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      In Wisconsin, Biden Attacks a Far-Right Senator but Avoids Trump Talk

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      As he promoted his economic agenda in Milwaukee, the president took several jabs at Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, in what served as a stand-in for an attack on Donald Trump.A week before Republicans visit Milwaukee for their first debate of the 2024 campaign, President Biden traveled to the city on Tuesday and attacked not former President Donald J. Trump or his Republican primary rivals, but Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.Mr. Biden spent several minutes contrasting his political record with that of Mr. Johnson, a Republican who has long expressed skepticism about government investment in local manufacturing jobs.“Ron Johnson, he believes outsourcing jobs is a great thing,” Mr. Biden said. “He doesn’t think American workers should manufacture products that require a lot of labor.”Mr. Biden’s sustained attack on Mr. Johnson, who won re-election last year to a third term that won’t end until 2029, served as a stand-in for an attack on Mr. Trump. The indictment on Monday of Mr. Trump in Georgia, the fourth brought against the former president, loomed heavy over the effort by the White House and the Biden campaign to promote his economic agenda, which they have taken to calling “Bidenomics.”The president has not addressed his predecessor’s legal travails, and he continued to avoid them on Tuesday. The White House, Mr. Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee each declined to comment about the charges against Mr. Trump in Georgia.“I think we’ve seen this movie before, actually,” Olivia Dalton, a White House spokeswoman, told reporters en route to Milwaukee. “We certainly can’t speak to what others are spending their time on.”Indeed, Mr. Biden’s tour and speech at a factory that produces wind turbine generators and electric vehicle charging stations were aimed at highlighting legislation he signed last year investing in renewable energy manufacturing. He reminded the audience several times that Mr. Johnson voted against the bill, as he sought to elevate the senator as an avatar of far-right “MAGA” elements of the Republican Party.“We have the best workers in the world,” Mr. Biden said. “It’s about time Ron Johnson’s friends understood that.”Asked to respond to Mr. Biden’s remarks, Mr. Johnson replied in a text message, “He is lying.”In Wisconsin, where the parochial nature of the state’s politics has often insulated it from national happenings, Mr. Biden’s trip served as a kickoff to a campaign for what officials in both parties expect to be again among the most competitive battleground states in the country. Vice President Kamala Harris visited the state last week to promote broadband access at a factory in Kenosha County and attend a fund-raiser in Milwaukee.Four of the last six presidential elections in Wisconsin have been decided by less than 23,000 votes. Since 2000, only Barack Obama has won the state by more.The state is in perpetual campaign mode. Four months after a State Supreme Court race that became the most expensive judicial election in American history, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin has retained nearly all of its organizing staff in preparation for bruising campaigns for president and the Senate. Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat who helped introduce Mr. Biden at his event on Tuesday, is seeking a third term.Even the most liberal Democrats in the state have rallied behind Mr. Biden, just as they did last year for Gov. Tony Evers, a white-haired pickleball enthusiast whose big applause line during his re-election victory speech last fall was “boring wins.”“Folks are used to having to support older white men in this state,” said Francesca Hong, a Democratic state representative from Madison. “I’m going to keep saying Bidenomics as often as I can.”Meanwhile, Wisconsin Republicans remain at odds about whether to keep fighting about the 2020 election.A Trump-endorsed candidate for governor who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 contest won last year’s primary but lost the general election to Mr. Evers. The Wisconsin Assembly’s Republican speaker spent 14 months on an investigation into the 2020 election — an endeavor that ended only after the former State Supreme Court justice responsible for leading it endorsed the primary opponent of the man who appointed him.And now one of the leading Republican prospects to take on Senator Baldwin next year is David A. Clarke Jr., a former Milwaukee County sheriff who has become a regular figure on the far-right, pro-Trump speaking circuit.Mr. Clarke on Tuesday said the Republican leadership in the State Legislature had become “disconnected” from the party’s base because it had failed to change voting laws in response to Mr. Biden’s 2020 victory in the state.“I am connected to and keep my finger on the pulse of the base voter,” Mr. Clarke said. “The concern is that voting integrity issues have not been resolved by the G.O.P. Legislature since the 2020 election. In a clean, fair and honest election, they feel we can win.”Mr. Clarke said he did not have a timeline to enter the race. “My name recognition and approval rating with G.O.P. voters in the state put time on my side,” he said.Wisconsin’s politics are on the verge of a major shift, with the State Supreme Court gaining a liberal majority for the first time in 15 years. The court is poised this year to overturn the state’s 1849 ban on abortion as well as Republican-drawn maps that have given the G.O.P. near-supermajority control of the State Legislature.Officials in both parties say the looming court decisions could juice turnout for their bases.Republicans are already outraged at the prospect of having the court overturn the abortion law and invalidate the maps. The State Assembly speaker suggested last week that he might consider impeachment hearings for the newly elected justice if she did not recuse herself after calling the maps “rigged” during her campaign.Democrats, on the other hand, see the possibility of having competitive down-ballot races for the first time since 2010 as a way to energize liberal voters who may not otherwise be enthused about voting for Mr. Biden, whose approval ratings in Wisconsin have sagged just as they have elsewhere in the country. More

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      Wisconsin lawsuit urges state to strike down Republican-drawn electoral maps

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      A day after Wisconsin supreme court justice Janet Protasiewicz took office, flipping control of the court to liberals, a coalition of legal groups in Wisconsin has filed suit to challenge the state’s electoral maps. It alleges that the state’s maps are gerrymandered and unconstitutional and aims to correct the partisan advantage Republican lawmakers have maintained in Wisconsin’s electoral maps for more than a decade.The complaint alleges that Wisconsin’s maps deny voters “equal protection and free association” rights and violate Wisconsin’s constitution, which calls for districts to consist of contiguous geographical territory.The lawsuit, filed at the state supreme court, asks the state to redraw the electoral maps for the state senate and assembly before the 2024 elections. The case also requests that state senators not up for reelection face a special election in 2024 after new maps have been drawn.If the court rules that Wisconsin’s maps are unconstitutional, Law Forward, a left-leaning law firm and one of the groups filing the lawsuit, “would be willing” to propose new maps, said Jeff Mandell, the group’s founder.States are tasked with redrawing their electoral maps every 10 years. In Wisconsin, the state legislature is responsible for drawing the legislative lines that shape political control of the state.In 2011, Republican lawmakers gathered behind the closed doors of a Madison law firm across the street from the state capitol, redrawing the state’s electoral maps and shifting millions of voters into new districts. The resulting maps, which were quickly signed into law by the former Republican governor Scott Walker, nearly guaranteed Republican majorities in both chambers of the state legislature.“In 2011, the legislature engaged in the most extreme version of gerrymandering that we possibly have ever seen,” said Mark Gaber, who manages redistricting litigation with Campaign Legal Center, one of the organizations signing onto the complaint. “The 2011 Republican legislature ensured that Wisconsin voters would never be able to change their minds.”A decade later, on 15 April 2022, the Wisconsin supreme court ruled in a 4-3 decision to adopt Republican lawmakers’ new maps, which further entrenched the party’s advantage in the state.In statewide contests, Wisconsin elections are typically competitive – the Democratic governor, Tony Evers, won the 2018 gubernatorial election by 1.1 percentage points, and was re-elected in 2022 by 3.4 percentage points. Presidential contests have been decided by similarly narrow margins in the last decade. In the state assembly and senate, though, Republicans have maintained large majorities since 2011. Currently, Republicans hold a majority in the assembly and a supermajority in the state senate.The legal groups filed the lawsuit on behalf of 19 voters, among them Denise Sweet, an Anishinaabe poet and Native Vote Manager with Wisconsin Conservation Voters, and Rebecca Clarke, a county supervisor from Sheboygan county. They argue that Wisconsin’s maps deprive their communities and constituencies of representation in the state legislature.In a statement, Evers called the complaint “great news for our democracy and for the people of our state whose demands for fair maps and a nonpartisan redistricting process have gone repeatedly ignored by their legislators for years”.Protasiewicz, who was sworn in to the supreme court on Tuesday after winning a closely watched election on 4 April, has criticized Wisconsin’s legislative maps as unfair and campaigned on the issue. In an interview with the Capital Times, the Madison newspaper, Protasiewicz said she “would enjoy taking a fresh look at the gerrymandering question”.This complaint is the first major voting rights case for Wisconsin’s new liberal majority on supreme court, which could decide more elections-related cases ahead of the 2024 elections.Wisconsin voters have tried to challenge the state’s gerrymander in the federal courts in the past. In a 2018 case brought by 12 Wisconsin voters, the US supreme court ruled that the court could not weigh in on the plaintiff’s claim that the entire map was gerrymandered, asking the plaintiffs to return with a case focusing on specific districts. In a separate ruling in 2019, the court ruled that partisan gerrymandering could not be adjudicated by federal courts. More

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      How a Wisconsin official became ‘a scapegoat’ for voter fraud falsehoods

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      The future of Wisconsin’s top election administrator, a respected and experienced elections official, is uncertain as state Republicans continue to fan the flames of rightwing conspiracy theories about her role in the 2020 election.When Meagan Wolfe took over as interim elections administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) in 2018, her appointment to the seat was uncontroversial. Then the assistant elections administrator, Wolfe had helped run Wisconsin elections since 2011, redesigning the state’s online voter information portal and overseeing IT and cybersecurity work on elections statewide. Republicans in the state senate confirmed her appointment to helm the WEC unanimously in 2019.But by her term’s conclusion last month, bipartisan support for the administrator had evaporated. Rightwing activists and public figures who falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen pointed to the WEC, and Wolfe, as conspirators in a plot to deliver the presidency to Democrats. Republicans in office echoed the conspiracy theorists’ allegations that the WEC had bungled the 2020 election – if not outright endorsing their claims of fraud.In recent weeks, Wolfe’s reappointment has become a messy political showdown between elections officials and Republicans in the state senate. Though she currently remains in her role, the battle alarms elections experts, who worry that political attacks on elections administrators will deepen the distrust in Wisconsin’s elections that took hold in 2020 and allow it to continue in the critical swing state moving into another presidential election year.“All of the misinformation and disinformation about voter fraud sort of just got blamed on Meagan Wolfe,” said Kathleen Bernier, a former Republican state senator who has chaired the senate elections committee and broke with her party over claims of voter fraud. Bernier, who now leads an elections education organization called Keep Our Republic, described Wolfe as “a scapegoat”.In the weeks leading up to Wolfe’s reappointment, falsehoods about the elections administrator circulated. When Gateway Pundit – a rightwing website that often spreads disinformation about elections – published a post enumerating a list of false claims and calling on readers to urge legislators to stop Wolfe from beginning her second term, the WEC said the commission was flooded with emails with claims that appeared to be copied from the misleading post.At a press conference during the Wisconsin GOP’s annual convention on 17 June, state senator Devin LeMahieu signaled that Wolfe would not survive a confirmation hearing in the state senate. The reason she would not garner support from Republican legislators, LeMahieu elaborated, was her “mishandling” of the 2020 elections.On 27 June, the six-member bipartisan WEC convened to discuss her reappointment. During the meeting, the commissioners expressed uniform respect for Wolfe, praising her record in office and denouncing election lies.“I think you would agree with me that Meagan Wolfe is blamed for all manner of fanciful conspiracies that have no basis in fact,” said Don Millis, a Republican commissioner. “What’s concerning about these conspiracy theorists is that they’re willing to trash the reputations of anyone who’s interested in trying to administer elections fairly in our state.”In a procedural maneuver, the three Democratic members on the bipartisan commission blocked the body from taking a vote on Wolfe’s reappointment, which would have triggered a vote in the senate – and likely jeopardized her position.Without a vote, Wolfe would remain in office, an unusual but not unprecedented scenario. In 2022, a Republican-appointed member of the state’s Natural Resources Board refused to step down at the end of his term. The Wisconsin supreme court, then controlled by conservatives, ruled that the end of an official’s term does not create a vacancy in their office. Without a vacancy, the court ruled, the state could not replace an appointed official.The next day, senate Republicans voted to proceed as though Wolfe’s appointment had been sent to the legislature for confirmation. Lawmakers have not yet moved forward with a confirmation hearing or up-down vote, which would follow in a typical confirmation process.Wolfe was at the helm of state elections in 2020, “one of the most difficult if not the most difficult times for American elections”, according to Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin who directs the university’s Elections Research Center.The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic sent elections workers scrambling to adjust the voting process to mitigate the risk of the virus while ensuring people could still exercise their right to vote. As Wisconsin’s 7 April elections approached, Covid-19 had spread rapidly around the US, taking hold in Milwaukee and disproportionately killing Black residents in the historically segregated city, “a crisis within a crisis”, the Wisconsin governor, Tony Evers, said in a press conference.The WEC worked on new guidelines for voting amid the pandemic, including sending absentee ballots, rather than in-person poll workers, to nursing homes. Unlike a move by Evers to postpone the April election, the decision by the bipartisan elections commission to adapt their operations in nursing homes was not challenged in the courts, and the commission voted to continue the practice in the November general election.In the wake of the election, recounts and multiple reviews confirmed Biden’s victory in Wisconsin and underscored administrators’ success in running clean elections during a difficult year.Still, a subset of Republican party activists in the state clung on to Donald Trump’s false claims that the election had been stolen. A 14-month long investigation by Michael Gableman, a former Wisconsin supreme court justice who promoted Trump’s false claims of election fraud, elevated unfounded doubts about the security of the 2020 election in Wisconsin.During the investigation, which ultimately yielded no evidence of widespread fraud, allegations surfaced about a nursing home resident who had voted despite lacking the cognitive ability to do so. The WEC’s pandemic-era nursing home policy of deploying absentee ballots rather than poll workers – a source of little controversy when enacted – was suddenly a smoking gun, and Wolfe, a high-profile suspect.“I think standing strong is really important,” said Wolfe. “Doing as much as we can to push back, and letting people know we’re not going to be silent when they try to disparage our election process and our work and the results of elections. But sometimes that’s an impossible task and it’s a huge worry for all of us. Not just in Wisconsin, but around the country.”Although no evidence calling the results of the election into question was ever uncovered, including in nursing homes, the idea that Wolfe and the elections commission had behaved illegally and delivered a fraudulent victory to Biden caught on. Rightwing figures around the state played up the allegations, with the Racine county sheriff even calling for members of the commission to face criminal charges for sending absentee ballots to nursing homes during the pandemic. Republican lawmakers – including assembly speaker Robin Vos – called on Wolfe to step down. In 2022, Janel Brandtjen, a state representative from Waukesha county, echoed Trump’s calls to decertify the election.Wolfe withstood those attacks, but far-right Republicans did not relent, instead ramping up their attacks this year as election administrators prepare for the 2024 presidential contest. A resolution, which passed during last month’s annual Wisconsin GOP convention, called on the elimination of the WEC, and in the weeks leading up to Wolfe’s reappointment, officials like Brandtjen called for her removal from office.Though Wolfe’s public support from Republican state lawmakers deteriorated, her reputation in the field of elections administration has not wavered. During her tenure, Wolfe chaired numerous national committees on elections administration and security and under her leadership, the WEC earned recognition for improving voting accessibility.A bipartisan letter of support signed by elections officials around the US and published online by the non-partisan group Center for Election Innovation and Research described Wolfe as “one of the most highly-skilled election administrators in the country”. The 2021 letter emphasized how difficult it would be to replace Wolfe given her experience and stature.Claire Woodall-Vogg, the executive director of Milwaukee’s elections commission, described Wolfe as a critical resource and source of stability in the state’s elections and said the consequences of Wolfe losing her position would be “frightening”.“We reach out to the election commission for technical assistance on a daily basis,” said Woodall-Vogg. “You need people who are competent, who are being led and trained well, and I would imagine that morale would sink so low that you would have constant turnover and we would really lack the technical assistance that we need in order to administer elections.”Scott Krug, the Republican chair of the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections, also split publicly with leaders in his party, praising Wolfe as “open and honest and transparent.” Municipal clerks in his district, he said, supported the administrator. “I don’t think their opinions ever changed, and they’re the ones that actually run the elections.”Despite the senate’s move to force a vote on Wolfe’s confirmation, the legislative body has taken no further action to proceed to a vote.“As a legal matter, and as a constitutional matter, I don’t think any of this has any meaning,” said Jeffrey Mandell, a Wisconsin election law litigator. “It’s been weeks now since they passed that resolution. If they really wanted to vote down their fake nomination, they could have done it that night. They didn’t.”Even if Wolfe remains in office through the 2024 elections, experts say the false and misleading allegations about her conduct that this conflict has generated will haunt elections in the state.“There will continue to be people who are suspicious about elections, distrust authorities, and this will give them another reason to have those views,” said Burden. More

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      Senate Democrats Outpace Republicans in Fund-Raising in Key States

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      The 2024 election map is a challenging one for Democrats — especially in states they need to hold for a majority. But the incumbents made a strong financial showing this quarter.Senate Democrats staring down tough re-election fights can look to one bright spot: sizable fund-raising hauls and cash stockpiles more than a year before Election Day.In states where they are most vulnerable in 2024 — Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin — Democratic incumbents have raised more money than they previously have at this stage in earlier cycles, the latest campaign filings show. Saturday was the deadline for campaigns to file spending and fund-raising reports for the three months between April 1 and June 30.Most of the vulnerable incumbent Democratic senators also topped their prospective Republican challengers in fund-raising and will head into the fall with several million dollars in cash on hand.The race for Senate control is in its earliest months, and Republicans are still building campaigns. Yet the Democrats’ relative financial strength in the second quarter of an off year suggests significant energy as the party aims to protect its slim majority next year.The electoral map, however, will be one of the most challenging the party has faced in years. Nearly two dozen Democratic seats are up for re-election in 2024, with eight incumbents seen as vulnerable, while just 10 Republicans face re-election — and all of the G.O.P. incumbents won by comfortable margins in previous cycles.In their Senate re-election bids, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana both brought in more than $5 million. Mr. Brown had $8.7 million in cash on hand, and Mr. Tester $10.5 million. Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin raised $3.2 million, the most ever raised in a Wisconsin Senate contest in an off year, according to her campaign.Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a conservative Democrat who has not yet publicly said whether he will run for re-election — and is flirting with a third-party presidential run — raised $1.3 million over the last three months and has more than $10 million in the bank, expanding his cash advantage over Gov. Jim Justice and Representative Alex Mooney, Republicans who have already begun campaigns to unseat him.In Pennsylvania, Senator Bob Casey posted his best fund-raising quarter to date, bringing in more than $4 million for his re-election bid.Republicans have been preparing their own money machines and recruiting candidates in five states with vulnerable Democrats. Republican confidence has also been bolstered by the 2024 Senate map.The Democrats “are trying to use money to defy gravity,” said Stu Sandler, a political consultant and former political director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “This is a lopsided map for them,” he added, pointing to former President Donald J. Trump’s 2020 victories in Ohio, Montana and West Virginia — all states Mr. Trump won decisively. And, he said, Republicans have some “very credible favorites” to challenge the incumbents.Democrats view this fund-raising as a crucial show of strength that will fortify their candidates ahead of a difficult 2024 cycle for the party.“Voters and grass-roots supporters are once again supporting battle-tested Senate Democratic candidates in record ways because they recognize the stakes of this election and the importance of stopping Republicans from implementing their toxic agenda,” said Tommy Garcia, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.In Arizona, Representative Ruben Gallego raised more than Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who has changed her party affiliation from Democrat to independent, by two-to-one — the second time this year Mr. Gallego has notched such a ratio. He still trails Ms. Sinema in cash on hand by more than $7 million. Ms. Sinema has not yet announced whether she will run for re-election.Even Democrats in safe Republican territory had strong showings. In Texas, Representative Colin Allred raised $6.2 million in his challenge to Senator Ted Cruz. Mr. Allred, who announced his campaign in May, brought in more money in a shorter period of time than Mr. Cruz, who raised $4.4 million in the last three months. More

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      Wisconsin teacher fired for criticizing school district ban of song Rainbowland

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      A teacher in Wisconsin has been fired from her job after she criticized her public school district’s decision to ban the song Rainbowland, which exalts the virtues of inclusivity, from a children’s concert at her campus.The members of the board governing public schools in the solidly Republican community of Waukesha voted unanimously to dismiss Melissa Tempel from her job on Wednesday, saying the teacher’s defense of the Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton duet violated district policy because she did not speak to her supervisors first.Tempel and her advocates, meanwhile, have maintained that she was exercising her constitutionally protected right to free speech but was punished because the song in question references rainbows, a key symbol of the LGBTQ+ community, according to reports from local television station WISN as well as other media outlets.Her dismissal comes amid a fresh national wave of anti-LGBTQ+ action and rhetoric from political conservatives, including the US supreme court’s decision in late June to strike down a Colorado law compelling businesses and organizations there to treat same-sex couples equally.The dispute pitting Tempel against the Waukesha district dates back to March, when the teacher expressed her frustration on Twitter that officials had blocked students at her school from singing Rainbowland during an upcoming concert that they were staging.“When will it end?” wrote Tempel, who had taught classes in Spanish and English to students in first grade (the UK equivalent of year 2) at Heyer elementary school.The tweet went viral and caused an uproar in some quarters. Leaders at the school defended the ban by pointing to a district policy which essentially prohibited “controversial issues in the classroom”.But officials have declined to say why they considered Rainbowland to be controversial, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – a leading Wisconsin news outlet – reported. The song was reportedly replaced with Kermit the Frog’s differently themed Rainbow Connection.Tempel’s superiors put her on leave in early April. And in May, she received notice that the school district’s superintendent – James Sebert – would recommend that the local education board fire her, setting the stage for a four-hour hearing on Wednesday over Tempel’s future.According to WISN, at the hearing, Sebert asserted that Tempel “deliberately brought negative attention to the school district because she disagreed with the decision as opposed to following protocol and procedure”. He added: “I believe that behavior is intolerable.”WISN reported that Tempel countered, “I thought that the fact that the tweet that I made – that Rainbowland wasn’t going to be allowed – was something that the public would be really concerned about and that they would be interested in knowing about it.”The board’s vote to fire Tempel was 9-0.A former US attorney in Wisconsin, James Santelle, told the Journal Sentinel that he believes the district’s policy which led to Tempel’s firing violates the American constitution’s first amendment, which protects free speech.Tempel has said she intends to file a first amendment lawsuit against the Waukesha school district but has been deliberating which court to pursue her case in, according to the Journal Sentinel.Waukesha is a city with about 71,000 inhabitants. The community also drew national attention in 2021, when a man intentionally drove a car into a crowd at a local Christmas parade, killing six people and wounding more than 60 others. More

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      Wisconsin governor slashes tax cuts and boosts school funding – for centuries

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      Wisconsin’s governor, Tony Evers, signed off on a two-year spending plan on Wednesday after gutting a Republican tax cut and using his broad veto powers to increase school funding for centuries.Evers angered Republicans with both moves, with some saying the Democratic governor was going back on deals he had made with them.Wisconsin governors have broad partial veto power and Evers got creative with his use of it in this budget, which is the third passed by a Republican legislature that he’s signed.He reduced the GOP income tax cut from $3.5bn to $175m, and did away entirely with lower rates for the two highest-earning brackets. He also edited the plan to increase how much revenue K-12 public schools can raise per student, by $325 a year until 2425.Evers, a former state education secretary and teacher, had proposed allowing revenue limits to increase with inflation. Under his veto, unless it’s undone by a future legislature and governor, Evers said schools will have “predictable long-term spending authority”.“There are lots of wins here,” Evers said of the budget at a signing ceremony surrounded by Democratic lawmakers, local leaders, members of his cabinet and others.Republicans blasted the vetoes.The Republican assembly speaker, Robin Vos, said allowing the school revenue limit to increase effectively forever would result in “massive property tax increases” because schools will have the authority to raise those taxes if state aid isn’t enough to meet the per-pupil cost. He also said scaling back the tax cut put Wisconsin at an economic disadvantage to neighboring states that have lower rates.Vos did not say if Republicans would attempt veto overrides, an effort that is almost certain to fail because they would need Democratic votes in the assembly to get the two-thirds majority required by state law.Republicans proposed tapping nearly half of the state’s projected $7bn budget surplus to cut income taxes across the board and reduce the number of tax brackets from four to three.Evers kept all four brackets. The remaining $175m in tax cuts over the next two years is directed to the lowest two tax rates, paid by households earning less than $36,840 a year or individuals who make less than $27,630. Wealthier payers will also benefit from the cuts but must continue to pay higher rates on income that exceeds those limits.Evers was unable to undo the $32m cut to the University of Wisconsin, which was funding that Republicans said would have gone toward diversity, equity and inclusion – or DEI – programming and staff. The budget Evers signed does allow for the university to get the funding later if it can show it would go toward workforce development and not DEI.Evers previously threatened to veto the entire budget over the UW cut. But on Wednesday, he used his partial veto to protect 188 DEI positions in the university system that were slated for elimination under the Republican plan.Another of Evers’ vetoes removed a measure that would have prohibited Medicaid payments for gender-affirming care. The governor accused Republicans of “perpetuating hateful, discriminatory, and anti-LGBTQ policies and rhetoric” with the proposal.No Democratic lawmaker voted for the budget, but most stopped short of calling for a total veto.Evers ignored a call from 15 liberal advocacy and government watchdog groups that had urged him to “fight like hell for our collective future” and veto the entire budget, which they argued would further racial and economic inequality.Evers said vetoing the entire budget would have left schools in the lurch and meant rejecting $125m in funding to combat water pollution caused by so-called “forever chemicals”, also known as PFAS, along with turning down $525m for affordable housing and pay raises for state workers.No governor has vetoed the budget in its entirety since 1930. This marks the third time that Evers has signed a budget into law that was passed by a Republican-controlled legislature. In 2019, he issued 78 partial vetoes and in 2021 he made 50. That year, Evers took credit for the income tax cut written by Republicans and used it as a key part of his successful 2022 re-election campaign.This year he made 51 partial vetoes.The budget also increases pay for all state employees by 6% over the next two years, with higher increases for guards at the state’s understaffed state prisons. More

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      DeSantis Continues to Test the Waters of 2024 — and Supporters Are Getting Restless

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      The Florida governor looked to excite voters in Wisconsin, finding supporters — but also doubters — in the competitive Midwest.When Peggy Nichols heard Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was coming to this rural stretch of Wisconsin for a local Republican Party fund-raiser, she pulled out her button-making machine and crafted 10 red “Ron DeSantis 2024” pins.“He should hurry up and jump in the race,” said Ms. Nichols, who was wearing one of her creations while waiting for Mr. DeSantis to address a crowd of more than 570 people. “I made them to encourage him.”But the governor, who just wrapped up Florida’s two-month legislative session and still must deal with the state budget, is taking his time on announcing a formal bid.For now, Mr. DeSantis’s reluctance to declare his candidacy underscores the challenge he will face if he does join the race against a former president who retains the support of his party’s base. Mr. DeSantis must figure out how to set himself apart from former President Donald J. Trump without alienating his supporters — a complicated political maneuver given how closely he tied himself to Mr. Trump during his first run for governor in 2018.At the Saturday event, a sold-out dinner for the Republican Party of Marathon County, Mr. DeSantis continued to focus on his record as Florida’s governor, rather than making a direct case for why he should be president.“In Florida, we deliver big victories every single day,” Mr. DeSantis said, adding that he put conservative principles ahead of political expediency. “A leader is not captive to polls. A leader gets ahead of polls. A leader sets a vision, executes on that vision and delivers results.”Mr. DeSantis played all his greatest hits. He received a standing ovation when he criticized Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, and said that Florida had chosen “freedom over Fauci-ism.”At the fund-raiser on Saturday, Mr. DeSantis shook hands, signed autographs and took selfies.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesMr. DeSantis is expected to announce his bid for the Republican nomination for president in the next few weeks and has been building a robust political operation in Tallahassee, Fla., hiring campaign staff and meeting with donors.On Saturday in Wisconsin, Mr. DeSantis engaged in the sort of retail politics that he sometimes avoids, shaking hands, signing autographs and taking selfies. But he left directly after his remarks.“He was very personable,” said Cindy Werner, a Republican from Milwaukee who ran for lieutenant governor in 2022 and spoke briefly with the governor as he made his way through the crowd. “I don’t understand the media narrative at all.”Representative Tom Tiffany, who represents Wisconsin’s Seventh Congressional District and is seen as an ally of Mr. Trump, introduced Mr. DeSantis, praising his landslide re-election in November.The governor, Mr. Tiffany said, “is showing how it’s done to the rest of the United States of America.”But as Mr. DeSantis stays on the sidelines of the presidential race, even some of his backers have grown anxious and publicly urged him to declare. An announcement, they say, would allow Mr. DeSantis to make a more forceful case for himself as the Republican with the best case for beating President Biden, and to defend himself more vigorously against Mr. Trump.A handful of people rallied in support of Mr. Trump outside the convention center where Mr. DeSantis spoke.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesSupporters of Mr. Trump had promised to push back against Mr. DeSantis’s appearance in Rothschild, a village roughly two hours north of Madison. But only a handful of people showed up at a rally in support of Mr. Trump outside the convention center where Mr. DeSantis spoke. Those who attended on a cold and drizzly evening said Mr. DeSantis would pay a price with the party’s grass roots for challenging the former president.“We want to send a message to DeSantis that this is Trump Country,” said Deb Allen, a Republican who drove 90 minutes from Oshkosh to Rothschild. “He should focus on Florida. He should wait another four years.”The rural northern and central Wisconsin counties surrounding the area where Mr. DeSantis spoke are often referred to as Trump Country. Mr. Trump carried Marathon County with 56 percent of the vote in 2016, when he won Wisconsin, and 58 percent in 2020, when the state flipped to Mr. Biden.But Wisconsin has not always been in Mr. Trump’s corner. In the 2016 Republican primary, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas won the state, suggesting voters and donors here could be open to an alternative to Mr. Trump.Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the State Assembly, who has clashed with Mr. Trump, said in a phone interview that Mr. DeSantis would be “a great addition to the race.”“He’s got a good record,” said Mr. Vos, who did not attend the dinner on Saturday and who said he believed it was too early to make an endorsement. “He’s aggressive and assertive in his beliefs.”By the end of the evening, Ms. Nichols had given away all of her buttons, including the one she had been wearing, to others at the dinner who said Mr. DeSantis’s speech had won them over. More

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      DeSantis to Visit Wisconsin, a 2024 Battleground, as He Circles Trump

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      The Florida governor, who has slipped in polls as his expected entrance to the presidential race nears, is moving beyond early nominating states like Iowa and New Hampshire.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is expanding his political travel as his poll numbers slip ahead of an expected presidential campaign, visiting rural north-central Wisconsin on Saturday in a sign of his intent to compete for voters beyond early nominating states like Iowa.Declared candidates, including former President Donald J. Trump, have largely focused on making appearances in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, three of the first states on the Republican nominating calendar next year.But Mr. DeSantis’s visit to a convention center outside the small city of Wausau, an area roughly 90 minutes west of Green Bay that voted heavily for Mr. Trump in the last two elections, suggests that the governor is preparing to challenge the former president more directly in a crucial battleground state.“It’s a smart move by DeSantis,” said Brandon Scholz, a lobbyist and former executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party. “You don’t go to Wausau, Wisconsin, to get cheese curds. You go to get the grass roots talking. You go to get on local TV. It shows that DeSantis is thinking about his strategy beyond the early states, and that he’s picking his spots well.”For Mr. DeSantis, who is expected to announce his 2024 bid in the coming weeks, the trip to the Midwest offers a chance for a reset. A trade mission abroad late last month — meant to elevate his foreign policy credentials — received only a lukewarm response. And his poll numbers against Mr. Trump have consistently dipped.On Friday, Mr. DeSantis dismissed concerns by some fellow Republicans that he was taking too long to announce a campaign.“That’s chatter,” he said at a news conference at the Florida Capitol. “The chatter is just not something that I worry about. I don’t bother.”At another point, he said of his political ambitions, “We’ll get on that relatively soon,” adding, “You either got to put up or shut up on that.”Mr. DeSantis can point to a busy two-month legislative session in Tallahassee that ended on Friday and allowed him to notch conservative victories on abortion, immigration and education, among other issues dear to his party’s base. With legislators returning home, he is expected to pick up his out-of-state travel schedule, which includes stops in Illinois and Iowa next week.After helping vault Mr. Trump to the presidency in 2016, Wisconsin swung to Joseph R. Biden Jr. four years later. Republicans there have continued to take losses, including the re-election of Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, in November and a bruising loss last month in a consequential State Supreme Court race.The Saturday event for Mr. DeSantis, an evening fund-raiser for the Republican Party of Marathon County where he will speak about his memoir, is sold out with more than 560 attendees, according to organizers. “It’s not just Marathon County,” said Kevin Hermening, the county party’s chairman. “We have people traveling in from Chicago, Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee and Green Bay,” he said. “There is a real interest in listening to somebody who represents the next generation of conservative thought.”Mr. DeSantis may use the Wisconsin dinner to highlight his family’s Midwestern roots: His mother is from Youngstown, Ohio, and his wife, Casey DeSantis, is also from Ohio. His father was raised in western Pennsylvania.Mr. DeSantis, who has spent most of his life in Florida, recently started to emphasize his ties outside the state.“I was geographically raised in Tampa Bay, but culturally my upbringing reflected the working-class communities in western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio — from weekly church attendance to the expectation that one would earn his keep,” Mr. DeSantis says in his memoir, “The Courage to Be Free,” which he is promoting nationwide. “This made me God-fearing, hard-working and America-loving.”Saturday’s fund-raiser is not a high-dollar affair, allowing Mr. DeSantis to talk directly to his party’s base. Individual tickets cost $75. A table of eight went for $1,000. Representative Tom Tiffany, a Republican who represents the area in Congress and has not made a presidential endorsement, will introduce Mr. DeSantis.Mr. DeSantis’s visit to Wisconsin could also invite further comparisons between him and Scott Walker, the state’s former governor and onetime front-runner in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, who ended his campaign after only two months. Like Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Walker was a young, popular governor. But he stumbled early on the campaign trail and saw his star quickly dim as Mr. Trump outshone his establishment rivals.In Wisconsin — which will also host the Republican Party’s 2024 convention, in Milwaukee — Mr. DeSantis will be walking straight into the heart of Trump country.The former president held several rallies in the state’s rural north during previous campaigns, and handily beat both Hillary Clinton and Mr. Biden there. Mr. DeSantis has so far largely avoided mentioning Mr. Trump by name, although a super PAC backing the governor’s campaign is stepping up its attacks.“The die-hard people up here still love Trump,” said Linda Prehn, a Republican who helped organize the Saturday event. “But I know a lot of people who voted for him two times and do not want to vote for him a third time” in a primary.Ms. Prehn said she did not know much about Mr. DeSantis, although her friends in Florida had praised how he handled the coronavirus pandemic and a recent devastating hurricane.“People want to get a look at him,” she said.In a recent survey of Wisconsin voters, Mr. DeSantis performed better in a head-to-head matchup against Mr. Biden than Mr. Trump did, according to the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies.Still, pro-Trump forces are mobilizing to challenge Mr. DeSantis in Wisconsin. On its Facebook page, the Republican Party in nearby Waupaca County posted an invitation calling for a rally in support of Mr. Trump outside the dinner where Mr. DeSantis will speak.“Please gather with us,” the post said, “for a patriotic rally showing that Wisconsin is Trump Country!” The post was earlier reported by NBC News.On Saturday, Mr. DeSantis is likely to make his case to party activists by extolling the results of Florida’s legislative session.“I think we got probably 99 percent” of his agenda, he told reporters on Friday. He acknowledged, however, the failure of high-profile defamation bills that would have made it easier for private citizens to sue news outlets for libel, measures that some right-wing outlets had opposed.“Look, the defamation, it’s a thorny issue,” Mr. DeSantis said. “Clearly I don’t want to incentivize frivolous lawsuits. That is totally unacceptable.”As Mr. DeSantis makes the positive case for his candidacy, the main super PAC supporting his candidacy, Never Back Down, is attacking Mr. Trump.The group released an ad this past week that features an actor putting a fresh bumper sticker on his truck.The new sticker reads “DeSantis for President.”The man places it directly over a tattered decal for Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. More