Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon showers with a high of 82. Sunrise is 5:24 and sunset is 8:35, for 15 hours, 10 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 94.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 5:15 PM.
On this day in 1776, church bells (possibly including the Liberty Bell) are rung after John Nixon delivers the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence.
There’s a story today from reporter Baylor Spears about two Democrats running for the 17th Senate District seat that Sen. Howard Marklein (R-Spring Green) now holds. This post isn’t about the Democrats1 mentioned in that story; it’s about the district in which they’ll be running. Spears reports on the political composition of the district before and after redistricting toward fairer maps:
Marklein won the district with 60% of the vote in 2022, but Senate District 17 changed considerably under the new maps. According to an analysis by John Johnson, a research fellow at Marquette University, the district leaned Democrat by 1 percentage point in the 2024 presidential election and by over 4 percentage points in the 2024 U.S. Senate race.
See Baylor Spears, Democratic Rep. Jenna Jacobson launches challenge to one of GOP’s top senators (‘Seat in 17th Senate District among those eyed in 2026 campaign to topple Legislature’s Republican majority’), Wisconsin Examiner, July 8, 2025.
Sen. Howard Marklein accepted the budget deal with Gov. Evers. He did so because, like other officeholders in the WISGOP, he needed that budget deal if he were to have any hope of remaining an officeholder next year.
The loss of a gerrymandered 60% district to a -1% to -4% district has a way, it seems, of making WISGOP legislators more amenable to compromise. Underlining Marklein’s supposed bipartisanship is little more than a political incumbent’s survival instinct.
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- Rep. Jenna Jacobson (D-Oregon) and Lisa White. ↩︎
Zooming into the site of a double detonation supernova: