Welcome to the Wisconsin Forward Podcast, a product of the Civic Media Network.
I'm your host, Matt Rothschild, and on the podcast, we'll try to explain the riddle of
the swing state and how we can move Wisconsin forward.
You know, my friends and relatives from outside of Wisconsin are always asking me, what's
up with Wisconsin?
How can you have two U.S. senators who are so far apart in Tammy Baldwin and Ron Johnson?
In Wisconsin, by the way, used to be such a progressive state.
What happened over there?
First of all, the split personality of the Badger State is nothing new.
Wisconsin does have a fine progressive pedigree.
It voted for Abe Lincoln twice by pretty big margins.
It was home to the great leader of the progressive movement, Fighting Bob LaFalla, who was governor
and senator here and who championed the direct election of senators along with a whole range
of other democratic small-deer reforms like Workers' Comp in 1911, and a minimum wage
law in 1913, back then, Wisconsin was known as the Laboratory of Democracy.
On June 10, 1919, Wisconsin also became the first state to ratify the 19th Amendment to
the U.S. Constitution, which, of course, gave women the right to vote.
And Wisconsin was the first state to let public sector workers join a union.
But Wisconsin, remember, was also home to tail gunner Joe McCarthy, who defeated LaFalla's
son, Senator Bob LaFalla Jr., in the Republican primary in 1946 on the way to becoming Senator
himself.
Joe McCarthy was then reelected in 1952 by a comfortable margin.
Then there's this, the voters of Wisconsin went for Richard Nixon all three times, affected
surprised and kind of appalled me.
Since 2010, it's been exhausting politically here in Wisconsin after Scott Walker became
governor, and both the state assembly and the state senate flipped over to the Republicans.
They jerrymandered the maps, ensuring they're hold on power.
They decimated the unions, and they pushed a hard-right agenda turning Wisconsin into
a laboratory for reaction.
Every election since then, at almost every level, has been hotly contested and highly
partisan, with Walker finally losing to Tony Hevers in 2018 by slightly more than 1%.
So how do we make sense of all this?
Well, here's Todd Alba, host of the Todd Alba show on Civic Media.
I grew up in Southwest Wisconsin, a beautiful driftless, as I believe Lee Sherman-Dreyfist,
former Republican governor, used to call it the 23rd Song Place.
And it's a great part of the state, Richland County, where I'm from, I believe
I'm correct in saying, up until the last presidential election, it was one of 15 counties,
if memory serves in the entire United States of America, who had voted for the winning candidate
for president in like the last 50 years or something like that.
So I grew up in literally one of the swingiest parts of Wisconsin, which is a swing state.
Some people look at that and say, how weird is that?
Like how could a rural county in Southwest Wisconsin vote for George Bush and Joe Biden,
or George Bush and Barack Obama?
How can they vote for Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan?
You know, it's weird, right?
And I tell people, I think we're at least the part of the state that I'm from Southwest
turning to western Wisconsin.
We're really big on just at least getting to know or feel like we get to know people.
And after George Bush lost, George W. Bush lost, Richland County in Western, a lot of
Western Wisconsin in 2000, lost the state to Al Gore in 2000.
He made a point, and I can tell you this, because back in the day, I was Republican.
I was actually the chairman of the Republican Party in Richland County.
And I went to a third district, which is on the western side of Wisconsin, Republican
Party meeting, which they brought in national people from the party.
And I, you can ask people who were there, I somewhat jokingly, but not entirely got down
on my knees in the aisle at this, at this meeting above 100 people.
And I said, I am literally on my knees begging you to bring the president to western Wisconsin.
Now, I don't think it was just because Todd did that, but there were other people that
felt the same way.
And they were answered, and George W. Bush did a bus tour from O'Claire to La Crosse down
through the driftless, stopped at Richland Center the first time that a president, I believe,
since JFK had been to Richland County campaign there, and then went down to kind of Dodgeville
and these little burgs of Cobb and Cuba City and places that no presidential candidate had
been to, at least I said Jimmy Carter went to Mississippi tour back in 1980 or 76, whatever
it was.
But people thought, wow, because I helped coordinate that appearance by W. In Richland
Center.
And we had, and I think this speaks to your question in a long-winded way.
We had hardcore Democrats from Richland County that came out and said, I'm not going to
clap real hard, but it is the president of the United States.
And I want to tell my kids, I brought my kids and my grandkids, and I want them to say
that they saw a living president of the United States.
And there is this respect for the office and there is this, you know, we feel like they
cared enough to come here.
And George Bush won Richland County in 2004 and subsequently the state in 2004.
So I think that Richland County, I think that Wisconsin is a whole generally speaking,
we like to see people, and I think that's why Trump won Wisconsin in the 16 and Hillary
didn't.
She just took it for granted.
She didn't show up here.
And it's about, you know, Tommy Thompson was the quintessential Wisconsin politician.
You know, he cheerleading for Wisconsin.
He had these, a lot of people called him Hoki, but you know, one of them was, a lot of
these stops.
You know, and the speech was saying ladies and gentlemen, Wisconsin is the kind of state
where you come home from vacation.
Your neighbor, your neighbor's mode your yard for you and they come out in the front
porch with a six pack of Miller light and one head and a bag of cheese curds the other
and say welcome home friend.
And everybody connected because at some level, everybody knew somebody like that.
And I think that the politicians that maybe don't do the Tommy stick, but at their own way
and their own way, connect with voters tend to be the people who win and the most recent
example of that.
I think Tammy Baldwin is not getting it out of the park right now with her media message.
And the antidotes, you mentioned about George W coming to small towns in southwestern
Wisconsin and Tommy stick also suggests that, you know, people in Wisconsin are open-minded.
A lot of people in Wisconsin are open-minded.
I mean, they may have their teams that they support sports wise and maybe that rubs off
onto their cheering or rooting for whoever they choose politically.
But many Wisconsinites are willing to take a listen anyway.
I think that's absolutely true.
And again, I unfortunately, and I think it's one of the most tragic things in my life,
I'm 54.
As a Wisconsin, I think it's one of the most tragic things in this state in my lifetime
is what Scott Walker did to the political system because he turned, it was pre-Trumpism
in my opinion.
It was this and it started really with, in my opinion, back in the late 90s with Chuck
Kuala on the Democratic side and Scott Jensen on the Republican side to legislators,
leaders of legislature, it used to be that politicians would fight like hell on the
floor and on policy and then they'd walk four blocks down to a place called the avenue
and they'd buy each other a drink and say, you SOB, you really took it to me today,
what do you want?
And they'd sit there, they'd actually have dinner together and say, all right, what's
your bottom line?
And they'd make laws over a cocktail and a steak dinner.
And with Jensen Kuala, they started forbidding freshman members in their caucuses on both
sides from even being seen with a member from the other side or they'd have retribution
in terms of their committee chairmanship.
And a walker did that in spades and he started this absolutism where we're not talking
to them absolutely and it divided this state in a way that I've never seen.
We still haven't fully recovered and then you get Trump, which just fuels, gets gas
on the fire.
So one theory about Wisconsin's split personality and who wins and who loses here is candidate
based, how good the candidates are, who shows up and who doesn't show up.
Everybody knows that Hillary Clinton didn't show up in Wisconsin and that had a huge effect
even though she was playing too originally and then she had to cancel an event in Green
Bay because there was a crisis so she didn't end up showing up at all and that did cost
her here in Wisconsin.
But there are other theories about how we got here and where we are today.
And for this other explanation, here's Jay Heck, who's the executive director of Common
Cause.
He's been with Common Cause for almost 30 years.
I'm Jay Heck, the executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin.
And how long you've been there, Jay?
29 years, Matt.
Wow.
That's quite a while.
You get a trophy for that.
I hope to give you a watch if and when you're ever retired.
Some say it's because I've been unable to find a job anywhere else, no one else would hire
me.
Well, you must have come across this question in your time there, which is, what's up with
Wisconsin?
Why is this such a weird state?
You got to, you know, this is a state for that brought you fighting Bob LaFont.
It's a state that unfortunately gave the country Joe McCarthy.
We now have Tammy Baldwin and Ron Johnson.
What's up with this schizophrenic state?
Matt, as you know, Wisconsin is not only one of the most closely divided, evenly divided
between the party's states and the country, but it's also one of the most schizophrenic.
When I moved to Wisconsin in the late 1980s from Washington, DC, it still had the reputation
as being a beacon for democracy.
It was a state where you had a legislature that regularly changed hands between Republicans
and Democrats, same with governors, but they're always seen to be a bipartisan consensus
that was reached and, generally speaking, the two parties tried to do what was best for
the citizens of Wisconsin.
That culture changed in the 90s with the advent of Newt Gingrich, the contract on America,
and then the polarization of Wisconsin politics in the name of Scott Jensen and Chuck
Kuala and all the rest.
And so it's been a steady devolution over the years of what's happened in this state.
Sad.
I don't think it's beyond repair, but there is certainly this has been a long time in
the making.
You know, when I got to Wisconsin in 1983 and I was born in the Chicago area, so I knew
a lot about corruption and politics, and it was almost a joke here because the politics
in Wisconsin was so clean.
I mean, there was a scandal if someone bought lunch for a lot of you bought lunch for a
politician.
That was a scandal.
You know, it's a little different now.
The big scandal when I came in the late 80s was a lobbyist buying packer tickets for legislators.
And of course, that was outrageous because you couldn't get packer tickets.
They are impossible to obtain.
So that was serious business, but that was the kind of corruption that we were looking
at.
And so what's happened over the years, and I like to make this analogy with Chicago, you
know, at least in Chicago, the politicians are kind of honest about the corruption.
It's, you know, it's almost a point of pride in Wisconsin.
It's very, very much undercover and nobody admits to it.
But in many cases, the corruption is, I would say, more insidious because of the hypocrisy
that's involved.
And what kind of corruption are you referring to?
Well, the, infamously, the, the legislative caucus scandal in 2001, 2002, greatest political
scandal in Wisconsin's history, and the only time in the history of the United States
where you had the leadership of both political parties in both legislative chambers simultaneously
indicted and charged with felony corruption in office.
And this was illegal fundraising on state time using state employees.
And it was really a whole mastermind by the legislative leadership to inundate Wisconsin
with, with dark money illegally at the time and to transform their political power into
something much more absolute than the legislative legislature ever had in the state.
And that, of course, led to, I think just a continuation of that, most famously, after
2010 with the election of Scott Walker in the Republican-controlled legislature, not
just act 10, but all of the other anti-democracy measures that they ran through in the immediate
aftermath of, of 2011, including the most partisan gerrymander of any state in the country,
the imposition of the most severe extreme voter photo ID law in the country, the destruction
of public financing in this state.
And then act 10, which was transforming Wisconsin into a one-party political state with the destruction
of the public employee union.
So, so, you know, that, that sort of thing that happened, once you open the door to that
corruption and Governor Jim Doyle, who was elected on a reform slate in 2002, did absolutely
nothing to clean up Wisconsin.
He had an opportunity to do so and just didn't take advantage of it.
That's why we're here.
And I think it's important people understand that this, this just didn't occur overnight.
This has been a systematic destruction of democracy in this state.
And it took a long time for it to devolve.
It's going to take a while to, to fix.
But I'm happy to say that I think in just this year, we've begun to turn the corner in
that regard.
So, I'm optimistic about the long, long-term future of Wisconsin.
We'll hear more from Jay Heck in a future edition with Wisconsin forward.
But I wanted to bring in Trigg V. Olson of the Lincoln Project, who's a regular guest
on the Todd Alba show on the Civic Media Radio Network, because Trigg V. makes an important
point about the people of Wisconsin.
Here we are not really so much at each other's throats, as you might think, reading about
this red, blue divide here in Wisconsin.
Here's Trigg V. Olson, a senior advisor for the Lincoln Project, and a regular guest
on the Todd Alba show on the Civic Media Radio Network.
When you're in DC and people just say, you know, what's up with Wisconsin, I don't can't
figure it out.
What do you, what do you tell them?
It's just the nature of the state.
It can go either way.
They vote, they vote on people.
I mean, all my bodies, they like Tammy Baldwin.
You know why they like Tammy Baldwin, because apparently she came into a bar on Main Street
in order of falls.
The word got around that she was great to drink a beer with at the bar and like a really
nice person.
And I can tell you, having worked with her when she was in the state legislature, she's
one of the best people I've ever encountered in politics.
She is a super nice person.
I kind of read it right.
Yeah.
She's just super.
She shows up.
And she has a great staff.
Yeah, she shows up.
Yeah, she shows up.
I just think there's a huge opportunity here for, for, you know, Wisconsin is a
slightly right of center state at the end of the day.
But the people who are slightly right are pragmatic and they're not really represented
by what the Republican party has become.
And there's a huge opportunity if Democrats nominate candidates, you know, north of highway
eight, who aren't running like they're on the isthmus in Dane County.
And our guys like Bob Jelk and Bresky and the kind of people that Tommy Thompson woke
up every morning and said, hey, how can I go to work with them?
Paul Williams or Gary George, like that's the tradition that they're looking for.
They want people who show up, but they really at the end of the day.
And I mean, again, this is a Tommy Thompson isn't like, who do the, who do the guys outside
the paper factory at the, we're at the bar in rapids?
Who do they want to sit and have a beer with?
Now the irony, talk about Tammy Baldwin when she ran against Tommy, you know, like she
was the guy, she was the person they wanted to sit and have beer with because he had gone
in Washington and they made ads to make that point and, you know, he, that's how Tommy got
perceived.
I don't think it was necessarily fair.
You had two people who, honestly, if you had to pick two people in politics to drink beer
with each of these kids and watch the Green Bay Packers, Tommy and Tammy would be pretty
good.
We seem so much more polarized now, though, than even in that race.
Why is that?
I think that's because of what you see at the Capitol in Madison and sort of where and
how the Republicans have chosen to, to run post walker and govern post walker, which
is a 51% strategy, but I, I'm not necessarily sure that's where the people of Wisconsin are.
I mean, Todd and I say on our show all the time, you know, Wisconsin wants cheerleaders.
Tammy Baldwin, no one doubts that she loves the state and cheerleads for the state and
works her butt off for the state.
The thing, Trigby, you know, I've talked about this, usually at Republican events, they
don't allow you to conceal caring.
You can't take a weapon into the thing, right?
All right.
For good reason.
Right.
For good reason.
I, you know, I just think it's never enough for the extremes and honestly, like having
worked around the world in places that where extremism has taken hold, it's a cycle of
extremism and it's a race to the bottom and what ends up happening.
We've done a bunch of research in Wisconsin about this and in other states, you know, the
more Trump does what he does and what Scott Walker started and he gets people on the right
thinking the other side is their enemy, not trustworthy political opponents.
And then what happens is the more they talk about enemies, the more the people on the other
side respond to, I've got to defend myself.
And it becomes a cycle, but I can tell you, like when Todd and I were out traveling around
the state and every night after we do the show, we'd go and grab a few beers in a local
bar and invite people listeners to come talking to the people in the bars across state.
They don't.
They're tired of it.
They, what they, most of, most of them want problem solve.
They want good public schools.
They want workforce development.
They want the Wisconsin idea restored, we're in all these college towns.
They want, you know, law enforcement respected.
They understand that elections in Wisconsin are are genuinely clean and fair and that Donald
Trump lost in 2020 because they were going and not voting for Donald Trump or maybe not
voting for Joe Biden either, but they were voting for their congressman or they were
voting for, you know.
So you counter political extremism by finding cognitive dissidents, like, doesn't, that's
true in the United States, it's true wherever extremism is happening.
You think about, and I say this a lot, you know, I speak to rich people on the coast who
tend to be left-wing leaning, in fact, I did one for, for a group of people when I figured
out that most of them bundled money for Nancy Pelosi and I can tell you, I said, I ended
up saying to him, you know, I imagine myself doing a lot of things in politics, speaking
to all of you, it was never one of them and one of the guys shot back.
We never thought we'd be listening to a guy who worked for Mitch McConnell, he's too
shay.
But the, so the, just the one on one conversation.
Yeah, the one on one, cognitive dissidents is the key.
So, you know, I said to those people, you know, a lot of the Trump people you'd want them
as your neighbor, they'll bring you a casserole if your mom's in hospice.
In fact, I know that because my mom was in hospice for about seven months and I was out
there every week and they knew I'd stay in a hotel and I had people who were friends of
mine who, who would sent me really nasty stuff about me being part of the Lincoln project
who literally brought food to my hotel room, right, like, because they're good people.
Now I had people on the left doing the same thing, right, they weren't asking that.
There's a real cognitive dissidents and you've got to, you've got to ask questions and
listen to what they're saying and knowing who they are and how they live their life and
leading them to the incongruence between who and how they live their lives and what they're
exposing politically.
I'm sorry to hear about your mom and that story about you being in a hotel when she was
in hospice.
But you said something very interesting there that people on the left who knew you as a
Republican started to bring you in her food over and people on the right who are furious
yet you for being at the Lincoln project started to bring food over to and to me that is
a real Wisconsin anecdote that people who look at Wisconsin as a split state don't think
it's possible for us to have, you know, civil conversations with people who disagree with
you.
My play Texas Holden, that's one of my bad sins and, you know, one of my favorite players
I was with last night, got a Trump sticker on his truck and he's a really good guy.
And when I said something on Facebook once to all my Trump friends, please don't vote
for Trump.
One of my smart Alec Madison friends said get new friends.
But that isn't the answer.
I mean, the answer in the Wisconsin, I want to live in, is it Wisconsin where, yeah, we
can disagree even pretty strongly on politics, but, you know, we can play cards together.
We bring food to our friends whose moms are ailing.
And I think that happens more than people think and should happen more.
Trigg, what do you think about that?
100%.
I mean, I've said this on the show, I'll give some free advice to anybody who wants to run
for governor of the state of Wisconsin, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat.
If you're traveling around the state and saying to people, we don't wear red mega hats
or blue black lives matter hats.
We wear green and golden Wisconsin.
That's what we do.
When people are at Lambo Field or at Camp Randall, they're not asking who you voted for
in the last election.
When you're out on a deer stand, you don't care if the guy next to you, how the guy next
you voted or in the bar, right?
Like, it's politicians that are ending up doing this and dividing.
And it really, as we talked about, it started with Scott Walker for selfish reasons.
Like, we have to get back to that.
Like who wants to live in a Wisconsin where everything is seen through a partisan lens,
but that's extremism and I'll tell you, you go to Belarus, you go to Putin's Russia,
you go to any place where democracy doesn't exist, everything gets dragged into the politics
of it.
That's why you see stupid videos of Vladimir Putin playing hockey scoring goals like he's
Mark Johnson at the 1980 Olympics against NHL players and the guy can't skate online,
Mark Johnson.
How do we move Wisconsin forward and get over the polarization and have more productive,
you know, civil conversations with those who don't agree with us?
Well, I think, I think politically we have to have people start demanding that some core
ideas that have made Wisconsin and I'll tell you, everybody I know that kind of like
me grew up in Wisconsin, ended up going off, seeing other places, living other places.
If I could convince my wife to move back to Wisconsin tomorrow, I would be in a truck
headed back.
And everybody, you know, there are some foundational things that have made Wisconsin great.
And it's part of what Todd and I were trying to highlight when we went on the tour.
The Wisconsin idea, the university system is, is you, I mean, I'm out here in Virginia
as UVA, good school, sure, would my daughter actually wants to go to Wisconsin, which might
be my excuse to move back so I can have in-state tuition and keep thinking of that.
But UVA is a perfectly good school, but you go down there, it's just not the same vibe.
The state college is in Virginia or nothing like the University of Wisconsin system.
I mean, we were on the O'Claire Stevens Point, those campuses are amazing.
The Wisconsin idea, conservation, like when did that become a bad word?
You like to deer hunt?
You kind of like to have some conservation.
You like to bird watch?
Probably like the Mississippi Parkway.
People like Gail or Nelson and Tommy Thompson could work together for God's sakes.
We can work together now.
Look at education.
Our public schools are the core of our small towns and communities.
River Falls, everybody gets together at the high school football game.
They go to Steve's pizza and drink some beers at Johnny's afterwards.
They don't, they're not asked and they want their school supported.
There were things that were implemented and I was, I was in Tommy world when they were,
like revenue caps.
River Falls was a rural school then.
It's not a suburb of the Twin Cities, but it's still cheap because they haven't been
updated.
Don't want to expect that solution to be 30 years sacrosanct, they need, there needs to
be an update.
That's something everybody should be able to work together on.
You know, democracy, we have clean elections.
We generally have clean government in the state of Wisconsin compared to other places that
I've worked and that's under assault.
If the suddenly, you know, Donald Trump is basically still telling lies about the state
of Wisconsin.
Even Andrew Hitz come out, said that.
Like we should be outraged that he's doing that.
He's trash in her reputation.
He's taking something that doesn't belong to him and wrecking it.
And honestly, I like to make fun of Scott Walker on Todd's show.
I kind of did it on here, but what really gals me about Scott is he took something that
wasn't his to take and wreck for personal ambition and quite frankly, that's just outrageous.
And it's not in the tradition of Wisconsin.
Jim Doyle didn't do that.
Pat Lucy didn't do that.
Martin Shriber didn't do that.
Gaylord Nelson didn't do that.
Bill Proxmire didn't do that.
Tommy Thompson.
You may hate Tommy's policies.
Tommy didn't do that.
Scott McCallum didn't do that.
Scott Walker did that for personal ambition because he always wanted to be.
We need to rise up and start saying no to this.
And quite frankly, more than anything, what we need is some politicians who go around
and trust the people in the center enough.
And when I say center, I mean left of center, right of center, pretty much traditional
Democrats, traditional Republicans have faith in them that they're the people that from
either side bring it cast rules or pizza when your mom's in hospice, not these crazies
like Gabelman and people who are constantly beating each other up over politics for personal
ambition and power.
I'm with Trig V. Olson about how we can get along here in Wisconsin even when we don't
always agree with each other.
I do that with friends I play cards with.
And for a similar perspective on how we get along with people who may be not seeing
the same things we are in the world, here's Luke Mathers, executive producer of civic media
with a story of his own along these lines.
I think when a lot of people, not from Wisconsin, look at Wisconsin and see where half red
and where half blue and they act like the two sides never meet, I mean, the two sides
are meeting all over Wisconsin and actually getting along by and large at the bars and
at the ballpark and, you know, Friday night football and at church if people are going
to church and it's not like we're at each other's throats here, which I think some people
who aren't from Wisconsin when they see the divide here may think that's the case.
How do you see people getting along even with different political either strong beliefs
or mild beliefs?
Some of my best friends disagree with me via me on politics.
Like it is night and day what we believe, how we believe a government should function.
But at the end of the day, I care about their kids.
They care about me and my wife that we care about each other because we do have commonalities.
We root for some of the same sports teams.
We do the same activities.
We love playing bar trivia or whatever it may be.
We can disagree on things, but it doesn't mean that we can't like each other still.
And so for me, I stood up.
I was best man for one of my very good friends and we could not be different, more different
on the sides of the political spectrum for a really long time.
Now he himself has kind of started to be more of a moderate individual because he himself
feels like conservative politicians, Republican elected officials have more or less left him
behind.
But that's not necessarily something that I think may have happened.
Had I just been like, no, I don't agree with you politically and therefore I'm going
to cut you out of my life.
Yeah, your social influence on him may have had an impact too.
I think hearts and minds are the way to go and by being in these communities that we
represent like civic media and being there in those individual relationships with family
members, friends, just acquaintances that you interact with, trying to cut them all
out not being there, disengaging is not the way forward, engaging in civil and kind dialogue
is really what it takes to get somebody to change their perspective, change their point
of view and change their opinion on things.
And I think it's really important for people on both sides not to demonize the people
on the other side, not to think everybody who doesn't agree with you politically is an
evil person or has horns on their heads, there's going straight down.
There's aspects that is like, okay, we all have to agree on some common principles.
And the democratic process, people voting, civic engagement being a part of your communities
and getting involved, that's something I think we can all agree upon.
Yeah, for me, with my friends who were Trump supporters, January 6 was the issue.
Right after January 6, I would communicate with them and said, I know you're a decent
person, you can't agree with what happened on January 6, can you?
And almost all of them said, no, that was a horrible thing for this country and recognized
it.
And so there's some common ground right there.
The January 6 proponents, it's hard to have a conversation with them, I grant you
that.
Yeah, it's definitely a lot harder when, again, it gets back to where you're getting
your information, where there's some folks that are trying to undermine what happened
that day and downplay it, say that it wasn't there, we have elected officials in our state
here in Wisconsin that say, oh, it was just tourists, according to US Senator Ron Johnson.
And so there is definitely some downplaying there and again, it's important to know where
your information is coming from and we have to agree upon common principles and go
forward.
And there's a reason Ron Johnson wants to whitewash what happened on January 6 because he
was complicit in what happened on January 6.
Yeah, it seems that there's a lot of information that the public still should get to know because
that Senator is not answering the questions about how involved or downplaying, how involved
he was in the plot to overturn the electoral college results.
I'm Charles Franklin.
I'm director of the Marquette Law School poll.
We've been doing the Marquette poll since January of 2012.
Do you have any hopeful signs that come out of your polling about either civic culture
or how we get past this pretty toxic polarization that we've been living in?
Yeah, I would actually turn to anecdote for this.
We monitor telephone interviews to make sure the interviewer is asking the questions right
and that sort of thing.
It's a usual quality control thing.
And I am struck that most of our respondents range from somewhat reluctant but willing
to do the interview to pretty enthusiastic to do the interview.
But what I'm struck by is the tone of sincerity in their voices at either end of that spectrum.
And for Republicans and Democrats alike that I wish it were possible for people to hear
fellow citizens talking about politics and issues in a way that does make you feel like
there is still hope that political leadership and campaigns may not be emphasizing the
more positive side of civic life.
But it's still alive out there when you talk to ordinary voters and just listen to them
talk about their concerns.
And they want their elected officials to solve their problems too.
Yes.
Which is not to deny polarization because we are still part of that.
But if you only listen to the most polarized voices, I think you may easily lose sight
that there is still an involvement in civic life that lives on out there.
Thanks Charles Franklin for giving us that little upbeat note to end on as we're closing
out the first episode of this Wisconsin Forward podcast.
Actually Charles will be back again for our next episode of the Wisconsin Forward podcast
as he gives us his analysis of the presidential race here in Wisconsin and what his poll numbers
show.
And then we'll get Todd Albo's perspective on what the election means for Wisconsin and
for the country as a whole with our democracy hanged by a thread.
So please join me, Matt Rothschild, for this next episode of the Wisconsin Forward podcast
on the Civic Media Network.
If you like the podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or
your favorite podcast platform.
Learn more about the show and download episodes right from the civic media website, civicmedia.us.
