The Trump administration is focused on noncitizen voting ahead of the November 2026 election — Marquette University political science professor Philip Rocco said it’s a concerted effort on multiple fronts. The Enbridge Line 5 oil and gas pipeline in northern Wisconsin struck a leak and Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Sec. Karen Hyun called to halt work on a re-route project. Laura Dresser, associate director of UW-Madison’s High Road Strategy Center, said economic indicators for Wisconsin workers are mixed.

Philip Rocco
Professor, Marquette University Department of Political Science

• The U.S. Department of Homeland Security named Wisconsin as one of the states where it will investigate and prosecute voting by noncitizens. That announcement follows the Trump administration’s directive to the U. S. Postal Service to implement a process to mail absentee ballots only to those on a federal list of voters that is in the middle of court battles over implementation, as well as a U.S. Census Bureau report that purported to show 500 noncitizens in Wisconsin voted in the 2020 election. Rocco said the census report was baseless and just another voter fraud claim promoted by the president.
• Rocco: “I think what we’re seeing is a kind of multi-layered effort by the Trump administration to kind of do Jan. 6 every day to keep alive the myth that there’s widespread noncitizen voting to kind de-legitimatize elections. And it’s not just kind of one instrument or one tool that they’re using to do this.They’re using information from the Census Bureau, using enforcement power from DHS, and using in a really irregular way, the Postal Service, in an attempt to gatekeep who votes. And so I think what that tells us is that the administration is is really hedging its bets, both on what strategies it thinks it’s going to be successful with, but also what the outcome, in a way, of all of these strategies is going to be. And they’re kind of setting up, I think, some opportunities for themselves if one of the strategies doesn’t work out, that they can sort of fall back on another.”

Sec. Karen Hyun
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

• The Calgary, Alberta-based energy company Enbridge said its Line 5 oil and gas pipeline would resume pumping 23 million gallons per day starting the week of Sept. 7. It was shut down after a leak on Aug. 25 caused more than one million gallons of propane and butane to release into the atmosphere near Saxon in Iron County. Following this spill, Hyun and the Wisconsin DNR requested Enbridge halt work on its project to re-route the pipeline around the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa’s reservation. The Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission, or GLIFWC, has condemned the leak. In a letter to Enbridge, Hyun wrote, “the agency is deeply concerned about this spill and immensely frustrated by other recent noncompliance events.” She reiterated that this incident was not isolated.
• Hyun: “There have been several issues of noncompliance that have happened where there have been drilling fluid that’s leaked in the process of their horizontal drilling under some of the waterways as they reroute the pipeline around the Bad River reservation. I heard the concerns from GLIFWC and other tribal nations, and we share those concerns over those recent incidents as well, which is why we asked for a stand down. And we continue to have robust dialog with Enbridge about how they can increase their safety and environmental compliance in compliance with the permits that we’ve issued.”

Laura Dresser
Associate director, High Road Strategy Center at UW-Madison

• The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics issued its August 2026 employment update showing 162,000 jobs were added over the month. Dresser said the report offered great news at the national level, but that overall the labor market has barely grown since January 2025. She said Wisconsin’s total job base is slightly below where it was at 18 months earlier. Median wages in Wisconsin have grown steadily, however, sitting at just over $26 per hour, as found in the 2026 edition of the annual State of Working Wisconsin report. Dresser projects wage gains could be wiped out in 2026 as the cost of living increases.
• Dresser: “Inflation, the rate of inflation ,is higher than the rate of wage growth. This is what happened in 2022. Wages, workers’ wages, went up in nominal terms, but the cost of living just wiped that right out. That looks like what we’re heading into for 2026. So while we got a high in 2025 and that’s great news, 2026 looks much less likely that that will be a strong gain and possible that it will be a loss because of the high inflation.”

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