Unity and Determination in Wisconsin

You can’t help but get fired up when talking to former Democratic Party of Wisconsin chair Ben Wikler.

“There’s a sense of a generational project that is about to come to fruition,” he told the Prospect about his hopes for the 2026 election in Wisconsin. “All that is only possible because of a grassroots movement that fought for years to win fair maps… People remember, step by step, beating Scott Walker in 2018. Preventing super majorities in 2022. Flipping one supreme court seat after another and then fending off Elon Musk’s attempt to reverse the supreme court majority in 2025.”

“And all that has led up to this moment,” he concluded. “This is what all that work was built towards.”

I was ready to run through a brick wall or two for the Wisconsin Democratic Party after that pep talk, and I am a New Jersey resident who has never stepped foot in the ol’ Badger State.

On Tuesday there is a very real chance that Wisconsin Democrats win their first state government trifecta in sixteen years, capturing the governor’s seat along with a majority in both chambers of the legislature. There are also some critical U.S. House races that could play a critical role in who controls Congress.

AMONG THE SEVERAL WISCONSIN DEMOCRATS I SPOKE TO over the last week, there was universal (almost worryingly cocky) confidence that David Crowley was going to win the governor’s race against Tom Tiffany, and that the party would take back the state Senate. The state Assembly appears to be more of a tossup, but there is genuine hope there too,  even if, as state Senator Kelda Roys (D) told the Prospect, the maps still “heavily favor the Republican assembly.”

Not included in the rousing multi-year journey described by Wikler was this summer’s miserably messy Democratic gubernatorial primary, which could have put a crimp in the party’s chances on Tuesday. But by all accounts, the party has unified around David Crowley, and democratic socialist Francesca Hong, who finished second in the primary after leading almost wire to wire, was credited by multiple sources, including Wikler, for her diligent work across the state this fall.

“Not everyone who comes up short in a primary devotes themselves in this kind of wholehearted way to electing the person to win,” said Wikler. “Francesca really has, and I think that speaks to her character and speaks to the hunger that Democrats have in Wisconsin to actually win a trifecta that can govern, which is something that they haven’t had in a generation.”

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Becky Cooper, who ran Hong’s gubernatorial campaign and is now the director of Hong’s statewide We Make Better Possible tour, told me what Hong and other grassroots organizers are doing to get Crowley elected. One critical part of the work, she said, is pushing Crowley to the left on data centers and on taxing the rich. She is largely encouraged by what she has seen.

“I don’t know that I would have expected it even a few weeks ago, but there’s been movement because of some work of content creators that we had been working with throughout the campaign,” she explained. “They have put so much pressure on the Crowley campaign and [the Crowley campaign has] been responsive and reaching out to people, having those conversations. We’re optimistic in that way.”

“There’s going to be differences,” Cooper added. “It’s supposed to be a big tent and we’ve been trying to pick out those walls and get more people into the tent. So there’s going to be disagreements, but I think everybody is on the right track.”

Roys, who also ran against Crowley in the Democratic gubernatorial primary this year, is, like Hong, very much on board.

“We are finally on the cusp of realizing a generation-long dream of having a fair representative government where Democrats actually can get power,” she said. “And that is overwhelmingly the sentiment that I hear from people. As I drive around the state, I have a lot of people coming up to me and say, ‘Oh, you know, I really wanted you to be the nominee, but I’m excited for David.’ Or, you know, you’ll see somebody that has the Hong bumper sticker, like right next to a Crowley one.”

Roys told me that her personal top priorities for the next Wisconsin legislative session are public education funding and health care. Thanks to the Republican legislature, Wisconsin is one of ten states that hasn’t expanded Medicaid after the Affordable Care Act, which would extend care to nearly 100,000 low-income residents.

She also told me that she is ready to work with whoever wins, though she is obviously strongly supporting Crowley.

“I’ve worked with hostile governors before,” she noted.

“Oh yeah, you had one for a while,” I replied, referring to Republican Scott Walker, who ran the state from 2011 until 2019.

“By some measures we still have one now,” added Roys, catching me a bit off guard.

I got the sense in talking to some stalwarts of state Democratic politics (though not all) that outgoing Gov. Tony Evers will not be missed, in large part because of his actions during the primary.

Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson, a former U.S. Senate candidate, was diplomatic and succinct. “Among other legacies, [Evers] was the steady hand that slowed the political pendulum and returned the state to its historic center-left orientation.”

As for the next governor, Nelson said he would be surprised if Crowley loses. He also fully expects the Democrats to take the state Senate but calls the state Assembly a tossup.

“You’ve heard of the Arab Spring. Consider this the Labor Autumn,” declared Nelson. “All indications suggest the leadership is responding with both money and organization. Grassroots are excited. Hitting the doors, pounding the pavement.”

Late endorsements by several labor organizations were a key factor in Crowley’s primary victory, and the Wisconsin AFL-CIO, SEIU Wisconsin, and the UAW all joined the fray for the general election campaign.

Crowley has called for the repeal of Act 10, a state law passed by Walker in 2011 that severely restricts the rights of all state public employees except police and firefighters to collectively bargain, among other anti-worker measures. “The labor movement in Wisconsin,” Roys said, “was the number one target of Scott Walker and the Republicans when they took power. So this election cycle offers them not just the chance of actually getting some workers rights back in a place that has traditionally been just a bastion of labor rights, but the chance to finally play a part in politics again.”

Crowley’s opponent, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, voted for Act 10 as a state legislator and has said that he would keep the law in place as governor.

Nelson, who knows the ins and outs of Wisconsin politics as well as anybody, said that we should have a good sense of the governor’s race by 8:30 on election night. “If the map is pink, David [Crowley] wins. If it’s red, Crowley still likely wins. If it’s deep red, long night. Townships will come in first. The degree that they vote Republican will directly relate to GOP enthusiasm.”

I reached out to press contacts at the Wisconsin Republican Party as well as the Tiffany campaign but did not receive responses.

WIKLER BELIEVES THAT INCUMBENT WISCONSIN REPUBLICANS in Congress, like Reps. Derrick Van Orden and Bryan Steil, are especially vulnerable this year due to “three big horsemen of the affordability apocalypse:” tariffs, the war in Iran, and Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.

“They directly affect so many of the things that people buy or need each day,” he said.

Van Orden, who is being challenged for the second time by Rebecca Cooke, has been a longtime Democratic target. But Steil, who replaced former House Speaker Paul Ryan, represents the 1st District, which has been Republican since the Gingrich Revolution in 1994. The district is currently rated Lean Republican by prognosticators, but people I talked to believe Mitchell Berman, a certified emergency nurse who worked  for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for a decade, has a real shot.

“When you hear Mitchell Berman talk about why he went into health care, why he loves working with veterans, and the things that his own patients face, it is just so clear why he’s in this work and what his values are and his side he’s on,” said Wikler. “In a way that is a perfect contrast with Bryan Steil, who seems like the only person he really needs to work for is not a constituent at all, but the president who lives in Mar-A-Lago.”

In an interview with The Prospect, Berman did not much take to my admittedly hackish question about whether running for office was less stressful than working as an ER nurse.

“It’s a different type of stress,” he answered, politely, before explaining that he views the opportunity to run for Congress as an extension of his health care career.

“We have an opportunity to make such a massive impact in people’s lives by making sure that they can have access to affordable health care and preventative care to help prevent these bad outcomes that we’re seeing, and we can help restructure our health care system to actually work for people,” he said.

Berman, who legally had to resign from the VA to make the run for Congress, told the Prospect how chaotic things were there before he left, due to the Trump administration and DOGE.

“They started indiscriminately firing people, implemented hiring freezes and funding cuts,” Berman said. “Then of course during all of that we got an email from Elon Musk asking us to justify our job and give him three things that we did in the previous week.”

Berman’s immediate priority when it comes to health care is restoring the enhanced ACA subsidies and reversing the Medicaid cuts in the “Big Beautiful Bill,” which have had a devastating impact.

“We’re looking at 270,000 people in Wisconsin losing their coverage,” he said, the same statistic used in a recent ad. Berman noted that the underinsured and uninsured have nowhere to go for treatment. “So we were seeing increased wait times and overflow in our emergency rooms, because people would wait until the point that they got really sick to come to the hospital, overwhelming hospitals and that cost being then shifted to folks who had insurance.”

Berman also comes from a family of dairy farmers, and spent a lot of his childhood at the farm. He says rectifying what has been done to Wisconsin’s dairy farmers by Trump’s tariffs is another top priority. “Our closest trading partner for our dairy farmers is Canada,” he said. “Because of this trade war that has been undertaken by this administration, it’s not feasible for them to be able to sell their dairy products to Canada anymore… we’ve seen farm bankruptcies go up 700 percent in the last year here in Wisconsin.”

Steil’s campaign did not respond to an interview request.

Limited polling in the district suggests a dead heat. Steil outperformed Trump by 7 points in 2024, and there is a narrative that the incumbent congressman has a special personal brand that connects with voters in the district. Wikler, though, senses that Steil’s “boring empty suit armor” has been pierced by Trump 2.0. “There’s a sense among a ton of voters that they recognize that he is part of the thing that they are so furious about.”