to jail mayors and ultimately cost taxpayers more than $2 million. 

While Trump praised Brandtjen’s loyalty, her standing within her own caucus weakened. Assembly Republicans voted to bar her from closed caucus meetings in 2022, writing to her that past issues “led our caucus to lose trust in you.” Brandtjen dismissed the note as “petty.”

Krug saw an opportunity to restore order and told Assembly Speaker Robin Vos: “Give me the election committee,” he recalled. Vos handed him the gavel that December.

The tone changes, while legislation stalls

The tone shifted immediately. 

In one of the committee’s first sessions, Krug held public hearings on bipartisan bills to limit polling place closures and compensate local governments for holding special elections. In the next session, he held a hearing on another bipartisan bill to increase penalties for harming election officials. 

He didn’t shy away from giving space to Republican-backed priorities either — including a bill to specially mark noncitizens’ IDs as not valid for voting, and an informational hearing to investigate whether noncitizens were on the state’s voter rolls. The first was vetoed by Evers, and the second didn’t go far after the Department of Transportation declined to turn over the necessary data. (Krug told Votebeat he thought the number was minuscule but still wanted the department to share its data.)

Still, for clerks and legislators across the state, Krug has been a welcome change.  

Rock County Clerk Lisa Tollefson, who has been advocating for clerks in the Legislature for about eight years, told Votebeat that Krug was the best chair she’s worked with so far. “He wants to understand the system the most,” she said.

Rep. Lisa Subeck, a Madison Democrat and former member of the election committee, said Krug brought a civility back to the committee that had disappeared after the 2020 election. She also praised some of his ideas, though she questioned the effectiveness of his advocacy, noting many proposals he supported never got Assembly approval. 

Krug said a lot of the obstacles come from the state Senate, which blocked the Monday processing bill last year. The Senate, he said, has more “further-outs” on elections. 

Kim Trueblood, the Republican county clerk in Marathon County, called Krug’s leadership “refreshing” but said she doesn’t know what to do to convince some GOP senators “that the bogeyman under the bed is not real.”

Krug said he’ll keep trying, and his record suggests he won’t shy away from intraparty disagreements. 

He tried to calm down the rhetoric after 2024 U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde delayed conceding for two weeks, blaming his loss in part on “improbable” absentee ballot totals in Milwaukee. Krug recalled Hovde raising the issue again in a phone call during this year’s Supreme Court election. Krug, who was observing Milwaukee’s absentee ballot counting facility, said he told Hovde: “I’m telling you, it’s not the issue here.”

Hovde said he couldn’t recall the exchange. He told Votebeat that while he does not blame his loss on central count, his skepticism of the process remains.

Other states, meanwhile, are still battling the ghosts of 2020 in their legislative committees. In neighboring Michigan, Republicans rebranded their House’s Elections Committee into the Election Integrity Committee and placed it in the hands of a legislator who believes the 2020 election was stolen, regularly inviting the type of firebrands Brandtjen once welcomed. In Georgia and Arizona, hearings on election-related legislation regularly erupt into partisan shouting matches.

Vos, the Assembly speaker, said Krug has treated election concerns as “a problem to be solved,” rather than “milked.” He praised Krug for being practical with legislation rather than holding out until he found perfection.

“I think he’s really done a good job of bringing people together,” Vos continued. “He’s been an incredible leader to try to showcase that it doesn’t have to always be partisan.”

Walking the GOP tightrope on election policy

Krug stepped down as committee chair this session, shifting to vice chair and taking on a new role as the Assembly’s assistant majority leader, where he’ll help rally Republican votes. He said he hopes to bring the same spirit of compromise to his leadership role. 

The new role means he can write his own bills for the election committee, which he was unable to do last session, as committee chairs generally are not allowed to preside over their own legislation.

Krug said one of his biggest hurdles this session is dealing with election conspiracy theorists — a faction he argues has lost influence in Wisconsin but remains disruptive.

The tougher challenge, he added, will continue to come from Washington. Trump and his allies have called for banning mail voting, overhauling voting machine standards, requiring proof of citizenship to vote, and using the Department of Justice to scrutinize the Wisconsin Elections Commission. 

Krug has tried to give where he can, incorporating some provisions of a Trump executive order on elections into draft legislation. 

But his tone changed when Trump posted on social media that he wanted to ban mail-in voting and criticized voting machines. “My whole goal is to get results quicker,” he said, “not to go back to hand-counting and wait for results until the Friday after the election.”

Usually, when his constituents or other Assembly members come to him espousing these ideas, he can calm them down with “truth and data,” a strategy he says works until another press release comes from the Trump administration.

“And that’s our struggle,” he said. “You see this ebb and flow, and it’s all based on what comes out of Washington. So we put the fire out. He stokes it, then I put the fire out, he stokes it.”

Krug, a real estate agent, parent of six, and grandparent, said he’ll stay busy even if his tactics make him politically unpopular. If his constituents force him out for telling the truth, he said, he’ll just go sell more houses — and keep adding to his bobblehead collection, a running competition with Evers. 

Krug sees promising signs in his party

At Mo’s Bar, where workers and patrons greet him like a neighbor, it’s clear his independence hasn’t yet cost him local support. Despite the headwinds, he insists the atmosphere around elections has changed.

“I feel it when I talk to everybody,” he said. “It used to be my first conversation when I walked in here: ‘What are you gonna do about the goddamn election?’ It’s over. People don’t do that.” 

Buoyed by that shift, Krug is scheduled to introduce several election-related bills on Wednesday, telling Votebeat he expects most to win bipartisan support. The measures would let clerks process ballots the day before an election, add new auditing requirements, regulate the use of drop boxes, and repeal a law critics say puts ballot privacy at risk.

He also sees promising signs of improvement from within his own party. 

In April — when Hovde and U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson were still criticizing Milwaukee’s election operation — losing Republican Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel conceded defeat without caveat or complaint. 

As some supporters booed him, Schimel said, “You’ve gotta accept the results.”

Krug said he hoped the concession would be a sign to other GOP candidates that the “shine has worn off” of holding radical election positions.

“I’ll never find a way to fix it entirely,” he said, but he has to keep at it because the effort will shape how Wisconsinites view the Legislature on all other issues. 

“Everything starts from elections,” he said.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

State Rep. Scott Krug emerges as GOP’s voice of pragmatism on Wisconsin election policy is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Back in her clowning years, Karen DeSanto got a call from the king of Morocco.

“We hung up on him,” she said. “We thought it was one of our friends pranking us.”

It was actually employees of the consulate, but the king wanted them. DeSanto and her then-husband were both professional clowns with the Ringling Brothers, and they also performed as a duo.

Somehow, King Hassan II had heard about the DeSantos, and he flew them in on his private jet to perform for his granddaughter’s birthday at his palace in the capital city of Rabat.

His royal majesty, sitting on his throne in the middle of a room, loved their performance. The little girl? Not so much.

“She hated it,” DeSanto said with a chuckle. “That was our first and only birthday party.”

Clowning has taken DeSanto all around the country and the world, from the most opulent spaces of Carnegie Hall to much humbler places — she has used a pig barn to change into costume before performing in a rural field — and now, to the Wisconsin State Capitol.

A longtime Baraboo native, she was elected to the state Assembly in 2024 after heading the Boys & Girls Club of West Central Wisconsin for more than a decade.

But it’s been a long journey on the circus train — both literally and figuratively — to get here.

Running away with the circus

Born in Sacramento, DeSanto, now 61, said she dreamed of seeing the world. Her father took her to see the circus every summer, and young Karen would go every day it was in town, so much that the clowns recognized her and even roped her into the act, pulling her out of the crowd to perform gags with them.

Her father was a big part of her life, she said, and she was his caregiver when he got sick in his early 60s. While sitting in the waiting room during one of his appointments, DeSanto came across an ad for clown college in a magazine. She tore it out and shoved it into a pocket. After her father died a few months later, when she was 27, she found herself “itching to do something different” with her life, so she auditioned.

“I’m a big believer in saying yes,” she said. “The world just opened up to me after that.”

After graduation, DeSanto got one of the few contracts offered to a female clown by the Ringling Brothers.

She lived and traveled on the circus train, where her quarters were next to the elephant car. The friendly beasts would reach their trunks to her window to grab bananas from her hand. One of the elephants she rode during performances was also named Karen, and she reunited with her friendly steed years later at the zoo where it had retired. DeSanto swears the much larger Karen remembered her.

She married another clown after meeting her husband under the Big Top. They toured the big-city circuit, visiting places like New York and Los Angeles, as well as the rodeo route, which took them to smaller cities, including Waco, Texas, and Erie, Pennsylvania.

One of her first brushes with politics came in 1995, when DeSanto and her comrades performed for then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, future presidential candidate and then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and other politicians in the parking lot of the U.S. Capitol. Gingrich had asked the Ringling Brothers, already in town for a few nights, to perform outside the halls of Congress to celebrate the company’s 125th anniversary. The entertainers executed the famous elephant long mount, where the massive animals line up, place their hooves on the pachyderm in front and pose.

“I have great stories of kings and queens and all in betweens,” DeSanto said. “You name it, we’ve done it.”

The Boys and Girls Club

Eventually, the DeSantos bought a home near the Ringling Brothers headquarters in Baraboo, where they worked as the resident clowns for the Circus World Museum, and raised their daughter Emily, now 27.

In 2012, DeSanto left the circus to work for the Boys & Girls Clubs of West-Central Wisconsin, most of it as CEO.

In her time there, she led the revamp of the financially failing organization, which included clubs in Baraboo and Tomah, putting it on firmer ground, she said. DeSanto also oversaw the expansion of new clubs in Reedsburg and Portage.

She and her staff made the organization self-sustaining by tapping into moms and dads, local businesses and philanthropic organizations like the United Way, she said. They connected with their elected officials, like state Rep. Dave Considine, a Democrat from Baraboo, and pursued state and federal grants to help fund their after-school programs for rural kids.

“I’m just going to toot the horn that our clubs were the rural footprint for the nation,” she said. “But don’t get me wrong, it was always a struggle.”

She retired in 2024 from the Boys and Girls Club, but another interesting challenge arose for the versatile performer. And DeSanto found herself saying “yes” once again.

The Wisconsin Assembly

After Considine announced he would not seek reelection in 2024, he went about recruiting several Democratic candidates so his constituents could have options, he said.

DeSanto, with whom Considine had worked to secure some grant funding, was one of his picks.

“She’s really good in front of people. She knows people really well,” he said of DeSanto. “I think she also is a really strong fighter for individual rights. It was all about fighting for people to have the right to be successful and happy.”

Having worked at her existing clubs and helped to launch the new ones, DeSanto said she got to know the district and the people who live and work there.

She saw how important institutions like schools and the health care system were to the well-being of rural communities and knew she could be an advocate.

“I felt I had the chops, I felt I had the experience, I felt I knew my communities quite well,” she said. “That’s why I threw my hat in the ring.”

And in an era where money is so rampant in politics, her fundraising background couldn’t hurt either.

A three-candidate race emerged in the primary, and some voices, mostly online, tried to “weaponize” her background against her, DeSanto said, suggesting a clown didn’t belong in the Wisconsin Legislature.

Considine had prepared her for that.

“One of the first things I said was ‘Karen, don’t run from it.’ Embrace it and run on it,” he said. “And she did and I think she ran a really good race.”

The circus is quite popular in the district, DeSanto said, noting that the Ringling Brothers had grown up in Baraboo and made it their home base of their internationally renowned organization.

The criticisms backfired. She cruised to victory, winning more than 53% of the vote in the primary, a greater share than the other two candidates combined. DeSanto won the general election with more than 54% of the vote against a Republican challenger. The district had become more friendly to Democrats in the most recent round of redistricting.

About half a year into her 2-year term, in which her party is in the minority and thus unable to do much without GOP support, DeSanto has been a sponsor on a couple bills, including ones that would provide free, healthy school meals, lower prescription drugs and expand the homestead tax credit, but Republicans looking to cut spending stripped those from the budget.

She cast one of her first contentious “no” votes last month on the state budget negotiated by legislative Republicans in the majority, Gov. Tony Evers and state Senate Democrats, saying it did not do enough on issues important to her district, like affordable housing expansion, broadband access and public school funding.

Asked what she’s hoping to accomplish in her first term, DeSanto said, “I really am concentrating on listening, and absorbing what this Legislature is, and how the state Capitol works.”

“People say the Legislature is a circus, and I say ‘no, it’s not,’” she said with a chuckle. “The circus starts and ends on time. The people there are talented and kind and friendly.”

Another one she hears is that “government is a bunch of clowns,” an assertion with which she vehemently disagrees.

“Clowns are highly trained individuals, and they can do just about anything,” DeSanto said. “And they take their craft very seriously. And they bring joy and happiness.”

This article first appeared on The Badger Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The Badger Project is a nonpartisan, citizen-supported journalism nonprofit in Wisconsin.

From one circus to another: Professional clown serving in Wisconsin Legislature is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.