Inside Wisconsin Politics

The Democratic primary for governor starts to get negative, and one candidate turns to national live streams to raise money.

Not everyone is happy about it.

This is inside Wisconsin politics.

I'm Shawn Johnson here with Anya van here with Anya van Wagtendonk and Rich Kremer in Eau Claire.

Hey, gang.

Hey, Shawn.

So I want to start this discussion with a simple question.

I think a lot of people probably associate political campaigns with negative attacks.

Candidates run for office, they attack their opponents.

So, Anya, I'm wondering why is it noteworthy that here in the middle of summer, we have overt negative attacks in this Democratic primary?

Yeah.

You know, I think for the last couple weeks, months, there have been some snipes, what I might call sort of a Midwestern, nice approach to trying to get negative.

This was the first week that we got, you know, a press release from a candidate explicitly saying, my opponent has done something bad.

I am going to do something great.

And that was Mandela Barnes calling out Sara Rodriguez, a former lieutenant governor, calling out a current lieutenant governor over donations that she received while she was in the Assembly and essentially trying to to suggest that she is viable, that he is not.

So making an issue of this in a much more explicit way.

So a little bit of a shot across the bow, six weeks out from the midterm to really kind of start to make these more explicit points.

Rich, I think this kind of pales by comparison from attacks you would see in national politics right now, for sure.

And in past Wisconsin campaigns.

Have you seen anything like this yet this summer?

Not really.

I mean, it's it's as Anya mentioned, these these have been pretty mild.

And I guess if we're thinking about, you know, boneless buffalo wings, these would be the ranch and the, the blue cheese type of attacks that we've seen thus far.

We're starting to get into the actual, you know, Frank's redhot kind of territory.

But even still, it's pretty tame.

And what I was thinking about is the earlier veiled criticisms that we heard, like during the Democratic convention or something, most people aren't really tuned in to this race yet.

That is your regular voter.

But the people that might be getting these communications from the candidates could be, you know, fellow politicians looking to endorse one of the six candidates in the race could also be messaging out to money groups or donors.

I mean, that's speculation.

But really, unless you're really tuned in, you wouldn't be able to connect the dots between some of the attacks we've seen until this moment between the candidates when they're talking about electability or first time politician, etc.

You'd really have to do some homework to find out.

And now it's, it's a little more blatant, right?

So you would have to know like a convention, for example, when Kelda Roys says, we can't have anybody without experience stepping in here at this time, she's, you know, we kind of know who she's referring to, but she's not saying it.

Francesca Hong saying, you know, voters can detect BS.

I don't know, I suppose she could be saying that about everybody but her.

But this is like a candidate against another candidate.

So I guess I'm wondering, what does it say about Mandela Barnes and Sara Rodriguez right now that the attack is coming from Mandela Barnes against Sara Rodriguez?

And by the way, she responded in kind.

Absolutely right.

It was kind of a forceful exchange of words.

So then her response was, essentially, you ran for Senate and lost.

I ran for lieutenant governor and won.

And so again, them's fightin words.

That's a little bit not quite Midwest nice.

So I think it tells us a couple of things.

One, it says that Sara Rodriguez is considered to be a serious contender, right?

You don't need to take down somebody who has nowhere to come down from.

Another thing is that Mandela Barnes is really trying to make utility rates a kind of central platform.

And so using this particular thing, donations around utility rates is also a way to kind of draw attention to himself.

And then I think the third thing is, you know, voters are pretty checked out, even though, again, we are less than six weeks away from the primary, absentee ballots have already started being sent out.

But there's like a way that these candidates need to be drawing contrast between themselves in a crowded race where there's not super strong distinctions, right?

On the sort of the major issues, they're relatively unified.

And so this is also a way of like distinguishing in terms of lanes.

So he didn't go after, for example, Francesca Hong, who is a little bit more on his wing of the Democratic Party, he went after somebody who's a little bit more moderate.

And so it's a way of, I think, again, trying to draw starker distinctions between lanes in this race, not just between individual candidates.

to make sense of the lanes in this race.

I mean, I kind of have a sense of it, but I wonder if they are feeling it out too.

And that is kind of the way I read it too, is that Mandela Barnes probably win over the Francesca Hong supporters necessarily, but those Rodriguez supporters, they might be my people.

1 in a crowded primary, you're fighting over the same voters.

You're fighting over Democrats, right?

And so you also, it's the kind of thing where a few thousand votes can be the difference between winning and not.

It's more competitive in certain ways than a general.

And so like the contours of what competition looks like in the primary is also going to look different.

Rich.

And this kind of reminds me of something I heard from a campaign strategist back in 2022.

This was the Senate race between Mandela Barnes and Ron Johnson.

Ron Johnson's polling numbers, you know, approval ratings weren't super high.

And this this person who was a Republican campaign consultant, said Johnson doesn't need to improve his numbers.

He just needs to hurt and bring down the numbers of Barnes.

So in a primary like this, that might be part of the calculus.

Like if someone seems to be whether it be from internal polling or whatever, getting some ground in your campaign doesn't like that.

Try to knock them down a bit.

So I guess I wonder if this is kind of uncorking the bottle, so to speak, you know, like, is this going to be the new norm now that a fight started?

Is it okay for Democrats to say, well, you know, I didn't start it, but but I got to finish it now, or they or they see sort of the urgency of the primary coming up.

And, and if they want to stand out, do they have to attack?

Is there any signs that that's happening?

Well, it's a little bit of a calculation because, you know, on the one hand, negative attacks can get you more attention if you're kind of sassy on social media, that tends to resonate a little bit more.

But at the same time, you don't want to weaken fellow Democrats terribly because ultimately they're going to go up against, presumably, Tom Tiffany in November for what is going to be a close race, like a general election in Wisconsin is always going to be close.

And so you want to kind of weaken your opponents across the finish line, but not so much that you kind of leave your entire party susceptible to potentially.

Tom Tiffany, picking up what you've already said and running with it.

Rich, what do you think?

Yeah, it's it's, I agree 100%.

And I mean, no matter who the Democratic candidate is, it would be surprising if the entirety of the party doesn't try to rally around them, because this race is pretty critical for them as they're they're hoping, you know, the best case scenario would be a trifecta where they win the state assembly, state Senate and keep the governorship.

So maybe that's also why the attacks have been kind of mild.

But whoever it is, that bad blood will likely magically disappear, at least publicly after the August primary.

So, Anya, there was a story that you covered this week involving Francesca Hong fundraising strategy here.

It was at the end of the fundraising period, by the way, where she went on a couple of national livestreams to raise money.

Tell us about who she talked to and why is that significant?

on Monday.

One was Mike from PA, who's sort of a progressive streamer aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America.

He has a pretty big following.

And then she went on with Hasan Piker, who's arguably one of the biggest political streamers online, and he's become something of a kingmaker or perhaps attempted kingmaker on the left of American politics.

And he's appeared with a number of DSA aligned or sort of leftist politicians.

And so she went on with him.

It was about an hour and a half appearance.

It was a sort of fun and chatty.

They talked about politics, but they also ate Korean food and they talked about merchandise, and they talked about whether they should erect a statue of Scott Walker for people to walk around and slap when they have big feelings.

So it was this really, you know, it's a very different kind of appearance than might occur sort of here on PBS Wisconsin or.

But that was this kind of approach to, according to Francesca Hong meeting, different types of voters, more disaffected voters, the type of people who keep these streams going, again, perhaps very different voters than our, our, our audience.

But at the same time, Hasan Piker has said numerous very controversial things in the past, things about Israel in particular that has offended some Jewish communities.

And so there's also been a response.

She ended the day having raised about $92,000 from those two different streams.

Hasan Piker has said now he's going to come out to Wisconsin and campaign with her.

But at the same time, there's been this kind of pushback from fellow Democrats and others saying, why would you appear with somebody who has said X, Y, Z in the past?

And and so like you did see some attack there from David Crowley kind of like saying you should just you shouldn't go on here.

Right?

I mean, essentially, yeah.

He said those comments are beyond the pale.

And, you know, I should perhaps specify what they were.

So he has said, for example, nine over 11 was deserved.

And he says that he was referring to this idea that America's foreign policy actions have consequences.

And then again, a number of his comments about Israel and Zionism has has sort of been seen as conflating Jewish American Zionists, this kind of thing.

And so I spoke with, for example, Ann Jacobs, who's the co-chair of the Jewish Caucus of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, who was really kind of appalled by the fact that Francesca Hong would go alongside this person and said that, you know, should Hong received the nomination in November, she feels like she's going to have a lot of work to do to bring Jewish Democrats kind of into the ballot box to make sure that a Democrat can still win.

And again, you know, I reached out to the Hong campaign for comment and they said, essentially, we are willing to meet with just about anyone to share our vision if we don't go on these types of platforms, that creates a vacuum that conservative messaging can instead go to.

So they're trying to create this sort of big tent.

Some of the concern from other Democrats is who all should be in the big tent.

And how much did she raise in a day?

$92,000, $57,000 from Hasan Piker or from that stream.

And, you know, for somebody who's watched those streams, they kind of know what to expect for somebody who doesn't.

It's a bit it's a little busy on those streams, is it not?

Yeah.

As a, you know, a public radio girly, I will say it was a little bit stimulating to have that kind of thing going.

But I think people who are younger than me like this is how they are getting a lot of their, their news and information.

And again, in this kind of funny, cheeky way.

All right.

What do you think, Chad?

I don't know.

Is that how it's done?

Right, fam?

Rich, rich Kremer, what are Republicans saying about this appearance there by Francesca Hong?

They're saying a lot.

They're they're framing it.

As you know, this is the entire Democratic Party lurching to the left towards these what they call dangerous ideas and comments.

So they've they've been very critical of Hong.

But again, they're conflating this to to try to say that all Democrats are essentially Hasan Piker fans and they support everything that he's ever said, which is obviously an exaggeration, but that seems to be the way you do it in politics when you're trying to bring down the other side.

And we'll get a sense in the middle of July, July 15th, or when fundraising reports are due for the first half of this year.

So you'll see not only that fundraising, but everybody else's fundraising up through that point.

And, you know, you'll get a real sense of who's got a formidable campaign right before the campaign wraps up.

Essentially, we're going to be in a very compressed primary campaign here.

Rich Tom Tiffany, the Republican candidate for governor, is had the benefit of not having a real contested primary on his side.

And he's getting a correspondence now from the president of the United States about disaster declaration.

What happened there?

It was really interesting.

So President Donald Trump used his his personal social media site, Truth Social to announce that Wisconsin has been approved for around $22.5 million in disaster relief aid.

This is tied to the storms that we saw earlier this year, big time flooding, other kinds of damage that really hit local governments pretty hard.

So he made this announcement, which is not unusual, but he didn't mention Governor Evers once.

In fact, he said that the first call that he made was to Tom Tiffany, who he also mentioned I endorsed, and he kind of re-upped that.

Trump also essentially applauded every Republican in the congressional delegation and didn't mention a single Democrat from Wisconsin, even though Governor Tony Evers and people like Tammy Baldwin and the rest of the delegation sent letters in May asking for this assistance, they were asking for $27 million.

So it almost seemed like the president was treating Tiffany like he's already the governor.

And that that Evers is already kind of an afterthought.

So that was that was pretty interesting to see.

And the Evers administration essentially doesn't know the details, at least when you talk to them.

They didn't know the details of the funding.

You reached out to the white House press office and had a series of questions for them about the details, and they had a very brief response to you.

That's right.

I wanted to I asked, you know, when might this money be coming?

What type of aid?

Because there's aid from the from FEMA that goes to businesses or governments or individuals.

I so those were the questions I asked, and they just said, we refer you to the truth, which means to the president's post.

So they didn't have any additional information.

All right.

So we had two very big Supreme Court decisions, US Supreme Court decisions this week, which were national news.

But I think it's fair to say there are some Wisconsin angles in there.

First, this this birthright citizenship decision.

Rich, I think this was widely expected that the court would rule against President Trump's executive order and say that birthright citizenship is protected by the US Constitution.

But there are Republicans, and I mean noteworthy Republicans in Wisconsin who are saying, we got to do something about this.

Yeah.

To to to borrow Ange's term, big feelings.

There were big feelings from some Republicans in Wisconsin.

Congressman Derrick Van Orden basically said that the Constitution's 14th amendment was aimed at guaranteeing citizenship to freed slaves and not for children of illegal immigrants.

He said the ruling undermines the integrity of American citizenship, and that Congress has to do something about it, with it being declared unconstitutional, at least the executive order.

It's kind of unclear what that would look like.

Congressman Toni WHEDA, another Republican, said that, you know, this amendment wasn't intended for what it's being used for today.

There's all this talk of birth tourism, where the idea is that people that are pregnant, you know, women that are pregnant from other countries come here, have a baby strictly so that they can get that child citizenship automatically.

One of the more, I guess, aggressive comments came from seventh Congressional District Republican candidate Michael Alfonso.

He's the son in law of Shawn Duffy, the U.S.

transportation secretary.

He talked about how his newborn baby can trace her ancestry, quote, back to before the Revolutionary War, and that the ruling essentially is telling people that children like his are not equally as American.

To quote Chinese spies, anchor babies.

So a lot of a lot of thoughts coming from some on the right.

And Ana there was this other Supreme Court decision involving national parties and how much they can raise and spend.

You said it would export the Wisconsin model.

What do you mean?

Wisconsin, since about 2015, we have had a rule on the books that says that our state political parties can raise and spend as much money as they want in political races.

You've actually reported on the fact that this was a Republican law, that in recent years, Democrats have made very good use of, in particular, in our enormous Supreme Court races.

Right?

Democrats, for example, for the election of Janet Protasiewicz, spent $10 million on that campaign and that sort of unleashed these floodgates.

Well, now, as of this Supreme Court decision, this will be the case at the national level, at the federal level.

So the national political parties RNC see these kinds of organizations.

They can spend as much as they want on these races in coordination with campaigns.

And so essentially, it's doing away with a major cap on campaign finance regulations that, you know, people I've spoken to have said, as in Wisconsin.

So now we'll go the nation.

Yeah.

And I know the Wisconsin law.

Everybody thought for sure this is going to help Republicans.

It ended up being helpful to Democrats here.

We'll see what happens with this change at the national level.

And opened the floodgates for us to have record breaking, expensive elections.

It seems like every year.

all the time we have for today.

Thanks for joining us.

Our colleague Zac Schultz will be back next week.

This has been inside Wisconsin politics.

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