Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 13. Sunrise is 6:45 and sunset is 5:32, for 10 hours, 46 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 60.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1878, Thomas Edison patents the phonograph.
Selected area election results (unofficial) among three candidates in the race for Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction:
Underly
Kinser
Wright
City of Whitewater
335
223
183
Town of Richmond
61
129
122
Town of Whitewater
48
64
34
Obvious limitations: these are (1) unofficial results, (2) from selected areas, (3) in a primary, (4) on a cold day in February.
The statewide figures, with almost all precincts reporting, are Underly @ 38% of the vote and Kinser @ 34.5% of the vote, with Wright @ 27.5% of the vote.
Underly and Kinser will advance to the April General Election.
Valentine’s Day in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 25, and snow likely this evening. Sunrise is 6:53 and sunset is 5:25, for 10 hours, 33 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 96 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Kinser leads the field in campaign fundraising thanks to a flurry of contributions in January from big-dollar Republican donors. She had raised $316,000 through Feb. 3, compared with $123,000 for Wright and $121,000 for Underly.
In 2021, Underly narrowly topped the seven-candidate primary field with 27% of the vote. Six candidates were aligned with Democrats, but none emerged as the clear alternative to Underly among Democratic voters. That helped the sole Republican-backed candidate that year, Deborah Kerr, to nab the second spot on the general election ballot with 26% of the vote. Underly went on to win the general election that year with 58% of the vote in a one-on-one contest with Kerr.
This year, three candidates are competing for two spots, and the primary has become several contests stuffed into a single race: one between Underly and Wright among Democratic-leaning voters, another with Kinser trying to consolidate enough support among Republican-leaning voters to outperform one or both of her rivals, and another with all three candidates competing for independent and crossover voters to tip the scales in their favor.
With only two candidates this year to potentially split the support of Democratic-leaning voters, Kinser would likely need to far outperform Kerr’s 26% in the 2021 primary to earn a spot on the April ballot, assuming a competitive contest between Underly and Wright.
If the split between Democratic-leaning voters and Republican-leaning voters in this race is like 2021, then, yes, Kinser would likely need to outperform Kerr’s 2021 vote share.
It would be surprising, however, if the balance between ideologies is like that of 2021. At least, it would be surprising to me. If the conservative1 candidate cannot place comfortably in one of the two spots in this race, then conservatives wasted a campaign on a weak candidate or weak messaging. This environment, Spring 2025, is as much of a high-water level as the conservative populists in Wisconsin may ever have.
I’d guess Kinser will exceed 26 percent easily, and find herself in the Spring General Election against Underly.
We’ll know Tuesday night, and likely early Tuesday night.
______
Conservative as an ideology in American is now synonymous with conservative populist. There are still a few different individual conservatives, but there is only one ideological movement: populism. ↩︎
Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 15. Sunrise is 6:54 and sunset is 5:24, for 10 hours, 30 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 99 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Involvement and Cable TV Commission meets at 5 PM.
On this day in 1960, with the success of a nuclear test codenamed “Gerboise Bleue,” France becomes the fourth country to possess nuclear weapons.
Wauwatosa education consultant Brittany Kinser has signficantly outraised both of her Democratic opponents, according to the latest campaign finance reports. Her half-million dollar haul ($508,000) so far this year is nearly four times as much as state Superintendent Jill Underly raised ($132,000) and about 13 times as much as Sauk Prairie School District Superintendent Jeff Wright ($38,000).
Kinser calls herself a moderate but is backed by conservatives for her pro-school choice positions. Underly, the incumbent, is backed by the Democratic Party, though Wright has chipped away at some of her base. ….
Both state parties are pumping their preferred candidate’s campaigns with cash at an unprecedented level for a state superintendent election at this stage of the race, shattering any assumption about it being a nonpartisan election.
The Republican Party of Wisconsin contributed $200,000 to Kinser’s campaign so far, nearly 10 times the amount it gave in the entire 2021 race. The state Democratic Party gave Underly about $106,000 this month. The party gave her about $208,000 in the entire 2021 race. Wright has neither party’s financial support.
And there’s still a month and a half to go before the April 1 election.
Kinser has more than doubled the superintendent fundraising record set by then-Superintendent Tony Evers in 2017 for this stage of the race. In Gov. Evers’ entire 2017 superintendent race, he raised about $517,000. Kinser has raised nearly the same amount in just the first month of this race.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be snowy with a high of 26. Sunrise is 6:55 and sunset is 5:23, for 10 hours, 27 minutes of daytime. The moon is full with 99.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Liberal candidate Susan Crawford continues to out-raise her conservative opponent Brad Schimel in a race that will decide control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
With roughly 50 days to go until the April 1 election, the race is already on track to smash previous fundraising records for a Wisconsin judicial election.
Crawford, a Dane County judge, has brought in about $7.7 million since announcing her campaign last year, according to the most-recent reports filed by her campaign committee this week.
Meanwhile, Schimel’s campaign has reported about $5 million in donations.
Reports due this week cover donations through early February. Those disclosures were filed by campaign committees and do not reflect outside spending on the race, such as by groups who pay for their own issue-based ads.
Detailed reporting on donors and donation amounts to the candidates is available at the Journal Sentinel. Note that while both major parties can transfer money to their preferred candidates, the candidates themselves cannot solicit more than twenty-thousand per donor. Candidate Schimel, predictably, didn’t seem to care about that limitation:
State campaign finance laws restrict donations to Supreme Court candidates to $20,000. But under a decade-old change by the Republican-controlled Legislature, political parties are allowed to receive unlimited donations, money they can then forward to their preferred candidates.
“Then, if you want to give a lot more, you can give that to either of the state parties, and they can transfer it,” he said. “They can transfer that to candidates. You can’t earmark it and say, ‘I’m giving you this money but you have to give it.’ But they’re going to those donors who are going to wait till after November 5 (2024) to make sure that I’m the last thing that they give the money to. But that money is going to come.”
Scientists from the California Institute of Technology have developed microrobots smaller than the width of a human hair for targeted drug delivery. The minuscule robots can operate in body fluids and deliver the medicine exactly where it is needed in the human body.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 45. Sunrise is 7:10 and sunset is 5:07, for 9 hours, 57 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 5.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On the issue of whether he should hear a challenge to Act 10, or instead recuse himself, Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Brian Hagedorn is undoubtedly right:
Conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Brian Hagedorn will not participate in a case challenging the constitutionality of Wisconsin Act 10, the 2011 law restricting public employee collective bargaining rights.
In an order released Thursday afternoon, Hagedorn said he would recuse himself from a case being considered by the state Supreme Court that was filed in 2023 by the Abbotsford Education Association. The court is currently weighing whether to take the case directly before a state appeals court weighs in.
Hagedorn previously served as chief legal counsel for former Republican Gov. Scott Walker when Act 10 was drafted and defended in earlier court challenges.
Hagedorn said after reviewing legal filings in the case and the court’s ethics rules, he determined that recusal “is not optional when the law commands it.”
“The issues raised involve matters for which I provided legal counsel in both the initial crafting and later defense of Act 10, including in a case raising nearly identical claims under the federal constitution,” Hagedorn said.
And, there’s an update on yesterday’s post about partisanship on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Readers may have seen WISGOP complaints about Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Susan Crawford’s attendance at a Democratic event. The complaints would have more credibility if her conservative and WISGOP-backed opponent, Brad Schimel, hadn’t already justified partisan support of court candidates:
“It’s just become that way, that liberal judicial candidates will associate with the Democratic Party and conservative judicial candidates will end up affiliating with the Republican Party,” he said, adding that each campaign needs grassroots support. “The question isn’t whether you have a political affiliation. It’s whether you can set that aside when you get on the bench.”
Thursday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 51. Sunrise is 7:11 and sunset is 5:05, for 9 hours, 55 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 1.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
I’m not sure what to make of a story that finds the Wisconsin Supreme Court race effectually partisan. The Wisconsin Supreme Court has been partisan for many years. Still, someone feels the need to explain this to Wisconsin readers:
As with each one before them, Wisconsin’s next Supreme Court justice pledges to be “impartial” when ruling from the bench.
But the current race for that coveted seat has been — and will continue to be — anything but politically neutral.
Indeed, the two candidates are repeatedly pointing out the other’s political ties leading up to the April 1 general election, and the two major political parties have lined up behind their preferred candidate, animated by the prospect that voters could again flip the court’s ideological majority.
One hears that even a broken clock is right twice a day, and so it’s Brad Schimel (of all people) who explains the state of affairs accurately:
In an interview with the Journal Sentinel, Schimel said he didn’t see a retreat from the overt partisanship of state Supreme Court races coming any time soon.
“It’s just become that way, that liberal judicial candidates will associate with the Democratic Party and conservative judicial candidates will end up affiliating with the Republican Party,” he said, adding that each campaign needs grassroots support. “The question isn’t whether you have a political affiliation. It’s whether you can set that aside when you get on the bench.”
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 19. Sunrise is 7:16 and sunset is 4:57, for 9 hours, 41 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 24.4 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1943, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill conclude a conference in Casablanca:
Key decisions included a commitment to demand Axis powers’ unconditional surrender; plans for an invasion of Sicily and Italy before the main invasion of France; an intensified strategic bombing campaign against Germany; and approval of a US Navy plan to advance on Japan through the central Pacific and the Philippines. The last item authorized the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific, which shortened the war.
The Nazi-adjacent Mr. Musk has weighed in on the Wisconsin Supreme Court race:
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and Tesla CEO, has waded into Wisconsin’s high-profile state Supreme Court race that will determine if the court stays under liberal control or flips back to a conservative majority.
“Very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud!” Musk posted Thursday morning on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that Musk owns.
While races for Wisconsin Supreme Court are technically nonpartisan, partisan groups and donors have already heavily flooded cash into the campaigns of Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, the liberal candidate, and former Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel, the conservative in the race.
Much better to be, as I am, one of these Wisconsin millions. The Wisconsin Supreme Court race will be decided here, and nothing of Musk’s voice or money will change the outcome.
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy & windy with a high of 34. Sunrise is 7:24 and sunset is 4:43, for 9 hours, 19 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
But [Waukesha County Circuit Court judge and Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate] Schimel suggested there are other perks to being a judge than having your own potty.
“You set your own hours,” Schimel said. “I set the hours. Certainly, I’ve got to get my cases done, but I can decide — you know what? — if I want to do golf on Thursday afternoon, I can do that.”
The same, Schimel said, is not true for lawyers, who have to show up in court when told to do so. He said he doesn’t misuse that power. And, he said, there are times he’s had to work “all day and into the evening.”
But that appears to be the exception.
“I’m home for dinner most nights now,” he said. “I shoot in two sporting clays leagues. Or I was until I made this announcement (to run for the Supreme Court). I was shooting in two shooting clays leagues a week. I was doing all this, playing band rehearsals.”
Friday in Whitewater will be snowy & cloudy with a high of 29. Sunrise is 7:24 and sunset is 4:40, for 9 hours, 16 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 86.8 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 2 PM.
On this day in 1776, Thomas Paine publishes his pamphlet Common Sense.
Yesterday, I posted on the statewide race for Superintendent of Public Instruction, and mentioned local races that were contested. One Wisconsin election, however, is sure to attract attention far beyond the Badger State:
About $5 million has already been raised by two judges vying to be the next justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, with Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, the candidate backed by Democrats, claiming she’s outraised former Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel by $600,000.
While detailed reports aren’t due until Jan. 15, both candidates released fundraising totals Wednesday covering a period ending Dec. 31.
Schimel’s campaign said it raised $1.5 million between July 1 and Dec. 31, and a grand total of $2.2 million since he got into the race in November 2023.
….
Crawford’s campaign said she raised $2.8 million since entering the race in June 2024, seven months after Schimel. During the July to December reporting period, Crawford’s campaign said it raised more than $2.4 million from donors in 71 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties and ended the period with $2.1 million in the bank.
There’s Wisconsin’s big contest for 2025, with only few other high-profile elections nationally (notably, gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia). Our Wisconsin Supreme Court election will receive attention, and money, from across America.
The 2023 election spending between Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Janet Protasiewicz and former Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly was well over $50 million, and it’s a comfortable guess that this race will top that figure.
Employers added 256,000 workers last month, surpassing economist expectations of 155,000 jobs added, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data on Friday showed.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 27. Sunrise is 7:24 and sunset is 4:39, for 9 hours, 15 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 78.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Public Arts Commission meets at 5 PM.
Statewide, there will be a February primary election for Wisconsin’s Superintendent of Public Instruction. In this statewide race, it’s not merely contested but contested in a way that requires a primary election:
Three candidates have filed nomination papers for state Superintendent of Public Instruction, which means there will be a primary election next month for Wisconsin’s top education post.
State Superintendent Jill Underly has two challengers: Sauk Prairie School District Superintendent Jeff Wright, and Brittany Kinser, a former special education teacher and reading advocate.
The primary will be held Feb. 18 with the top two candidates facing each other in the nonpartisan election on April 1.
Locally, we’ll have, it seems, contested races for the Whitewater Unified School District Board and one of our city’s assembly districts before the voters in April. That’s all to the good: voters will be able to see differences between candidates.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 50. Sunrise is 7:13, and sunset is 4:20, for 9 hours, 7 minutes of daytime. The moon is in its first quarter with 50.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Jill Underly, Wisconsin’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, faces a challenge from the left in her race for re-election:
Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Jill Underly, who is running for her second term in office with the backing of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, faces a challenge from Sauk Prairie School District Superintendent Jeff Wright, a Democrat who says he wants to improve DPI’s communication.
Elections for the state superintendent are technically nonpartisan. Candidates run on the same ballot in the February primary, and the top two advance. The primary is Feb. 18, 2025 and the general election is April 1. No other candidates have entered the race so far.
….
Prior to winning her first term in 2021, Underly served as the superintendent of Pecatonica School District, a rural district in southwestern Wisconsin. She has also previously worked as a principal, a teacher and a state consultant to Title I schools in Milwaukee and across the state.
Wright, who launched his campaign about a month after Underly, has served as the superintendent of Sauk Prairie School District since 2019 and was named Administrator of the Year in 2024 by the Wisconsin Rural Schools Alliance. He also previously served as a principal in Chicago. He hasn’t held public office before, but has run unsuccessful campaigns in 2016 and in 2018 for the state Assembly.
Wright said in an October interview with the Examiner that he probably aligns closely with the current superintendent on many issues, but he thinks there is currently a “disconnect” between DPI and schools.
“They’re not bringing the people together from the teachers’ union, the administrators’ associations and other groups to have an active conversation about what concrete steps are we taking right now to get this work done,” Wright said. “Schools want to know what’s happening at the DPI. We don’t want to be surprised by changes. We want to be in conversation so that it’s very clear that we’re working on the same team.”
Underly has the backing of the state’s Democratic Party, and Wright has the backing of the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) Political Action Committee and Kirk Bangstad’s Minocqua Brewing Company SuperPAC.
I’m not a Democrat (rather a Never Trump libertarian who supported Harris-Walz), but it’s hard for me to see how these political action committees can overcome the organizational strength of a major political party. There’s as yet no announced Republican candidate in the race, but there is sure to be at least one (for an office that is, nominally, non-partisan).
Admittedly, any campaign, against almost any incumbent, is likely to make headway with the contention that the public has a lack of information (or in the case of the DPI, technical information that’s been made readily comprehensible to most residents). No one ever went broke, so to speak, by arguing that government statistics were opaque. Still: an outsider’s climb against an organizationally-backed candidate is uphill.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with afternoon showers and a high of 46. Sunrise is 6:59, and sunset is 4:24, for 9 hours, 24 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 26.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets at 5:30 PM, and the full board goes into closed session shortly after 6 PM, resuming open session at 7 PM. The City of Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 5:30.
In a statement, the Schimel campaign said “leftist judges in Wisconsin and around the country are failing to enforce our laws,” and called the Nov. 5 election “a repudiation of the left’s radical agenda that made life more dangerous and expensive for Wisconsinites.”
“From opening the border, to releasing criminals on our streets, to rogue judges on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court breaking norms to advance their radical agenda. Brad Schimel is a judge of the people who will stop the madness and defend what is right,” the statement said.
….
In a statement, Crawford said the state needs a court that is “committed to upholding the rights and freedoms of all Wisconsinites.”
“I’ve spent my career standing up for Wisconsin values like safe communities, reproductive rights, clean air and water, and fair elections. As a prosecutor, I took on tough cases to hold criminals and sex offenders accountable and bring justice to victims. As an attorney, I fought for working people, families, and teachers when their rights were threatened and being trampled on,” she said. “Now, as a circuit court judge, I work every day to deliver justice impartially, keep our communities safe, and treat everyone fairly under the law.”
Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 54. Sunrise is 6:47, and sunset is 4:31, for 9 hours, 44 minutes of daytime. The moon is full with 99.8 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
While Eric Hovde lost the race for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin (see below), he’s doing better with conspiracy theorists on X:
Social media posts about election fraud in Wisconsin have surged since Election Day, surpassing all other battleground states, according to data collected by PeakMetrics, a software analytics company.
Between Nov. 6 and Nov. 12, the number of posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, mentioning election fraud in Wisconsin surged from 2,570 to 22,589 — an approximately 789% increase, according to the report. There has been no evidence to suggest voter fraud is a common issue in Wisconsin.
Hovde’s claims about his loss to Tammy Baldwin are easily debunked, as Ricardo Torres writes at the Journal Sentinel:
Hovde went on to say that at 4 a.m. Milwaukee updated its count to include roughly 108,000 absentee ballots and that Baldwin won “nearly 90% of those ballots.”
“Statistically, this outcome seems improbable,” Hovde said. “As it didn’t match the pattern from same day voting in Milwaukee, where I received 22% of the vote.”
….
Absentee ballots are just a portion of the total votes in any election. But since Hovde is focused on absentee ballots, it’s fairly easy to see his claim is incorrect by going to the city of Milwaukee’s election results page. It should be noted that some absentee voters chose third party candidates for U.S. senate or skipped that race.
Milwaukee received 108,964 absentee ballots by Nov. 5, according to the unofficial count.
Of that group, Baldwin received 88,229 and Hovde received 17,699 absentee ballots.
So Baldwin got about 80.9% of the absentee vote and Hovde got about 16.2% of it.
Clearly Baldwin did not get “nearly 90%” of the absentee ballot vote.
Baldwin’s absentee ballot vote in Milwaukee was similar by proportion to her Election Day in-person vote in Milwaukee. Torres continues:
On Election Day itself, there were 140,043 votes cast in Milwaukee, according to the unofficial count. Of that number Baldwin received 102,598 and Hovde received 29,574.
So Baldwin pulled down 73.2% of the vote on Election Day compared to Hovde’s 21.1% of that vote.
The wide disparities that Hovde claims are false: Baldwin did somewhat better with absentee ballots, but there was no statistically improbable result as Hovde claims.
Drone views show the medieval castle of Haut-Koenigsbourg, as if it were floating in clouds on a foggy day. Built in the 12th century by a Germanic imperial family, the castle was a mountain fortress which was later besieged and pillaged.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with evening showers and a high of 54. Sunrise is 6:45, and sunset is 4:33, for 9 hours, 48 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous, with 92.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Lakes Advisory Committee meets at 4:30 PM.
Although it has been suggested the Leonid meteor shower and storms have been noted in ancient times, it was the meteor storm of November 12–13, 1833 that broke into people’s modern-day awareness. One estimate of the peak rate is over one hundred thousand meteors an hour, while another, done as the storm abated, estimated in excess of 240,000 meteors during the nine hours of the storm, over the entire region of North America east of the Rocky Mountains.
It’s been over a week, in a state where margins of electoral victory survive scrutiny (despite conspiracy theories and speculation), and yet losing candidate Eric Hovde admits he lost, but won’t concede. In this, Hovde is true to form, confirming what critics (as I am) saw about him. Wisconsin Public Radio describes Hovde’s stance accurately:
