Inside Wisconsin Politics

GOP convention, decline of debates, ballot lawsuit

Shawn Johnson:
Republicans are in Dallas for the GOP’s midterm convention. Some stayed away. We talked through the pros and cons of attending a rare event in national politics, along with other campaign developments closer to home. This is Inside Wisconsin Politics.

Shawn Johnson:
I’m Shawn Johnson here with my colleagues, Anya van Wagtendonk, Zac Schultz and Rich Kremer in Eau Claire. Hey, everyone.

Anya van Wagtendonk:
Hello.

Shawn Johnson:
So I have this distinct memory. It was just two years ago. We were all in Milwaukee. It was the RNC, and you were there. You were there and you were there. Anya, what’s the deal? National conventions are every four years. What is this midterm convention that Republicans are doing right now, and why does it matter?

Anya van Wagtendonk:
You know, I had the same question about a week ago. I like to think I’m fairly tuned in to national politics. It is arguably my job. And I had never heard of a midterm convention. So this is not comparable to the events that we all went to in 2024. Those were nominating conventions. They’ve been held since the 19th century. This is more of a sort of rally kind of situation that Democrats experimented with in the 70s and 80s, and then decided they were not a good idea, that they were kind of a waste of time and money and maybe fractured their party. But now Republicans are giving it a shot. And so this is the first ever Republican midterm convention, and it’s, you know, going into a midterm election where they feel like the sort of deck is stacked against them as a party. They are the majority party at a time that people are pretty unhappy. And so this is about sort of revving up the base and really kind of focusing on Donald Trump as the continued kind of standard bearer of the party, when he won’t be on the ballot in November.

Shawn Johnson:
And we’re not in Dallas for this one. Rich, but you watched the stream of day one of this convention, which featured some, you know, one Wisconsin speaker. What did you see? Who’s there? And give us a kind of a sample of the flavor of what people heard.

Rich Kremer:
All right. Well, I’ll start with who was there. And at the national level, we had some big names. Of course, President Donald Trump was the keynote speaker last night. He’s going to be the keynote speaker again on Thursday night. But regardless, he had his cabinet secretaries there. Scott Bessent was there. Mehmet Oz was there. Todd Blanche was there. And as well as just a host of lawmakers from Congress Tom Emmer, Steve Scalise, etc. Folks in leadership positions. And the flavor was the Republicans really first of all, speaker after speaker went at length praising President Donald Trump, his accomplishments, etc. They talked a lot about the 2025 Big Beautiful Bill Act, although they were calling it different things. And we also just heard a lot about what they thought Democrats are all about. In general, the speakers were saying that Democrats are crazy and Republicans are the party of common sense. I heard one speaker call Democrats evil and that sort of thing. We heard a lot of culture war issues, transgender issues came up quite a bit. A lot of talk about Democrats loving open border policies, etc. And also a lot of talk about democratic socialism and kind of a mix of that with straight up accusations of communism within the Democratic ranks from Republicans.

Shawn Johnson:
And Derrick Van Orden, the Republican congressman from Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District, was there. And among the speakers, here’s a little sample of what he told Republican activists.

Derrick Van Orden:
You deserve high quality, readily available, and actually affordable health care. You know who else knows this? Our great president, Donald J. Trump.

Shawn Johnson:
So, Zac, Derrick Van Orden represents one of the swingiest districts in the country where a ton of money is going to be spent has already been spent trying to flip that seat. Why is he delivering this message on health care and Donald Trump at this convention, just a couple of months away from the election?

Zac Schultz:
Well, clearly, he is so closely attached to Donald Trump and running for Congress as a federal position he has no room to separate himself from there and make this about the Wisconsin race, like we’ve seen with Congressman Tom Tiffany, who’s running for governor and did not attend this event because he wants the focus to be on his race for governor, not his connections to Donald Trump. Derrick Van Orden either doesn’t have that luxury or is not interested in playing that game. No matter what, he’s going to be associated with the president. So for good or bad, he’s got to tie himself even closer to that and hope events like this boost the president’s turnout in his district, which would allow him to go along. Remember, he’s run behind Trump in these elections. In ’24, Trump got more votes than he did. He barely won, while Trump won his district by a larger margin. As for health care, that is one of the issues that he’s trying to run on there because it’s very important to the people in there. A lot of people lost health care in that congressional district. We’ve seen hospitals close in that area. Van Orden wants to take credit for federal legislation that brought in additional funds. There were some rejiggering through the state budget if you remember, Governor Evers at the last minute, trying to get a bill through that would authorize a higher reimbursement rate for and capture more of those federal funds. Van Orden tried to take credit for that. He’s running on that. Democrats saying, “well, you’re the one who ruined Medicaid for a lot of the people in this district, why they’re suffering from it in the first place.” So he views that as his issue to run on and his connection to Trump to boost that turnout in that district, which is why he needs to be there.

Shawn Johnson:
Yeah, I mean, Rich, it seems like there’s a couple ways you could go with President Donald Trump if you’re a candidate. You know, Derrick Van Orden has chosen this path. It kind of reminds me of Senator Ron Johnson, his last reelection, where he just embraced the president completely. And you even heard the president last night tell delegates, activists, hey, pretend I’m on the ballot. What’s going on there?

Rich Kremer:
Well, we’ve heard from Republicans election after election where they don’t do as well as they’d like that, well, there’s just this big group of voters that President Donald Trump was able to get to the polls in 2016 and 2024 that others just haven’t been able to reach. So there’s essentially speaking to those individuals. And if President Trump, you know, says, think of the ballot like I’m on it because the last eight years of my second term are on the line here, the hope is that those voters will understand that and will play the part and go out and vote for the various Republicans fighting to keep the House and the Senate in Republican control. Whether that works, we’ll see. It hasn’t in the past, but who knows?

Shawn Johnson:
And, you know, as it pertains to health care, we should mention that after Van Orden’s speech, which you reported, Democrats were pretty quick to attack and say, “hey, this is the guy that cut health care through the Big Beautiful Bill Act, with all these new restrictions on Medicaid enrollment.” Anya, I wonder we’ve talked on this program before about, you know, what happens when Republicans don’t, I guess, sufficiently adore the president, for lack of a better term. Tom Tiffany’s not there in that room with Derrick Van Orden and is not at the convention. Does he face any potential risks by not being there and being overtly supportive?

Anya van Wagtendonk:
Well, you know, he didn’t say “I’m not going because I want to separate myself from the president.” He said that he has campaign events here in Wisconsin, and he is not at all the only kind of vulnerable Republican or Republican from a swing state to not attend, and for different reasons. Again, some of them cited family events or other obligations. Some of them cited the cost. This is also a major kind of fundraising event. And so attending costs tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you’re running for sort of a smaller congressional seat or something, maybe that’s not, you know, a financial calculus there. So we don’t exactly know what Tom Tiffany’s kind of calculus is, except that we know that he’s running statewide in Wisconsin. There is the kind of guaranteed Trump base no matter what, but nationally, Trump’s poll numbers are not good among the sort of moderate and more independent voters that any statewide candidate in Wisconsin needs to win. And so maybe this is kind of an easy way to put a little bit of separation there, not have something as clippable as what Derrick Van Orden had that is just, you know, when they’re making attack ads, it’s very easy to kind of try to unite those two figures. And so he’s not kind of handing anything over quite so easily.

Shawn Johnson:
Zac, you just talked to Tom Tiffany and you touched on this convention. I believe. What’s his general take on why he’s not there? And you know, what’s he talking about right now?

Zac Schultz:
His main reason is he says he’s got a very busy schedule and he does. He’s doing a lot of campaign events. He’s doing a lot of press conferences, but it’s not in his interest right now to be in Texas when he should be in Wisconsin. And it strikes me as looking back to 2024, speaking of the Democratic convention that year Tammy Baldwin was up for reelection, and she spent almost the entire convention barnstorming Wisconsin, instead of being down in Chicago, she showed up for a day to do her due diligence. But part of her mentality was “I need to be where people see me that will be voting for me, not to be down in a convention hall.” Tom Tiffany taking that same approach doesn’t mean he’s pushing the president off at arm’s length by any stretch. However, I will say throughout our entire very long conversation yesterday, I asked many questions about Donald Trump and policies and implications. He only used Donald Trump’s name twice the entire time, and that was only referencing how Democrats are trying to connect him to Donald Trump. Every other time he talked about the administration or the president at most. Otherwise, he brought it back to Wisconsin every single point. He knows that traditional Republicans who support Donald Trump will vote for him. He also knows there are a lot of former Republicans or moderate Republicans or independents that don’t like the president right now that may vote for him if they don’t think of him too closely with the president. And so he is trying to walk that line between winning those votes and keeping a little bit of distance, but not angering some of that MAGA base that is very prickly and very sensitive about showing enough fidelity to the president by being there. Most of those people will vote for him anyway, so he doesn’t have to worry as much about protecting that flank, because he has very legitimate, serious MAGA credentials when it comes to being aligned with Donald Trump. Even if he stripped most of those from his website in his campaign for governor.

Shawn Johnson:
And I think it’s safe to say that the view of our governor’s race that most people are going to see is not through this midterm convention, maybe not through very interesting discussions about data centers and flock cameras, but on these TV ads that are going to become more and more prevalent in Wisconsin, these little 30-second snippets that take everything out of context. Rich what does the race for governor look like from that perspective, from somebody who’s watching this thing on their phone or on their TV and just getting these little samples, what is the debate about right now?

Rich Kremer:
Well, the latest ad I saw from David Crowley basically talked about affordability, about his plan to respond to housing costs, utility costs, etc. He doesn’t go into great detail, which is not uncommon with these types of ads. Essentially it’s what you would expect from years past. It’s him with his family sitting down, talking about costs being too high, and how he has plans to solve it. And from Tom Tiffany, we’ve seen him kind of go down the road of the whole “tough on crime Republican, Democrats being weak on crime” lane. One of his most recent ads focuses on a Milwaukee County policy where inmates in the jails were given access to iPads, and there was reporting recently that some of those inmates were reaching out and bothering or harassing or threatening witnesses. So the ad is essentially saying, “look at what David Crowley signed off on. Don’t let him do this for the entire state.”

Shawn Johnson:
You know, Zac, one area where we would have gotten more context in the not too distant past was through a series of debates between the candidates. We’re only going to get one this year, it turns out. The WBA debate, the [Wisconsin] Broadcasters Association debate that we would have broadcast and have for years, is canceled. So why so few debates? What happened this year?

Zac Schultz:
Well, David Crowley’s campaign says he agreed to that second debate. He said he would have agreed to more. They’re still doing one debate on October 21st. But this one had been earlier in the month. It was Tom Tiffany who said he only needed to do one debate. And when I asked him about it, he said, well, this has been a policy of his. When he’s been running for Congress, he said one debate is more than enough to cover all these issues, and it’s not a new trend. This has been going on for a decade or longer, where a lot of these candidates really don’t need the exposure. They have so many ways to contact their voters, either through social media, through mailers, through ads, that they don’t need the free media that they used to rely on ten, 20, 30 years ago, back when it was easier for us to hold a debate. Public television used to do one for every cycle, and it was pretty common to get them to come in. It was just figuring out the dates and everyone would say, “yeah, can’t wait to be in there.” And we stopped offering because we just couldn’t get anyone to say yes, to agree at the same spot at the same time. So this is not new. It’s a relic of the past. And there’s the old cycle of whoever’s behind in the polls wants to do more debates. I don’t know if that even applies anymore. I think it has more to do with how you limit your exposure, and doing one debate says, “I’m willing to do it.” Doing any more after that is just a risk that something could go catastrophically wrong.

Shawn Johnson:
So the new normal, perhaps from here on out. I guess there could be a time when we’re talking about zero debates, but this year it sounds like one.

Zac Schultz:
Yeah. Well, when’s the last time we had multiple gubernatorial debates?

Shawn Johnson:
I don’t remember. Rich, when’s the last time you had a debate between the candidates for the 3rd Congressional District? Derrick Van Orden and Rebecca Cooke?

Rich Kremer:
Boy, I don’t know the last time. I think the last debate Van Orden was involved with was with Ron Kind back in 2020.

Shawn Johnson:
Yeah. So before we wrap up here, we should touch on a couple of legal developments in cases that you’ve been reporting on. Anya, first, let’s talk about this lawsuit that was filed today by Planned Parenthood challenging some abortion restrictions in Wisconsin. What are they looking at there? And what’s the new approach they’re taking?

Anya van Wagtendonk:
Yeah. So this is kind of the new lawsuit following the really major settlement of the law of abortion in Wisconsin. So people might remember Roe falls, trigger laws go into place in the states, including one in Wisconsin. And so for many years, we were kind of watching that go through to determine the legality of abortion in Wisconsin. That was resolved last year. And so now there’s all of these kind of lesser restrictions in place on abortion access. And there has been some hinting that abortion advocates were going to file some sort of challenge to one or some of them. And so this lawsuit today was challenging a 24-hour waiting period and a requirement that a physician has to preside over the administration of abortion. What’s notable about this is that this is the first week of this new Supreme Court term, which is a 5 to 2 liberal majority. Two justices have pretty close previous relationships with Planned Parenthood. And so this is going to be kind of the first test of how far some of these activists, I think, can go in the courts to expand abortion access in Wisconsin.

Shawn Johnson:
Okay. And then another case that you’ve all reported on in some form is this challenge to mail-in voting restrictions. Rich, what’s going on there, and what is going on with absentee voting in Wisconsin?

Rich Kremer:
Absentee voting is underway. Ballots have gone out and are going out. The Trump administration is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to pause a federal judge’s order that is blocking the U.S. Postal Service’s plan to essentially not send ballots by mail to people who aren’t on these lists that the federal government approves. So who knows what will happen with that. But absentee voting is underway in Wisconsin right now.

Shawn Johnson:
And, Zac, sometimes, of course, we can’t control what the U.S. Supreme Court’s going to do. But sometimes states that don’t want the court to intervene will make a point of saying voting is happening. Now is not the time.

Zac Schultz:
Yeah. There are a lot of states where ballots have gone out. Ballots have already come back, and there’s a lot of clerks trying to figure out if this actually goes forward, how they will work around the chaos because it will be chaos. That’s a certainty. It’s how does it get around and how many people actually lose their ability to vote through the mail because of it?

Shawn Johnson:
All right, before we go, we wanted to let you know that WPR is making an interactive guide to the candidates, and we want to know: what questions do you want them to answer as they compete for your vote? Let us know in the comments or at wpr.org/elections. That’s all the time we have for today. This has been Inside Wisconsin Politics. Be sure to follow us on PBSWisconsin.org, wpr.org, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.