I wouldn't call him stupid, so no, that's a say.
He was, he wasn't as natural as Tommy,
but at the same time he knew how to navigate
all the political spheres.
Oh, yeah.
And for him to come out and say that,
it's like, where are you doing?
No one's gonna buy that.
No, just acknowledge the bald spot.
Right.
It happens to the best of us, you know?
All right, yeah, roll on.
All right.
So I guess let's start by bringing you back a little bit.
Okay, sure.
What is your history of politics?
When did you first start taking an interest
of thinking like...
Oh, gosh.
Well, I think you can probably blame the American Legion.
Back in high school, I had a chance to go to Badger Boys
State down in Ripon, and that's kind of a government
simulation, I guess.
It's a camp.
You get together with kids from all over the state
for a week, and you elect county and city and state
officers, and I enjoyed the heck out of that.
So I think that was probably my first taste of things.
I did have a family friend who was a county supervisor,
and my uncle was a town chair for a chunk of the time
I was a kid anyhow, so I got a little bit of a view
of that world, but probably, you know,
probably the combination of those things.
As it became apparent that there were going to be new maps.
How, where in that process did you think,
okay, this is my chance.
This is what I need to get into.
Whew, pretty late, to be honest.
I didn't expect to be doing this six months ago.
You know, as the sort of, it became more and more likely
that we're going to have new legislative maps.
I tuned in a little bit more.
Green Bay was sort of the poster child for the old gerrymander
because the Metro was split three different ways
to the horizon, and then when it turned out,
they created a district that made sense.
That was the core of Green Bay Metro,
and that was a district that was certainly winnable,
and indeed had a little bit of a democratic advantage to it,
and then my years perked up a little bit,
and I started having some conversations,
but really that only, that went down probably
starting a week before the maps came out.
So pretty quick process, I guess.
I mean, like, I certainly wasn't thinking
about this last Christmas, you know?
Okay.
So what's this process been like for you?
Have you enjoyed getting deep into the middle
of retail politics?
More or less, yeah.
I mean, look, any candidate for any office who tells you
that they love every minute, every day,
and every interaction is probably, you know,
shading the truth a little bit, but you do learn things.
I mean, I've been knocking a lot of doors.
I'm closing in 11,000, and that's quite a few,
and, you know, I've lived in Brown County
for a large majority of my life,
and there's still, you know,
I've walked up a quarter mile long driveways
to, you know, pretty darn nice houses
in the Fox River and Rockland,
and I've, you know, walked down the hallways
of some not particularly nice apartment buildings
and everything in between.
And, you know, just occasionally, you know,
things happen that stick with you.
I've talked to two grandmothers,
and not particularly old grandmothers,
like women my age who are raising grandkids
because their daughters have, you know,
died from, you know, from a drug overdose,
and the first time that happened,
I said, oh gosh, that's a terrible shame,
and the second time it happened, it was like, wow.
Okay, this might actually be something going on here.
And, you know, it just brings you in touch
with a lot of different people
from a lot of different walks of life
that you wouldn't usually, you know,
no one person would usually interact with that.
So that's always interesting.
And like everything you do is actually ranges
from not bad to pretty good, but there's just a lot of it.
You know, that's the honest experiences of Canada.
I mean, if you're not working hard,
you're not doing it right, so.
So tell me what the issues are
that are most important to you.
Sure, I mean, I'd say a few things.
One is probably the thing I hear most
from people at the doors,
which is there's just a lot of cost
of living issues out there now.
People are looking at their family budgets,
you know, around the kitchen table,
and they're just feeling a little pinch
more than they were a few years ago.
And, you know, there's a variety of things involved with that.
I mean, I can't do much about the cost of groceries
as a state elected official,
but there are things that do matter to people
and do matter to their budgets
that the state government does touch.
And there are things like housing costs,
which, you know, my house has gone up
from maybe 120,000 to, you know,
maybe almost double that in the last five or so years.
And, you know, maybe great for me,
and for everybody else who owns a house.
But if you're a young family trying to get that first home,
if you're a renter,
because your rents go up and down
with the cost of housing around you, that's tough.
And people are concerned about that.
So there are things that we can do in the state
to make people's lives easier,
to help young families get that first mortgage,
to help increase the supply of housing.
And so that's an example,
but, you know, healthcare also comes up with folks,
young families, oh boy, childcare.
You know, anybody who's got young kids now,
I mean, it's about like sending your kids to college,
the cost of, you know, childcare
to cover both parents away at a job.
So, you know, people are having to sharpen their pencils there.
So, to boil that down,
I'd like to help push in the right direction
and help just make the lives of regular people
in this community a little bit easier.
You know, and they're not gonna give me magic wand,
I'm not gonna be able to remake the world,
and that would be probably a terrible idea anyhow,
but you can help, you can help,
and that's the big reason I'm running.
When you look at what your opponent is gonna be offering,
how do you differ most in terms of
what the two of you would bring from that perspective?
I'd say a couple things.
Probably a few things, actually.
I mean, I've sent my adult life in the business world.
You know, I'm a Democrat, but I understand that,
you know, the private sector drives the economy
and creates jobs and generates the tax revenue
to do everything else we need, you know,
from paving the streets to, you know, educating our kids.
In that role, I've worked most of the time, you know,
mostly for myself as a business consultant,
where I work with people and try to get them together
around the table and get the facts
and, you know, to solve problems together.
And that's the kind of mindset I'd wanna bring to Madison.
I wanna work together with people
no matter who they are, if it's a good idea,
if it's a Democrat, it comes from a Democrat, that's great.
If it's a good idea, if it comes from a Republican,
that's just fine too.
And there's not a lot of that attitude in Madison right now.
One of the other things that we've got an opportunity to do
because of the state budget is
the record state budget surplus,
and this is what I'm trying to say,
is I talked about some things it can do
to help make the financial lives of regular people easier.
Another thing we can do is give some of that money back
to the average voter, the average taxpayer,
in a form of a tax cut for regular people here in Wisconsin.
So that's a priority for me.
My opponent has raised taxes multiple times
in his job in local government.
He advocated for an increase in the county sales tax.
And I think his record is different from mine on that front.
The final thing I'd say is just a point of comparison
is it has to do with the issue of reproductive rights.
I've been straightforward with the voters
as to where I stand.
I trust the women of Brown County.
I think women should have the freedom to make choices
and work with their doctor
and without their state senator being in the middle
of some of these decisions.
My opponent, on the other hand,
is comfortable with the idea of a statewide abortion ban.
And he's supported by colleagues
that are Republican state senators right here
in Brown County who want to ban and veto fertilization
in many forms of birth control.
And that's just crazy to me.
And that's crazy to most of the voters I talk to as well.
So I think that's a clear difference
between the two of us as well.
When you look at abortion as an issue,
obviously in 2022, it was very fresh.
It was very raw because dobs had just come out.
Right.
Two years later, does it still have the same
motivating poignancy for people
or is it only the people that were already going to vote
based on that issue anyway?
No, I think the world has changed.
I mean, this is an issue that Democrats used to be afraid of.
And I think public opinion
because of what the Trump Supreme Court did
in the Dobs decision in taking rights and freedoms
away from half of the population.
It's changed what was kind of an abstract,
you know, philosophical debate
and made it really concrete and real for a lot of people.
Does it still have the same crossover appeal though?
I think so, I think so.
One, I mean, this is just one story,
but I was talking to someone who was a poll worker
during the primary election, you know,
now a few weeks ago, a month ago.
And he said he had about, you know,
10 or a dozen young women come in
to register at the polls a day of.
And he said, yeah, I don't think they're turning out
to vote for Trump on this one.
You know, I think that issue is still resonates.
But, you know, I'm a candidate, I'm not a pundit.
So, you know, take whatever I tell you, you know,
however you want, but you're at the doors.
I do hear from people with the doors on that issue.
Like I said, I hear a lot of it cost a living.
And then, you know, honestly, one of the bigger things
I see here is less of an issue than an attitude.
And it's, you know, why can't you guys just try
to work together and get something done for us?
That I hear from people, you know,
left to right and in between.
But, you know, aside from that, yeah,
I think cost of living, I think, you know,
reproductive rights, schools, you know,
roads and streets, those are all things
that come up pretty frequently.
Yeah, I want to go back to one other point
that you made earlier.
You said that you would like to see the tax cut
for people and that your opponents raise tax
at the local level.
Yes.
And if I didn't know the party affiliation,
I would assume that you were the Republican
criticizing the local Democrat.
Right.
So, I mean, how much of that, I mean,
local governments have needed money.
They have needed to raise sales and property taxes
simply because the state has been underfunding them.
So, do you give him a little slack in that regards
in terms of what local governments have needed to survive on?
He's made a series of choices, you know,
he's a grown man.
He can take responsibility for those choices.
Okay.
So, when it comes to people's awareness
of the new district maps, do they understand
that what's happened when you come to their door?
Do they know this is an open seat,
that it's competitive now?
Increasingly.
I mean, I'm not going to tell you that, you know,
I'm, anybody who's running for legislative office
is a very, very, very minor celebrity, okay?
It's, you know, we are not top of mind for people.
This is not the, you know,
this is not the presidential election, all right?
But, as we get a little closer to November,
I have noticed that people tuning in a lot more.
More people are, you know, recognizing me
or they recognize my name.
They say, oh, I've seen your sign, you know.
So, there's awareness there.
And when I, you know, and sometimes I do get asked
to like, wait, what's the district?
And, you know, what happened to so-and-so who used to,
you know, I get those questions occasionally.
And then if you've mentioned the words,
yeah, new maps, then, you know, often the, you know,
the light goes on, that they remember something about that.
But, you know, honestly, the people who are,
most surprised are probably in, in L.A.A.,
and Ashwabanaan, because Rob Coles has been their state
senator for decades, I think, I mean, more than 30 years.
I don't know exactly, exactly when he was elected.
So, you know, for the first time in a generation,
there's gonna be a different state senator there,
no matter how the election turns out.
So, so people are tuned in,
but not everybody has the same amount of information
as everybody else, as you'd imagine.
But when people learn that this district is open,
that there's new maps, do they get more engaged
when you say the stakes?
When you say there's a chance the Democrats could actually,
you know, maybe this cycle and the next cycle
retake the states.
Yeah, that the assembly seats could actually flip the chain.
Well, I mean, look, I'm running to represent
the people of Metro Group.