- The following program is part of our "Here & Now" 2018
Wisconsin Vote election coverage.
- I'm Frederica Freyberg.
Tonight on "Here & Now," a first look at latest poll numbers for
upcoming primary elections.
After that, capital insight on the high court redistricting
remand.
A closer look at democratic candidate Matt Flynn,
and an election season fact check,
Wisconsin versus Minnesota.
It's "Here and Now" for June 22.
- Funding for "Here & Now" is provided in part by Friends of
Wisconsin Public Television.
- A first look tonight at the latest statewide poll on primary
candidates and issues of import.
The long list of democrats running for governor haven't
picked up much traction by way of name recognition and the
primary is less than two months away.
This week, two of the dems dropped out of the race,
Milwaukee businessman Andy Gronik and Eau Claire State
Representative Dana Wachs.
Director of the Marquette Law School Poll Charles Franklin
joins us now with more.
Thanks very much for being here.
- Good to be here.
- Well, so given what you know about polling and campaigns,
would you expect more to drop out quickly?
- Well, I think the problem is with such a large democratic
field, it's been hard for people to get traction.
Tony Evers has an advantage having been elected statewide
three times already.
So it's been very hard for the rest of the pack to break out.
We didn't see anybody break out in the wake of the Democratic
Party Convention in June, for example.
And so I think those low numbers are an example of so many people
spreading the support around.
- And so Tony Evers breaks out more than others as you say,
but still, he's not known by 61% of the respondents.
- And that's the best known of the candidates,
including the republican candidates for senate.
I think Evers had an advantage in the teens in our March poll,
now it's up in the 20s, but there's still 34% that say
they're undecided about who they'd support in the democratic
primary.
So that shows the fluidity that's possible but also shows
Evers has a really substantial advantage at this point.
- Let's go ahead and take a look at those screens because
you've just been talking about the numbers here.
They're single digits except for Tony Evers and the same holds
true only lower for the other candidates.
How unusual is the size of this field?
- The field is exceptionally large.
In Wisconsin politics, it may be a historic high.
Nationally we saw a very large field in the republican primary
in 2015 and '16, so that was sort of a preview of what we're
seeing now.
But the real problem with such a big field is divided resources,
divided support, and then what does it take for someone to get
traction and move up?
It's possible in big fields for someone to break out and
supporters to suddenly coalesce around them,
but we haven't seen any evidence of that yet.
- Let's take a look at the senate primary.
In that race, your polling shows that Nicholson sees 37% to
Vukmir's 32%, with 30% of the respondents saying they don't
know.
Why no big bump here for Leah Vukmir
after the Republican Convention?
- That's really interesting because she got the endorsement
solidly, 72% or 3%, I think, at the convention.
We might have expected a boost for her,
but her name recognition is better than it was in March,
but so is Nicholson and hers didn't bounce up a lot more.
Same thing on the democratic side, Kelda Roys got the,
won the straw poll at the Democratic Convention yet she's
still at 2% in our latest poll.
- Taking a look at the possible senate matchups,
your poll found Baldwin receives 50% to 39% for Nicholson,
7% undecided, 4% saying they would vote for neither.
And then matched against Vukmir, Baldwin receives 49% to 40% for
Vukmir.
Are these strong numbers for Tammy Baldwin?
- These are pretty good numbers for her.
50% is sort of a magic number, 49 is still 49,
but the margin of 9 or 11 points is not small.
That's a pretty good margin.
It is still July, or June, rather,
and we still don't have name recognition for Nicholson or
Vukmir.
Both of them are up in the high 60s, low 70s of non-recognition.
So you know, I caution that we're a ways away from the
primary and we're certainly ways away from the general.
- I makes me wonder, is all of this kind of non-name
recognition anything to do with how national headlines might be
stealing the show?
- I think there is certainly a competition that if you're
following politics closely, you're overwhelmed by national
news, and the latest things from the Trump White House,
for example.
If you're a more casual viewer, then you turn on the TV and
those things tend to crowd out any local information about your
candidates.
And none of the campaigns as campaigns have really gone up on
the air with a massive ad campaign.
We've seen some outside groups advertising and the campaigns
are beginning to put some ads up,
but we're still not at the point where that would infuse the air
with messaging.
- It's coming.
So with about a minute left, I just wanted to ask you about
matchups in the race for governor.
Scott Walker's support range from 44 to 49% but dem
candidates support, you found range from 36 to 44%.
Isn't Walker basically running pretty close to these unknown
candidates?
- He is, and that reflects how strongly divided the state
remains about Scott Walker with a substantial percentage
favoring him and supporting but a substantial percentage not.
I think the takeaway here is that he leads by,
let's call it 4 percentage points across several of the
candidates.
Does a little better, there's a 2-point margin with Mike McCabe,
a 4-point with Tony Evers and couple of other democrats.
But the bottom line here is, Walker versus a democrat is
roughly a 4-point margin right now.
And as the democrat ends up getting the nomination,
we might see that tighten more.
- All right.
Charles Franklin, thank you very much.
- Thank you.
- The highly anticipated U.S.
Supreme Court ruling on the Wisconsin lawsuit over
gerrymandering came out this week and was underwhelming.
In tonight's capital insight, how the court's opinion sending
Gill v.
Whitford back down to a lower court had experts calling it a
punt.
Wisconsin Public Radio's Capital Bureau Chief Shawn Johnson is
here.
Thanks for being here. - Hey Fred.
- It may have been a punt.
They didn't dismiss this thing outright,
leaving plaintiffs in the case saying that they feel like they
can make it anew.
- The more I digested it, the more I realized that the path
forward, it'll take time, but the hurdles they've put up are
not difficult for us to meet.
It'll happen.
- So the hurdles as Bill Whitford calls them include
going back and finding more plaintiffs in more districts
to prove their case.
- Yeah, but the bottom line is, I guess, going into this case,
a lot of people viewed the Wisconsin case as a chance for
the court to answer a question that has been grappled with for
decades, can there be a point at which the drawing of district
lines gets so bipartisan that a violates people's constitutional
rights.
The court didn't say yes or no with Wisconsin's case,
but it did keep the case alive.
- In fact, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion
stating that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the
lawsuit, while expressing no view on the merits.
He said, "It is a case about group political interests,
not individual legal rights, but this court is not responsible
for vindicating generalized partisan preferences.
The court's constitutionally prescribed role is to vindicate
the individual rights of the people appearing before it."
- And the court's unanimous remands to the lower court over
standing is what had Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel
state this, "I am pleased that the highest court in the land
has unanimously reversed the trial court's erroneous decision
in validating Wisconsin's Assembly map.
Today is a win for the rule of law in Wisconsin and a testament
to the talented attorneys at the Wisconsin Department of
Justice."
- Not so fast, though, because even in her concurrence,
Justice Kagan offered a road map for plaintiffs in a new case.
So it's not necessarily over here.
And her road map, as I understand it,
included finding more plaintiffs or vigorously arguing an
infringement of First Amendment Rights of Association.
So those rights held by parties or political organizations and
their members.
- And she goes on to cite Justice Anthony Kennedy
extensively in her concurrence that he is the swing vote in
this case, and his opinion was widely viewed to be critical to
the outcome in the Wisconsin case,
and he was silent on this one.
- We didn't get a commitment from Kennedy.
And he dodged making a commitment.
And the whole case was really about getting Kennedy's vote and
that's still out there.
- And on this point, experts who've watched Wisconsin's case,
watched cases like this around the country,
and watched Justice Kennedy, agreed,
here is University of California-Irvine Election Law
Professor Rick Hasen.
- I think what we can read is that after a decade and a half,
Justice Kennedy still cannot make up his mind about what to
do about partisan gerrymandering.
In both the Wisconsin case and the Maryland case,
the court punted, put the issue off for another day,
didn't decide really anything big on the merits,
and decided to boot these cases on a technicality.
- So interestingly, he says Justice Kennedy still hasn't
made up his mind but it's not as though there hasn't been a lot
of time to do that.
- He has been well briefed, right?
This has been an issue that-- Kennedy wrote something in 2004
that made everybody think at some point,
we're going to revisit this and we're going to bring a case that
maybe Kennedy will like.
We'll bring a metric that maybe Kennedy will latch on to.
Maybe Wisconsin has that.
So not hearing from Justice Kennedy in this case is big.
I mean that was arguably the biggest thing to happen in this
case, is that we didn't find out what he thinks about all this.
- Meanwhile Plaintiff Whitford says maybe Wisconsin won't even
be the vehicle for the case that decides all of this.
- That's one school of thought.
There's another redistricting case out of North Carolina,
as of right now, the court hasn't said whether it will
hear.
So maybe North Carolina is the case that decides all this.
Hasen said, no, I think Wisconsin is going to be the
case.
That the Wisconsin case is going to end up back before the U.S.
Supreme Court and they're going to have to decide this thing one
way or another.
- And yet the timeline here is pretty critical.
We've come down to kind of the crunch time of 2020 elections.
- It's not going to happen in time for 2018 obviously,
but whoever gets elected in 2020,
the legislature that gets elected then,
will be the legislature that draws the next redistrict maps
that are in place in Wisconsin for the next decade,
so the 2020 election is critical.
- Everybody is going to be watching all over again.
- Watch that court again, that's right.
- Shawn Johnson, thanks very much.
- You're welcome.
- As the Trump Administration's policy of so called
zero-tolerance separated children from parents coming
over the border into the U.S.
caused nationwide upset this week,
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker sent two dozen National Guard
troops to Arizona on Monday to help secure the border.
Wisconsin's troops will assist the Arizona National Guard and
U.S.
Custom and Border Patrol.
Images of immigrant children in federal custody dominated the
news cycle and by mid-week, President Trump signed an
executive order ending family separations.
We know of one father and son that were on their way to
Milwaukee when they were detained at the border and
separated.
Meanwhile, immigrant advocates Voces de La Frontera says they
have been devastated since the zero-tolerance policy was
instituted.
- So the separation of families at the border,
it impacts the families here because on one,
we are seeing that separation of families here already,
but also increases the fear in people's lives.
- In the midst of the immigration uproar,
President Trump held a rally in Duluth mid-week.
Wisconsin Public Radio's Superior Bureau Reporter
Danielle Kaeding was there.
She joins us now with that and an update on flood recovery in
the northwest part of the state.
Danielle, thanks a lot for being here.
- No problem, Frederica.
- So even as President Trump signed an order ending the
separation of parents and children just before traveling
to Duluth, he maintained his zero-tolerance policy at this
rally?
- Yes, he touched just briefly on the actual order itself and
the signing of it, saying that they were going to keep families
together at the border but they were going to be as tough as
they've ever been on immigration.
And then he really talked to his supporters in terms of repeating
over and over again that they were going to build the wall.
That they already had resources put towards that,
and that they were going to continue do that.
Drawing chants from the crowd, "Build that wall,
build that wall." So he was definitely saying they were
going to do more, not less, to control immigration.
- What else stood out at that rally?
- The number of people.
I mean there were more than 8,
000 people in the AMSOIL Arena.
It was a packed house.
People came from all over Minnesota and Wisconsin to see
him speak.
He talked about a number of other topics too including his
recent visit with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader,
and efforts to shore up denuclearization there,
tax cuts and also the economy and how well it's doing.
- As for flooding in northwest Wisconsin,
I know the governor declared a state of emergency in five
counties and at least two people were killed in the high water.
What's the situation at week's end?
- Well, now the waters are beginning to subside and county
and state road crews are being able to get in there and see
exactly what the damage is.
There is still some areas of northern Wisconsin where flood
waters re still covering the road including U.S.
Highway 63 near the Bibon Swamp Area in Bayfield County.
They're beginning to develop plans to repair state highways
including U.S. Highway 2 by north Fish Creek, near Ino,
where that project could take several months to replace a
bridge that was entirely washed out there.
And also on U.S.
Highway 53, where they're currently restricted to one lane
northbound and southbound on Highway 53 as far as traffic
goes.
They're going to try and get in there next week and begin repair
so they can have that up and running
for the July 4th holiday.
- Okay. Tough stuff.
Danielle Kaeding, thanks very much.
- Thanks, Frederica.
- A closer look now at the governor's race and our
continuing series of interviews with democrats running in the
primary.
Tonight, we speak to Matt Flynn.
Flynn is an attorney in Milwaukee.
He is a U.S. Navy veteran
and former chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.
Matt Flynn joins us now.
Thanks very much for doing so.
- Good to be here. Thank you.
- So two of your compatriots have dropped out of this race as
of today.
What will you do?
- I'm in it for the long haul, and I think we're in pretty good
shape.
The Marquette Franklin Poll that just came out shows me in second
place.
I'm tied with two others in the rounding, but in the raw data,
we actually are in second place, and I think we're doing very
well.
- And yet those numbers in the Marquette Poll, what is it,
7% of the vote you garner, and 77% of those polled don't know
- Their name recognition polls.
The good news is that they know me a lot better than all the
others except maybe for Tony Evers, but we have a ways to go.
But with seven weeks to go, which is where it is right now,
our advertising campaign on television is about to start,
and I'm working hard, getting around the state and we're
picking up a lot of support.
- Among all the other candidates, albeit two fewer,
why do you think you should be the progressive voice for
Wisconsin?
- Well, there's a couple of things.
I was the chair of this party.
And I know the state and I know the government well.
I'm a Navy veteran.
I'm the only veteran in the race and getting good veteran support
around the state.
And I differ from them on a number of issues.
One of them is Foxconn.
I think it's a crocked deal that I will stop with litigation.
None of the others say they will stop it.
Tony Evers says he'll make them put solar panels on and the
others complain about it.
I will stop it because it's going to strangle our budget for
15 years.
- On what basis can you beat Scott Walker?
- Well, right now in that poll that we saw,
Scott Walker leads me but I'm within the margin of error.
He leads me 46-42, and I come to it with much less name
recognition than he does.
There's a hunger to replace Scott Walker in this state,
there really is, and I think out of all the candidates,
I was a lawyer for a long time, practicing complex litigation
with a lot of the same issues that it will take to stop the
Foxconn deal.
If I'm on the stage with him, it's going to be a different
kind of debate than it was the last couple of times.
So I think every indication is we can beat him.
- On the economy, one of the things you want to do
is reverse Act 10.
How does that help the economy?
- The way it helps the economy is several fold.
Teachers have been demoralized, they really have.
Act 10 was a taunting document.
If you read the actual act, they did it to basically insult and
demoralize teachers, and they've reduced their wages.
Now, there are certain things that you could do outside of an
Act 10.
I will repeal Act 10.
I will not compromise on it.
It's going to be totally repealed.
I think teachers' wages have to go up.
Now how to pay for that in an issue such as should they
contribute to their pension, healthcare,
my view is if they're going to contribute to their pension and
healthcare, they should be paid a wage that permits them to do
that.
So my wife is a speech pathologist in the Germantown
Public Schools for over 30 years and I saw the devastation it
did, so I will repeal Act 10.
- You also want to invest, you say,
in roads and infrastructure.
How would you pay for it?
- Re-indexing the gas tax.
I think it was a big mistake 10, 13 years ago to stop doing that.
Right now our transportation budget is 20% debt service.
In other words, paying interest on what we've already borrowed
and it's going up.
We can't have that.
So we're going to pay as we go and we're going to repair our
roads.
And I'm also-- there are 13 east-west roads from Highway 2
down to Highway 14.
Many of them, only Highway 29 is really four-lane.
I want to make them all four lane and as soon as we can do
that, it's going to revitalize rural and western -- northern
Wisconsin as well.
- On educate, you call for free two-year public college or
university tuition for every in-state student.
How do you do that?
- At in-state institutions, not outside.
The reason is very simple.
My proposal is not K-12, it's PreK-14.
I'll put more into early education, early childhood,
but for the first two years, there are a lot of kids in the
state when they turn 18 think they can't afford college or
trade school, they go off to Duluth, Minneapolis.
They go to Chicago.
We're losing a lot of good people.
If we get rid of Foxconn, if we take that billion dollars in
Medicaid supplements Walker turned down,
if we take the $800 million in train money he turned down,
if we get rid of the manufacturers' credit and
exemption, which is very unproductive and it's cost us
about a billion dollars, we can easily do it.
And other states have done it.
- So you just touched on the Medicaid money.
What else would you do for healthcare in Wisconsin?
- Well, long-range, I think federally we're going to have to
have Medicare cover everybody from birth to death.
And it's the cheapest way to do it.
70% of the people in this country already get some sort of
government-related Medicaid, Medicare, military, so forth.
But what I would do in the short run,
because I can't mandate that, even though Medicare is a real
cost cutter, I would open up BadgerCare.
In addition to getting the billion dollars back,
open up BadgerCare to anybody who doesn't have health
insurance and wants to buy into it for a premium unless they're
indigent.
- Meanwhile, Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act is being
chipped away at and more efforts are underway to do away with it.
If you became governor, you can declare that you want all of
these things but how do you kind of reverse what has been
happening to the Affordable Care Act?
- Well, we have a President Donald Trump who in my view is
vandalizing our healthcare system and betraying us to the
Russians quite frankly but in the short run,
what I would do with healthcare with him,
the Affordable Care Act to me is a bridge between an old system
and what I hope is Medicare for everybody.
So we have to open the exchanges.
We have to have more options and I will fully fund everything
that's in my power to fund.
- Matt Flynn, thanks very much.
- Good to be here.
Thank you.
- We continue to follow up on statements made on "Here & Now"
by democratic candidates for Wisconsin governor.
This week, multimedia reporter Marisa Wojcik circles back to
remarks made by Tony Evers about healthcare.
- Wisconsin can't go very long without being compared to
Minnesota.
Recently democratic candidate for governor Tony Evers told us
Wisconsin is lagging behind its western neighbor in the area of
healthcare.
- All those things that Scott Walker didn't do has caused
Minnesota to move forward and have cheaper and better
healthcare than we do in Wisconsin.
- What does cheaper and better mean?
We followed up with Evers' campaign and they referenced a
2017 study by the liberal group Citizen Action of Wisconsin.
This particular study looked at 2018 premiums and found that on
average, Wisconsinites pay 45% more in premiums.
A recent report from the Urban Institute shows that from 2017
to 2018, Wisconsin premiums saw an overall increase of 43.5%.
Minnesota saw a 15.1% decrease.
Now nationally, many states saw premiums spike as federal
reimbursements for cost share reductions were no longer
available and overall, fewer people enrolled in the
individual insurance marketplace.
For Minnesota, it wasn't until recently that premiums
stabilized.
The state's 2016 premium rates were set to increase between 14
and 49%.
Many in Minnesota attribute the new found balance in the state's
marketplace to the state's re-insurance program,
which uses state and federal money to subsidize insurance
companies to cover exceptionally high claims.
Wisconsin is hoping to enact a similar re-insurance plan.
Having applied for a federal waiver back in April.
For these and other fast facts, visit wpt.org.
- Now for an update away from the state capitol,
the former General Motors plant in Janesville is coming down to
be rebuilt for future use.
The Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation this
week announced it is putting a half million dollars toward the
demolition.
Six buildings in the former assembly plant will be razed.
The demo is expected to be completed in two years.
Remediation and redevelopment will take several more years.
A commercial real estate company then plans to turn the property
into about 1 million square feet of industrial and warehouse
space.
Also this week, a new state office building in Milwaukee
will be named after the late civil rights leader Vel
Phillips.
Phillips passed away in April at the age of 95.
She was the first African-American woman on the
Milwaukee Common Council and the first African-American woman to
hold state-wide office as secretary of state.
And finally tonight, a look ahead to next week,
when we will continue our interviews with the democratic
candidates for governor.
Firefighter Mahlon Mitchell will join us next week on "Here &
Now." I'm Frederica Freyberg.
Have a great weekend.
- Funding for "Here & Now" is provided in part by Friends of
Wisconsin Public Television.
For more information on "Here & Now's" 2018 election coverage,
go to WisconsinVote.org.