The 2024-25 Wisconsin Badgers could be a surprise team in the Big Ten and nationally if a trio of Minnesotans can perform at a high level. Nolan Winter is back for his sophomore season, Steven Crowl will undoubtedly start every game for a fourth straight season and Daniel Freitag hopes to be one of the best freshmen in the conference.

Crowl attended Eastview High School in the Twin Cities. Winter, like past Badgers stars Tyler Wahl and Nate Reuvers, attended Lakeville North High School, which is southern suburb of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Freitag went to Breck High School after open-enrolling from Bloomington Jefferson, both of course located in the Twin Cities.

But they are just a few names from Minnesota who have helped guide the Badgers to significant success over the last 20 years. The Minnesota-to-Wisconsin pipeline really took off in former head coach Bo Ryan’s third season — 2003-04 — in Madison. Since then, there are eight players from Minnesota who have left their names in Wisconsin record books.

Taylor was a tremendous point guard who as a senior helped the Badgers go 30-6 in 2006-07 and finish No. 6 in the final AP Top 25 poll. They made it to the second round of the NCAA Tournament where they were upset by UNLV as a No. 2 seed.

Leuer wound up playing in the NBA for eight seasons after sensational junior and senior seasons with the Badgers. He averaged 18.3 points and 7.2 rebounds to create an elite 1-2 punch with Jordan Taylor in 2010-11.

Taylor was a beast of a point guard who wound up being voted First Team All-Big Ten twice and an All-American second team selection as a junior in 2010-11. The Badgers went to the Sweet 16 as a No. 4 seed in 2011 and 2012. Taylor is second all time in Badgers history with 464 assists.

Bruesewitz never stuffed the stat sheet but he started nearly every game for Wisconsin during his junior and senior seasons. The Badgers went to the Sweet 16 when he was a sophomore and junior and they lost in the second round of the tourney during his senior year in 2012-13.

Berggren started all 71 games he played for the Badgers in 2011-12 and 2012-13 and averaged about 10 points per game while serving as a 7-footer to control the paint on the defensive end. As a senior, his 2.1 blocks led the Big Ten.

Davison started 157 of 161 games with the Badgers and made an instant impact as a true freshman. He was leading the team to a ranking as high as No. 4 in the nation in 2020-21 only to have that team finish 18-13 and lose in the second round of the NCAA Tournament as a No. 9 seed. In 2021-22, Davison once again led the Badgers to the second round of the tournament as a No. 3 seed before getting upset by 11th-seeded Iowa State.

Reuvers arrived in Madison and started 15 games as a true freshman and 104 in his career. No player in Wisconsin history has more blocks than Reuvers’ 184.

Wahl’s 162 games in five seasons with the Badgers is the most in program history. He scored 1,350 points and grabbed 800 rebounds in his career, though the Badgers never made it past the second round of the NCAA Tournament — even though they were a No. 3 seed in 2022 and a No. 5 seed in 2024.

Wisconsin has had more than its share of campaign visits this year, but there’s been just one to Prairie du Chien, a community of about 5,500 residents along the Mississippi River.

This was no accident. As former President Donald Trump addressed supporters from a high school gymnasium, he spoke in front of a posters of mug shots, including one showing the face of a non-citizen who was recently arrested in Prairie du Chien on multiple felony charges.

During the visit, Trump told the crowd that “every state is a border state.” He accused President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris of enabling illegal immigration. And he tied the issue to violent crime, despite multiple studies showing immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.

“I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs and vicious gang members,” Trump said.

In Wisconsin, Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to rank immigration as a top issue,

according to a recent survey of registered voters from the Marquette University Law School

. And though Wisconsin is more than a thousand miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, immigration has emerged as

one of the top issues

between Trump and Harris.

Trump regularly invokes anecdotes about immigration and crime. But despite some high-profile individual cases, University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Michael Light says research shows increased immigration is not tied to higher crime rates.

“Criminologists have been studying the issue of immigration and crime for over a century and, generally speaking, what we find is that immigrants tend to have lower crime rates than native-born U.S. citizens,” he said. “It’s a fairly consistent finding.”

Light says

recent studies suggest

that pattern holds true, whether an immigrant is here legally or illegally.

“Obviously, undocumented immigrants do commit crimes,” he said. “But the question is, is that level of criminality higher than for other groups? And, generally speaking, the research that we have suggests no.”

If he’s elected, Trump has pledged to revive a program known as Title 42, which restricted immigration on public health grounds, and to restore a policy requiring migrants to wait in Mexico while their asylum cases are pending. He’s also said he would end birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents who are in the country illegally — a pledge that has raised constitutional concerns.

Harris has emphasized her support for a bipartisan border proposal which would have included more funding for the border patrol as well as anti-fentanyl enforcement. Harris says she supports an “earned pathway to citizenship” for people who already live in the U.S.

Since President Biden took office in 2021,

unauthorized border crossings reached a record high of of nearly 2.5 million in 2023

, according to federal data about the number of people apprehended by border patrol agents for trying to cross between official ports of entry. Those numbers

h

ave fallen in 2024

after the Biden administration cracked down on eligibility for asylum claims.

University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Political Science Professor Anthony Chergosky thinks the issue puts Harris and her Democratic running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, at a disadvantage.

“I don’t think the Harris-Walz ticket is trying to win the issue of immigration and border security,” Chergosky said. “I think they’re trying to reduce the Republican advantage.”

Trump’s

promise to carry out the largest deportation in U.S. history

has raised alarm bells from agricultural industry groups, including the right-leaning Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation and the left-leaning Wisconsin Farmers Union.

Tyler Wenzlaff, a lobbyist for the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation, says mass deportations would worsen a labor supply shortage.

“This is especially true in dairy farming, because it requires yearlong labor,” he said. “It’s a 24/7, 365 industry.”

According to one survey

from the School for Workers at the UW-Madison, thousands of immigrant workers without legal residency perform an estimated 70% of the labor on Wisconsin dairy farms.

Tina Hinchley, a dairy farmer in Cambridge, says the industry would be “crushed” without their contributions.

“They are necessary for us to have America’s Dairyland,” she said. “If we did not have these people that work tirelessly on our farms and care about our cows and work alongside us, just like family members, we would not be able to do what we’re doing.”

Trump has repeatedly accused immigrants of taking jobs from native-born Americans, but Hinchley said that doesn’t reflect reality.

“There is not enough help in our rural communities,” Hinchley said. “There is not enough people that want to get up at four in the morning and work all day around cows.”

At Trump’s rally in Prairie du Chien, area resident Kevin Johll said he believes the former president is the right person to get the country “back on track” by ensuring strong border security.

“We want people to come to the country,” he said. “We want them to do it legally. You know, there’s laws and orders in this country.”

Frank Walterscheit, who lives in the Poynette area, said he hasn’t been impressed by how Harris has “flip flopped” on border security.

“She’s the one that created this mess, so I don’t know how she’s gonna fix it,” he said. “She’s had three-and-a-half years, and she hasn’t done anything.”

According to

Marquette’s polling

, 31% of Republicans listed immigration as their top issue, behind only the economy. For self-described independent voters, the number was 6%. Among Democrats, just 1% said it was their top issue.

Jon Sutton responded to Trump’s visit by protesting with other Crawford County Democrats. He said he was disturbed by how the former president was using one criminal case in the small Wisconsin city to demonize a whole group of people.

“It kind of gives a bad, almost a black eye to the town,” Sutton said. “A lot of the the Trump campaign is based on immigration, and what I perceive as as sort of racist and and anti-immigrant sentiments that I just don’t share.”

Joe Schulz contributed reporting. Wisconsin Public Radio can be heard locally on 91.3 KUWS-FM and at 

wpr.org.

© Copyright 2024 by Wisconsin Public Radio, a service of the Wisconsin Educational Communications Board and the University of Wisconsin-Madison

A study by the Pew Research Center found that 36.2 million Latinos will be eligible to vote in 2024, up 4 million from the 2020 election. This makes Latino voters one of the most critical voting blocs, leading both Democrats and Republicans to ramp up their efforts to tap into such potential support. In Nevada, Latinos are projected to be crucial in both the presidential race and the contest for the state’s other Senate seat, pitting incumbent Jacky Rosen (D) and against Republican Sam Brown. Ads from both parties populate platforms like YouTube — one of the three most used apps by Hispanics — trying to win over the Latino voter bloc.

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What these ads, as well as the political machine, seem to miss is that Latinos are not a monolithic group. This can lead politicians to miss out on the many different factors that shape Latino identities. Voter tendencies can vary significantly between different Latino groups — and even within Latino families.

A multigenerational perspective

Rico Cortez is a Mexican American living in northern Nevada. He was raised by a single mother, Rebecca Guerrero, and his Latino roots, along with growing up with a strong matriarch, have shaped his political views. “Women’s rights are super important to me because women raised me. Women brought me into this world,” Cortez stated.

Latinos tend to put a larger emphasis on family than that of non-Hispanics. According to the Pew Research Center,84 percent of Latinos believe that family members are more important than friends. Cortez moved back to northern Nevada five years ago to care for his aging mother because his connection to his family is so important.

Rebecca Guerrero was born in Verdi, Nev., in 1929, making her 95 years old. Despite her age, she is still civically engaged and has consistently voted throughout her lifetime. For her, it was important to pass on this civic duty to her children. Her political identity has shaped Cortez, and today, both Guerrero and Cortez represent a unique part of the Latino vote in Nevada.

As a young mother, Guerrero struggled with the cost of living in Nevada. “Well, it was no picnic. It was rough because the man that I was married to didn’t care too much. And we had to go on welfare to get my kids what they needed,” she remembers. Rising rent prices, inflation and increasing the minimum wage have become increasingly important to Guerrero and her family.

This falls in line with the priorities of other Latino in Nevada. In the state with the largest Latino middle class, the cost of living is one of the most significant issues for many Latino voters. Eighty-four percent of Latinos in Nevada agree that it is difficult for middle-class families to prosper in the United States. Republicans — like GOP Gov. Joe Lombardo — have capitalized on this by touting their ability to do things like loosen requirements for business licenses in the state and tighten immigration laws to save jobs.

Immigration is another critical issue for Latinos in Nevada, and Guerrero has her own immigration story. At 10 years old, she had to leave her dying grandfather in Durango, Mexico, to travel to live with her aunts in California. Leaving him behind was hard for her., “I had to kneel and have my grandfather do the sign of the cross and bless me. Then I crossed, he stayed on that side, and I came to this side,” she says.

While some Republicans have used immigration as a selling point to Latino voters, the Trump campaign has pushed anti-immigration rhetoric and massive amounts of disinformation, leaving some voters, like Guerrero, upset; when asked about Trump, she stated, “If you don’t have a good president, well, everything goes to pot. If we get Trump, well, Trump is an asswipe.”

According to aUnivision poll, Latino voters in Nevada favor Kamala Harris by 18 points. While both Guerrero and Cortez will be voting for Harris in November, 41 percent of Latino voters are undecided. Issues like abortion and border security are making some lean toward the former president.

Abortion is one of the most significant issues for Cortez in this election cycle. He sees reproductive rights as an essential part of supporting women, “I’ve just always been an advocate for women. I don’t want to see my little nieces having to fight for things that my mother already fought for.”

For Guerrero, abortion has been a bit of a gray area. She comes from a strong Catholic background. Catholic doctrine opposes abortion. And withCatholicism being the largestfaith amongst Latinos, it can sway values and belief systems. While Guerrero is still very religious, time and conversations with her son eventually led her to support a woman’s right to choose. Cortez and Guerrero are among the 44 percent of Nevadan Latinos who say they will vote “yes” on a ballot measure that would establish the right to abortion in the Nevadan Constitution.

The issue of abortion reflects how Latino viewpoints can differ significantly depending on factors such as age, religion and party affiliation. While the Latino vote will be crucial in Nevada and across the nation in November, it is not monolithic, and many different cultures and life experiences shape the identities and values of Latinos in the Silver State.

Regardless of the differences, Cortez is proud to be Latino and is excited to see how important the Latino vote has become in Nevada. He celebrates the sense of community he feels being Mexican American: “I love that sense of community. I think we have a strong sense of community, and we care for each other and look after each other.”

In the weeks leading to Election Day, The Fulcrum will continue to publish stories from across the country featuring the people who make up the powerful Latino electorate to better understand the hopes and concerns of an often misunderstood, diverse community.

What do you think about this article? We’d like to hear from you. Please send your questions, comments, and ideas to newsroom@fulcrum.us.