Wisconsin’s state government has been divided for the last eight years, with Democrat Tony Evers in the governor’s seat and Republicans controlling both chambers of the Legislature.
That will change following the Nov. 3 midterm election. Democrats won a trifecta of power: with David Crowley as the next governor and majorities in the state Senate and Assembly.
WUWM’s Teran Powell spoke with Phil Rocco, professor and chair of the political science department at Marquette University, about what this means for Democrats.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Teran Powell: [With] the Democratic trifecta that we'll have now here in Wisconsin, what do you think they'll be able to accomplish?
Phil Rocco: One of the things that I have been looking at over the last few years is all of the items in Gov. Tony Evers' budgets that the Legislature very summarily stripped out in the budget process, ranging from expanding Medicaid, expanding facilities and access to mental health services, to reforms to K-12 education financing that really were left on the cutting room floor in the budget process.
And that stack of issues gives Governor-Elect David Crowley, and the Democrats in the state Legislature, a really long list of items to cycle through. And I think one advantage here is that while this is a new configuration in government — one that we haven't seen in many years in Wisconsin — it's not as if Democrats have to reinvent the wheel in terms of their policy agenda.
There are a lot of things that I think the Evers administration judged were popular issues. And so I think that sets Democrats up to hit the ground running.
Do you think there'll be any roadblocks to what Democrats might want to accomplish?
When a party comes back into power after having been out of power in a legislature for a long period of time, I think one of the biggest challenges that they face is you have a lot of priorities, a lot of things that you want to do, but which do you act on first? Because obviously the legislative session is only so many days long. There's only so much fiscal room in the budget. So, there might be differences of opinion on what the most important issue items are.
I think one of the challenges Democrats are going to face is how do we put that list of priorities together? How do we ensure unity in our caucus on those votes? And how do we present the voters with a set of priorities that that we can act on quickly that really speak to the issues that were central in the election?
One other challenge I think Democrats are going to face is that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act made lots of changes to federal-state programs, including Medicaid, that really limits access to those services. Medicaid is not the only program that falls into this category. There's so much fiscal interaction between the federal government and the states. What happens in Washington really matters for what can be done in Madison.
Is there anything else that stands out to you the most from Tuesday's election results?
I think it's also really significant that David Crowley is the the first Black person elected governor in the state of Wisconsin, the first county executive of color in in Milwaukee County. It's rare that successful gubernatorial candidates come from the city or county of Milwaukee. Scott Walker too, in a way, was an outlier there.
But I think that Crowley's success as the the first Black person elected governor of Wisconsin is historic. And I think it illustrates that there is a kind of broad appeal of the pragmatic progressive ideas that Crowley put on the ballot with his candidacy.
