Cambria Math;Times New Roman;  I'm Tom Zinnen, I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center.  I also work for UW Cooperative Extension.  And on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to  Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.  We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.  Tonight it's my pleasure to introduce to you Kathy Cramer.  She's a professor in the Department of Political Science.  She was born in Grafton, Wisconsin, and went to high school there.  She came to UW-Madison and got her undergraduate degree in Journalism and in Political Science.  Then she went to the University of Michigan and got her PhD there in Political Science, and then moved directly from there to here to be on the faculty. 

 She is also the Director of the Morgridge Center for Public Service, which is located in the Red Gym, and the impacts of which are felt all over Wisconsin, and all around the world,  and probably also in the hearts of the students that get to do that.  Tonight she gets to talk to us about the topic of her book, and the topic of her talk tonight is the Politics of Resentment, Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin, and the Rise of Scott Walker.  Please join me in welcoming Kathy Cramer to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.  (audience clapping) - Thank you, Tom.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.  Thank you.   Hi, everyone.  Thank you very much.  It really is a pleasure to join you all this evening.  Tom, thank you for inviting me to do this, it's really an honor. 

 I'm going to start off with a puzzle, or what I hope you all agree with me is a puzzle.  On the one hand, we have a variety of types of documentation of the fact of rising income inequality.  These graphs were not designed by me, they're from a variety of different scholars from across the country, basically documenting the same thing, and that is that income inequality in the United States has risen pretty drastically since the 1970s, and it's increased because the income earnings among the people in the top echelon of income earners has gone up pretty dramatically, while the income earnings of the rest of us have pretty much stayed the same.  So income inequality is a fact, or is as close to a fact as social science gets.  We have this.  And we also have, at the same time, something else, which is evidence that our governments are not necessarily responding to the wishes of many of us.  So I'm going to show you a graph here that was created by my friend Larry Bartels, who is a Political Science Professor at Vanderbilt University.  And this is done from a study of senators' behavior, looking at the correspondence between the way senators in the late 80s and early 90s voted, and the wishes of their constituents.  What this graph is showing you is that if you carve up the constituents into three chunks, low-income, middle-income, and high-income, the senators voted in the closest correspondence with people who were wealthiest at the time, and really, there wasn't much correspondence between the way senators voted and the lowest-income earners.  You might say to yourself, well this is probably driven by the behavior of politicians from one particular party. 

 And that's not the case.  This next graph shows you that with respect to both Democrats and Republicans, the correspondence between the way national-level legislators, senators at the time, vote and the wishes of their constituents have the strongest correspondence among people who are wealthiest, the wealthiest constituents.  Some correspondence among those in the middle income tier and really not any correspondence at all with people in the lowest third of income earners.  This kind of relationship has been documented over time by other scholars, so this relationship continues, and by that I mean, if our national level legislators seem to be responding to anyone in the population, they're responding to the wealthiest amongst us.  This is also taking place at the state level, as other scholars have documented in recent years.  So the puzzle for me is this: income inequality is increasing, and has been since the 1970s, we know it, we hear about it.  At the same time, our politicians don't really seem to be responding to many of us, and yet, there's very little call in the population for redistribution, any kind of redistribution.  We keep voting in politicians who don't seem to be responding to many of us.  So the puzzle for me is why? Why is this happening? Well, sometimes a question gets asked a little bit differently, and in a less charitable fashion, and that is, it gets asked as, "How can people be so stupid?" Right? So that's what I'm here to talk with you all about tonight, not why are people stupid, but what is going on in voters' minds when they think about politics? So typically, when we talk about the question of how can people be so stupid, or why is it that people are voting against their interests, I worry about that question, because to me, if carried to extremes, what it's saying is most people are incapable of participating in democracy.  And I certainly hope that's not the case. 

 But this isn't about my hopes, this is about what I've learned over the past eight or nine years.  So, typically, in the study of public opinion,  we ask the question of what's wrong with people. Right? Again, how can people be so ignorant, how can they be making the wrong choices? And tonight I want you to try to think about this differently with me, and think about it not with respect to what are people getting wrong, but instead, how are people understanding their world? How are they getting it? How are they interpreting politics, and therefore, why are they making the choices that they are?  A little bit of background about me.  Tom Zinnen, when he introduced me, said that I was from Grafton, which is about here, although my brother came and listened to a talk I gave, I think just last week, and he said, "Oh, you know, "you've got that wrong, you're actually pointing to not our hometown, but a different town." Roughly, this is where I'm from.  (audience laughing) And I tell you that because I'm a very proud member of the faculty here, and as Tom explained, I was very fortunate to be able to join the faculty here as soon as I finished my PhD.  It was my dream job.  It was the reason I went to graduate school.  And while I was sprinting for tenure, I dreamed in my mind that if I were fortunate enough to earn tenure here, my next project would be something about going around the state of Wisconsin, listening to people talk, understanding how they're understanding their state and the politics within it, and at the same time, giving myself an opportunity to find all the great places for pie around the state.  (audience laughing) Well, so what I did, to be honest, is I have always been interested in the way people interpret politics, and I have found that the best way to study that, for me, is to listen to people talk to one another, not necessarily to listen to me or respond to my questions, but listen to the way they talk to one another in the settings they normally spend time in, with the people they normally spend time in.  So what I did was I decided to design a study  that allowed me to study that among people living in Wisconsin, and at the same time, use the conversations I was observing as a way to set questions for the Badger Poll, which is a state-wide public opinion poll that our Survey Center here at UW-Madison used to do.  And I thought, just my own sensibility about public opinion is if we're truly going to gauge the way people in the state think about politics, we should ask questions about things that people care about, not necessarily that I care about, or that people in Madison or in North Hall, where the Political Science Department is, care about. 

 And so this is what I did, and I should also add, with the blessing and the support of UW-Madison, when I applied for a Wisconsin Idea Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin grant to enable me to travel around the state, the University said, "Absolutely, great idea.  "But while you're out there, would you please also ask about us?" Ask about the UW-Madison, what do people think about the UW-Madison? So what I did was to carve up the state into eight different regions, depending on political leanings, population density, type of industry, different demographics, also type of agriculture.  And in each of those regions, I sampled several places, typically a large place and a small place.  And then I sampled for some additional places to get a wide range of places.  I wasn't aiming for perfect representation of the whole state of Wisconsin.  What I was aiming for was a wide variation in places, particularly with respect to socioeconomic status.  At the time I started this study, way back in 2007, I was very interested in the way social class mattered for the way people thought about politics.  So I wanted some low-income communities, some higher income communities, communities that varied by the type of local industry, and even level of education.  So this is a picture of the 27 communities that I eventually visited.   And what I did was to, back in 2007, I sampled these places and then I called up the county Extension Office, and I said, "Where in, for example, "such and such Wisconsin, do people get together on a regular basis that I might get access to?" And following here in the next few minutes are some of the pictures of the places I visited. 

 You will see pictures of gas stations, for example.  I spent a long time in gas stations, because in many small towns in Wisconsin, the gas station is the place where people go to get the news, typically in the morning.  So I ended up going to a lot of diners, a lot of gas stations, some churches, a few types of other establishments, where everybody in the community knew there was a group of regulars who got together on a regular basis, usually daily, to talk about whatever, whatever was of concern to them.  For example, I would be told about a gas station.  So back in May or the summer of 2007, I would walk in and I would say, "Hi, I'm Kathy, "from the University of Wisconsin- Madison.  Do you mind if I join you this morning?" And they would laugh, you're all being very polite, yes, they would laugh a little and say, "Sure, lady."  And then, I would give them a business card so they knew my name and had a way to contact me if they wanted to.  I also passed out a token of my appreciation which was typically a football schedule, or a pen, or a pad of Post-it Notes, and I learned very quickly, as you will see, that I had to say, "No, your taxpayer dollars did not go to pay for these." (audience laughing) "They were donated by the alumni association." And then I would ask if it was alright if I turned on my recorder, I had a digital recorder that I used to record all the conversations, and then I would say, "Tell me, what are the big concerns in this community?" And then, the conversation would start.  I had a few other questions each time I visited these groups that I would ask, but I tried, as much as possible, to let the conversation flow naturally.  There were 27 communities I visited.  39 groups overall across those communities. 

 I visited most of them between two and three times, some groups as many as five or six times.  I was doing this study between May of 2007 and November 2012.  I thought that I was wrapping up my study in late 2010, but at that time, as you recall, Wisconsin politics got very interesting, so I stayed in the field a few more years.   Here's what I learned.   You know I'm from Grafton.  I explained myself as a small-town Wisconsinite for many, many years.  But I quickly learned that Grafton, population of about 7,000 when I was growing up, is not small-town Wisconsin.  I learned, once I got outside of the Madison and Milwaukee metro areas, that there is sort of a mental map of the state that is more prominent when you move outside of those metro areas, of Madison and Milwaukee, and then the rest of the state.  Sometimes you hear the term "outstate Wisconsin," right? Here's the map of Wisconsin again.  Just a reminder that, you know, that our main metro areas are here, Madison, and Milwaukee, but there's a lot of geography left in the rest of the state. 

 And so, many people would explain to me as they're talking about local events, or state policy, federal policy, even, that they would carve up the state into these two main regions: Madison and Milwaukee, sometimes the m&m's  I also heard that Madison, to many people, represents both the University and the State Legislature.  It's sort of a center of power, and for many folks, the decision making is all sort of a part of one mix, which is a little bit surprising if you live in Madison, particularly in these times, where we don't often think of the University and the Legislature operating in sync.  (audience laughing) There's another part to this geography, and that is this basic story line that I heard in many different parts of the state, again, primarily in so-called outstate Wisconsin, outside of the main metro areas, that Madison and Milwaukee suck in all the taxpayer dollars.  So, Madison sucks in all the taxpayer dollars, spends them on itself or on Milwaukee, and people in outstate Wisconsin never see what they pay in return.  So, it's a story partly about the resources, but it's also partly a story about power, about who has power in the state.  And I heard many times that there's this perception that Madison makes all the decisions, and communicates them to the rest of us, but we don't have a say.  Nobody's listening to what we think.  There's not a reverse listening mechanism built in.  The decisions are communicated outward and there isn't listening going on in return. 

 So it's partly about the resources, partly about the power, but also, partly about respect.  So many times I heard people say, "You know, "the thing is, those people in the cities, "they just don't get us.  "They don't understand how we live, and they don't understand our values." Let me give you some examples of this, what it sounded like in their own words.  Mind you, these are recorded verbatim.  The names I'll refer to I've made up to protect the identity of folks.  But I think I can explain it to you, I can give you a kind of a general conception of what this sounded like, but I think it's most meaningful when you hear it in their own words.  So in this conversation, I'm talking with a group of retired and working women in the northwest corner of the state, and they meet once a week for breakfast in the back of a local restaurant,  and I've been asking them about University of Wisconsin Madison.  And Teresa, who's a former teacher, is explaining to me, well, her own sentiments about how people downstate in Madison and Milwaukee treat young people from her neck of the woods, if you will.  Teresa says, "As a former educator, I resented "highly comments such as there is no education north of Highway 8." [which is a highway that runs east west across the top tier of the state.]  They say things like, "These kids aren't-- "We send them such absolutely excellent and "well-prepared students, that they have the attitude "that we are the hick area of the state.  It was painful." And I asked her. 

 I said, "So where did you get that from, from recruiters? And she said, "No, professors." And I said, "Really? When they would visit?" And she said, "Well, yeah, or publish newspaper articles, or you know." And that was a little distressful, because I think northern Wisconsin feels a little far away from Madison anyway, and we keep waving our hands and saying, "Yoo-hoo, "there's another half of a state up here! Up north is not Wausau!"  Here's another example from a town not far from there, but farther south.  This is a group of people who meet once a week in the basement of a church, because this church is the main, is really the only meeting space in this community.  There's no gas station, it's a very tiny town, and so the people who meet there, some of them are part of the congregation, but some of the people are local business owners from nearby communities.  There's some farmers, there's some retirees, there's some stay-at-home moms.  It's a mix of people.  And again, we're asking about University of Wisconsin-Madison.  And I'm asking them, I've asked them, "What do you think the university does well?" And they have lots to say.  And then I get around to talking with them about what do you think the University of Wisconsin- Madison does not do well when you think about it? And Martha says, "Well, represents our area.  "I mean, we're strange to Madison.  "They want us to do everything for Madison's "laws and the way they do things, but we "totally live differently than the city people live. 

 "So they need to think more rural, instead of all this city area." And Donna says, "We can't afford to educate our children "like they can in the cities.  "Simple as that.  We don't have the advantages." And Ethel says, "All the things they do "based on Madison and Milwaukee, never us." And Martha says, "Yeah, we don't have the "advantages that they give their local people "there, I think, a lot of times, and it's probably "because they don't understand how rural "people live, and what we deal with, and our problems."  This general perspective I'm describing I call "rural consciousness," a social science-y term which explains something that's actually not all that complicated.  Basically, what it is this identity as a rural person, combined with this perception that I'm not getting my fair share.  People and people in communities like mine are getting the short end of the stick, right?, which is what I mean by distributive injustice.  Again, there's several parts to it.  It's this perception of where the power is, who has the power in the state.  It's also this perception of where the resources go, how they're allocated, and where they're drawn in from, and also this notion of respect, that rural areas are ignored and disrespected.   What I want to explain to you is how this colors attitudes toward UW-Madison, and then I'm going to come back around to this question of income inequality, and how this perspective has been a very fertile ground for arguments for smaller government, or small government candidates.  So first, with respect to UW-Madison, as I mentioned briefly a few moments ago, even in groups that were critical of the University, there's a lot of love towards this institution. 

 I mean you can, I can, honestly, walk into just about any establishment around the state and encounter someone wearing Badger gear, right? When I ask people what does the UW-Madison do well, people did not, were not at a lack of things to say.  Oftentimes they would say Badger sports, the marching band.  They would eventually get around to research, especially research that was prominent in the news at the time, so for example, stem cell research.  Many people had great stories about their experience at UW Hospital, very heartwarming stories about it.  And yet, perhaps it's because people feel as though this institution is theirs,  there's also a great sense of distance from it.  So in these perceptions that I was explaining to you about how people feel distant from the power centers of the state, or feel as though the resources are allocated in Madison and Milwaukee and not their communities, the same kind of sentiment was used to talk about people's association with UW-Madison.  There was this sense that it's too expensive to send a child here, it's hard to get in.  There's a sense that the faculty here are lazy, liberal, and elitist, meaning we don't teach our own classes, right? There's TAs who are teaching the classes instead of us.  This perception that you have your summers off.  And there's also perception that people who are on the faculty, or even not on the faculty but working here at UW-Madison, earn income that is far, far more than you can find in a typical job in many of the small communities around the state. 

 So in the same way that people talked about life in general in the state, perceptions of UW-Madison were woven in there.  I want to say, and I'm not just saying this, partly because UW-Extension is sort of in the room and responsible for this wonderful program, but when people did talk about their fondness toward UW-Madison in particular, people would also bring up Extension with me, and talk very warmly about Extension in their community.  So, this is somewhat separate from UW-Madison, but in people's mind, UW-Madison was partly about Cooperative Extension.   Here's, now, how this perspective is also related to support for small government.  I'm going to give you three storylines of how this works, so that's what I mean by the narrative.  I realize this is kind of social science-y approach.  Stick with me, you'll see what I mean.  Okay, so one is that when I was engaged in conversations with people about specific policy areas, the conversation often had this storyline of, "You know, Kathy,  we're not opposed to "spending on government programs in general, "but the thing is that if we pay higher taxes, that money's never going to come back to us."  I heard this most commonly with respect to education in outstate Wisconsin.  So people would say things to me like we really value education in our community, we're proud of the great schools we have here, but you know, they're asking us to pay more for education.  It's just not something we can support because that money's going to go to Milwaukee, or it's going to go to Madison, and we're not going to see that money come back and benefit our own schools. 

 That's one way it sounded.  Here's another narrative.  That even though there's a substantial portion of the workforce in any community in the state that's employed by a government, roughly 10 percent of any municipality in the state, folks there, roughly 10 percent of folks there are employed by local, county, state, or federal government, there's a perception that even if those folks have lived in that community a long, long time, decades, they're not really from there.  They're not driven by decisions that are made in this place, they're driven by decisions that are made downstate, in Madison.  DNR, for example.  How many of you have heard people critical of DNR? I know I'm not the only one.  Public school teachers, as well, right? There's a sense that whatever is driving those folks, those government employees, those decisions are made by urban people based on urban values.  They're not us.  They're not one of us.  So, with respect to Act 10, you can see how this worked, that people would be talking about things like: public employees aren't people like us,  they're driven by decisions that are made in places that aren't respectful of people like us. 

  If you look outside at our community, which so clearly is dying, in some respects, whether it's the change in farming, or the change in the businesses on main street, whatever government is doing, it is not working for places like this.  So why would we ever want more of it? Right? And following from this was sentiments about how it's time that public employees pay their share, right? Why is it that I, as an outstate Wisconsinite, am working so hard to make ends meet, and I can't afford healthcare, but you're asking me to pay higher taxes so that I can pay for healthcare for public employees?  Doesn't make sense to me.   That leads me to the third narrative of how this worked.   Underlying that attitude about who's working hard  in the population are these notions of deservingness.  So there's this sense that, you know, I'm working really hard, as a person in outstate Wisconsin, and oftentimes I'd be hearing this from people who were doing physical labor during the day, sometimes loggers, sometimes people working in agriculture.  And the attitude was that, you know,  as a person who uses my body all day, I'm working really hard, but you, Kathy, like first of all, you're driving around the state in your Volkswagen Jetta, having coffee with us, like how's that hard work, right?  And also, sometimes, this is the best shorthand that I came across for this attitude, was people would say when do you take a shower? And I'd say well, before I go to work, and they'd say exactly.  I take a shower when I come home.  And that was an illustration to me of their conception of people who are deserving are people who are working hard, and people who are working hard aren't people who are sitting behind a desk thinking, and talking all day.   So, part of this notion of deservingness, and hard work, we have to acknowledge that for a long time, there's been a racial component to this, and notions about who works hard in the population have been used, at times, to bolster this stereotype of people of color as being lazy, lazier than white folks in the population.  And so as I'm telling you about this us versus them perspective, urban versus rural, I suppose some of you are thinking isn't this about race? Isn't this about people in outstate Wisconsin saying, you know, I don't like those people in the city, meaning people who are racial minorities. 

 That is undoubtedly in the mix here, but it's so much more complicated than that.  And so as you hear what I'm saying, I encourage you to think about how this isn't, this isn't just about race, and also it is about race, and that's partly why our racial tension and our racial  injustice is so difficult and so complex, because there are many parts to it.  Even when we don't talk about race, we're talking about who's deserving, we're talking about who has power, and it's all built on a long legacy in which we have often criticized expanding government by pointing to who is not deserving, and certain components of the population.   So I want to come back to the question I started off with, a while ago, and that is that how are people in outstate Wisconsin, or small-town Wisconsin, rural Wisconsin, understanding redistribution and the appropriate role of government?  And my short answer for this is, through resentment.  In many of these conversations, what I was hearing was resentment, kind of this slow burning feeling about I'm not getting what I deserve.  I'm not getting my fair share, and somebody else is, and they don't deserve it.   And a resentfulness toward that.   And again, it's complicated because it's both resentment towards cities and city people, but it's also resentment toward public employees, it's resentment toward people of color, and it's all in this context, where we see it day after day, my goodness, especially in the presidential campaign, this attitude of they don't deserve what they're getting, and I'm not getting what I should be.   You may be asking: Okay, but how much of this is based in fact?  Is it the case that small-town Wisconsinites aren't getting their fair share? So I want to show you some facts for a moment.  This is a bar chart, it's just showing you where state and federal expenditures went in 2010, based on the type of county in Wisconsin. 

 There's 72 counties in Wisconsin, and rural counties here are counties where the population's less than 10,000 folks.  Micropolitan is between 10,000 and 50,000 folks, and metropolitan counties are those 50,000 and over.  Just from this basic bar chart, you can look at this and say yeah, most of the money goes to metropolitan counties.  But, of course, because that's where all the people are, right? So let's carve it up a little bit differently.  Let's look per capita.  And what I'm going to show you here, is that with respect to state aid and federal aid, there isn't a very strong relationship, if there is one at all, between how rural a county is and how much state or federal dollars it's getting.  What this chart is showing you is each of the dots is one of the 72 counties.  And so, it's as you go to the right across the graph, those counties are more rural, and then the Y axis is the number of, the amount of money per capita, thousands of dollars per capita spent in state aid.  Again, this is 2010 dollars, not much of a relationship, depending on...  So per capita, it's not necessarily the case that rural folks are getting less state aid. 

 Same basic thing with respect to federal aid.  Then you might say: okay, well is it the case that  more tax money is being sucked unfairly from rural counties? Not really, and this is basically the same chart, so farther to the right is a more rural county.  Again, the Y axis is thousands of dollars per capita.  And what this is showing you is that it looks like more rural counties, people living in more rural counties, are actually paying in less to the collective pot, than other folks living in metro counties.  Same with respect to federal tax money.   Well then, how about we turn on investment.  So if we look at how much people are paying in compared to what they're getting back.  If anything, if you're a person living in a rural county, you're actually getting a little bit more than your so-called fair share, okay? State dollars and federal dollars.  But I want to pause here and say these charts, you might say, these people are just wrong.  They are just wrong. 

 Well, the thing is that, it's not about the facts.  It's about the perception.  And I want to show you a few more graphs that shed a little light on where this perception is coming from.  So here, again, are the 72 counties, and here's median household income.  It's much lower in our rural counties, in the state of Wisconsin.   Here's folks living below the poverty line.   Slightly more people living below the poverty line in our rural counties.  Unemployment, same kind of story.   So when people were telling me, "We're having a hard time making ends meet here.  "Don't you get that? "Can't you just look outside the window and see the rough time that our community is in?" That's a real experience. 

 They're having a hard time making ends meet.  These perceptions of injustice are not necessarily driven by looking at a graph like this.  Oftentimes, they may be driven by mass media, seeing perceptions of people doing well in other places, not their own.  Maybe it's driven in part by the tourism industry.  When we come in from relatively wealthier places in the state, and spend a lot of money, or when they're doing their own grocery shopping and they see the pricey champagne bottles in their liquor area, it's not for people in their community, oftentimes, it's from the visitors from other parts of the state, right?  So those perceptions are based on something real.   So now I want to turn to our contemporary politics and share with you about what I've learned about how this matters.   These are just perceptions, right?, but they do matter, and here's why.  Because some people are very, very good at tapping into them.  Wisconsin, I don't need to remind you, has kind of been ground zero for debates about the appropriate role of government in recent years.  Scott Walker is a person who, whether consciously or unconsciously, knew how to tap into this rural consciousness, this thing I'm calling rural consciousness. 

 I want to give you some examples of what that sounded like as he was running for government,  governor, excuse me.   I have up here a question to myself: What does this sound like in campaigns, when politicians try to tap into this thing? And for one thing, it sounds like a train.  Here's what I mean.  Back in 2010, in the gubernatorial race, you'll recall one of the issues was this high speed train between Madison and Milwaukee.   I didn't recognize it at the time, but looking back over transcripts from debates and such, it was clear that this was an issue that Scott Walker used very well to tap into this divide, sort of Madison and Milwaukee versus the rest of the state.  So here's something he said during the first debate in the primary, in the 2010 gubernatorial race.   And he, I probably don't need to remind you who these characters are, but Jim Doyle was not the incumbent, but the previous sitting governor at the time, Democrat, right? And Tom Barrett is not yet the Democratic opponent, but eventually will be.  Tom Barrett was the Milwaukee mayor at the time.  Scott Walker was County Executive of Milwaukee County at the time.  And Doyle had accepted $810 million from the federal government to build this high speed train between Madison and Milwaukee. 

 And here's what Walker said: "If you look at what Jim Doyle and Tom Barrett "have put on the table in spending $810 million "on a high-speed train line between "Milwaukee and Madison, with no assurance "that it will go to Eau Claire or La Crosse, "or anywhere else, it's just about those two areas.  "And it's about taking that money, money that "will cost the citizens of Wisconsin up to $10 million "per year, according to their numbers, "I think it will actually be much more, "that's $10 million that doesn't go to fix "the road that goes up from West Salem through "the cutout up to Black River Falls.  "It doesn't fix streets in La Crosse.  "That's money that's taken away from our local "roads, and our bridges, and our other transportation needs today." The dividing lines are pretty clear there.  Who's the "our"? Not the people of Madison and Milwaukee, but the other folks, right? Here's another way that it came across.  When Walker was talking about why he pursued  Act 10, he explained it partly in terms of public employees in places like Madison and Milwaukee.  Here's an example.  He's explaining to the American Enterprise Institute his actions with respect to Act 10 and why he pursued the policies with respect to public employees in that bill, and he said this: He said, "We were able to rein in abuses of things "like overtime and other excesses out there, by no longer "having opportunities where, in our case, "some of our state employees could literally "call in sick on their shift, and then come back "to work the next shift on overtime.  "Or, bus drivers in places like Madison, that made $150,000 or more because of overtime." In places like Madison.  Interesting. 

  Okay, how about the presidential campaign? We haven't heard a lot about rural versus urban divides.  There's been some, and I could talk more about that later, but in general, to me, the politics of resentment are all over the place.  Donald Trump is another person who's been pretty adept at tapping into them.  You hear many people say, "What is going on "with our politics these days? How can it be that Donald Trump is so successful?" I actually don't think it's a mystery, given what I heard around the state.  Many times it's called anger, I think that's part of it, but for me, resentment is this thing that's been around for a while.  I know it's been in Madison since May of 2007, if not well before that.  I mean in Wisconsin since May of 2007.  But it's something that when tapped into, can be anger, and pretty intense.  A pretty intense emotion that can mobilize people.   So, I want to sum up with a few thoughts on  what the lessons are from these conversations for politics in general, in Wisconsin and elsewhere. 

 And also, I hope to leave you with a joke that will make you laugh, as well as some ideas about how we might turn things around.   So, when people ask this question of are people voting against their interests? I want to point out that what I heard in these conversations was not people being fooled by social issues, like abortion.  Sometimes that's the conclusion that people draw, that people are being fooled into voting, for example, for the Republican party, by being distracted by other issues.  People were talking about their economic interests here, all the time.  They were talking about their concern for their own livelihood, jobs, and such.  And so I just want to point out that it's not the case that people are being fooled away from economic interest.  Economic considerations still matter very much here.  Also, I talked a bit about partisanship, but one thing I want to point out is that I did not encounter many strong Republicans or strong Democrats when I was doing this research.  And I've told you mainly about what I learned from so-called outstate Wisconsin, but I spent time in our cities and our suburbs, too.  And in almost every group, when I got around to the question of, you know, "Which political party do you think best represents people like you?" almost always people would say, "Well, neither!"  And people expressed a lot of discontent with both political parties. 

 And I think it's in our interest to ask if it's not partisanship that's driving who people  vote for, what else is going on? And I found time and time again that this question of who is deserving, who works hard, was much more important for the way people were making sense of politics, whether it was state or national politics.   So, here's where I get to the alternatives.  And by alternatives, I want to say that I'm not talking about what's the alternative to the Republican party.   What I'm talking about is what's the alternative to a politics in which people are making their arguments on the basis of denigrating certain social groups, certain entire groups of people, whether they be Madisonians or Milwaukeeans, or people of color or immigrants.  Isn't there another way that we can have a democracy? And I believe there is.   I think one thing is that it's absolutely necessary that we ask more of our elected officials.  We're a long way from that, I realize, but to the extent that we can, we should insist that our elected officials make their arguments on the basis of something else than the backs of other citizens.  I also think we should draw attention to what government is doing for us.  Again, this is not an argument in favor of the Democratic party.  This is an argument just in recognition that  democracy is partly about government, and we would do well to understand what it is that government does for us before we start, I shouldn't say start, before we dismantle it. 

 There are things that government does for us that are very invisible to many people.  So, for example, and I use the term submerged benefits of government here based on some recent research that's been done in political science.  Suzanne Mettler is one person in particular, at Cornell University, who has looked at this, that when we ask people, "Have you ever been "the recipient of a government social program?" very, very few people say that they have.  But when you ask people whether you've taken the mortgage interest tax deduction, over 90 percent of the population says, "Yes, I have." That's a government program.  That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.  That many of us benefit from the government far more than we recognize.  I think it's worthwhile to acknowledge it.  I also think it's worthwhile to think back to those bar charts I was showing you about which income tier senators seem to be responsive to in the late 80s and early 90s, and ask who are politicians listening to, and to demand that they listen to all of us.  I also wonder about our rural areas.  I learned a lot about rural Wisconsin, and I consider myself a lifelong Wisconsinite. 

 I was surprised by a lot of this sentiment, and it's left me wondering are our policies meeting the needs of our rural areas? There's some pretty serious need in outstate Wisconsin, as in other places, granted.  But I wonder, could something be different? I've talked mainly about perceptions from outstate Wisconsin.  It's absolutely the case that many folks in cities in our state, Madison and Milwaukee, also perceive the government's not responsive to their needs.  I think there is some need for our legislators to understand people form other parts of the state, more than they do currently.  I think the current context of partisan embattlement prevents a lot of that, but we certainly need more of it.   With respect to UW-Madison, in particular, here are three main lessons that I've taken away:  One is that sometimes on campus we say we need to communicate better, we need to tell people what we're doing.  I suppose that's part of the deal, but I also think part of it is in the way we do our jobs.  Those of us on campus who do get out to other parts of the state, I think we need to do more about just chatting with the locals, to be honest.  Telling people what we're up to, and explaining to them why we think our research matters for their lives.  So in my mind, this isn't about just packaging our messages differently. 

 It's about actually listening to people more, and understanding where they come from, and trying to figure out how our own work could contribute to their lives.  I also think, related to this, that that listening should not just be for show.  We shouldn't have town hall meetings to make it look like we're concerned.  That listening should be in the service of establishing long-term, mutually beneficial relationships.  That's hard and expensive to do.   It takes time, which none of us have a lot of, but I think it's very important.  And this is also not just a plug for the Morgridge Center for Public Service, although it is that, but I think, and I found it very refreshing to work at the Morgridge Center for Public Service for the past two years because it is a place where we're constantly talking about the common good.  We're constantly talking about service to others.  And I think that is a theme that, wow, we are so hungry for.  What about the common good? Where did that go? Let's draw more attention to it. 

  Finally, I still do this, too,  but I encourage you when you leave here tonight, the next time it comes up in conversation, "How can people be so stupid?" think about whether that's the right question to ask.  Is it that the ordinary American is ignorant and not capable of participating in democracy? Or is there something else going on that we ought to worry about? Finally, let me try to make you laugh, because I know this is very depressing, a lot of it.  What I'm going to share with you is my very favorite conversation from these, my five-plus years of travels around the state, and I know some of you have heard this before, but every time I say it, it warms my heart.   This is a group of folks who, men, retirees, people on their way to work, who are meeting in basically central west Wisconsin, and it took me a while to find these guys because they meet behind a curtain in the back of a diner every weekday morning, starting at about 6:30, and they play dice.  So it took me a while before someone divulged this to me, but the first time I went, and went through that curtain at the back of the place, they stopped playing dice for a good 45 minutes, and at the end of the game they said, "Kathy, you can come back, "but you're going to shake dice the next time you do, you better bring your change purse." And they said, "Do you know how to play Ship Captain and Crew?" And I said, "Why yes, I do." Thankfully, as a lifelong Wisconsinite I'd played Ship Captain and Crew many times with my family.  And Ship Captain and Crew, for those of you who don't know, is a dice game where you get three rolls.  You have a little dice cup, five dice, and you shake three rolls, and you have to shake a six, a five, and a four, in that order, and the remaining two dice determine how high your roll is.  Well these folks would start off playing a quarter a round, and then at 7:25 it'd be the dollar round, so kind of high stakes toward the end of the morning, before they all ran off to work or wherever they were going.  On my third visit, I'm playing dice with them, and also in town that day, there's a horse auction, and they're asking me about the horse auction.  So Henry says to me, "Why don't you buy one "of them horses? I got a trailer." And I say, "Well, I'm not sure where I would keep him." They knew by this time that I lived right in the middle of Madison, about a mile out from the stadium, and I invited them to use my driveway if they ever needed to, for a football game or such. 

 So I say, "I'm not sure where I would keep him." And Henry says, "Huh?" And I say, "Well, I don't know where I would keep him." And Henry says, "Ah, you'd keep him in Madison, that's where they keep all the..." (audience laughing) And he says, "Well, basically, all you've got to do "is buy the front end of the horse.  They've got the back end in Madison." (audience laughing) So, funny, but here's the problem.  We're playing dice and I keep winning, and winning, and winning.  And here I am, I'm three years into my project here, and I know full-well by this time, there's this perception, "Oh, you people in Madison, "You parachute in, you take all our money, and leave," and so, I'm really uncomfortable so I'm joking along with him and trying to lighten the mood a little bit.  And I say, "Well, I come and I ask for your thoughts, and I take your money." And Richard says, "Well, I tell you what, that's good, though, because we have so little of it." and I say, "Well, it all goes to Madison anyway, right?" Ha-ha-ha.  And Howard says, "We expect nothing less from Madison." And Richard says, "Well, at least it won't cost any postage to get it down there now." (audience laughing) So, thank you all very much.  Thank you.  (applause)   - Welcome everyone, to  Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.