Staying Engaged In Your Community with Dale Schultz (Hour 1)

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From the Civic Media World Headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin, it's the Todd Alba Show.

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Good afternoon, everybody.

Todd Albault along with Mr. Aaron Zommers on the board.

It is six minutes past the hour of two o'clock on this Monday, September 15th, 2025.

It is a great day to be Wisconsinite, back to work, back to school, spectacular fall day here in downtown Madison on State Street at the World Headquarters of Civic Media.

Aaron Zommers, how the heck are

you?

Doing well, had a nice weekend, got a lot done at home, got to...

Jam out a little, play some music with some friends.

How about

you?

Uh, yeah, Saturday was a little as my grandma used to say, done in.

And so, uh, uh, stayed at home, kind of did some things around the house, kind of recouped from a very, very busy week news wise last week and watched the, the Badgers, our Wisconsin Badger football team down in Alabama, as Keith Jackson used to say.

And going in, remember, Mike Clemens, a great sports reporter, I said the line was 20 out in the desert that, you know, Alabama was expected to win by 12.

That was the betting line.

And Clemens said, no, it's up to 22.

And I said, I'm not.

But if I were a betting man, I'd probably put 100 bucks on, on the over on that.

I should have done that because Wisconsin lost by a score of 38 to 14 to the Crimson Tide did not look good at all.

that that last, uh, and really the offense only scored one touchdown because the other touchdown was from special teams.

So we'll get into more of that later, but yeah, not a, not a great look for Wisconsin, Alabama.

And really an already a must win situation when the Maryland Terps Terrapins come to Camp Randall on Saturday.

So we'll talk more about that a little later on the upside.

What a weekend for the crew.

Milwaukee Brewers.

have clinched the postseason and got an absolutely spectacular come from behind win on Saturday night against the dreaded St.

Louis Cardinals.

Crew one, nine to eight in 10 innings was down there yesterday with Brady Ewing and the boys, his family at County Air.

County Stadium at Ampham Field yesterday.

And you thought maybe they'd have the same thing come back in the ninth, but just couldn't get it done.

Great pitching by the Cardinals and Milwaukee lost in nine innings three to two yesterday.

They get back underway here tomorrow at home.

We got the day off today.

They're back underway tomorrow against the Los Angles Angels.

605 the pregame show on many of our stations tomorrow afternoon or tomorrow night with the first pitch just after 6 30 you can hear it on RCE and Richland Center ISS in Oshkosh and our new station WBZH in Hayward, but the crew Got that that first big milestone, which is securing a postseason birth and so while I was in in Milwaukee yesterday at Infant Field and went down to the gift shop.

I I wanted a lot

this is a little tight, but it works.

And so it's the last, it was either a medium or a double XL.

And I'm like, wow.

So I've got the October baseball 2025 t-shirt.

Cause anytime you're playing in October, that means you, you made the playoffs.

So I'm all set to go.

Great.

We'll talk more about that a little bit later as well.

Great time with Brady and his, and his family.

Just great people.

Appreciate him coming on every other week.

So try to take him to, to one game a year just to say thank you.

That was

That was a lot of fun.

So those were the, uh, the sport deadlines.

And we're going to play you here in just a while.

We're going to play you a really, I still get goosebumps hearing it and talking about it.

Bob Uker, the great announcer, wrote a letter to the brewers and gave it to owner Mark Atnasio before he passed away in January in case the crew got back to the playoffs.

And on Saturday night.

Pat Murphy, the manager, read that letter.

And we've got the audio.

Thanks to our great sports reporter, Mike Clemmons.

We're going to play you the full thing here in just a little bit.

Also coming up on this show at the bottom of this hour, my former boss, former Senate Majority Leader, Dale Schultz, Republican, Richland Center, is going to be in via phone discussing political violence and also civil discourse.

He's gonna be out in public talking with former Democratic Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney and one of the great jurors in Wisconsin Dave Donner are doing a public forum on civility and Our constitutional crisis in Green County this week gonna talk to him about that Dale received death threats of his own in his political career How did he deal with them?

And what does he think of the current situation and then in hour number two do not miss it?

Coming up at 306 in our two state senator kelder-royce a frequent guest on this program announced this morning via video that she is running for the Democratic nomination for Wisconsin governor We're going to talk live to state senator kelder-royce here coming up in hour two Find out how our first full day as a gubernatorial candidate is going and a what's worse dentist or doctor in hour two as well

Want to start out with a clip from former Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg.

He was on Meet the Press on NBC yesterday.

And I think as more news and disinformation came out over the weekend over the assassination of Charlie Kirk, this is a good place to start for this discussion today.

Here is former Secretary of Transportation, Pete

Buttigieg.

not just the sickness of somebody who would pick up a gun and shoot someone, but I think a broader societal sickness that frankly, I think you could see and feel.

And how many people around America, normal people, not dangerous people, were at a moment when we all should have still been praying for the victim and his family, were busy online praying for some shred of evidence that the shooter would turn out to be from the other political team.

That is not healthy and that is not a way forward, but that is exactly what the algorithm pushes us to do.

And this does seem to be especially acute.

for young men.

Young men right now statistically are the group most likely to spend most of their time alone.

That is a prescription for a deeper societal level of pain and unraveling that we have got to turn around.

We can't go on like this.

And I think it's especially important to remember that some of the very same people who are in these conversations online will be perfectly normal offline.

That's why we do need to just put down the phone

put down the computer, step out and talk to each other in environments where our humanity comes through.

For Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg.

It encapsulates, perhaps better than I could, my own feelings.

Zomers and I talked about this before today's show, talked about it with a great director of operations, our immediate supervisor, Luke Mathers.

We were sitting there and our owner and CEO, as he occasionally does, kind of came by to say hi, and we got into a conversation about this with Sage.

Here's my feeling, folks.

The amount of time, and I'm not complaining, very grateful to have this job, the amount of time it takes now for me to make sure that the information we're passing on about this major event or any other is getting greater and greater.

Why?

because it used to be that you could say, well, okay, the FBI said this, well, they're going to be truthful.

The FBI is now controlled by Kash Patel, which is essentially doing the Trump bidding.

You add into that the huge amounts we talked about this last week, Russian bots and Chinese bots, in other words, made up people online by computers who are putting out disinformation, inaccurate information,

to drive us against ourselves, you guys, to drive us against ourselves.

Reviewing the fluidity of last week's events with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, I feel pretty good about the information we passed on to you.

Remember, we said it was fluid.

This is what we know at the time.

The alleged shooter, we told you was white.

That's true.

Christian Mormon home, that's true.

His parents, longtime Republicans, Trump supporters, that's true.

Pro-gun family and RA members, that's true.

I think the only thing, and I'll correct myself, the only piece of information I passed on from this program last week that we don't know now is true or not, it doesn't appear to be, was that I said that his dad was a former sheriff for a 27-year law enforcement official.

That part, I got wrong.

So I want to clean that up.

But I can't come on this show every day and try to give you all the accurate information on things like this.

It's just too overwhelming.

We're not equipped for it, quite frankly.

And neither does I think it do any good to come on here and gin things up from a talk format and pity each other against you and have these screaming conversations or demeaning conversations or angry conversations.

What I wanna do, I think, I hope we're equipped to, and we're gonna talk about this a little bit more in the show, our friend Kira Saban, positivity, life psychologist, life coach, had a great post this weekend.

I'm gonna summarize it, we'll talk more about it a little bit.

And she said, as we talked last week, our brains, physiologically, are not capable of digesting daily drama and trauma, not capable.

And while we can never stop bad things from happening in the world, also simultaneously, there are all kinds of good things.

And just because we talk about the good in the world doesn't mean that we're putting on Pollyanna or rose colored glasses and ignoring the bad.

We'll still talk about politics and current events.

But to do deep dives and to suss this out and to have arguments about it, what I think, what I hope is more productive is A,

Sharing the good in this state because there's a lot of it.

We travel around We brought you those stories gonna continue to do that and be bringing folks on and I know it happens to be my former boss by having on anyway Dale Schultz a guy who actually got death threats as a state senator in this state.

I was there We're gonna talk about how he handled that how he continues to handle that this week not hiding away in a hole but going out in public

along with Dave Mahoney, a Democrat, former sheriff, along with Dave Doninger, a judge, having good conversations in our communities and realizing what Trigvie Olsen keeps reminding us as someone who's fought authoritarianism and dictators in Eastern Europe around the world to the point where Vladimir Putin himself has banned Trigvie from ever coming to Russia so the guy knows something about how to handle authoritarianism.

He reminds us trick me does the art our enemies are not our neighbors guys not our neighbors our neighbors are our neighbors and How do we?

Listen to each other and understand each other and create community because that's the best thing I could help do I can't come on the air and solve all of political violence

I can't come on the air and I don't have the team or the ability or the time to do the hard, hard research of putting and trying to give you the counterpoint on every piece of social media stuff out there.

But what I can do is come on and help tell the truth about Wisconsin, what we do know, try to put in context of family and neighbors and fellow Wisconsinites.

And I don't think that's being polyanna-ish or saying, oh, you know what?

You don't want to talk about the hard stuff.

I think it's more difficult today than maybe ever before to look across the backyard fence and say, even though they put a Biden Harris or a Trump Vance yard sign in the yard, I can still respect them as a neighbor and a fellow human being.

And that's where it starts, in my opinion.

That's where we can actually make progress in Wisconsin, in each of our communities.

realizing that our neighbors and our community members, there's so much more that unites us, that divides us.

And if we just heard Pete Buttigieg say, and we heard that Buttigieg, obviously Democrat, and we'll come back after this specific meeting right here at Network and Talk Work.

You're listening to Civic Media.

Stay up to date on the latest news and information for your local community and Wisconsin by signing up for our free email newsletter.

Visit civicmedia.us slash email to

get started.

If the last segment sounded like it ended abruptly, it's because it did.

Normally, normally, and this is how good Zomers is, you know, some people, they watch the clock.

And you know, when you're going to break, you got to wrap it up.

I have relied so much on Zomers, because he's so good, he starts the music.

30 seconds and as soon as I hear the music, I'm like, all right, I got 30 seconds.

And he was, and pretty soon I see him waving his arms because the computer froze up.

It wasn't Zomers and we couldn't play the music going out because of the computer Zomers.

Oh, it's, it's all good now.

All right.

But I want to let people know it wasn't you.

It was, it was just sometimes things don't work right.

It's just the way it goes.

And we, and you, and you move on.

So, uh, welcome back to the show.

Dale Schultz, former Senate Majority Leader, talking about political violence and, uh,

Good conversation.

How to be, how to have disagreeable conversations without being disagreeable on community.

Looking forward to that.

And State Senator Keller Royce, an hour two, just after the top of the hour at three o'clock, she announced her run for governor today.

Gonna be talking about that.

Finishing up this conversation on the headlines the week, we played the cut from former secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, from Meet the Press yesterday, saying that, look, we gotta get offline.

We can't be consumed with this disinformation from both sides and this has been propagated by places like Russia and China to pit us against ourselves.

And living online ain't healthy.

Doesn't matter who you're supporting.

All right, Zomers?

Yeah, one thing on that, actually, we could maybe ask Dale about when he's on.

He told us about a book called Bowling Alone that was written around the year 2000 about a trend that the author saw then.

of people spending a lot more time alone and not talking to everyone else and the internet's made that so much worse.

It's still relevant today.

Yeah, absolutely.

It really is.

And the more we talk to each other, the better off we are.

Quickly, let's go to the phone lines.

Troy in Montoribless, NWMDX.

Troy, thanks for calling.

We'll see you.

Oh, quickly, I guess.

I don't know how to talk to these people because

They didn't vote for a normal Republican.

They didn't vote for Bob Dole.

They didn't even vote for George Bush.

They voted for a racist rapist.

And, you know, if I don't understand that and I'm proud that I don't understand that because I don't want to have understood how you could vote for that guy.

And if that shuts people out of my life, that's fine because I'm fine letting them go.

Right.

I that's who they are.

I appreciate the comments as always, Troy.

And I, I get where you're coming from.

And certainly if people are unhealthy in our lives, it's better not to have them in it, right?

If there's just no way to get around that.

But I do think it's important to bring a curiosity and say why and think to ourselves, and we're not here to fix everybody, at least I'm not, but like to think to myself, okay, why does that person feel that way?

do they have hurt or do they have unfortunate circumstances in their own life that cause them to want to support something that I don't agree with?

It doesn't mean we're always going to see eye to eye, but can we say, hey, we might disagree on this, but we can still talk about the Packers, or we can still raise money for our local EMS together and help out our communities.

I'm not saying that we have to condone things that we don't agree with, but I'm just saying,

myself, at least, I think I could use a better job of trying to understand people.

But I appreciate the call, Troy.

Thank you so much.

Mark, in part a sec.

Mark, we're up against the clock.

If you could make a brief please, my friend, go ahead.

Yeah, I hear again the condemnation of the word empathy, and it was claimed.

Oh, that's a brand new word.

Well, it may be actually coined, you know, that when I looked up, it's coined from a German word back in 1908.

But the concept of empathy is quite old.

I mean, I guess, human

David Hume and Adam Smith actually spoke of it as a fellow feeling among your fellow human beings.

But of course the Bible is filled with empathic emotions in there.

The actual word is the definition of the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

And Charlie Kirk actually used empathy to gain support among his people.

Like I said, you are feeling put upon.

You're not getting the job you want.

You're not getting the wealth you want.

You're not getting the opportunities you want, I understand that.

And it's interesting that a man who condemns the word empathy uses understanding of other people to gain support and channel their energies and their anger toward people they're not supposed to, they shouldn't be angry with.

The people they should be angry with is the guys at the very top that manipulated this situation where all the wealth is in their hands and we are supposed to fight over the scraps.

Yeah, appreciate the comments mark.

Thank you so very much eight five five seven five two four eight four two eight five five seven five two four eight four two We're going to continue talking about this perhaps a little bit more in in hour two We're actually going to continue the discussion with with Dale Schultz And in a lifelong Republican 30 plus years in the legislature and assembly in the in the state senate ran for for us congress in the third district and

When I was working for him at various times, but particularly his last term from 2010 to 2014, he had a number of issues.

Act 10, right?

Scott Walker's Act 10, which divided the state in terms of basic getting rid of the ability for public unions to negotiate, public workers to negotiate, including teachers in the state.

And Dale was one of the last people on the Republican side to announce where he was going to go with his vote because he went out and listened to his constituents.

And that resulted as someone who was there in a lot of hatred towards him from both sides, but particularly his own party, Republican party.

And at the time we still had fax machines, ran out of fax paper.

Basically phone lines got so clogged up that we couldn't answer phones because I had so many phone calls coming in We're gonna talk to Dale about what is it like?

To have a death threat that involves you and your family how he dealt with that and his advice

on dealing with our friends and neighbors in today's political climate.

Welcome back to the title of our show on the Civic Media, ready to work 35 minutes now, past hour two o'clock on Monday, September 15th, 2025.

Appreciate Zommerers on the board.

That song usually means we got one guest on the other side.

He is former state Senate Majority Leader, Dale Schultz, a Republican from Richland Center who joins us via phone and the auspices of full disclosure.

He also is one of my former bosses as well.

Dale, I appreciate you taking time on short notice to join us today.

How are you?

Well, I'm terrific like a lot of people I'm busy that didn't care of my fault chores a little touch-up painting here and there and the like to get ready for winter

I know you're always a busy guy out there whether it's in town or on your farm there you and your wife run So I appreciate you taking the time and and I wanted to bring you on I appreciate you doing this because knowing you so well

I know you're not always comfortable talking about this stuff because you don't like to draw attention to your own stories, but you're uniquely qualified to talk about the moment.

So I appreciate this.

And that is when you were particularly the last term from 2010 to 2014 after you were Senate Majority Leader.

And Act 10 came up in the capitol.

Scott Walker's bill to attack collective bargaining for public workers in this state.

You were one of the last Republicans to tell people how you were going to vote because you went across your district and listened first.

And that resulted in a number of threats into your office while I was working for you back then.

We still had fax machines.

We ran out of fax paper.

The phones got so tied up we couldn't even take calls.

hundreds, not thousands of emails, and you receive death threats.

And I want people to understand that the worst of it came from people from who allegedly were from your own party, Republicans and conservatives.

And the worst it got, and I double-checked to make sure I was telling the truth with our former colleague TJ, and he remembered it the same way.

As far as I can tell, Dale, we only actually, or you had the office shut down closed for one day.

And that is when someone put a bomb threat, a death threat, through the mail slot in your office door at the state Capitol.

And you told us all to leave for the day.

Had the Capitol Police involved.

TJ actually insisted on coming back later that night.

I said, what are you doing?

He goes, I'll clean it up for radio.

He said, look, I got stuff.

I gotta get done.

Screw it.

I'm going in.

And, and, and.

Just talk to us, Dale, what that's like being an elected official and having death threats and threats against you and your family.

Well, I don't know that being an elected official makes it any more or less pleasant.

The fact is that we all care about our kids and our spouses and we cringe about the reality that someday somebody who's

derange might do something horrible.

And, yeah, it gives everybody who's involved a sense of a real concern.

But let me just talk to this in a broader sense and make it more relevant to what's happening now and a little less about me.

You know, what we have, what happened in this country,

as we've decided to turn politics over to the moneyed political class that's really run by a bunch of consultants who make a ton of money telling politicians how they can stay in office forever and enjoy all the perks associated with what goes on and their basic message is ginning up hate and

they know and they can present facts to you that that really motivates people far more than if you would gin up a bunch of love.

And that by itself is kind of depressing to me.

But that's the reality.

But the choice of what you do cannot be blamed over on consultants, even if they're the principal actor in this little play of ours.

It's really up to you.

And yeah, I don't care whether you're a Republican or a Democrat right now.

The first thing I tell people when they talk to me, my former colleagues and new legislators is, you know, maybe you ought to look in the mirror and you ought to consider once in a while the other guy might be right.

You know, I remember being in the legislature when we were really concerned about out of control anger on the floor of the state Senate and.

The majority leader and minority leader would get together, go behind closed doors with the offending party and calm them down and point out that this was against our traditions.

It's against our rules.

We're not here to punish them.

We want them to have an opportunity to express themselves.

But this is really spoiling it for everyone.

And it's going to lead to less talk, less compromise down the road, particularly among our constituents.

They don't do that anymore people either don't talk or they get really angry and pretty soon the consultants are ginning it up with with constituents at election time and the politicians instead of you know, assuming this sort of reinforce it and I think we all know that both sides do this I tend to be a little more critical of my former colleagues because

I thought we Republicans were better than this.

I guess that's not so much true anymore.

And I think if we're ever going to get out of this, it's going to be when the public decides they've had enough and throws all the bums out.

And particularly the ones that can't ever find a way

to sit down with anybody and work something out.

We're talking to former State Senate, Wisconsin State Senate Majority Leader Dale Shultz, Republican from his home in Richland Center via phone, talking about political violence, discourse, how to better conversations.

Dale, we played a cut from former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg at the top of the show.

He was on Meet the Press this weekend saying, hey, part of this is just

Putting down our electric devices getting off the internet because there's so much disinformation and reconnecting with our neighbors now I'll clean this up a little bit for radio But when I was your chief of staff and during act 10 some of this stuff we you know Television was still a bigger thing and so we watch I would have a small TV monitoring state

programs and national programs.

I can't remember what the issue was specifically, but you came in off the floor one day and you said, what are you watching?

And I told you about whatever program it was.

I said, and we've been getting a lot of emails and this is just terrible.

And you cut me off and you said, turn that crap off.

What is this doing to solve the problem?

We're here to ameliorate the situation and to cut the tension.

I looked at you and said, not only that, we should make it better.

So I mean, but you were, you, and that was a great lesson for me because you were less concerned about what was hot on TV or the internet and more about solving problems and connecting like Buddha judge said today with our communities.

And I, and I really admire you.

And I thank you for teaching me that lesson.

Well, that's very kind of you, Todd.

And I think people are judges in entirely right.

What I've been preaching for a couple of years now is engagement.

And by that, I mean exactly what the Buttigieg said.

Get out of your own little world, set down your little echo chamber with your smart device, and go talk to your neighbors.

And you don't even have to talk about politics.

Just get to know them and find out what's motivating them, what's concerning them.

There's a lot of pain out there, and it is confined to one political party or the other.

And we've got to reconnect with our neighbors.

But I also like to tell you another little story, and I think I've said this on the air before.

But, you know, during Act 10, I was the last person to indicate how they were going to vote.

And the rationale behind that was, as you said, it didn't make a lot of sense to me to decide how I was going to vote and then go out and list of my constituents.

They would have spotted me for a phony like they did everybody else in about three seconds.

I went out and took the heat.

Everybody was mad at me.

Everybody was demanding I vote their way.

And there were times when I had picketers in front of my house, particularly I remember one snowy morning when it was really cold.

I had a whole bunch of picketers out here.

I think the majority of them might have been teachers, but they were a lot of different people as well.

And instead of yelling at them or calling the cops,

I just went out my back door and walked around the house quietly and non-threateningly.

And I said, I'm really concerned about you and I hear you and I'm here to listen to you.

And I said, I just have one thing I'd like to do in advance.

And I stopped, turned, went on the front porch and got a bucket of sand and brought it down and sanded sidewalk.

And I said, look, I don't want anybody to get hurt out here.

That would just be silly.

And furthermore, before we get started here, I just want to add one parenthetical note.

And that is, if you feel like you need more sand than these sidewalks, you're free to go up on my porch and get the sand and take care of the sidewalks.

Now, let's talk about things and tell me what's on your mind.

And, you know, the conversation didn't last a long time.

It was only about maybe five minutes.

I had to get to Madison.

That kind of a gesture by a politician that's a little disarming a little bit open goes a long long way with people in pain

and

It would be nice if we saw a few more of our elected officials doing that rather than Preaching how fearful they are of their constituents, you know We don't need

that

I'm so glad you told that story.

That's why I wanted you to share it again with people because I think it epitomizes how you dealt with people who didn't always agree.

Instead of calling the cops or saying, oh my, or getting your firearm out, you took sand out to make sure that the people protesting against you were okay.

And also for the record, so people know Dale was the only Republican that voted against Act 10 and against Scott Walker against his own party in that issue.

But Dale, to

We're talking with former Senate Majority Leader Dale Schultz.

What do you make of people in Wisconsin?

Robin Voss has talked about this, and now we're hearing legislators in DC.

Everybody's scared.

Oh my gosh, I'm scared, I'm scared.

You know, and why are people today, not everybody, but there are so many electeds who are now scared versus what you did when you had people protesting outside your personal home?

Well,

you know what I didn't tell you in advance of that is I probably, and you know this to be a fact, probably traveled further and farther in my district, listening to my constituents on a regular basis than almost any of my colleagues.

I would say to the current leadership in the state legislature and in Congress, why don't you get off these phony baloney phone call town hall meetings where you were.

know that you're being screened when you call in, and it's basically a giant commercial.

And go out and meet your constituents.

And meet them before there's a problem.

You know, it's hard for people or social media to tell lies about you if they already know you.

So just go out there and sit down with them.

You don't have to solve all the problems or own anybody.

Just go out and lend a sympathetic ear.

And listen, and if you ask a question, answer it briefly and transparently.

And isn't it

telling Dale, to your point you just made, people like Tammy Baldwin, U.S.

Senator Tammy Baldwin, are going out and meeting with people.

People like Mark Bouken, congressman here from the Second District, doing that.

Derek Van Orton in the Third District refuses to meet with his own constituents by and large.

And I think you nailed it, Dale.

If you know your constituents, you're not going to be fearful.

I think that's so important.

Do you have five more minutes or are you going to run?

No, I'll stay

five minutes.

All right, just going to go up against the clock here.

But I want to come back, and we're going to talk specifically with Dale about this forum.

He's having this week with former Democratic Sheriff Dave Mahoney and Judge Dave Dianio.

We're talking about that on the other side.

It's the town hall ball show for a Monday on the Civic Media.

We're ready to

go.

You're listening to Civic Media.

Find the latest news, information and archives of all your favorite shows on the Civic Media website,

civicmedia.us.

This is fantastic.

We thought we were going to talk to State Senator Keller Royce, who announced her gubernatorial run this morning.

It appears she's going to be in studio with us, sitting right here beside us.

So that'll be fantastic.

Looking forward to that.

Right now wrapping up our discussion, our conversation with former Republican Senate Majority Leader, State Senator Dale Schultz of Southwest Wisconsin joining us via phone from his home in Richland Center.

Dale, appreciate the time.

We're having that great conversation about...

political discourse, political vials.

You made the great point that one of the reasons you weren't afraid when people protested your home, one of the reasons you didn't call the cops or get a firearm out, that you went out and put sand out there in the winter for people protesting you for their own safety, was because you knew your constituents.

And I think you're absolutely right.

Our elected officials would be a lot better served if they did the same thing.

To that end,

You have not, you have not stopped doing that, meeting Wisconsinites.

Our former, our mutual friend, your former colleague, state senator, Tim Cullen, late great Tim Cullen, Democrat, you and he went out, talked about gerrymandering a lot.

Also a former state senator, majority leader, Bob Jowk.

You guys have talked about the environment and politics.

And now you're doing it with former Dane County Sheriff, Democrat Dave Mahoney.

And former appellate court judge David Dininger, you guys are going to be down to the beautiful community of Belleville at Belleville High School Auditorium this Wednesday from six until 7.30 on Constitution Day.

It's being sponsored by Hands Off Nuglaris and the Belleville Liberty Bells.

Love that.

Talk to us, Dale, about what you and former Sheriff Mahoney and Judge David Dininger are doing down in Belleville this Wednesday.

Well, let me just say we spent the first segment talking about a problem and I always believe that that's fine as you should talk about problems, but you also should try to formulate a plan to make things better and Heaven knows we we need a lot of plans to make things better but one of the ideas that I like that I heard that I've decided to sign on with You know with a great deal of passion is the notion of fusion voting

Infusion voting is something that existed in this country up until the end of the 1800s or early part of the 19th or 20th century.

And it ended because the political parties decided they wanted to control the voters and the political process to a greater extent.

But prior to that time, we allowed people to vote for

multiple candidates for the same office, and their votes could be fused.

In other words, you could vote for Dave, Mahoney for Sheriff, and if I lived in Dane County, I could vote for Dave, Mahoney for Sheriff, and we could be in two different political parties, and our votes would be fused together.

What this does is this puts

The 40% of the populace that doesn't like either political party anymore in the driver's seat That they will have agency in the political process and That what what they do basically is they go to Canada they like and say we'd like to put you on our ballot and even though you're running as a Republican or as a Democrat we'd like to put you on our ballot and

And if we have fusion voting, you get to count our votes with the votes from any other political party that's supporting you.

And in a state like Wisconsin where you have very slim margins, this allows people in the middle to have real agency because right now we have a majority of a minority electing a lot of offices.

that leads to a lot of anger all by itself.

And fusion voting is a way of ameliorating that problem.

There are other ideas, but this is one that I think has a real opportunity to come to fruition.

And to that end, we have sued the state of Wisconsin to allow us like we

did once upon a time in Wisconsin to be able to do fusion voting.

And I'd just like to say, parenthetically, that's how the Republican Party was born in Ripon, Wisconsin.

Whig, freaks, soilers, anti-abortion, grange.

Political parties came together, joined forces, and elected Abraham Lincoln.

You know, we have other states doing that right now.

Kansas is trying to get back diffusion voting.

Connecticut and New York do it.

But if you want to empower those folks who are not so ideological, I'm not going to call them moderates because there are many people who take centrist views who are very passionate about one thing or another.

And I just want to deal them in.

You know, the fear for a bad democracy is more democracy.

Republican Party today, very different than when it was created in Ripon, Wisconsin.

I would argue different than when you were in office as well.

Dale Shultz and Dave Mahoney, Republican and Democrat respectively, are the co-chairs of United Wisconsin.

You can find more about

fusion voting and the mission of united wisconsin at united wisconsin spelled out dot org that united wisconsin dot org you could catch them wednesday this wednesday september 17th at the bellville high school auditorium from six until seven thirty uh in bellville talking about the constitution about fusion voting on constitution day i can't think of a better way to celebrate a constitution dayl that you and david

Mahoney and Dave Doninger in a bipartisan, even nonpartisan fashion, talking about solutions and getting out and meeting people.

That's where it's at, Dale.

Well, I couldn't have said it any better.

And let me just say, come on out, all of you who are listening right now, tell your friends, neighbors, and even your relatives.

This is good for everybody.

And we promise we'll have a good time.

And hopefully we can develop some more plans that we can work on together that will make this the special place that I want to be.

Thanks, Dale.

I really appreciate you, State Senator Kelbur Roycer, gubernatorial race next on the Civic Media Radio.

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