Democrats sweep Wisconsin in Trump rebuke, strategists say

From the Fox 6 studios, this is Open Record. I'm Brian Poulsen. I'm joined by Fox 6 investigative reporter Nicole Herzog. Hello, Nicole. Hello. And we are joined by Fox 6 political reporter Jason Kelby. Welcome back, Jason. Great to be here. We are recording this episode on Thursday, November 5th. We are just beginning to assess the fallout from a midterm election that brought a dramatic, I guess both is true, a democratic political shift. It said dramatic. I said democratic. They're both right. But here in Wisconsin and across the country, Was it a blue wave? Was it a blue tsunami? How did it happen? And what does this new political landscape mean for Wisconsin? We'll dig into the numbers with Marquette University researcher John Johnson. We'll be joined by Democratic strategist Sachin Chetha and Republican strategist Bill McCoshen for an assessment of the message voters are sending. But first, Jason is going to give us a full recap of Tuesday's blue streak. We'll do that right after this. We are back on Open Record. Tuesday produced a political landscape in Wisconsin. It looks very different than it did just a few days ago. Wisconsin elected its first black governor. Democrats captured both chambers of the state legislature and flipped two of Wisconsin's congressional seats. And it wasn't just Wisconsin. This happened at the national level. Both houses of Congress now blue as well, Jason. But it all starts with the most unlikely, I think it's got to be the most unlikely comeback story in the history of Wisconsin politics. David Crowley elected the next governor After. He dropped out of the race. He dropped out of the race and said he had no path forward in the Democratic primary. He endorsed the Lieutenant Governor, Sarah Rodriguez, and that was the end of it. But then. Days, just a few days after he endorsed Sarah Rodriguez, she had some major problems with her campaign finance reports that were filed in January that were finally revealed and showed that she had many, many duplicate entries. We dug into those numbers, found a lot of problems where it showed she had a lot more money in the bank than she really did. Part of the reason why Crowley Kelly is endorsing. And Rodriguez, at that point in time, as it was seen that she was going to have a million dollar ad buy on television, that she was going to be the candidate, maybe the only candidate that was going to be able to stop Francesca Hong, who was a Democratic Socialist of America candidate who was getting a lot of momentum. And she seemed inevitable. She seemed inevitable. The polls were showing her 20 points ahead in some places. And so Democrats that didn't want to see the DSA candidate be the nominee tried to stop her and they put their efforts into backing Sarah Rodriguez. But then with the campaign finance scandal. He actually said, I can't continue in this race because it just kept coming up. I found in her reports a donation that her campaign made to a Republican women's group. And we asked, well, what is going on here? And the campaign responded, oh, that was a mistake. It actually was money that we sent to the Milwaukee County Democratic Party to enter numbers into the system. It's auto populated. And instead of making the donation. To the actual group they made, the Wisconsin, the Milwaukee County Democrats, it appeared that they made a donation to the Wisconsin Republican Women's Group, which they didn't. Campaign problem after campaign problem. Sarah Rodriguez drops out. The day later, David Crowley gets back in. A day after that, Governor Tony Evers, who had sat out the entire year not backing any of the candidates. And it seems like he would be a weakened candidate getting back in after dropping out. But that endorsement by Governor Evers seems to have been really powerful, Jason, in getting him over the line for the primary and then carrying him through in the general. I think that makes sense, because when you were looking at the polling at about the time that this was all taking place, 30, 35 percent of the Democratic primary voters said they were undecided. They're looking for help on who to vote for. Well, who do they look to to get guidance on who to vote for when you're so undecided? Democratic Governor Tony Evers is still very popular amongst Democratic primary voters. They look to him. He says, this is my guy, David Crowley. And they did go across the entire state at that point in time. And there was just sort of a momentum to Crowley on the Democratic side. He won that primary. Very, very, very small margin. 3,600 votes separated. Francesca Hong. From winning that Democratic nomination, Nicole, you worked for a couple of years in Madison, so you've been very close to all of this. I mean, this is obviously an enormous comeback win. He's also the first black governor of the state of Wisconsin. So there's history behind this. It was a remarkable campaign. Right. And we also I wanted to ask, too, about the money impact. We were talking a little bit about that. We know that Republicans outspent the Democrats here. How much of an impact do you think that that's really making? Does it make a difference anymore? I mean, there's going to be a lot of. A lot of number crunching, a lot of soul searching, I think, for Republicans that are definitely doing that right now. We'll hear from a Republican coming up a little bit later here. I mean, they are asking the questions, what went wrong here? This was really a national tsunami that wiped out Republicans all over the place, including in these Republican strongholds like Texas and Kansas and in other places. We'll get to that national perspective in a second. J.R. Ross from WisPolitics has calculated a number crunch to all of the ad spending from the independent outside groups and the campaigns and said that this governor's race is the most expensive gubernatorial race in Wisconsin history, more than the last county I looked at from him. He had $160 million spent in this one single governor's race, all that money flooding the airwaves. And you're right, according to his calculations. The upper hand was Tom Tiffany, the Republican congressman who lost this race and lost this race substantially, lost by more than eight percentage points. And he had all that money. I think your question is, does that spending matter? I think money does matter, except in this case, there were such political headwinds. against Republicans and at the backs of Democrats that it might not have mattered who ran in a lot of these races. And we saw that because it wasn't just a Wisconsin First of all, it wasn't just the governor's race. You now have a Democratic trifecta. They got the Assembly and the Senate here in Wisconsin. And there are a lot of people who thought there's no way that was going to happen. You're going to see all three. I mean, Mordecai Lee, our political analyst we've had on for years, said he didn't see any chance of that happening. And yet that is what happened. But it At the national level as well, in Washington, D.C., not just the House, which was almost a foregone conclusion, but the Senate as well. The Senate was a shocker, I think. I mean, I think if you asked people a year ago if the United States Senate was going to flip, they would laugh at you. Chuck, the Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, who likely he'll have a battle, but he'll likely be the majority leader in twenty twenty seven. He said, yeah, we're going to we're going to take control. And people are like, OK, yeah, that's just what you say, because that's what you got to say as a coach of the team. Thank But would you flip Kansas? No, that's that's impossible. I mean, Kansas hadn't voted for a Republican or Kansas hadn't voted for a Democrat for senator in 90 years. Texas hadn't voted for a Democrat for senator in more than 30 years. I mean, up and down, and they flipped both you. those states on Election Day. Really shocking, I think. Do you think there's any one issue that really made people change their minds? I think people are just absolutely angry about the economy. They're angry about the war in Iran, which is very unpopular when you look at the polls in Wisconsin and across the whole country. People are, and Republicans included, upset with the president going to war in Iran. And and then seeing those gas prices, the Strait of Hormuz is definitely part of the gas prices surging diesel prices. So think about rural voters. They've been really moving to the Republican side, especially in the northern part of Wisconsin, which I'm hoping we'll talk to John Johnson about our number cruncher from Marquette University. Northern Wisconsin has gone gone deeply red in the last decade or so. And they how do they power all of that heavy farm equipment? Diesel. Diesel prices are above $6 a gallon. They're looking at their dollars and cents and saying, this is untenable. They have the tariffs as well, which means they're selling some of their soybeans or produce over to Canada. They're dealing with the tariffs and things like that. So dollars and cents, number one issue for voters, whether you're a farmer, whether you live in the city or the suburbs, dollars and cents. And I think they're upset with the economy. They're They're upset with the price of utilities, groceries, gas. I mean, they're just upset. They had to take it out on someone, and I think they're upset with President Trump, and they took it out on Republicans across the state and across the country. I think what you say, Jason, is right, but you think about it. Democrats were always going to be motivated to vote against Trump's Republican Party, but you brought up the point about Republicans being angry. Many that are upset, they feel that President Trump maybe didn't keep his promises or he did some things that didn't put America first, the war on Iran, gas prices high, things like that. So what... May have hurt them is that a lot of those Republicans who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 didn't vote at all or may have even said some of those people on the margins may have said, no, I'm going back to Democrats because you didn't do what I expect you to do. We saw the Wisconsin congressional delegation. There were a couple of tight races. I mean, Brian Stiles seat formerly held by Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, before he went to Washington, D.C. That district hadn't been Democratic for a very long time. It is now 1995. Yep. And it's flipped. Mitchell Berman. That was I think a lot of people thought that there was a chance there was going to be close. It was a toss up. But I think a lot of Republicans said, I think that one's safe. It wasn't. And that one early. I mean, if you would have said last year when you're looking at the forecast for 2026, you would have said, OK, that's that's a likely. That's a likely Republican seat, not going to invest much. But but Democrats did see an opportunity to flip it there. And with the blue wave really crashing across the entire country, they were able to really wipe out Brian Stile by several percentage points, to be to be honest here, a seat that maybe if you would have asked people in both Democrats and Republicans in that area, Kenosha, Racine, all over to Walworth County. Is Brian Stile going to lose? They're probably laughing and say, no, but we still got to put up a fight here. Democrats probably have said we have a bunch of guests today, so I don't want to spend too much more time in this first segment. But I think we have to talk about the three statewide constitutional amendments, which we may not see. We've been seeing a lot of those with a Democrat in the governor's office and the. legislative branch being controlled by Republicans, so they've been going around the governor's office by having these constitutional amendments go before voters. There were three this time, and one, the partial veto that the governor has the power. That's what led to Governor Evers having the 400-year tax increase by stitching together some numbers. That narrowly passed prohibiting future governors from having that power. Yeah. So this is the as you mentioned, the governor had scratched off and. It scratched off a hyphen and got rid of a digit. So it was supposed to be an increase for one school year. And so, you know, school year is 2023 to 2024 with a hyphen in the middle. Scratch off the hyphen, scratch off one of the two of the digits, and you make it a 400-year per pupil. A tax levy increase, so the ability to potentially raise the tax levy, not for one school year, not two school years, but for 400 by doing a creative use of the veto pen. So specifically for tax increases, the partial veto is now prohibited. The constitutional amendment passed by the voters. Voters in Wisconsin have the final say on whether to amend the Constitution. It did pass the Republican-controlled legislature in two consecutive sessions. A session is a two-year. So two consecutive sessions, they passed this resolution, went to the voters. It bypasses the governor. The governor doesn't get to veto this. It goes right to the people, the people have the final say. And they said, no, the governor should not be able to use the partial veto to raise taxes or create new taxes or raise new fees or create new fees. Important to note, though, it's only for taxes and fees. The governor can still. Cross off items and change letters, things like that. Right. Yes. And that's the funny thing. I mean, in Wisconsin, there's different names for these vetoes that have been used by Republicans and by Democrats over the years, including the Vanna White veto, the the Frankenstein veto. I mean, there's all these funny names that but Republicans and Democratic governors have used that partial veto in very creative ways, including what Governor Evers did with the 400 year. Tax increase I mentioned the other two quickly. We're going to our first guest. The other two were one essentially DEI related actions by the government now prohibited. That's part of the Constitution. But the one that you said it took two sessions of two year sessions to get this through the legislature. That's why we're still talking about COVID-19. There was a constitutional amendment that would have prohibited. The closure of forced closure of religious spaces like churches, worship gatherings during a health emergency that failed. That one failed. And that one. So that's not a constitutional amendment. But the other one on affirmative what was known as affirmative action it was approved by the voters will ban the government from either discriminating or giving preferential treatment on the basis of race. Sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin, that will apply just to the government. So colleges, private employers can still use race in hiring, things like that. But the government entities, which would also be universities like the University of Wisconsin. Only those public universities and those public technical colleges will not be able to use race or any of those other protected classes, giving them preferential treatment in employment in contracts. So if you're going to have a. Construction company fixing potholes, you can't say, I'm going to hire, I want to give a contract to a diverse-owned business. No, you can't do that in Wisconsin any longer. It's against the Constitution. So contracts, employment, education, preferential treatment is done away in Wisconsin. We're going to take a break because we've got a lot of guests to get to. And our next guest is from Marquette University, a researcher who's going to dive into the numbers. We're going to speak to John Johnson when we come right back after this. And we are back on Open Record and we are joined by John Johnson, a research fellow at Marquette University's Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and a collaborator on the Marquette Law School poll. John, thank you for being here on Open Record. Great to be with you. You wrote that this was a wave election, but what stands out to you as you dig into the data here? I was sort of expecting this to be an election like many of the past ones we've seen where parts of Wisconsin get redder and parts get bluer. That's even what happened in 2024, which felt like a wave election in a lot of ways because almost everywhere got better for Trump. But there were still a few places, the WOW counties and Door County, where Kamala Harris actually did better than Joe Biden had in 2020. That's not what this election looked like. This was just more blue everywhere across the board, all 99 assembly districts. voted more for Crowley than they did for Kamala Harris in 2024. It was really remarkable. The degree of the change varied from place to place, but it was at least a few points everywhere in the state. Every kind of place, seemingly every kind of voter voted more for Democrats this time than they did two years ago. We looked at those turnout numbers. It looks like without having all All of the write-in votes added into this number, about 2.6 million people, a little bit more than that, voted this time around. That's the same that voted roughly in 2022 and the same that voted in 2018. So we're not seeing a spike, a large, large, large spike in people voting this year, at least with the tentative numbers we have. Are you seeing, when you look at those maybe red areas in northern Wisconsin, are you seeing that the turnout? Has increased or decreased? I mean, are these are these Republican voters who sat out and didn't run, didn't vote? Or are these new voters coming in that are turning the state blue? Yeah, that's the question. So there's three quarters of a million fewer people who voted in this November than November two years ago. So on the one hand, Wisconsin, we say it has high turnout in midterm elections, and it does compared to other states, but it's still much lower turnout than we see in Wisconsin in a presidential year. And the question is, how did those three quarters of a million people who didn't vote this time, what were their political views? And based on all of the evidence we have from different sources, I'm confident that those are a more more Republican group of people. than the people who are the most likely to show up. So that's tough for Republicans to begin with. I think some of those people were going to stay home no matter what, because they're just presidential year, low propensity voters, but also disillusionment with the Trump administration affected the decision of some people to stay home. They couldn't probably countenance voting for a Democrat, but they wouldn't show up to vote for a Republican. Once the precinct data is available across the state, I'm working on gathering some of that today. We'll be able to take a really fine grain look at exactly where people showed up and where they didn't. That'll answer some of this question. To give you a sense of how the change in turnout versus persuasion could have played a role, our last Marquette poll, which showed Crowley up seven and ended up winning by eight, in our registered voter sample in that poll, we asked people who they remembered voting for in 2024, and that registered voter sample was plus two for Trump. So actually, just ever so slightly more Trump voting than the state was in 2024 when Trump won by one point. But in the likely voter sample, the people who told us that they're actually going to show up and vote, it was a Harris plus three electorate. So I do think that that's probably accurate. It was probably the case that if you took everybody who voted in in November this year, that those people probably were a slight majority for Harris among the ones who voted in 2024. But it doesn't explain the eight-point victory that Crowley got. That involved quite a bit of persuasion of people who historically hadn't supported Democrats as well. How reliable is the polling typically here? What do we see that might surprise you, and how often does it get it right? Yeah, it's much easier in midterm elections, I'll tell you that. We've had a pretty good track record in 2018, 2022, and now 2026. One point difference in our margin from the ultimate one. Polling across the country, a little bit more of a mixed bag. I would say a pretty good night for polls generally, although you can find places where they miss. Atlas Intel, again, the most accurate pollster from the 2024 cycle. They were out right before the election predicting a plus 14 swing towards Democrats. It ended up being plus 13, so they're looking pretty good. New York Times, Sienna, often rated the best pollster in the country, had a pretty good night. Again, we did as well off by one point. So all in all, we feel like it was a good night for polling. I know you won't tweet your own horn, but let's just be honest. The Marquette poll is rated the number two poll in the country, according to Nate Silver's Silver Bullet. So let's just say that right there and then. And obviously, you said, you know, when you do well, you want to toot your own horn. When things don't go well, people say, well, they're undersampling Republicans. And I think coming into this, a lot of people said a lot of a lot of Republicans said, yeah, they show him up seven, but they undersample Republicans. Republicans don't like to take polls. In this case, it proved you got it right. My question is, when you look across the board, especially when you're getting granular, you're looking assembly district by assembly district, you're looking at different race and age groups and other demographics. You're going to see in a blue wave like this that there's a difference, an increase in all of these areas for Democrats or a margin that's different. So the margins are going to be what you're looking at. Dane County, Milwaukee County are always going to be overwhelmingly in favor of Democrats. You're going to see rural areas that are going to favor the Republican candidate. But it's often the degrees to which that is the case, which is where you see the differences. Was there a uniform difference in that degree this time around, or did you see some particular areas that really stood out where there was a bigger jump than you expected? I guess a good way of looking at this is how each district shifted in its vote for president in 2024 and governor in 2026. And if you look at it that way, the smallest swings towards Democrats, again, every seat swung towards Democrats, but the smallest swings were in Rhinelander, you know, up north, in Hartford, Delafield, Plymouth, and Merrill. So there you kind of got a mix of up north and then the most Republican parts of southeastern Wisconsin. The biggest swings, the places where Crowley improved the most over Harris two years ago, were in the parts of Milwaukee County where a lot of Latinos live. So the assembly districts on the south side of the city of Milwaukee, Oak Creek and South Milwaukee itself. One of the biggest changes was that 21st district, the flip, where Jesse Rodriguez retired. I think Jesse Rodriguez was the only Republican who had a chance of winning that seat. Probably didn't even have a chance this year, but she held it in 2024. Running far ahead of Trump Based on that, based on what you're saying there, I remember in twenty twenty four, there were a lot of Latinos who came out in favor of Donald Trump. And since then, we've seen the ICE crackdowns. We've seen a lot of concern in the Hispanic community about how this administration has dealt with the immigration issue. Do you think there are a lot of maybe Hispanic voters who had Trump regret who is that what's showing up here in the data? That's what it looks like. And it's the same thing that's happened in Florida and the Rio Grande Valley. I mean, all across the country, you see this pretty sharp swing of Trump voters who Latino Trump voters shifting to Democrats this time around. And, you know, immigration, I'm sure, played a role. But there's been some polling by like some of the Latino focused research groups that suggest that. Latino voters are also very affected by frustration with wars in the Middle East and diesel and gas prices as well. So it's not that like Latino voters have like unique parochial concerns. They're also very much driven by the same kind of concern. It's the economy, but they have much, but they have much less party loyalty, especially people who've moved here more recently. You know, they don't, they're not like, oh, my family's always been a Democrat or always been a Republican. So perhaps it's easier for them to change their allegiances from one election to another. You talked about Jesse Rodriguez's seat. She didn't seek reelection, a Republican state representative. Bob Donovan did seek reelection and lost. You had called Bob Donovan the white whale. He kept overperforming in this sort of Democratic district that he represented. He kept overperforming the party and winning. He lost this go around. What happened there? Yeah. I mean, Ben Briss, it did not end up being close at all. Yeah. Ben Briss won by 12 and a half points. Crowley won by 15 points. So, you know, we see Donovan still had about a three point advantage relative to the top of the ticket. That was the kind of margin that saved him in 2024 and saved him in 2022. But this year, the wave was so big. I know I don't see this in your graphs just yet, looking at your blog, but college campuses is a place you've looked at, and I really find it fascinating. If you look at 2024, there are some of the college campuses in Wisconsin, UW-La Crosse, UW-Oshkosh, UW-Platteville, where there were 47 to 50 percent of students voted for the Republican candidate in 2024 for Donald Trump. And in the Supreme Court election earlier this year. Those same campuses voted 17%, 22% for the Republican or the conservative, the believed to be conservative candidate of the Supreme Court. Massive difference. Did you see that as well in this election? What does the campus vote look like? Man, I wish I had looked that up. I haven't looked at that yet, but that's a great question. I'll dig into that. That's the next chart on his blog. I got another idea. I got another idea. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry, John. It's a good point. Well, I was going to say the craziest thing with that campus vote analysis to me was that from November, 2024 to the April, 2025 election. So the same school year, the same students who live there, you saw this just like massive swing towards the democratic endorsed Supreme court candidate and this huge drop in turnout. So I interpret that as the Trump voters on those college campuses just didn't show up in April. And it's pretty interesting. We talk about Republican strength with low propensity voters, which makes it difficult to win non-presidential elections. And it seems like that difference in the propensity to vote holds true even among current college students. We've got about one minute left with you. We have these new maps, and I'm just kind of really curious, you know, what your analysis had found was that the new legislative maps, Donald, President Donald Trump won the majority of the assembly districts and then Vice President Kamala Harris won the majority of the Senate districts. Would. Would the assembly still have flipped under the old maps? Have you done that analysis yet? Probably not. But once we get good precinct data, we'll be able to answer that definitively. There is a point where gerrymanders break. If every Democrat was as popular and as popular in the same places as Tammy Baldwin in 2018, that would have broken the old gerrymander. I don't think this election would have done that, but it's a big enough Democratic wave I want to look and see. Well, we talked about that on election night. The back-to-back things you had for Democrats here was the change in the maps and then, of course, the midterm wave against the sitting president. And obviously, it turned into quite a night for Democrats. John Johnson, Marquette University, thank you so much for being here on Open Record, and we'll look forward to more of your analysis going forward. Yeah, it was fun. Take care, guys. Thanks, John. So that tells us where votes changed, but why did they change it? What is the message voters are sending? Our next two guests are going to talk about that from opposite perspectives on opposite sides of the aisle. We will hear from Sachin Chetta, a Democratic strategist, and Bill McCaution, Republican strategist, when we come right back after this. And we are back on Open Record, Brian Paulson with Nicole Herzog and Jason Calvi. And we are now joined by Democratic political strategist Sachin Chedda and Republican strategist Bill McCaution. And as I see you guys on the screen, you're sitting on the opposite side we would expect in terms of your political affiliations. But we'll keep that in mind. That's Bill on the left and Sachin on the right. Guys, thanks for being here on Open Record. Thanks for having us. Let me start with this question for both of you. And I'll start with you, Sachin. Why did Democrats win to the degree they did on Tuesday? Well, I think the obvious answer, and I think Bill and I will agree on this, is Donald J. Trump. That's the number one reason. The Trump administration has not focused on what they said they would do. They have not focused on the things that Americans have told them that they care about. And that is why we've seen the results here in Wisconsin that we saw of a massive blue wave. And it's also why we saw the exact same thing happen across the country, including in places where I think Folks are still astonished, winning Senate seats in places like Iowa, South Carolina, Texas, Kansas. And I think that we as Democrats should be proud that we ran the campaigns and ran the candidates who could take advantage of that moment. But we should not fool ourselves that it was because of Democratic genius or because of our agenda alone that we won this victory. Bill, same question. I think it's good counsel such and just gave Democrats that it wasn't about them. It was about Donald Trump and voters spoke loud and clear. They feel like he didn't deliver on the couple main promises he made affordability being at the top of that list and endless wars would have been number two, a close second. Um, and those things stung all the way down the ballot in your last segment with John Johnson, which I found fascinating assembly Republicans in particular have always been able to separate themselves from what's going on in DC. They were not able to do that this time. This is what these races were nationalized up and down the ticket. And that worked to Democrats advantage for sure. And the president himself had said, vote as if I am on the ballot, his name's not on the ballot, but vote as if I am. And it seems like people did. Take him to heart on that. What did Republicans get wrong with the messaging here? What could they have done to appeal to more voters? Well, not enter the war back in February, Republicans were sitting in a pretty good spot back in February. And if you're gonna do the war, and I'm not a military analyst, so I'm not in a position to say whether it was right or wrong, history will judge that. But Donald Trump paid a heavy, heavy price. price in the short term, and so did Republicans at the congressional and legislative level, and frankly, gubernatorial candidates across the country. So that would have been number one. Number two, they should have focused more on economic issues throughout the first, the two years that they were in charge. That's what voters put them there to do. I think there was quite a bit they could have gotten done, and they got distracted on things that people really didn't care about or things that didn't. Their personal life, like a reflecting pool or a ballroom or what we're going to do with the Kennedy Center, nobody cares about those things. Those aren't things that impact my life on a daily basis, but gas prices do. Right now, Democrats are coming in. They've made a lot of promises on the campaign trail to focus on affordability. But when you're looking at Washington, D.C., they're going to have two years here. The entire term of these new members of Congress will be under President Donald Trump. Are they going to be able to get anything done in Washington, D.C.? I think there's a couple of things. So first of all, The third thing, and I agree with Bill, right, that it's the war and it's a lack of focus on people's bills. I think the third thing is the corruption. And I think people really do see the corruption. They can see the president admitting he's making billions of dollars while he's the president. And so I do think that you'll see the Democrats proposing policies, and some of them, I'm guessing Donald Trump will sign off on, to make things better, because he's not as ideologically committed to the right in that way, especially on economic issues, as opposed to immigration and some of these other things. And then I think you'll see the Democrats holding the administration to account for the corruption, and that will highlight. Why Washington is broken, why our politics is broken, why our political system is broken. That's what's going to happen in Washington. At the state level, it's very different because in a lot of states, there's a Democratic trifecta. There's not a Republican boogeyman to point to. And Democrats really are going to have to deliver. Bringing gas prices down isn't something that state governments can usually do, maybe a little bit on the gas tax. We could do something on the minimum markup here in Wisconsin, which would, again, have a few cents of impact. In fact, we. It's really hard to affect grocery prices, but people can make bills more affordable by doing things like subsidizing health care or subsidizing child care. These are things that our Democratic legislators and the governor have promised to do here in Wisconsin. They have a little bit of resources in a surplus to invest in those things. And I think that will kind of be their top priority at the beginning of the new year. Well, Sachin may be surprised, but I actually agree with him on the ethics reform. Wisconsin has some of the toughest ethics laws in the country, and for good reason. And they should do that in D.C. And hopefully that's not a troubling thing for the White House to deal with and sign into law. But Washington desperately needs that, not only for this administration, but the next administration and the one after that and the one after that. It's time for ethics reform, for sure. Let me just say, Brian, I'm never surprised, Bill, when you and I agree. I think we agree a lot, and not just on things like the Milwaukee Brewers, where we've gone back and forth on Twitter. We see the Brewers logo. It's okay. But what I'd say is that Wisconsin has a long history. Of us, all of us agreeing on way more than we disagree with. And Bill, you started your career in Wisconsin politics working for Tommy Thompson. And the thing that I always point out when I'm with you is he was a governor who wanted to be universally popular and universally admired. And he was able to get to that 60%, 65% approval. It wasn't until we got to Scott Walker where there wasn't even a desire. To get to that level of popularity, right? Scott Walker was happy being a 50% plus one governor, right? And then achieving an ideological agenda as opposed to being inclusive in his government. Well, that's me. Probably is more like Tommy Thompson. And I think that's what you're going to agree with that in the next. And that sets me up for what I wanted to ask, because we heard in David Crowley's acceptance speech that conciliatory tone. I'm the governor for all. Let's work together. Let's have this sort of new, you know, I'm ready to talk to, you know, my door is open. I'm ready to talk to the legislature, however that goes. Republicans, I want to hear from you. But you've got a Democratic trifecta, and I would actually say it's a superfecta because you also have a Supreme Court that is 5-2. So Democrats and liberals, progressives in Wisconsin have everything right now. All the power is in their hands. And my question is, can that David Crowley vision of. sort of the kumbaya, we're all going to be together. Is that a reality? Because we've already heard the leaders of the legislative houses in Wisconsin say, we're going to be aggressive. We have an aggressive agenda. And that doesn't sound quite the same as let's try to be popular and work together. Can it be what David Crowley said on election night when Democrats have all the power? Go ahead. Yeah, it sure can be. When you roll in with the most gubernatorial votes in the history of the state of Wisconsin, you've got political juice. And the question is, how do you want to use it? And he surrounds himself with a good team in the governor's office in particular and at the Department of Administration. They can kill bad things before they ever get to his desk. We used to do that all the time in the Thompson administration. you know, that's to his advantage. Can David Crowley, I wrote last week and you can find it on Dairyland Sentinel. I thought his superpower was a likability. I still believe that. And he's got the potential to get to 60% favorability if he governs the right way. And by doing that, he can get a lot done. It really matters on the question is what does he want to get done? And look, Bill and I agree on this as well. It is about the human being, and I want to point something out. When Scott Walker was county executive, which is the job that David Crowley is going to be coming out of, he was more bipartisan. He had Democrats in his cabinet. He built relationships. I was working as Governor Doyle's southeastern Wisconsin director for some of that, and we would be at events together all the time and had an incredibly positive relationship, even up until he was elected and in the days after he was elected. It changed when he dropped the bomb. Because that was so partisan on Act 10. And the way that he did it, it wasn't just what he did. It was the way that he did it. Style matters. Character matters. Tone matters. If David Crowley governs as governor, the way that he has governed as Milwaukee County Executive, as an inclusive leader who brings people along, you can see the success with the county board. The previous two county executives battled with the county board. David Crowley, as county executive, has made the county government one team in Wisconsin. And if he does his best to do that, even in the face of what is very likely ideological and principled. Opposition from Republicans, minority Republicans in the legislature, he can win over the people of Wisconsin, even those who didn't vote for him. Now, will he do that? That's the challenge, right? You have to you have to govern that way. The Republicans in Congress. The White House, the US Supreme Court have had exactly that quadfecta that we were just talking about that the Democrats are gonna have here in Wisconsin. And they squandered it, 100% squandered it. And so that is gonna be the test here and in states across the country. I was just looking at Georgia has elected eight statewide Democratic elected officials yesterday or two days ago, right? They can squander that. They've also won one house of the legislature down there, or they can build upon it. And it is a choice for leaders to make. It's how you govern. I don't think that's just ideological. It's not being far left or middle or moderate. It's about style. It's about being inclusive. Some of the policy prescriptions will be liberal. Some of them will be moderate. Some of them might even be slightly conservative. But you have to do it in a way that makes people feel like they're being heard. And I have one more thing to say. Message matters and substance matters, and you have to marry the two. I think Joe Biden got the substance exactly right facing the COVID crisis, and I think he got the messaging exactly wrong. He didn't learn the lesson. from 1992 from Bill Clinton, which is to feel people's pain and to recognize the reality that inflation was causing pain. He didn't acknowledge it. He didn't hit it head on. He didn't actually engage with the public about it. He just said, look, it's happening everywhere. It's better in America than it is in other places. It'll pass. That wasn't good enough. And that's why we got beaten in 2024. And so I think if David Crowley engages with the people with the style and character and honor that he has, he has a chance to be a really successful governor for the long term I have a million questions. You guys have anything else? Potentially on a national ticket. I mean, if he does well, listen, he's 40 years old. He's the youngest elected person, governor in the state of Wisconsin since 1830 or 1930. Excuse me, Philip La Follette. So 96 years. So he's a young man. So the opportunity for him to either get scooped up and be on a national ticket or eventually be the nominee himself. And is there in front of him if he governs the right way? We've only got a couple of minutes, so I do want to ask this. Before we go on, I want to make sure you guys both have a chance to answer this. And I'm going to start with you, Sachin, which is, what do you think the first thing Democrats should do from a policy perspective should be in Wisconsin? Well, there's going to be a demand that they do something about data centers. That's a bipartisan demand. Eighty percent of the public is concerned about the impact of data centers on their community, on their water, on their electric bills. He's promised to do something on health care that's probably expanding access to BadgerCare, which 41 states have already done, Republican and Democratic states. He's promised to do something about child care and make some investments because child care is family's biggest expense, often even bigger than their mortgage payment And so I think if they do something quickly early in the term on those things and then invest in public schools, but keep responsible in terms of their budgeting, I think they have a lot of chance of success early in the administration. And Bill, my question to you, what can Republicans do to win voters back? Well, they got to get back to the basics. Listening. We all have two ears and one mouth. You got to use them in that proportion. And somehow we got away from that. And the voters spoke loudly on Tuesday. And we got to focus on economic issues without question. That's what they care about most here in the state of Wisconsin. Nobody in the state legislature impacts whether there's a war in Iran or not, but they do impact how the state budget works. So we got to focus on bread and butter issues that matter. And if we're going to talk about what unifies Wisconsinites, The Milwaukee Brewers winning the World Series, that unifies Wisconsinites. Phenomenal. Last time they were in the World Series, I was a senior in high school. So I, unlike Sachin, and I didn't get a chance to go to any of the games, two of my kids did down in Tampa. I am going to be smiling for the rest of my life, but I think they can repeat, to be honest with you. I don't think Bill and I disagreed a single time during this short segment. We should go to a game together, Bill. Yes. And what I'll say is that we all want Wisconsin to do well. One thing I'll point out is Tommy Thompson really wasn't anti-Milwaukee. You know, we had the stick it to him comment at one point, but he wasn't anti-Milwaukee. I think the Republicans need to recognize that an anti... Trans kids, anti-Milwaukee, negative message isn't working for them. They do have principles that can be attractive to the people, but the attacking of Milwaukee has not worked politically. It didn't work in this election. People were reminded the Friday before the election, 750,000 people on the street, not a single arrest. Why we love the biggest city in the state, the place that I live. And so let's build on the positive. Let's work together and let's figure out how to make Wisconsin even stronger. I'll point out that when 1982 happened, I was 10 years old, but I was living in suburban St. Louis, a Cardinals fan, and grew up. But here I was in 2026 interviewing Robin Yount on the streets of Milwaukee in the middle of a World Series celebration. It was absolutely one of the most memorable things of my career. Gentlemen, Bill McCaution, Sachin Chetha, thank you for being here on Open Record. Thanks for having me. Thank you. And we will go off the record when we come right back. And it's time for us to go off the record. This is the part of the podcast where we get a little more casual, have a little fun by answering a question nobody else is prepared for. I know this one, and it's a very Sarah Smith, who used to be here all the time. This is the kind of questions you would ask. But I did come up with this one because I saw it somewhere. Here's the question. Is it sock, sock, shoe, shoe, lace, lace? Is it shoe, sock, shoe, lace? What order do you do things when you're putting on socks and shoes? I don't ever wear matching socks. I wear mismatched socks every single day. I actually don't think I own a pair of matching socks. Okay, but if you... By the way, I am talking about tied shoes, so if you have, like, tennis shoes, because if you don't have shoes that tie, but if you have shoes that tie, let's forget socks for a minute. Do you go... shoe and tie that lace then the other shoe then tie that lace or do you do each shoe and then tie them one at a time? No because I actually don't think I tie them. I run out the door like I just throw them on. You just slip them on. I just slip them on and then usually my like shoelaces are untied and I'm running. Okay how about you Jason? The socks go on by themselves right like I put the socks on when I'm getting changed. The socks are on. I'm walking around the house with my socks on. Okay so you I mean so but but when you do do you do you have a like is it right foot first Left foot first? What's the... Right, left, left, right? Does it matter? I guess it's left, right, and then, you know, when I put the shoes on, it's going to be left, right, and then tie. Left, right, and then... So you go left, right, then tie left, tie right. But are you left-handed or right-handed? Right-handed. I'm right-handed. I always do left shoe first, and I don't know why that is. Oh, because I'm left-handed, and I feel like left first, because that's the dominant one. Yeah, if I put the right shoe on first, that feels really strange. I guess when you're playing baseball, right, the mitt goes on the left hand. So same thing, the shoe is kind of like a mitt for the... Yeah, a mitt for the foot. Foot. It covers the... Jason, I dig your foot mitts. Those are real nice. New ones. Tim, what about you? Socks first. Right, left. Right, left. Right, left. Right, left. Okay. So we have a theory here. We've got three people here that are saying they put it on the opposite. They're not opposite the dominant hand. So I think we've got something here. I've also learned something. We have two left handers here. I know. You're left-handed, you're left-handed. I think we might have discovered that already. Between the two of us. Okay. My brother was always left-handed. He had left-handed golf clubs, everything else. But yeah, so now the other question is, do you, when you're putting, if you're tying, you said you're not tying, you're just doing the slip-on. More and more people are doing the slip-on, by the way. If you do the slip-on, then this doesn't apply. But if you're doing the tying, do you tie one, then the other, and then go back and retighten? Or just one time? One and done. Okay. I feel like my shoelaces are always coming undone. Well, you don't have shoelaces. Yeah, there's no shoelaces to tie. Well, no. Like, I'm saying I will wear shoes that have shoelaces, but I don't tie them in the morning. Like, I just, like, shove them on. So, are they tied but loose, or are they just flopping completely untied? Like, you're going to trip and fall and hurt yourself. No, they're loose. Okay, they're loose. Okay, so you can slip them in. Yeah, then you got to, like, double time. Tim, are you a tie the shoes tight kind of guy? I've reached the point in life where I'm slip-ons. You know what? If I have to tie shoes, I do a double knot. If I have dogs, I walk them in the morning, I have to have one pair of shoes that slip in because otherwise it's just too much work to go walk the dogs in the morning. Okay, we've answered that one. No one here, by the way, no one here is left sock, left shoe tie, then right sock, right shoe tie. That would be a psychopath. That's not okay. If anyone does that, I'm sorry I called you a psychopath, but that's how it feels to me. Anyway, that's all we have time for. We'll wrap things up when we come right back. Well, that was a good one today, guys. I enjoyed it. For Nicole and Jason, I'm Brian Polson. If you have a topic you'd like us to discuss on Open Record or an issue you think we should investigate for Fox 6 News, send us an email to fox6investigators at fox.com. As always, thank you to our director of production, Cale Zimney, our executive producer, Brian Graham, photojournalist, editor, and technical director, Tim Primo. And with that, we'll see you next week.