Is Wisconsin — or the country — really as divided as the maps make it look?
On the spreadsheet of unofficial election totals posted by each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties following the election Nov. 5, a handful showed a clear majority for the Democratic presidential ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Many more counties were won by the winning Republican ticket of former President Donald Trump and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. Trump garnered enough votes to carry Wisconsin and enough states to return to the Oval Office in January.
A lot of those Trump-voting counties were rural ones, contributing to longstanding stereotypes about a monolithic body politic of deep blue cities and a bright red countryside.
But months before Election Day, on a mild August evening in a quaint round barn north of Spring Green, the writer Sarah Smarsh cautioned against oversimplifying the politics of rural voters — and against turning a blind eye to a part of the country that, she said, has too often been written off.
Advertisement
Sarah Smarsh speaks during a presentation in August near Spring Green, Wisconsin. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)
“I grew up on a fifth-generation wheat farm in south central Kansas,” Smarsh said that evening. It’s a place of “tall grass prairie, which happens to be the most endangered ecosystem … and simultaneously the least discussed or cared about or protected. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that that’s the ecosystem of the place and people that I also happen to believe have not been given fair attention and due consideration.”
Smarsh made her mark with the book “Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.” As a journalist and author she has straddled the community of her upbringing and the urbane, academic world that she entered when she became the first in her family to pursue higher education.
The child of a carpenter and a teen mom, Smarsh has explored the socioeconomic divide in the U.S., mapping it to the destruction of the working class, the demise of family farms and the dismantling of public services from health care to public schools.
“I write about socioeconomic class and I write about rural issues, but that’s because I grew up in working poverty, and that’s because I grew up on a farm,” Smarsh said. And while those identities “are enormously consequential,” she added, she seeks to break down the assumptions that people carry about them. Her message: “You don’t know who my family is, and especially if what we assume is that they’re white trash, worthless.”
It’s a story that gives new context to the election results from 2016 on, and takes on new importance after the election of 2024. The residents of those places dismissed as “flyover country,” Smarsh said back in August, have many of the same concerns of urban and suburban voters, including reproductive rights, public schools, gun violence and other subjects. And understanding them in their diversity and complexity casts politics, especially national politics, in a more diffuse and complicated light.
Advertisement
Where ‘people don’t care about political affiliations’
Concern about climate change and a desire to live more sustainably led Tamara Dean and her partner to move to western Wisconsin’s Vernon County in the early 2000’s, where they built a homestead, grew their own food and became part of the local agricultural community.
Tamara Dean
Climate change followed them. In their county, extreme weather events became almost the norm, with a 500-year flood “happening every few years or every year,” Dean said in an interview.
“A rural community really coalesces when extreme situations happen and they help each other out,” Dean said. “And when we were cleaning up after a flood, helping our neighbors salvage their possessions or even getting people to safety, no one’s going to ask who you voted for, and people don’t care about political affiliations.”
Dean has written a collection of essays on the couple’s time in the Driftless region of Wisconsin, “Shelter and Storm,” to be published in April 2025 by the University of Minnesota Press.
Distrust of the federal government
Residents, she found, had something of an ambivalent relationship with the federal government.
For all the complexity of agricultural economics, the U.S. Department of Agriculture programs that provide financial farm support were familiar and well-understood by longtime farmers and easily accessible to them, she said. But when the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) promised recovery assistance for flooding in 2018, “it just took forever to come, and it took a lot of bureaucracy to try to get it,” Dean said. For individual applicants, “getting any kind of assistance might be so daunting that they just wouldn’t think it’s worth it.”
Advertisement
For Dale Schultz, a former Republican state senator who has been thinking at length about politics and government in recent years, the election outcome has prompted contemplation.
Schultz left the Legislature a decade ago after splitting with Republican then-Gov. Scott Walker over legislation stripping public employees’ union rights and weakening Wisconsin’s mining laws.
Since then he has campaigned for redistricting reform and supported the overturning of Wisconsin Republicans’ gerrymandered legislative maps. iIn October he went public as a Republican supporting the Harris campaign for president.
In his part of the state, he saw a distinct contrast between the Democratic campaign and the Republican one.
“I saw an extremely good Democratic effort to talk to people face-to-face,” Schultz said in an interview. The GOP campaign along with allied outside groups such as American for Prosperity, however, appeared to him to focus almost entirely on mailings, phone calls and media.
Advertisement
“It became clear to me that politics is changing from the time I spent in office, being less people powered and more media powered,” Schultz said.
Ignored by both parties
Schultz said he’s observed a level of anger among some of his one-time constituents that has alarmed and surprised him, a product, he suggests, of having been ignored by both parties.
Dale Schultz
One target has been regulation, to the point where “they’ve lost track of why regulations are important and why they should support them,” he said. Yet he sees the direct answer to that question where he lives in Southwest Wisconsin.
“In the last 20 years there has been a renaissance in trout fishing, like I could not even have imagined 20 years ago,” Shultz said. He credits the Department of Natural Resources and its personnel for working with local communities to ensure conditions that would turn trout streams into suitable habitat to support a burgeoning population of fish. “That doesn’t happen without water quality and water quality regulations, and land use and land use regulations.”
Schultz has been spending time in conversation with friends “who are like-minded and similarly curious,” he said. “And then you just watch and wait and see what happens, and try to voice concerns that are real and that need to be dealt with, and [that] we’re not going to be able to hide from as a country.”
He hopes for the return of a time when people like him, who consider themselves “just to the right of center,” can again “talk to everyone and possibly craft a solution.”
Advertisement
Back in August, Sarah Smarsh offered a gentle warning about the coming election to her audience in the round barn north of Spring Green.
“Whatever happens in November, everybody else is still here — the other side is still here,” Smarsh said. “And so there’s going to be some caring to do, and that’s probably going to be for generations, because we didn’t arrive at this moment overnight.”
The Wisconsin judge who allegedly helped an illegal migrant evade immigration authorities pleaded not guilty through her attorney on Thursday.
Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan entered the preliminary plea in federal court, which was surrounded by a swarm of protesters supporting the judge, who has become a symbol of resistance against the Trump administration’s immigration policy.
Dugan, 66, was arrested last month after being accused of obstruction of justice and concealing Mexican national Eduardo Flores-Ruiz from federal law enforcement.
Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan is seen entering the Milwaukee Federal Courthouse on May 15, 2025 in Milwaukee, Wis. Jovanny Hernandez / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Stay up to date on the Wisconsin judge who allegedly helped a migrant doge ICE
She is accused of rushing Flores-Ruiz, who is accused of domestic battery, out of her courtroom and encouraging him to use an exit that is not usually available to the public to help him evade immigration agents who were there to bust him.
Advertisement
She has denied wrongdoing in the case, with the defense seeking to have the charges dismissed, arguing that the judge is entitled to judicial immunity for her official acts.
Former US Solicitor General Paul Clement, who is on Dugan’s legal team, has slammed the prosecution as unprecedented and unconstitutional.
People gather during a demonstration in support of Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan at the Federal Courthouse in Milwaukee on May 15, 2025. Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn ImagesProtesters seen outside the courthouse. Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Dugan’s lawyers have requested a speedy trial during Thursday’s hearing, which lasted only five minutes.
The high-profile arrest led to outcry from Democrats, with protesters lining up outside the courthouse on Thursday in support of Dugan.
The protesters flashed signs that read, “Free Judge Dungan,” as they also criticized the spade of deportations under President Trump.
Advertisement
Dugan’s trial is scheduled to begin on July 21.
The two charges against Dugan carry a maximum penalty of six years in prison and a $350,000 fine.
A Wisconsin judge charged with helping a man who is in the country illegally evade U.S. immigration agents who were trying to detain him at her courthouse filed a motion to dismiss the case Wednesday, arguing that there’s no legal basis for it.
Attorneys for Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan argue in their motion that her conduct on the day in question amounted to directing people’s movement in and around her courtroom, and that she enjoys legal immunity for official acts she performs as a judge. They cite last year’s US Supreme Court ruling in President Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference case that found that former presidents have absolute immunity from prosecution for official acts that fall within their “exclusive sphere of constitutional authority” and are presumptively entitled to immunity for all official acts.
Advertisement
“The problems with the prosecution are legion, but most immediately, the government cannot prosecute Judge Dugan because she is entitled to judicial immunity for her official acts,” the motion says. “Immunity is not a defense to the prosecution to be determined later by a jury or court; it is an absolute bar to the prosecution at the outset.”
The judge overseeing her case is Lynn Adelman, a former Democratic state senator. Former President Bill Clinton appointed him to the bench in 1997.
A spokesperson for the US attorney’s office in Milwaukee didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Federal prosecutors charged Dugan in April with obstruction and concealing an individual to prevent arrest. A grand jury indicted her on the same charges on Tuesday. She faces up to six years in prison if convicted of both counts.
Her attorneys insist Dugan is innocent. She’s expected to enter a not guilty plea at her arraignment Thursday.
Advertisement
Dugan’s arrest has escalated a clash between the Trump administration and Democrats over the Republican president’s sweeping immigration crackdown. Democrats contend that Dugan’s arrest went too far and that the administration is trying to make an example out of her to discourage judicial opposition to the crackdown.
Dugan’s case is similar to one brought during the first Trump administration against a Massachusetts judge, who was accused of helping a man sneak out a courthouse back door to evade a waiting immigration enforcement agent. That case was eventually dismissed.
According to prosecutors, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz illegally reentered the U.S. after being deported in 2013. He was charged in March with misdemeanor domestic violence in Milwaukee County and was in Dugan’s courtroom for a hearing in that case on April 18.
Dugan’s clerk alerted her that immigration agents were in the courthouse looking to arrest Flores-Ruiz, prosecutors allege in court documents. According to an affidavit, Dugan became visibly angry at the agents’ arrival and called the situation “absurd.” After discussing the warrant for Flores-Ruiz’s arrest with the agents, Dugan demanded that they speak with the chief judge and led them away from the courtroom.
She then returned to the courtroom, was heard saying something to the effect of “wait, come with me,” and then showed Flores-Ruiz and his attorney out a back door, the affidavit says. The immigration agents eventually detained Flores-Ruiz outside the building following a foot chase.
Advertisement
“The government’s prosecution here reaches directly into a state courthouse, disrupting active proceedings, and interferes with the official duties of an elected judge,” Dugan’s motion states.
The state Supreme Court suspended Dugan from the bench last month, saying the move was necessary to preserve public confidence in the judiciary. A reserve judge is filling in for her.
Manuel Franco claims his $768 million Powerball jackpot
Manuel Franco, 24, of West Allis was revealed Tuesday as the winner of the $768.4 million Powerball jackpot.
Mark Hoffman, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
The Wisconsin Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big. Here’s a look at May 13, 2025, results for each game:
Advertisement
Winning Mega Millions numbers from May 13 drawing
06-29-33-47-68, Mega Ball: 20
Check Mega Millions payouts and previous drawings here.
Winning Pick 3 numbers from May 13 drawing
Midday: 0-8-3
Evening: 3-8-7
Check Pick 3 payouts and previous drawings here.
Advertisement
Winning Pick 4 numbers from May 13 drawing
Midday: 6-4-1-9
Evening: 3-8-3-6
Check Pick 4 payouts and previous drawings here.
Winning All or Nothing numbers from May 13 drawing
Midday: 03-07-08-10-11-13-14-18-20-21-22
Evening: 01-03-04-06-07-08-12-14-15-17-21
Advertisement
Check All or Nothing payouts and previous drawings here.
Winning Badger 5 numbers from May 13 drawing
01-17-23-27-31
Check Badger 5 payouts and previous drawings here.
Winning SuperCash numbers from May 13 drawing
09-20-23-24-34-39, Doubler: N
Check SuperCash payouts and previous drawings here.
Advertisement
Feeling lucky? Explore the latest lottery news & results
Are you a winner? Here’s how to claim your lottery prize
Prizes up to $599: Can be claimed at any Wisconsin Lottery retailer.
Prizes from $600 to $199,999: Can be claimed in person at a Lottery Office. By mail, send the signed ticket and a completed claim form available on the Wisconsin Lottery claim page to: Prizes, PO Box 777 Madison, WI 53774.
Prizes of $200,000 or more: Must be claimed in person at the Madison Lottery office. Call the Lottery office prior to your visit: 608-261-4916.
Can Wisconsin lottery winners remain anonymous?
No, according to the Wisconsin Lottery. Due to the state’s open records laws, the lottery must, upon request, release the name and city of the winner. Other information about the winner is released only with the winner’s consent.
When are the Wisconsin Lottery drawings held?
Powerball: 9:59 p.m. CT on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday.
Mega Millions: 10:00 p.m. CT on Tuesday and Friday.
Super Cash: 9:00 p.m. CT daily.
Pick 3 (Day): 1:30 p.m. CT daily.
Pick 3 (Evening): 9:00 p.m. CT daily.
Pick 4 (Day): 1:30 p.m. CT daily.
Pick 4 (Evening): 9:00 p.m. CT daily.
All or Nothing (Day): 1:30 p.m. CT daily.
All or Nothing (Evening): 9 p.m. CT daily.
Megabucks: 9:00 p.m. CT on Wednesday and Saturday.
Badger 5: 9:00 p.m. CT daily.
That lucky feeling: Peek at the past week’s winning numbers.
Feeling lucky? WI man wins $768 million Powerball jackpot **
WI Lottery history: Top 10 Powerball and Mega Million jackpots
This results page was generated automatically using information from TinBu and a template written and reviewed by a Wisconsin editor. You can send feedback using this form. Our News Automation and AI team would love to hear from you. Take this survey and share your thoughts with us.
