Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 13. Sunrise is 7:14 and sunset is 5:01 for 9 hours 47 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 66.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 5 PM.
On this day in 2010, Apple announces the iPad.
Rich Kremer reports today that ‘fundraising reveals party priorities in battle for Wisconsin Legislature.’ The headline and story are spot-on — fundraising tells us what party donors think are the odds of taking one chamber of the Legislature or another. These donors may be right or wrong about the bets they’re placing. Kremer writes of what their contributions reveal about their sense of the race:
During the last half of 2025, the Republican Assembly Campaign Committee raised around $4.5 million with the help of a $3 million donation from GOP megadonor Elizabeth Uihlein and another $1 million donation from fellow megadonor Diane Hendricks. The group ended the year with around $5.2 million in the bank.
During the same period, the Assembly Democratic Campaign Committee raised just more than $1.1 million, which included $175,000 from Democratic megadonor and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and $100,000 donations from Lynde Uihlein of Milwaukee and David Hall of Pewaukee. The Democrats’ committee ended the period with around $241,000 in the bank.
It was a different story on the Senate side of the fight for legislative control. The State Senate Democratic Committee raised around $772,000, while the Committee to Elect a Republican Senate raised around $307,000. At the end of the year, however, the GOP group had more money in the bank than its Democratic counterpart.
University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Political Science Professor Anthony Chergosky told WPR the best way to determine how political parties feel about upcoming elections is to see where their donors are putting their money. He said the latest Wisconsin data “reflects the simple math that Republicans are more likely to maintain control of the Assembly majority than they are to maintain control of the Senate majority.”
See Rich Kremer, Fundraising reveals party priorities in battle for Wisconsin Legislature, Wisconsin Public Radio, January 27, 2026.
Of the $4.5 million that the Republican Assembly Campaign Committee raised, $4 million — 89 percent — came from 2 donors. Campaign money makes a difference, but bets from a couple of donors who bet large and often tell more about what they think than anything else.
It’s been a theme here at FREE WHITEWATER that Wisconsin politics (and politics elsewhere) is increasingly national in focus. That focus will be so intense this fall, and views so firm among so many voters, that big donors with long-standing commitments and long-standing preferences won’t matter as much as in prior years.