‘It Feels Like We’re Being Punished for Something’: Life Inside Wisconsin’s Most Polarized and Predictive County

In the meantime, mentioned Steur, “There are two Wisconsins. There’s the one in downtown Madison, and there’s the one at dive bars in Prairie du Sac,” the city adjoining to the place we had been sitting. “I like each of them. … I don’t know methods to construct the bridge — or rebuild it, if there ever was one.”

Rock Springs is a bit of the opposite, redder Wisconsin, and that’s the place Ken Pieper sells popcorn from an old-timey wagon a few block away from a mead distillery. Pieper owns River Creek Popcorn, which used to function out of a storefront till floods ripped by the small downtown and destroyed it. Now, he’s conveniently located outdoors his personal home, which sports activities an indication on the garden for Tim Michels, the Republican challenger to Evers. “There’s a silly a part of this, too,” Pieper mentioned of working so near residence. His former sunroom is overrun with popcorn paraphernalia.

He and his brother Dennis stepped out of the wagon to sit down on a bench within the chilly sunshine and speak politics, which they often strive to not do, since they’re on reverse sides. Each grew up in Sauk County, on a farm a few mile outdoors of city, and Ken has a easy clarification for a way his brother’s political path diverged from his personal. “Ding-a-ling went to work for the academics union.”

Ken hopes Michels wins the governor’s race as a result of “schooling in Wisconsin is trashed. … I don’t suppose it was essentially [Evers] that trashed it, however he ain’t essentially helped.” (Dennis interjected: “It was Scott Walker that trashed it. I taught for 35 years, so I do know.”) Ken simply hopes Michels, a rich businessman and political novice in Wisconsin who received Trump’s endorsement after which gained the GOP main, gained’t be one other Trump. Ken likes a few of what Trump did for the nation, however “If he’d stayed off Twitter and discovered to zip his entice, he would’ve been an entire lot higher politician. … That sort of worries me about Michels, I imply, he’s sort of a Trump individual.”

The Ken/Dennis divide encapsulates the fitting/left divide within the midterms: For Ken, the financial system is the highest difficulty, and for Dennis, it’s abortion. “The financial system was already beginning to go downhill badly already when Covid got here in,” Dennis mentioned. “So how will you say it’s a Democratic factor when mainly it’s been right here for 4 years already?”

There adopted a semi-friendly bickering match over whether or not Mandela Barnes is just too far left.

Dennis: “And also you’re considering your man isn’t too far proper?”

Ken: “You’ll be able to’t get any farther left than with Mandela Barnes.”

Dennis: “In what approach?”

Ken: “Professional-abortion, massive federal authorities, growth of the federal government …”