Welcome, everybody, to Midday Magazine for this April 4th, 2024.
Have your host, James J. Mailoff here.
In part two today, we're going to welcome in Father Weller
from Assumption Catholic Schools.
We'll be talking with him about assumption talent show
that is coming up right around the corner.
Right now, in the studio, and always feels good to say that,
our friend Wisconsin State Representative Scott Krugin
with us right now, Scott, good to see him out.
Good to see you, too.
So speaking of assumption talent in talent shows,
how about that girl's basketball team, that talent?
That is tradition now, like, when I was in high school,
it was Wisconsin Rapids Lincoln High School wrestling.
Yes.
Now it's assumption high school girls.
So that's nice to have a team that is just dominating
every year.
So congratulations team, congratulations assumption, great job.
We were talking about this on Playmakers the other day
and how fortunate we are in this area.
And a lot of communities can hang their hat on certain things,
but you're so right, man, whether we were kids
in the program at Lincoln with wrestling
and some of the swimming we were kids in.
This area has really been represented
on the sports field a lot.
And we appreciate the Lady Royals, great work by them.
I also appreciate, and I imagine you want to add
on to this with me, Scott.
We just wrapped up an election this past Tuesday.
Yeah, man.
You want to thank everybody.
Great timing.
Great timing.
You're just worked out.
Really do appreciate all of our poll workers,
all of our volunteers, everybody out there
helping democracy ring and keep going here.
Do you, I imagine you have some thoughts
or some takeaways from the year?
Yeah, I've got a great story.
Might take us a while, but we'll get through it.
So Tuesday, I decided to volunteer as a poll observer
at Central Count in Milwaukee, to just see the process
because everybody gets the bad connotation of late night
ballad dumps and all these things that happen
in Central Count Milwaukee.
I'm like, you know, I just came off a week's vacation
in Myrtle Beach.
I'm digging back out.
I'm ready to go to finish the election.
I'm like, let's just get down there.
I'll just rip it and rip it, right?
So got down there and probably 100 individuals
processing the absentee ballots, about 50,000 absentee ballots.
They have to go through from 7 a.m. until they're done.
Most years, it's been a little slow to just be honest.
It takes sometimes till three in the morning
for those results to come in.
The rest of the state feels like they're
being held hostage waiting for that last result.
So we did let Milwaukee know ahead of time
we're going to be down there and low and behold,
they started early.
Got it, got going at 7.30 in the morning.
I got there in the afternoon just to watch
and talk to all the observers and watching
interactions between the poll workers,
or not the poll workers, but the ballots ordering
and the tabulating teams and the observers
and just figure out all the connotations.
I asked the Milwaukee mayor to go down and meet there with me.
So he and I met at Central Count.
The Milwaukee election commissioners were all there.
I made the chief commissioner give me a tour with the mayor.
The Wisconsin election commissioners were there
and they saw us, the mayor and the commissioner and I touring.
So the Wisconsin election commission,
like there's a whole cabal of us,
just going through these places.
And observers had some issues about some rooms
that weren't being allowed to be observed.
So I said to the mayor and I said to Paulina Gutierrez,
the Milwaukee election commission,
I said, can you just show me every corner of the building?
Like just walk me through, like I don't need to be in there
all night, I just want to know what's going on in there
because people are going to ask questions there they are.
So I literally saw every room in that building,
every access point to go outside, how to get inside,
where all the ballots are, where all the extra ballots are
in case they run out, like I got to see every single thing.
Right?
So about,
Paul's close to eight,
the election tabulators were getting pretty far
and their process had about 40,000 ballots out of 50,000
processed in Milwaukee, about eight o'clock.
About 815, we got the call that the constitutional amendment
had passed statewide and it was a pretty quick call.
Yeah.
The next race to be called was the Shimmel race
and I was watching results coming
while I'm observing all this stuff
and I knew the Shimmel race was getting close to being done.
So all of these, I call them passionate individuals
who are observing,
who tend to have some problems with the process sometimes,
who told me that their sole mission was to be there
to make sure that this process works
from start to finish,
I wanna make sure everything's fine
and I agree to 100%, and that's what we have to do.
It's a price of democracy.
But as soon as those statewide races got called
and everything was looking like it wasn't going their way,
they didn't seem very content to finish the whole process.
Yeah, that was a bad taste, right?
It's a very, very nasty taste and it was bad
because it was 930-ish and I was sitting there
and I'm friends with a bunch of them, right?
There's just something that are way further out there.
They walk over like, okay, nice meeting young,
I'm outta here.
Like, yeah, but you didn't see them,
they cleared the cards and they're putting them
in their machines now, you wanna watch them,
get the tabulator data onto the data card,
you wanna watch the commissioner take the card
over to the courthouse,
like you wanna be at the courthouse to watch them upload it,
like now it's done.
No, it's not done.
Like, can you, you know, if you wanna go through the process,
let's go through the process.
So it was, it's great to have 100 observers
watching 100 people working,
but I just wanted people to be a lot more honest
about why they're there and what they're doing.
Like, if you're gonna observe it and just see it to the end
to see actually how good of a process
it actually was this time, it's not been in the past.
Yeah, I grant anybody that from 18 to 20 to 22
was not always a great process.
The process on election night here in April of 2025
was smooth.
I posted that.
Yeah.
I talked about it on X and I've never been hated more
in my life because I talked about how clear
and concise directions were, how good the communication was,
how I was able to go anywhere
and you get the ultra, ultra, ultra,
far out people out there who didn't hire a liar.
Yeah.
No matter what I say about it,
there's nothing I can do, right?
So you just have to understand in this job, in this world,
you cannot take it personally
and that bled over this week into some folks here locally
who caught on to this individual
who, you know, brazenly want to try to disrupt
and my wife's on Facebook just like I am.
Mm-hmm.
And yesterday she was basically the point
where she was at tears because of the personal attacks
that people would throw at me on Facebook
for telling the truth.
Had to have a conversation with her again,
like we've been at this a long time,
ebbs and flows, people like you, people don't like you.
I said, I don't want you to worry about it.
I can handle me, like I got my, you know what, together.
Like I don't, like the guys at clap back,
I told them you need to call me today.
We had a 45 minute argument and the end were good, right?
Mm-hmm.
But I just think people have to take time to understand
that if you have questions, if you have concerns,
the first outlet isn't X, the first outlet isn't Facebook,
the first outlet isn't Instagrams, whatever else is out there.
Yeah.
The first outlet is the cell phone I'm holding
in my hand literally 18 hours a day,
the number that I give out to everybody
in every community I represent at everything I do
posted on Facebook.
Mm-hmm.
It's 7-1-5, 3-2-3, 3-2-9-3.
It is as simple as a phone call.
You, you find out real quickly where people stand,
whether it is the people leaving in the election early,
you find out right away they don't care about all people,
they just care about themselves and what they're doing,
and where people come from on this one
when they bark on social media, but they won't reach out to you.
If you really want to be heard,
you're not sitting there leaving comments
on Facebook or Twitter or anything like that.
You're actually reaching out to a representative.
It is the equivalent of, you don't like the gas prices
and you're yelling at the clerk.
The clerk doesn't do that.
The clerk is just doing a job.
You're yelling at the wrong person.
You're not actually getting anything done.
You're just a dog that wants to bark.
You are a keyboard coward.
You are the definition of that.
And I stand on this one and I'm only speaking for myself,
but I got done talking about it on the morning show earlier
and immediately got a message from somebody.
Because I said, I don't read comments.
Because I don't.
If you have something to say to me,
good, bad, whatever it might be,
I give you a billion times a day how to contact me.
Reach out to me like an adult.
Now, if you are 10 and you're listening to us,
I don't know why you're listening at 10 years old.
I mean, we appreciate it.
That's cool, but I will give the grace to that.
If you are under the age of 18 then outside of that,
though, you got no excuses.
Yeah, and there are billions to contact.
And real quick, Scott, I'm sorry, you're good.
There is no excuse in the world to go after anybody's family
members.
You are the definition of a coward and I stand on that.
And if you have a problem with it, again,
you can contact me directly.
I won't be seeing it in the comments.
Yeah, and I do the same thing.
I only bring up that story to reiterate that people
just need to get out of their echo chamber.
Mm-hmm, right.
I mean, take five minutes and go to an event
where somebody's at and just ask a question.
Like, even when I was in Central County
and people saw me taking the tour
and going in the so-called secret rooms,
I came back out and then at the rest of the night,
they came to me saying, hey, could you ask them about this?
I'm like, maybe you could ask them about this
and not have to rely on me to ask them about it.
But I'm happy to do it.
That's my job.
I just want people to be able to talk to each other
for God's sake.
It's just such a lost art at this point
that I understand the challenge.
So I mean, it's a different world and I get that
and we have to adapt to it.
But I'm still going to push back on people saying, hey,
don't send me a form letter in the email
from somebody that heard something about something else.
You know, don't just drop a message somewhere
and hope that I'm going to respond.
Like, shoot me a text, give me an email, give me a call,
take five minutes to articulate what the problem is.
Yeah, if you really care,
then we want to hear from you
and there are plenty of opportunities
for you to be heard.
This isn't difficult.
And if you have questions about our election process,
guess what, you can be a part of it.
Not only by voting, but by being a volunteer
and being a poll worker or something like that.
Every election, they are dying in every community
that I represent for people to maybe,
so here's a bill idea that we had.
And I'll bleed into that a little bit.
One of the ideas is we see early voting
as such a accepted practice across the state right now
and every bigger municipality has the ability
to provide, you know, as unlimited early voting hours
as they want.
But my smaller municipalities through Adams, Wood,
and Juno County, there are a lot that just can't afford
to do it because our clerks work full-time else,
somewhere else, if somebody's really concerned
about access to voting or being able to cast a vote
or being involved in the process,
go to your local clerk in these very small townships
and ask them if they can deputize you to be a clerk,
so you can actually open that office
for people to come vote early.
Yeah.
So we're actually going to do a bill
that's going to require every Miss Paley in the state
to be available for 20 hours a week
to provide early voting hours,
and we're going to pay for it from the state.
That's really cool.
That's really cool.
It's rare, right?
We've got money right now.
We're not going to agree on how to spend it.
The governor's not going to sign our tax cuts.
We're not going to do all the extra spending
he wants to do in the budget.
It's got to go out the door
and the best way to spend it's on election integrity
and getting rid of these perception problems.
My biggest problem though is I need people.
Yeah.
Like my clerk in the town of Finley,
she has been there for 52 years.
She's in her 80s.
She's to the point where nobody in that township
wants to do her job as a clerk
that they are looking at the point of dissolving the town
because they cannot get people involved
in running the town government.
That's heartbreaking.
That's wrong.
That's rough.
Right?
So there are definitely ways that I can deal with it.
I told this individual I was conversing with
about the Facebook stuff.
Said I have to take enough heat and deal
with enough issues from people who already don't like me.
Like I'm pretty sure I don't need that from friends.
Like I need you to be a help.
We're great at identifying problems.
Everybody can identify a problem.
You can't help me identify a solution.
You're going to get less time.
Yeah, I can't because there are so many things
that we have to solve.
If you don't, not even just the election stuff
but even up the road here at DomTar.
Like we are working on a huge project in the state budget
right now just to protect the jobs at DomTar
because the federal government has come through
and said they have a dam
that's got a problem in it up in Rothschild.
So they've come to us and said,
hey, can you help us with funding this dam project?
No, that's radio acceptable.
See, that way.
But our problem there is, yeah, I've got the money.
I've got the political will.
I've got the skill and the knowledge
to put it all together and present it.
Get it through the legislature.
Get it through the budget process.
Get it to the governor's desk
and probably get the governor to sign it.
But the current Supreme Court has a case pending right now
that gives the governor unlimited veto power
on bills that aren't even fiscal at this point.
They had just heard it this week.
So the legislature is like, well,
if the governor's gonna have unlimited veto power
on every bill that we write, how do we write a bill?
How do we trust that he's not gonna do this?
And it goes back to the same message
I started with today.
It's communication.
Just sit down with each other
and just say, okay, this is what we wanna do.
Can I trust that you're going to leave it alone
because it's important to central Wisconsin
and the thought was in jobs
between Rothschild and Acusa.
I bang my head against the wall
and I take heat from both sides too much for saying this,
but common sense is not common anymore.
You've really got to work for it.
You've really got to dig for it.
You've really got to find it.
And once you do, you got to exploit the living heck out of it
because you're not gonna find it again soon.
So we've got 100 issues going on between now
and the end of our typical budget process.
They were trying to solve on elections and local projects
and all these things that have to develop a trust relationship
between the executive branch and the legislative branch
because we know that the judicial branch
was is another thing we're working on is saying,
okay, can we quit calling that a nonpartisan race?
For God's sakes.
And nobody in this country can tell me
that a Supreme Court race in any state
is a nonpartisan race anymore.
You know, I think ownership in owning things
and not trying to use kid gloves or kind of,
talk out of one side and talk out of both sides of your mouth.
I think we're asking for that more
in almost every level of society nowadays,
especially with our politicians.
We've got rid of shame.
Shame doesn't exist anymore,
especially in the political world.
So what's the whole back?
I mean, why can't we go the other way with it too
where you're owning things or something?
It's the same thing in those campaigns
in these nonpartisan races we see statewide
where there was the DPI race,
the Supreme Court race, our town clerk races,
our dog catcher races,
if they're nonpartisan dog catcher races anymore,
there's not a lot of them.
But I say this all the times.
Like I can sit here and I can talk
as nonpartisan as I want,
but everybody has some sort of a partisan streak.
Like can we just be honest about it
and put these things where they need to be on our ballot?
So in a low turnout, April ballot election,
people just have not grasped the concept
of voting in the spring as much as they do in the fall.
Yeah.
If it's an important election
and people are talking partisan issues in the election,
it should be in front of the voters
on a November election.
So I have an April election that chips fall where they may.
Like sure, it was I disappointed
with some of the results on Tuesday, sure.
Am I going to affect my family relationships
or my friendships with people over them?
No.
I mean, is this isn't life and death stuff?
Yeah.
Like if your guy doesn't win on the November ballot,
it is what it is.
We move on.
Yep.
We think we forgot how to move on in this country
because in a race, April of 2025,
where a candidate lost by 11% statewide,
people still want a yelling scream that there was fraud.
Yeah.
And we need to recount.
And that was somebody else's fault.
I'm like, so literally getting to the point
to go on to social meetings,
they say, hey, these are the 12 stages of,
or the five stages of grief, the 12 stages of recovery.
Like can we just start this process of just instead of losing?
Like, and I give Brad Schimmel
all the credit in the world.
His acceptance speech was great.
Like said, hey, I-
Well, then he gave one.
Yeah.
That we already got to get started.
He went over to after nine o'clock.
He said, I've already called Judge Crawford.
I told her, congratulations.
People in the crowd started booing.
He's like, no, it's like, yeah, what are you doing?
I was like, no, he goes, the numbers aren't going to change.
Yeah.
Like it didn't happen this time.
I'll come back.
I'll try again.
And to his credit, that speech gave him the opportunity
to come back next time.
Right, right.
Instead of somebody else who ran for U.S. Senate,
who went the other way in November and said, well,
I'm still looking into, I didn't really lose.
Like, yeah.
So I mean, it's just being gracious and being accepting
and knowing what your limits are.
I think a good way to wrap with you, Scott.
And I appreciate all your feedback
and everything you're taking on that one.
We're speaking with Wisconsin State Representative Scott
Krueger right now.
Scott, you recently were a part of an all-voting
is local forum in Milwaukee.
One to pick a brain and find out how that went.
Yeah, it's been a Milwaukee month.
It's been a lot of time.
There's rent a condo somewhere in Michigan.
It's a beautiful spot right there you're talking about, yeah.
It's cool, right?
So we went down.
I think this was the same Patrick's Day thing was, yeah.
We went down there.
So at least not aggressive.
The ranking Democrat on campaigns, the elections,
who, she and I have been great friends on issues.
We agree on.
We're not friends on issues we don't agree on.
So we don't talk about those.
So I had an idea that I got a hold of Sam Liebert down in Milwaukee.
He's testified on a few bills.
And I said, Sam, if you ever need me down there for anything,
happy to come talk.
So he's like, OK, well, here, why don't you
come do something like this?
And he, to his credit, I said, I don't just need it to be me.
If you want to bring anybody else, bring whoever else.
So we had the legal women voters.
We had all voting was local, national representatives.
At least not grass myself, disability rights
Wisconsin, just talking to people in a room
saying what we agree on, what we don't agree on,
how we can move forward.
Some things, whatever things we need to put in the closet,
we just don't deal with.
And I think Lee and I, to at least credit,
we did a great job.
The advocates point out things that they
thought worked in Milwaukee and don't work for Milwaukee.
We take those into account.
I described to them how I knew that the photo ID
idea was going to be constitutional.
We need to accept it.
And whether you like it or not, it's been in place for 10 years.
It's going to be here forever.
How do we adapt?
What do you want me to do next?
So there's always consternation about the indefinitely
confined exception and photo IDs.
So we're talking with the disability rights groups.
I don't even need to know if you're indefinitely confined.
There's a way that I can capture your ID
and not have to worry about your medical condition,
make you a permanent absentee voter.
Can you get on board with that?
That's exactly how these forums lead to those ideas that
end up changing our system to get rid of perception problems.
So driving to Milwaukee for an afternoon is so worth it.
And on the other side of that Scott,
just to pull this all together, the work and the information
that you receive from people, from constituents
in a adult way, and then actually talking
you face to face or being a part of these listening sessions
or a part of something like this, this is how you get heard.
This is how an adult gets things done.
If you really want to get things done,
this is one of the ways you do it.
It's not leaving a comment on X.
And it's also, think about this yourself to anybody out there
who was in this realm and fit this category.
How often have you responded to people talking you that way?
How often have you responded to people react
in treating you and your loved ones that way?
Do you find yourself immediately
wanted to be a good listener or how do you react?
I've told you this story probably a few times.
If I reacted to people the way they choose to act,
my wife would not let me run for office ever again.
That has been number one rule at home base.
It's like, don't talk any crap about anybody.
You talk about you, otherwise we're out of this.
I'm like, yes, dear, no problem, dear.
So that training comes through in times like this.
So I got to thank Amanda.
She did a great job teaching me up on this.
A big shout out to her.
I shout out to her and an appreciation to you and your staff,
especially you not only being here today, Scott,
but answering those questions and those town halls
and those listening sessions and like you've been doing,
looking forward to getting together next month,
talking some more, talking some brewers with you.
Yeah, we'll let them develop a little bit.
Yeah, that's right, that's right.
You know what I'm saying, right?
And we appreciate your Scott.
That number you were mentioning earlier,
if people want to reach out to us.
Yeah, 715-323-3293.
It is on maybe 20 hours a day at this point, so to 18.
And I want to remind everybody as well,
Scott's got a great e-letter that you can sign up for
and get all the information we were talking about today
and so much more.
Along with something we don't get the chance to talk about
very often a lot of the school visits
and things that happen at the capital.
Yeah, it fits full and new Lisbon this week.
I mean, all you got to do is shoot me an email at rep.cruge.ledges.wi.gov.
I mean, we do a video, so you don't have to read it.
I'll talk about everything in 30 seconds on a video
instead of reading it for five minutes.
Try to condense it and make it as easy as possible.
Shout out to Emmanuel Lutheran
I got to be over there a little while ago.
That was cool. That was cool.
Good to talk to you, Scott.
You take care of safe travels out there.
Yeah, two man, thanks.
And we'll be back with more Midday Magazine right here
at WFHR.
