Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 16. Sunrise is 7:11 and sunset is 5:05 for 9 hours 54 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 92.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1862, the Union Navy launches the American ironclad warship the USS Monitor.
There’s a story at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel describing how Trump’s Tom Tiffany endorsement scrambles Wisconsin governor race.
I don’t see how.
Trump was always going to endorse someone, and that candidate would thereafter secure the WISGOP nomination in August. For the WISGOP, the only candidate who mattered was going to be the one with Trump’s endorsement, and Trump was sure to endorse someone. No one on this planet spends more time interjecting himself into issues of all sorts, political or apolitical, than Donald J. Trump. The name for a primary and general election candidate for the WISGOP needs no surname — DONALD J. TRUMP’S CHOICE is name enough for most Republican voters.
For the WisDems, by contrast, this was always going to be a race through to the August primary. (Mandela Barnes is popular with many voters, but not so much that he will have an inevitable march toward August 11.)
Those conditions do not describe a ‘scrambled’ race — they describe a predictably top-down WISGOP contest and a predictably competitive WisDems contest. This was, by late January or early February, the probable state of play. And so it is.
Meet the crawling, grabbing spider-hand robot: