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In swing-state Wisconsin, new districts threaten the GOP hold on the Legislature
Packers fans Heather Gunnlaugsson, left, and Tim Mahoney, right, dance as the Packer Tailgate Band plays “Roll Out the Barrel” on Sunday, Sept. 29, before the Packers’ game against the Minnesota Vikings in Green Bay, Wis.
Angela Major/Wisconsin Public Radio
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Angela Major/Wisconsin Public Radio
GREEN BAY, Wis. — Smoke from portable grills filled the air with the smell of bratwurst on a recent Sunday in the parking lots that surround Lambeau Field.
People were gathered to watch the Green Bay Packers take on the rival Minnesota Vikings, but in a state and city where football is a staple of the culture, they were also there for the pregame tailgate and the experience of one of Wisconsin’s premier gathering places.
In one of the crowded lots, the Packers Tailgate Band meandered its way through lawn chairs and folding tables full of food. Brass and woodwind instruments carried the tune while a makeshift drum set mounted to a stroller kept the time. When the band played “Roll Out The Barrel,” a Wisconsin polka staple, people got up from their seats and danced.
“It’s probably like the best job I have,” said Tim Kozlovski, the band’s sousaphone player. “It’s just having fun with people and partying with them and getting them in the spirit for the game.”
Kozlovski said the Packers unify people in Wisconsin — he calls it a “good place in your heart.” And in an atmosphere like that, he said there are some things you just don’t talk about, like politics.
“You gotta learn to keep that to yourself when you’re trying to make people happy,” he said.
Not everyone has that luxury in Green Bay, where for the first time in years, Lambeau Field and the surrounding community are part of a fierce campaign that could decide control of the Wisconsin Legislature. A couple of parking lots over, local Democrats are tailgating, hoping to unlock the political power they were granted when the state redrew its political maps and turned this once-safe GOP district competitive.
“I actually enjoy talking about politics,” said Ryan Spaude, the Democratic candidate running to represent this area at the state Capitol in Madison. He’s a local prosecutor. “I enjoy having a respectful dialogue with other folks about politics. I also think we can do better than some of the yahoos that are down there in Madison right now.”
Wisconsin Assembly Candidate Ryan Spaude mingles with voters and other Democrats at a tailgate Sunday, Sept. 29, outside of Lambeau Field.
Angela Major/Wisconsin Public Radio
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Angela Major/Wisconsin Public Radio
Spaude is well aware of the divided nature of his district. President Joe Biden would have won this district in 2020—former President Donald Trump would have carried it in 2016. He jokes that this district is as purple as some of the Minnesota Vikings jerseys in the crowd that day.
“Ninety-nine seats in the state Assembly,” Spaude said. “There’s about a dozen that are like mine that could go either way. These seats will determine who gets the majority.”
Wisconsin could swing up and down the ballot
When it comes to races for statewide office, Wisconsin has a well-earned reputation as a swing state. Four of the last six presidential contests have been decided by less than a percentage point.
But in races for the Legislature, it’s been anything but competitive ever since 2011, when Republicans took control of state government and redrew the state’s legislative district lines, cementing their power for years to come.
“There would be a couple competitive seats in the state Assembly every year, but the outcome of them was basically inconsequential,” said John Johnson, a redistricting expert at Marquette University Law School. “There was no chance that majority control of the chamber would change.”
The GOP used its majorities to shift Wisconsin’s politics to the right. When Republican Scott Walker was in the governor’s office, they famously passed laws that weakened unions in a state with deep ties to organized labor.
Even after Democratic Gov. Tony Evers took office, their legislative majorities effectively gave Republicans veto power. As neighboring states expanded Medicaid or legalized marijuana, the GOP was able to block Evers’ plans that would have had Wisconsin join them.
This election, in this 50-50 district, the debate is different. Spaude said the number one issue he hears from voters is about the cost -of -living.
“The second issue is—why can’t you people work together? Just the gridlock you see,” Spaude said.
Wisconsin Assembly candidate Patrick Buckley stands outside Lambeau Field as fans tailgate Sunday, Sept. 29.
Angela Major/Wisconsin Public Radio
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Angela Major/Wisconsin Public Radio
Nearby, Patrick Buckley, Spaude’s Republican opponent is also making the rounds. He’s a small business owner and former police officer who currently chairs the board of Brown County, home to Green Bay.
“We get a lot of stuff done at the county,” Buckley said. “I’d like to take what I’ve learned there at the county to the state level. Because I think we need that there.”
Buckley said the new map created an opening for him because this new district had no incumbent. But he insists he hasn’t really thought about how his race could tip the balance in the Legislature. When asked about the top three things he talks about with voters, Buckley has a clear answer.
“Economy, economy, economy,” Buckley said. “A lot of people are hurting out there, and we gotta figure out what we can do as government to give them some sort of relief.”
New voting maps loosen GOP grip
The idea that Wisconsin could be in this position seemed, just a few years ago, almost impossible. Even with Evers in the governor’s office, the Legislature redrew Wisconsin’s maps to make them even more powerful with the help of a then-conservative majority on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court.
But everything changed in 2023 when voters flipped control of the court from conservative to liberal, and the new majority ordered new maps drawn
In an unexpected twist, the Republican-controlled Legislature chose maps that were drawn by Evers, making the political calculation that it was their least-worst option. In a brief speech before their vote, Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said the new maps would be “very competitive,” and the Legislature would be “up for grabs.”
“We will have the ability to decide if we want to go toward the direction of Minnesota and Michigan,” Vos said, referencing two states where Democrats control both the state Legislature and the governor’s office.”Or [if] we want to stay in the direction that we’re heading in Wisconsin, where we have the ability to have a lower tax burden, a lower regulatory touch, and still a historically good economy for Wisconsin. So I’m optimistic.”
Green Bay Packers fan Bud Hearley stands outside a garage turned into a bar in a neighborhood near Lambeau Field on Sunday, Sept. 29, before the Packers’ game against the Minnesota Vikings.
Angela Major/Wisconsin Public Radio
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Angela Major/Wisconsin Public Radio
This will be the first test of how that debate plays out in Wisconsin. As with many political issues, the answer could be complicated.
A few blocks away from Lambeau Field, Bud Hearley was watching the game with family and friends from the comfort of a garage turned into a bar. Hearley, who lives in a nearby district, said there are too many extremes in politics, and he’d like to see more compromise.
“I’m looking for a little more give and take on both sides with the issues that they make so extreme,” Hearley said. “There’s not enough middle.”
Hearly doesn’t fit neatly into one box when it comes to the issues. He favors the legalization of marijuana and thinks women should have the right to abortion, with some limits. He’s also a strong supporter of capitalism who is leery of government overreach. And he tends to vote for Republicans.
Back at the tailgating event, Democratic voter Denise Gaumer Hutchison concedes that Democrats may or may not win it all this year, but for the first time in years, she said they’ll at least be able to force Republicans to have a dialog. That was never possible, she said, under the state’s old maps.
Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chairman Ben Walker, left, speaks to Denise Gaumer Hutchison, center, a Democratic voter from Green Bay, outside Lambeau Field on Sunday, Sept. 29.
Angela Major/Wisconsin Public Radio
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Angela Major/Wisconsin Public Radio
“Those maps were not fair to the point that legislators wouldn’t even try,” Gaumer Hutchison said. “They wouldn’t even do doors. They wouldn’t even come talk to people who might be of a different opinion because they didn’t have to. Now they have to.”
It’s not just Lambeau Field’s Assembly seat that’s up for grabs this year. The district next door is so close it would have been won by both Evers, a Democrat, and Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson two years ago. The surrounding Senate district could also flip and give Democrats a chance at winning that chamber in 2026.
Regardless of the outcome, there’s already been a political sea change in Wisconsin, a state where the race for president is seemingly always up for grabs, and now the state Legislature is, too.
Now-former Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks at his primary election night event on June 9 in Blue Hill, Maine. Platner officially dropped out of the race July 10 following rape allegations from a former romantic partner that he denies.
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Graham Platner, Maine’s Democratic nominee for Senate, is officially out of the race.
The Maine Secretary of State said Platner filed the necessary paperwork to withdraw his candidacy two days after he announced he planned to do so following an accusation of rape by a former romantic partner. Platner denies the allegation.
The Maine Democratic Party has until July 27 to pick Platner’s replacement.
In his withdrawal notice, Platner said “people are desperate for change” and that’s why they voted “for a new kind of politics” by making him the Democratic nominee. He expressed gratitude for those who supported his campaign and said that he will continue to fight for “the movement we have built together and the future we believe in.”
He ended his notice with a strong statement aligned with the progressive platform.
“F*ck ICE. Free Palestine. Up the Hearts.”
Platner announced his plan to withdraw from the race in an 11-minute video he posted to social media on July 8. He said he had no choice but to suspend his campaign, citing it was no longer viable financially.
“We are going to lose our ability to fundraise. We are going to lose our ability to access voter data. We are going to lose all of the things that any campaign needs on the basic level simply to function,” he said.
Platner added that dropping out was not an admission of guilt. Rather, the decision, he said, is to keep the progressive movement in Maine alive to defeat Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November. Platner blamed the “political establishment” for his downfall and argued the goal was to force him out of the race.
“We built a campaign. We engaged in electoral politics. We motivated people. We banded together. We did it the way that we were told we are supposed to make change and we won. And now they are not going to let us have it. Not if it’s me,” he said.
Many powerful Democrats and progressives, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent, urged Platner to step down.
Platner has had to answer to a waterfall of scandals since he launched his Senate bid. Despite those, he ran away with the nomination in the June 9 primary, securing more than 150,000 votes — more than any other Democratic Senate candidate in Maine’s history.
Platner ran on a progressive platform centered on affordability, universal health care and getting corporate money and influence out of politics. During his campaign, he generated an undeniable amount of enthusiasm, something the Maine Democratic Party will have to harness if it hopes to beat Collins in the general election.
Multiple people have already launched campaigns to replace Platner, including former state Sen. Troy Jackson and former CDC official Nirav Shah, who both ran unsuccessful bids for governor.
Platner called on the replacement process to reflect “the Mainers who on June 9 turned out and showed that they are desperate for a different kind of politics.”
“We were asking for real democracy, and we did it the right way. And we won. But now the ball is in the court of the Democratic establishment,” he added.
The Maine Democratic Party said that it intends to hold a new nominating convention where around 600 delegates will select Platner’s successor. Candidates have until July 15 to declare their intent to seek the nomination and gather signatures from at least 8 of Maine’s 16 counties. Party leadership added they will make the nomination process public and transparent.
A Waymo robotaxi drives in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood this week.
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Heather Diehl/Getty Images
Police in San Mateo, Calif., posted Monday on social media that they had apprehended a pair of teenagers from a Waymo driverless robotaxi after the company alerted authorities to suspected criminal activity. It’s the latest incident involving video surveillance of passengers and others by autonomous vehicles — raising questions about the limits of privacy in such vehicles.
The Facebook post by the San Mateo County Police said: “Parents do you know where your teens are? @waymo does!”
The 15-year-olds were allegedly drinking alcohol and shooting toy guns from the car, according to the police. They said Waymo’s systems detected behavior that then triggered a safety response, after which the company disabled the vehicle and contacted police.
Waymo’s cars, equipped with an array of cameras, microphones and other sensors to monitor passengers and other nearby vehicles, are becoming more common in cities across the United States. Experts say the detention of the two teens in San Mateo highlights a potential — but not inevitable — trade-off between privacy and convenience. It also questions the extent to which companies similar to Waymo are required to hand over private data, including audio and video of passengers, in situations where a crime is suspected.
NPR reached out to Waymo, which is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, for comment on the details of the San Mateo incident and how the company responded, but did not hear back. But on its website, the company says that as many as 29 cameras in its autonomous cars provide an all-around view and “are designed with high dynamic range and thermal stability, to see in both daylight and low-light conditions, and tackle more complex environments.”
“There already exist laws that govern duty to report or even duty to protect” for carriers such as Waymo, according to Alessandro Acquisti, a professor of information technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “The privacy problems arise when and if driverless carrier companies used such laws or ethical obligations as a pretext for blanket, indiscriminate accumulation of identifiable data for unspecified future purposes.”
That includes not just monitoring people inside the cars, but outside too. Take, for example, a hit-and-run investigation last year in Los Angeles. Media reported that the police inquiry was aided by video captured by a Waymo taxi that had a clear view of the crime. Critics suggested at the time that authorities were using the company’s vehicles as a mobile surveillance platform. And during 2025 protests in Los Angeles against Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdowns, demonstrators vandalized Waymos, apparently angry that video recorded by the vehicles could be used by police, although there is no evidence that happened.
In a transparency report, Google says it received nearly 290,000 requests from governments worldwide in the first six months of 2025 for disclosure of user information across all its platforms, including Waymo. The company says that in more than 80% of the requests in those six months, some information was disclosed. “Google carefully reviews each request to make sure it satisfies applicable laws. If a request asks for too much information, we try to narrow it, and in some cases we object to producing any information at all,” the company says.
In an email to NPR, San Mateo Police Department spokesperson Jeanine Luna said that detaining the teens in the Waymo on Monday was “wholly appropriate” under the circumstances. “We received the call of a ‘firearm’ being shot from a moving vehicle,” she said. “Furthermore, the occupants were described as being possibly ‘intoxicated.’” she said.
“Being that the vehicle was disabled (the occupants had every right to exit the vehicle before police arrival, but they did not), a high-risk traffic stop was conducted to ensure the safety of all involved,” Luna added. “They were not arrested and were released to their parents, however, potential charges are still pending dependent on what the video from inside the vehicle shows.”
Autonomous taxis represent an ethical gray area
Robotaxis began to roll out across the U.S. in December 2018, when Waymo launched in Phoenix. These services have been used for less than a decade — so the norms surrounding them aren’t settled, experts agree.
The Facebook post may make Waymo passengers wonder what triggers a police intervention, says Irina Raicu, director of the Internet Ethics program at Santa Clara University. She has used Waymo’s driverless taxis and says ethically, the privacy issues surrounding them sit in a gray area. “There’s something about being in a car without another person that makes you think it’s private.”
“With all these recording devices, we don’t see them, [and] they’re not these obvious things being stuck in our faces,” Raicu adds.
That brings up a key issue: informed consent, Acquisti says.
“It is not clear the extent to which passengers … are reminded that when they step into the car, that they are being monitored, and most likely they are not told in its entirety how the data will be used,” he says.
Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity and privacy expert and professor at the Munk School at the University of Toronto, believes that Waymo does have a compelling interest in protecting its vehicles. He compares monitoring a robotaxi via cameras to a human taxi driver keeping an eye on passengers in the rearview mirror.
“Maybe the driverless car comes back … and it has all of its cushions slashed, and it’s like, ‘Who the hell did that? Let’s go and look at the tape,’” Schneier suggests. “You can’t have sex in the back of a taxi, right? Someone would say, ‘Stop it.’”
He concludes that some supervision makes sense. In an Uber rideshare, he notes, “most of the time there’s a camera recording the back seat.” (Uber says on its website that it allows drivers to install such cameras for the purpose of “fulfilling transportation services.”)
Waymo robotaxis, while a fairly common sight in the San Francisco Bay Area, are still a novelty in much of the country. And many people are hesitant to ride in one, according to a Pew Research Center poll published this month. The survey found that only 5% of Americans had ever ridden in a driverless car. Meanwhile, 71% of those polled said they would feel uncomfortable in one, with only 7% saying they would be “extremely or very comfortable” riding in one.
For that reason, experts who spoke with NPR said they were optimistic that it’s not too late to shift gears on privacy norms and policies surrounding these vehicles.
Acquisti doesn’t see why privacy measures can’t be built into driverless vehicles.
“I would immediately challenge the notion that people have to be monitored,” he says, noting that privacy-preserving technologies exist and can be installed.
“Driverless cars are coming, but they don’t have to come in this particular incarnation,” Raicu says. “They’re still being designed and redesigned. It’s early days.”
Donald Trump has terminated the remaining members of the independent, federal commission that assists election administration officials nationwide just a few months before the midterm elections, multiple outlets reported Thursday.
The remaining three commissioners of the four-member bipartisan commission were forced out on Thursday in different ways. The one Republican appointee resigned and the other two, Democratic appointees were notified of their terminations via email from the White House presidential personnel office.
“On behalf of President Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” the email, seen by Reuters, said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Election Assistance Commission serves as a “national clearinghouse of information on election administration”, accredits testing laboratories and certifies voting systems, and maintains the national mail-voter registration form developed by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, according to the commission’s website. The terminations follow Trump and top administration officials’ advocacy to change vote-by-mail requirements and investigations into the 2020 election outcome, which Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
“It is irresponsible and dangerous that this Administration remains dead set on causing chaos for our election officials across this country,” Arizona secretary of state Adrian Fontes said in a Thursday statement. “This move undermines the integrity of nonpartisan election administration.”
The 2002 law that established the commission, the Help America Vote Act, states the president can appoint replacements to the commission.
It is unclear how Trump will move ahead with the commission.
Reuters contributed reporting
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