Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 84. Sunrise is 5:58 and sunset is 8:01 for 14 hours 3 minutes of daylight. The moon will be new today with none of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1960, NASA launches Echo 1A, its first successful communications satellite.
Counting in the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary stretched from Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. (As with doubtless other Wisconsinites, I find that my Apple Watch’s sleep score is unusually low this morning.)
The WisDems’ volatile and surprising nomination process has now come to a close. The result was narrow, and in a contest ending so narrowly it’s hard to say what might have changed the outcome, because, candidly, many events might have shifted a few thousand votes between Crowley and Hong. News of a candidate accidentally stepping on a dachshund’s paw might have changed the outcome in a race otherwise so close…
Wisconsin has been, as she has been many times before, a place of national (and even international) attention. See Julie Bosman, Center-Left Candidate Defeats Democratic Socialist in Wisconsin’s Governor Primary, New York Times, August 12, 2026.
While the national press will, understandably, look at this race as a battle between two kinds of Democrat, there’s an election statistic that means much more. In the WisDems’ 2018 multi-candidate primary that Tony Evers won, 538,636 people voted for one of the Democrats. In the WisDems’ 2026 multi-candidate primary that David Crowley has now won, at least 787,665 people voted for one of the Democrats.
The 2026 number of those voting for a Democrat is about 46% larger than the 2018 number of those voting for a Democrat. Wisconsin has not grown forty-six percent larger in eight years, but the number of voters supporting a Democrat has.
Wisconsin’s Democrats and their allies are — and will be — energetic. In this respect, Rep. Francesca Hong captured the mood of the large Democratic-leaning coalition in her Tuesday evening remarks: “In 11 weeks, no matter who’s on this ballot, we are going to fight to win for one another.”
Yes.
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Forthcoming topics (in no decided order): A New Ethics Ordinance, a Whitewater Comparative Analysis, and Polling Places in the City.
British driver sets new land speed record for hydrogen-powered car: