Zac Schultz:

Now for a closer look at the Democratic primary race for governor and our continuing series of candidate interviews. Tonight with talk with Mike McCabe. McCabe was raised on a dairy farm in Rock County. He’s the founder and president of the political grassroots organization Blue Jean Nation and he’s the former executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. And Mike McCabe joins us now. Thanks for being here.

Mike McCabe:

Thanks for having me.

Zac Schultz:

And let the record reflect you are wearing blue jeans today.

Mike McCabe:

I am.

Zac Schultz:

So you are in the spirit. Why do you believe you’re the progressive choice for Wisconsin?

Mike McCabe:

Well, it’s partly because of my life’s work. I’ve spent almost my entire adult life as an independent watchdog working to expose and break the grip of big money influence in politics and exposing corruption in our government. And we’ve got a government right now that works incredibly well for a wealthy and well-connected and privileged few at the very top, but it’s ignoring the wishes and the needs and the interests and concerns of so many regular working people out there. As I travel the state, there are just a whole lot of forgotten people living in forgotten places all around Wisconsin. Some of them in the inner city, some of them way out in the country, like where I grew up. But we’ve got to have government that works for all us, and not just a few. And that’s been something that Ive dedicated my life to.

Zac Schultz:

Why are you better positioned to beat Scott Walker in the fall than the other democrats in this race?

Mike McCabe:

Latest poll says that Im running strongest among any of the candidate in the field. So if you believe polls, right there it says that Im the one who’s the most competitive head-to-head against the governor. But I think the real reason is that people are really hungry for a very different kind of leadership and a new kind of politics. And there’s a big field of establishment politicians, machine politicians, who’ve come up through that system. But what people are looking for is a clean break from that system because they see how it’s failed regular people. If regular folks are going to be in the driver’s seat of our government, we do need a very different kind of leadership. I think that’s what people are looking for and that’s what they’re seeing in me.

Zac Schultz:

You mentioned the poll, the Marquette poll. The head-to-heads, you are neck and neck with Governor Walker, but for the Democratic primary, you’re at 7%, which is behind Tony Evers but generally at the top of the rest.

Mike McCabe:

Yeah, rose to second place in that poll. There’s so many people undecided. So many people still getting to know the candidates. Ultimately the only poll that really matters is the one that’s held on August 14. Let the people decide.

Zac Schultz:

On health care, on your website, you say you want to make BadgerCare available for everyone in Wisconsin. How much would that cost?

Mike McCabe:

Actually, we need to do three things: we need to correct the mistake that was made when Wisconsin turned down the federal Medicaid expansion money. We should take that money. People have paid taxes out to Washington. We should bring that money back to Wisconsin. That makes more than 80,000 more people eligible for BadgerCare. We got to correct another mistake, when Wisconsin chose not to set up its own insurance exchange under the Affordable Care Act. We need to set up our insurance exchange but then we need to make BadgerCare a public option and put it on that exchange and let anybody choose it. We can do that actually by changing a single word in state law. If we change one word in state law, we can make BadgerCare a public option, put it on the insurance exchange, make that something that’s available for anybody to buy into regardless of income. So that’s not a matter of a huge additional state expense. It’s a matter of correcting some mistakes and changing state law to create that as an option for everybody.

Zac Schultz:

One of your position statements on your website connects legalizing the use of recreationally marijuana to paying for higher education. What’s the connect there for you?

Mike McCabe:

We’ve now got a state budget that spends more on prisons than on the entire university system. We are literally as a state spending more locking people up than we are on unlocking human potential. And a big driving force behind that is the fact that Wisconsin locks up so many nonviolent offenders. We’ve simply got to stop using prison as a punishment for nonviolent offenses. So yes, I’ve come out in favor of full legalization of marijuana. What that would do is get us to that goal of cutting our prison population in half. It’s a doable goal because look right across the border to the west. There’s Minnesota imprisoning half as many people as Wisconsin. Yet our two states have virtually identical crime rates. So imprisoning twice as many people hasn’t brought down crime in Wisconsin. It’s just doomed us to a budget that spends more on prisons than on the university system. We can turn that around. But it starts with using alternative approaches to sentencing with nonviolent offenses and investing in things like mental health and drug treatment services rather than locking people up and throwing away the key.

Zac Schultz:

I want to talk about your economic policy statement. It talks about a big shift in farming in Wisconsin, moving away from industrial agriculture and the CAFO, large scale dairy operations. Is that really feasible in this economy when those mid-size farmers are going away? They can’t afford to stay in the business.

Mike McCabe:

I grew up on a dairy farm. I come from that farming background. It was a small family dairy farm. We’ve lost over 10,000 family farms in Wisconsin in the last decade. And we’re still losing more than one a day. I just think our government should be on the side of incentivizing small-scale sustainable agriculture and helping to rescue those family farms so that they don’t all go away. Look, the way agriculture is evolving is not sustainable over the long haul for the land, for the air, for the water, for the animals, for the people of our state. We at least should have our government on the side of incentivizing a model of agriculture that’s sustainable. Coming from a family dairy farming background, having grown up working the land and milking cows with my family, I know that way of life really well and it’s a matter of having our government on the side of sustainable agriculture rather than subsidizing and encouraging the massive scale industrialization of agriculture.

Zac Schultz:

Mike McCabe, thank you for your time.

Mike McCabe:

Thanks for having me.