The Recombobulation Minute

Last week, Democrats notched a number of big victories in elections across the country, with important wins in states like New Jersey, Virginia, Georgia and California.

And while Wisconsin did not have an election on November 4 of this year, these results can tell us something about November 3 of next year, the day the 2026 midterm elections will be held. 

While races like the one for mayor of New York City grabbed more headlines, it’s the elections that happened in the Virginia House of Delegates that could tell us more about what might be coming in Wisconsin next year. There, Democrats went from a slight majority of 51 of 100 seats to a near supermajority with 64 seats.

Those kinds of downballot results could suggest that Democrats are poised for a big breakthrough in the Wisconsin State Legislature, which will have its first election held fully under new maps next year. Democrats will have their first realistic chance to flip the legislature in more than a decade. A lot could happen over the next year, of course, but results like the ones in Virginia have to be encouraging for Democrats in Wisconsin. 

Find all of Dan’s work at The Recombobulation Area. Subscribe to The Recombobulation Area’s podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and see more the Civic Media website.

We are just about one year away from the 2026 midterm elections, and after some recent big announcements, the Democratic field in the race for governor is very nearly set. Just one major decision looms, and that’s the one from former lieutenant governor Mandela Barnes.

Barnes seems likely to run for governor. And because of that, his 2022 run for U.S. Senate warrants a fresh re-examination. So, in a new column at The Recombobulation Area, I took a closer look back at that race and his campaign. Barnes lost to Ron Johnson by about 1%, just 27,000 votes, in one of the closest elections we’ve ever had for Senate in Wisconsin. It was a near miss that reflected both Barnes’ potential and limitation. In retrospect, I think his campaign managed to be both overrated and underrated at the same time. Underrated in the sense that he was unfairly maligned in his effort to unseat a well-funded two-term incumbent, overrated in how the campaign made certain strategic errors that proved costly in the end.

If Barnes does indeed run again in a statewide race, he’s going to have to do things differently in order to win, plain and simple. 

Find all of Dan’s work at The Recombobulation Area. Subscribe to The Recombobulation Area’s podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and see more the Civic Media website.

The Wisconsin Department of Transportation just announced the official start date for one of its biggest ever construction projects, the I-94 East-West project, which will reconstruct and widen a 3.5-mile stretch of interstate highway in the city of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County.

This is a massive project with an estimated cost of more than 1.7 billion dollars. And with this official start date announced also came estimates for how long this will take. According to the DOT, construction is expected to last until 2033. And we know that these plans always underestimate how much things will cost or how long this will take.

At The Recombobulation Area, this project — and the local opposition to it — is something we’ve covered extensively, including with an award-winning four-part series called “Expanding the Divide.” 

With these plans now becoming a reality, it might be worth revisiting that series and considering just how awful these plans are, how unnecessary and expensive an extra lane is and how in southeastern Wisconsin, we’re going to be dealing with construction and delays for the next eight years in order to shave a few minutes off of suburban commute times while city streets and city problems go ignored once again. 

In recent weeks, the level of activity from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has increased quite a bit. There was a raid in Manitowoc at a Walmart parking lot where dairy workers were known to congregate, a series of arrests in Madison, and in Milwaukee, ICE is looking to expand its operations significantly by seeking office space downtown to go along with a new field office on the city’s northwest side.

This has been concerning for many, and not without reason. A recent large-scale ICE raid at an apartment building in Chicago saw reports of armed federal agents breaking down doors, U.S. citizens detained for hours on end, and children being dragged from their homes in the middle of the night. 

While the American immigration system has a host of problems, this kind of violent show of force is not an acceptable way to address these problems. And ICE also just received an injection of $45 billion in the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” so it is imperative for all of us to hold ICE accountable and speak out when things go too far. Right now, things are going way too far.

Find all of Dan’s work at The Recombobulation Area. Subscribe to The Recombobulation Area’s podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and see more the Civic Media website.

Tom Tiffany, Republican congressman representing Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District, has finally made it official: He’s running for governor. 

The election for governor in 2026 is the state’s first open race for the office since 2010, and it’s sure to invite many candidates to run. And on the Republican side, Tiffany’s is the most significant announcement yet. There’s a very good chance that he is going to be the Republican nominee for governor at this time next year. 

If that proves to be the case, it would signify a major shift in the center of power for Republican politics in Wisconsin. For so long, it’s been the WOW counties — Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington, three of the counties that surround Milwaukee — that have been the Republican stronghold in the state. But if Tiffany is the one at the top of the ticket, it will be the most clear indicator yet of how the party has shifted from more of a suburban one, to one where GOP voters are more centered in exurban or rural areas. 

Find this and more analysis of Tiffany’s candidacy for governor in my latest column at The Recombobulation Area. Subscribe to The Recombobulation Area’s podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and see more on the Civic Media website.

We’re taking a little bit of a detour this week on The Recombobulation Minute so I can tell you about a brand new project we’ve been working on here at Civic Media, that we’re really really excited about. 

Here at the Civic Media network, we produce a tremendous amount of content on any given day. From our news team all over the state, to our daily lineup of political talk and commentary shows, to our many podcasts and weekend shows, to local morning shows to all kinds of digital content, there can be a lot to keep up with. 

But now, we are bringing you a new way to find all of this tremendous content. It’s a new email newsletter called Civic Media Today. Like The Recombobulation Area, it also publishes on Substack. This is going to be your one-stop shop to connect with everything across the Civic Media extended universe, from podcasts and livestreams of your favorite shows to the latest on everything happening across Wisconsin. 

So, go subscribe to Civic Media Today, our brand new free newsletter. You’ll be glad you did. 

Find all of Dan’s work at The Recombobulation Area. Subscribe to The Recombobulation Area’s podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and see more the Civic Media website.

This year’s Wisconsin state budget included a rather unfortunate cut: The Republican-controlled budget committee eliminated funding for the Veterans Housing and Recovery Program that would have kept two facilities, in Green Bay and in Chippewa Falls, open and operational. 

This state program aims to provide temporary housing, training, and supportive services to military veterans who are experiencing homelessness or are at risk of becoming homeless in order to help them obtain permanent housing. 

In response to these looming closures, Democrats representing parts of Green Bay and Chippewa Falls introduced legislation in August to keep these facilities open. But Republican legislative leadership has not even allowed a public hearing on the bill. And the clock is ticking. Without these funds, these facilities are set to close by September 30 of this year. 

Republicans need to come to the table and step up to support our veterans now, before it’s too late. 

It’s a noble goal, and an important one, and the estimated cost of keeping these two facilities open is less than $2 million – not exactly an astronomical number in a $111 billion state budget. 

Find all of Dan’s work at The Recombobulation Area. Subscribe to The Recombobulation Area’s podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and see more the Civic Media website.

Big political news dropped the Friday before Labor Day weekend in Wisconsin, with right-wing state Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley announcing that she will NOT be seeking re-election to another 10 year term on the court. 

In her statement announcing the decision, Bradley bemoaned a “shift from thoughtful, principled judicial service toward bitter partisanship, personal attacks, and political gamesmanship” in recent years. If you’ve followed Bradley time on the bench, you couldn’t help but note the hypocrisy in that statement, because that’s the exact kind of extreme, toxic approach she’s brought to the Wisconsin Supreme court over the past decade. 

But beyond that, this sets up yet another open race for state Supreme Court in Wisconsin. This one, however, will be a bit different than recent races won by liberal justices Janet Protasiewicz and Susan Crawford, where majority control of the court was on the line. In this race, liberals will have the opportunity to expand their majority from 4-3 to 5-2, if candidate Chris Taylor, a former Democratic state legislator, wins the election in Spring 2026.

Find all of Dan’s work at The Recombobulation Area. Subscribe to The Recombobulation Area’s podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and see more the Civic Media website.

Look, it’s probably too early to have a conversation about the 2026 race for governor in Wisconsin. But our readers spoke, and they asked for our take on this, so we delivered an extensive breakdown of who is running and who might be running in both the Democratic and Republican primaries for the first open race for governor in 16 years. 

In that breakdown, I identified the top 4 potential contenders to be the candidate for the Democratic Party. They are: Attorney General Josh Kaul, Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, and State Senator Kelda Roys. There are more candidates we’re monitoring, too. 

This primary will be a remarkable opportunity for voters to choose the path forward for the party. But on the Republican side, it’s less about the voters, and more about the endorsement of one man: Donald Trump. Because whoever gets Trump’s endorsement is all but a lock to win that primary. 

Check out my column for much, much more in our too-early breakdown of the race for governor in 2026. 

Find all of Dan’s work at The Recombobulation Area. Subscribe to The Recombobulation Area’s podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and see more the Civic Media website.

In early August, massive flooding hit southeastern Wisconsin after what some are calling a “thousand-year rain event.” One Milwaukee County official even likened it to experiencing a hurricane. So many people are going to be struggling to recover from this cataclysmic event.

Because of that, it is imperative that elected officials and public institutions step up and help people in this hour of need. We’ve seen a tremendous amount of support from first responders all over the region, and we should all be grateful for their dedicated work.

Beyond taking care of these immediate needs, we need to be making sure our infrastructure in the region is built to withstand greater amounts of rainfall coming due to climate change. Many of the wettest years in Milwaukee’s history have occurred over the last decade. But reports have indicated that Milwaukee’s Greenseams program, implemented after floods in 1997, helped mitigate some of the damage from recent flooding. We need more programs like that if we’re going to build for a safer, more resilient future.

Find all of Dan’s work at The Recombobulation Area. Subscribe to The Recombobulation Area’s podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and see more the Civic Media website.