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Daily Bread for 8.2.25: Justice Crawford

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Good morning. Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 78. Sunrise is 5:47 and sunset is 8:14, for 14 hours, 26 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 60.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated. On this day in 1869,  Japan’s Edo society class system is abolished as part of the Meiji…

Conservative Populism, Daily Bread, Elections, Far-Right Populism, Gov. Evers, Newspapers, Politics, Populists, Social Media, Wisconsin, WisDems, WISGOP

Daily Bread for 7.25.25: Fog-Shrouded Wisconsin

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Good morning. Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 84. Sunrise is 5:39 and sunset is 8:22, for 14 hours, 43 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated. On this day in 1965, Bob Dylan goes electric at the Newport Folk Festival, signaling a major…

Daily Bread, Elections, Legislature, Politics, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 7.23.25: A Better Wisconsin Politics Requires a Better Wisconsin Legislature

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Good morning. Wednesday in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny with a high of 91. Sunrise is 5:37 and sunset is 8:24, for 14 hours, 47 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 2 percent of its visible disk illuminated. On this day in 1829, William Austin Burt patents the typographer, a precursor to the typewriter.…

Daily Bread, Elections, Gubernatorial Race 2026, Wisconsin, WISGOP

Daily Bread for 7.16.25: Out-of-State Billionaires Seek Attention of Another Out-of-State Billionaire

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Good morning. Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with scattered afternoon thunderstorms and a high of 87. Sunrise is 5:31 and sunset is 8:30, for 14 hours, 59 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 66.6 percent of its visible disk illuminated. Whitewater’s Parks and Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.…

Daily Bread, Elections, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 4.29.25: Fusion Voting

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 61. Sunrise is 5:51 and sunset is 7:53, for 14 hours, 2 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 5.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1986, a fire at the Central library of the Los Angeles Public Library damages or destroys 400,000 books and other items.

So, how ’bout fusion voting:

Voters in Wisconsin could be seeing double on Election Day if the practice of fusion voting — which allows the same candidate to appear on the ballot under multiple party lines — makes a comeback in the battleground state.

A lawsuit filed Tuesday seeks to legalize the practice, saying it would empower independent voters and lesser-known political parties at a time of increasingly bitter partisanship between Republicans and Democrats. The lawsuit comes just four weeks after the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, which broke records for spending and saw massive involvement from the two parties and partisan interests. 

Common in the 1800s, fusion voting means a candidate could appear on the ballot as nominated by Republican or Democratic parties and one or more lesser-known political parties. Critics argue it complicates the ballot, perhaps confusing the voter, while also giving minor parties disproportionate power because major-party candidates must woo them to get their endorsements.

Currently, full fusion voting is only happening in Connecticut and New York. There are efforts to revive the practice in other states, including Michigan, Kansas and New Jersey.

See Scott Bauer, Same candidate, two parties. A Wisconsin lawsuit aims to bring back fusion voting, Associated Press, April 25, 2025.

Wisconsin voters can understand a fusion ballot, as much as voters in New York and Connecticut, leaving possible confusion as an unpersuasive objection. Beyond that, it’s hard to tell how this might shape Wisconsin elections in the near-term. New York and Connecticut seem to have managed; we could, too.

Blue Jays:

Courts, Daily Bread, Elections, Musk, Scott Walker, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 4.10.25: That Was Walker’s Plan? Well, It Was Dumb Enough to Be Walker’s Plan…

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 46. Sunrise is 6:21 and sunset is 7:31, for 13 hours, 11 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 95 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 837, Halley’s Comet makes its closest approach to Earth at a distance equal to 0.0342 AU (3.2 million miles).

Yesterday’s post here at FREE WHITEWATER was about Scott Walker’s irrelevance to current Wisconsin politics. See Scott Walker, Man from Another Era. Bruce Murphy, at Urban Milwaukee, has a revealing post about how Walker tried, and failed miserably, to become relevant again. (As Murphy perceptively notes, the story depends on accepting the veracity of Walker’s account of Walker’s behind-the-scenes conduct.) Murphy lays out the details:

Musk’s approach, if we can believe Scott Walker, came from a plan hatched by Walker and the former Republican governor’s political consultant Keith Gilkes. Their pitch was for Musk to get involved in the Wisconsin race as he did in the presidential race in November. “You were effective in Wisconsin, and you can be effective in this race again in Wisconsin,” Walker said he told Musk.

Except. Musk spent money on a presidential race that polls showed was very close and with Trump leading. A relatively safe investment. And a race so close that the Musk super PAC canvassing voters door-to-door could get a big return from turning out a relatively small number of voters compared to the total number voting in Wisconsin and other swing states in November. Trump won Wisconsin by just over 29,300 votes, a margin of less than 1 percent.

Which is a very different situation than the Supreme Court race in Wisconsin. The state’s previous high court race, in 2023, with the abortion the key issue, was an 11% loss for the conservatives, with liberal Janet Protasiewicz defeating conservative Dan Kelly by more than 203,000 votes. Granted, Schimel was a better candidate than Kelly, but abortion was still going to be a major issue in this year’s election. Moreover, we now know that Republicans knew Crawford was ahead in the race and their polls showed Schimel’s high point in the polls was five points behind. In short, this would not be like the presidential election, where a relatively small increase in turnout could decide the election.

See Bruce Murphy, How Much Did Musk Pay Per Vote?, Urban Milwaukee, April 8, 2025.

Astonishing. This could have been Walker’s plan: it is, after all, Foxconn-level thinking. If Walker is to be believed, Walker was able to persuade Musk to waste tens of millions on a race that Schimel was losing and was likely to keep on losing once the radioactive Musk became involved.

Walker likely did concoct this plan, and get Musk to go along. There is, after all, no evidence whatsoever that the only person who could have concocted a worse plan was involved in the Wisconsin election.

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