Sara Rodriguez — Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor and a 2026 Democratic primary candidate for governor —- dropped out of the race after firing her campaign manager, and Here & Now senior political reporter Zac Schultz explained how this stunning election shakeup happened. Madison will be the location of a massive nuclear energy research and development facility — Realta Fusion CEO Kieran Furlong described its goals.

Zac Schultz
Senior political reporter, Here & Now

• With less than a month before the Aug. 11 primary election, Sara Rodriguez was seen as one of the frontrunners in the 2026 Democratic primary race for governor, but her campaign unraveled quickly. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising that Rodriguez dropped out of the race on July 17, except that for days after firing her campaign manager for fundraising reporting errors, she vowed to stay in. Eventually she called the financial fiasco “too much of a distraction.” Schultz said he’s never seen anything like this turn of events in his political reporting career.
• Schultz: Not like this. We’ve seen campaigns fall apart. We’ve seen campaigns run out of money and be deep in debt. That’s not new. It’s the discord — that it all came out and this back and forth throughout the week. If this had come out in February or March and those statements had been corrected, she probably could have survived and moved on because she still had support this week. Just this week, talking to people out in the field, she won the Ozaukee County Democratic straw poll with Francesca Hong in the audience. So the support was still there, but it was clear that she could not change the message away from her oversight of her own campaign to back to one being about the primary.”

Kieran Furlong
CEO, Realta Fusion

• A company spun out of UW-Madison, Realta Fusion will establish a 200,000-square-foot research and development facility on the site of the long-vacant Oscar Mayer plant in Madison. Private investors, the state of Wisconsin and the cIty of Madison all contributed toward financing for this development. Furlong said that scientists have been working since the 1920s to figure out how to harness the same process that powers the sun, and Realta researchers expect to have the first commercial operation based on their technology available by the mid-2030s.
• Furlong: “We’re on the way there. And, in fact, just recently we announced an experiment we did where we demonstrated we could pull electricity directly from the plasma that we’re operating in the WHAM machine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. So plasma is the fourth state of matter. So you think, you know, ice, water, steam, and the next step up would be plasma. So we need to get a plasma. We can hold that in a magnetic cage essentially, because we need to get it to temperatures much hotter than you could hold in a steel vessel, for example. But we’re making great progress with it. There’s still some work to do, and that’s what we’ll be doing our R&D in this new facility.”

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