Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 54. Sunrise is 7:27 and sunset is 5:49 for 10 hours 22 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 58.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1995, Quebec citizens narrowly vote (50.58% to 49.42%) in favor of remaining a province of Canada in their second referendum on national sovereignty.
One of the themes here at FREE WHITEWATER is that we live in a time when true bipartisanship has collapsed (and won’t be back soon). See That ‘Bipartisanship’ Didn’t Last Long — Because It Was Never There, The WisDems’ Bipartisan Delusion, Seeing Once Again That Wisconsin’s Not a Bipartisan Environment, ‘Bipartisanship’ in Wisconsin Is Simply the Vulnerability of the WISGOP Under Fair Maps, and After Bipartisanship.
Results within the latest Marquette Law School Poll support this view. (It’s only one pollster and only one poll, but it’s a well-regarded one.) Most of the attention on this poll concerns how little Wisconsin voters know about the gubernatorial candidates. See Rich Kremer, Marquette poll: Most voters unaware of candidates for governor, Supreme Court, Wisconsin Public Radio, October 29, 2025. (There’s likely to be at least one more candidate in the race, but the Marquette poll did not include as-yet-undeclared candidates.)
Look, however, at some of the poll findings for the 2026 Wisconsin Supreme Court election:
Fifty-six percent say Wisconsin Supreme Court campaigns have become so partisan that we should change to partisan election of judges, while 43% say we should continue the current non-partisan election of judges to the court. Among Republicans, 63% say we should change to partisan elections, while 49% of independents and 49% of Democrats favor partisan elections.
It’s a judicial contest that Wisconsin has established by law as non-partisan, but large numbers of voters know it’s only nominally non-partisan (and so they want to call it what it is). In a well-crafted electoral environment, overwhelming numbers of voters should believe that the environment is accurately described. Even when Wisconsin designates the race as non-partisan under the law, Wisconsin voters perceptively say that’s not what this is. (It’s as though you called a witch doctor a physician, and yet patients said “Oh, no, that’s not true. That’s a witch doctor, dammit.”)
Whether it should become a partisan election is another question; at least voters see what it has become. It seems improbable that we’ll soon return to conditions where non-partisan state elections are truly non-partisan.
There’s a consequent consideration: if intended non-partisan statewide races are truly partisan, what would one say about intended non-partisan local races?
That’s a question worthy of further exploration. I’ve touched on it only slightly, not in the depth it deserves. See ‘Coalitions’ from Quick Observations on a Weekend.
I’m a strong proponent of the claim that ‘you are your vote, you are your coalition.’ No one should care what an elected official thinks or says if he votes contrary to those ideas and statements.
There’s more to be done on the topic, I think, about local candidates clustered on the right or left.
Statewide, however, it’s a settled question — politics is partisan to the marrow.
Pet monkey gets loose in Spirit Halloween store: