Wisconsin Watch is previewing legislative races in toss-up districts ahead of the Nov. 5 election by focusing on key issues for voters and what candidates say they will do to address them.

Housing and child care affordability, abortion rights and public school funding are key issues in the race for the 61st Assembly District — a toss-up district encompassing portions of southwestern Milwaukee as well as Greendale, Hales Corners and parts of Greenfield.

The race is a rematch from 2022, pitting incumbent Rep. Bob Donovan, R-Greenfield, a longtime GOP office-holder in the Milwaukee area, against Democrat LuAnn Bird, a former executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin. Donovan won the 2022 contest by just 525 votes.

The partisan makeup of the district is an almost identical split between Republicans and Democrats, according to a Wisconsin Watch analysis of recent voting patterns.

The district is one of 15 that Democrats are targeting this cycle, with hopes of flipping control of the Assembly for the first time in more than a decade after the Wisconsin Supreme Court last year threw out the state’s Republican-gerrymandered maps.

Here’s where both candidates stand on important issues in the district.

Housing and child care affordability

Bird said a top priority to address burdensome costs facing Wisconsin families is to make child care more affordable.

“It doesn’t make sense when you have to spend half your salary on child care,” Bird said in an interview. She said she supports Gov. Tony Evers’ Child Care Counts program, which provides payments to child care providers on a regular basis to help keep their doors open. The program is credited with keeping thousands of child care facilities open during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

A woman in glasses and a yellow shirt crosses her arms and sits on a rock. — LuAnn Bird (Assembly Democratic Campaign Committee)

In October 2023, Evers extended the program through June 2025 using $170 million in federal funds. He has previously sought to include $340 million in the state budget to support the program, but that plan was scrapped by Republican lawmakers.

Bird said she would support an extension of the program. “If we want to strengthen our economy, we’ve got to make it affordable to go to work for everybody,” she said.

Bird also expressed support for tossing a state law that prevents local governments from implementing rent control programs.

“We could let local governments have more control over their communities,” she said. Giving local officials additional control could help address rent hikes that have been seen in many Wisconsin communities, she said.

Donovan supported a package of Republican-authored child care bills during the most recent legislative session. During the floor session, Democrats attached extending Child Care Counts as amendments to one of the bills. Donovan voted against the extension.

Donovan did not respond to interview requests for this story.

The GOP-backed package included bills that would have allowed parents to contribute $10,000 in pre-tax money to an account to pay for child care, created a $15 million loan program to help child care centers pay for renovations, established a new category of child care centers that could serve between four and 12 children, and increased the child-to-child-care-worker ratio allowed in some child care centers. None of the proposals became law.

A man wearing a red tie and a dark suit coat talks into microphones with a man and a woman in the background behind him. — Rep. Bob Donovan, R-Greenfield, talks to the media Jan. 24, 2024, at the State Capitol in Madison, Wis. (Andy Manis for Wisconsin Watch)

Abortion rights

Bird and Donovan offer starkly different views on what Wisconsin’s abortion laws should look like.

“The government should have no say in the decision,” Bird told Wisconsin Watch. “Women should be able to make their decisions without government interference.”

She criticized many of the state’s existing laws that make accessing the procedure more cumbersome, such as requiring women to wait 24 hours after an initial appointment and requiring physicians to perform an ultrasound before having an abortion.

The waiting period, in particular, disproportionately affects low-income women, Bird said, given that they likely have to take time off of work to access abortion care.

“Women should be able to choose if and when and how to start a family,” she added. “No politician can know what’s going on in a woman’s life who’s in that situation.”

Donovan joined all 62 of his Republican colleagues in the Assembly in June 2023 in voting against repealing Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban. Democrats attached the repeal provision to the state budget, forcing GOP lawmakers to vote on the issue. The 1849 law, which had been unenforceable because of Roe vs. Wade, was believed at the time to outlaw most abortions in the state. The 19th-century statute contains a vaguely defined exception for an abortion that is determined to be medically necessary to save the mother’s life, but does not make exceptions for cases of rape, incest or the mother’s health.

In January 2024, Donovan voted in favor of legislation that narrowly passed that sought to ban abortions — besides those for medical emergencies — after 14 weeks of pregnancy. Under current law abortion is prohibited after 20 weeks. That bill included a provision that would have required the 14-week ban to be approved via referendum before it took effect.

“I struggled with this legislation here before us today,” Donovan said during debate on the Assembly floor. “But I am supporting it because I believe, if enacted, it will help reduce the loss of life.”

“I am pro-life and I am Catholic,” he added. “And I believe that abortion is the taking of a human being.”

“There are objective truths in this life. And one of those objective truths is any abortion is the taking of a human life,” he said.

Public school funding

Bird said “absolutely the state should be doing more for public education.”

“I think the state should concentrate on making sure that our schools, the public schools, are well funded and producing the kind of education that we want,” Bird said in an interview. She also expressed concerns about lawmakers directing more funds toward private voucher schools, as they did in the most recent budget, when they tied $1 billion in public K-12 school funding to an additional $280 million in voucher school funding.

Bird, who has served on two school boards in Wisconsin, said she would bring her understanding of how public school funding works to the Legislature and be a “champion for what we need to do for public education.”

Donovan voted in favor of the deal that boosted funding for both public schools and voucher programs.

This article first appeared on Wisconsin Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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