Wisconsin
Voting in Harmony: A Wisconsin township sets itself apart and has a knack for picking winners
HARMONY, Wis. (AP) — It’s hard living in harmony during these politically divisive times.
But residents of a tiny Wisconsin town say they have the simple answer: actually live in Harmony.
Residents of Harmony Township — spread out on rich farmland and residential subdivisions on the outskirts of Janesville — tend to live up to the name of the 24-square-mile town near the Illinois state line. They also offer a reliable barometer of the political leanings of the swing state of Wisconsin.
Since 2000, Harmony voters have sided with the winner in all 13 presidential and gubernatorial races.
“I do believe that the country is quite divided,” said town board Chair Jeff Klenz, sporting a long white goatee and wearing a Harley-Davidson T-shirt. “I don’t believe that same thing in Harmony Township. You don’t get the feeling of people being against each other.”
Klenz repeats a saying heard frequently around the town of 2,500: “Everybody lives in harmony in Harmony Township.”
Demographically, Harmony has the same percentage of white people as the state — about 86%. Almost 12% identified of Harmony residents identified as multiracial, above the statewide average of 2.2%. But there’s no Black population to speak of, in a state that’s 6% Black, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
Still, given Wisconsin’s recent political volatility, Harmony’s knack for picking winners is uncanny. Four of the past six presidential elections in the swing state of Wisconsin have been decided by less than a point. The only other of Wisconsin’s 1,800 towns, villages and cities that share the distinction is Merrimac, a village of about 500 people roughly 75 miles (121 kilometers) from Madison, according to research by Marquette University professor John D. Johnson.
What to know about the 2024 Election
Donald Trump carried the town of Harmony by just 36 votes in 2016 on his way to winning Wisconsin by 22,748 votes and becoming the first Republican since Ronald Reagan to take the state. Four years later, President Joe Biden won the town by 78 votes and carried Wisconsin by just under 20,682 votes.
Retired General Motors worker and 53-year Harmony resident Loren Hanson, 79, voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020 but doesn’t know if he can stick with him a third time this November. He’s having a hard time coming to grips with Trump’s felony conviction.
“I think our politics are a mess, quite frankly,” Hanson said. “And really bad this year. I’ve never been a solid Republican or Democrat. And sometimes you vote for the lesser of two evils, and this year I don’t know which is which.”
Hanson said he’s hesitating on Trump because of his personal troubles, calling him an “outlaw.”
“It would be really hard for me to vote for Mr. Trump right now,” he said, referring to his hush money conviction.
But Hanson has reservations about Biden as well.
“I think he’s old,” Hanson said. “He’s got some problems this way or that. Personally, I’d like to see both of them booted out and I’m disappointed that the parties can’t come up with someone younger.”
Klenz, a 68-year-old retired police officer, said after voting for Trump twice before, he’s sticking with him despite the conviction.
“Being in law enforcement for over 30 years, I never had a problem with our judicial system, but as I’ve gotten older and maybe wiser, I’ve seen that we certainly do have some problems,” Klenz said. He said the Trump conviction showed that the judicial system “has been used really different than it should be used.”
Despite the deep divisions in Harmony, both Republicans and Democrats say they don’t let politics drive how they treat one another.
“There are roots here that go down very deeply and they are roots of acceptance, respect and cooperation,” said 85-year-old retired nurse and Biden voter Lucille Vickerman, seated next to Trump voter Klenz.
“We vote almost half and half,” Vickerman said. “But we don’t hate each other. We don’t get into massive to-dos.”
But why?
For starters, people talk to one another to understand where the other is coming from, Klenz said.
Politics isn’t a driving force in Harmony “because most of the people around here are used to taking care of themselves,” Klenz said.
And when people do talk, it doesn’t tend to be about national politics, Vickerman said.
“They talk about what’s going on in the school system or what’s going on with the road repair,” she said.
Town clerk Tim Tollefson, whose job is to run elections, said politics just doesn’t divide people in Harmony the way it seems to in much of the rest of the state and country.
“I don’t think people take that part of politics and put it into whether people can be friends or not,” Tollefson said. “The signs out in the yard? You don’t see that many in Harmony Township.”
Vickerman said she was struck last fall after seeing a plethora of signs, including some painted on the sides of barns, during a drive through northern Wisconsin.
“Coming from here it was a little unnerving, to be honest,” she said.
Hanson said he avoids talking politics in Harmony “because I have friends on both sides and some are pretty extreme.”
Harmony is in southeastern Wisconsin, about a 15-minute drive from the Illinois border. It consists of farms that the town boasts are on “some of the best farmland in the U.S.” and houses built by people who work in the adjacent city of Janesville.
That’s the home to former House Speaker Paul Ryan and also the former home of the country’s oldest General Motors plant, built in 1919.
But when the plant shut down during the Great Recession in 2008, the city and region went through an economic and social upheaval, forced to readjust without a longtime major employer.
Harmony was established in 1848, the same year Wisconsin became a state. It carries the distinction of being one of the first in the country to construct its own town hall building.
Built in 1876, the building was moved about 30 miles northeast and is now part of the living history museum Old World Wisconsin.
Coincidentally, the presidential election in 1876, the year Harmony residents set about building their town hall, was one of the most contentious in U.S. history. Taking place during post-Civil War reconstruction, there were widespread allegations of electoral fraud, violence and disenfranchisement of Black voters.
Rutherford B. Hayes won Wisconsin by 6,141 votes, or just over 2 percentage points, in 1876.
There are parallels between that period and the present day, including “intense polarization with a shrinking kind of middle ground and a high level of rhetorical violence,” said Stephen Kantrowitz, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in the reconstruction era.
In this time of deep division, Kantrowitz said it was “wonderful” that both sides in a place as evenly divided as Harmony can get along.
But the larger question, he said, is what happens when communities like Harmony are presented with questions that cut to the heart of people’s sense of security, dignity and fairness.
“It sounds like Harmony is not in the middle of such a struggle,” he said. “It behooves the people who say politics aren’t top of mind to think about what they will do when suddenly an issue arises that is not so easily finesse-able.”
Vickerman, who moved to Harmony in 1960 when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, didn’t vote in 2016. But she cast her ballot for Biden in 2020. This year she’s soured on him and Trump: “I wish neither of them was running.”
“I’m not a Biden fan but I can’t bring myself to be a Trump fan,” she said. “I’m fearful that Trump will refuse to leave office if elected. There’s a part of me that does worry about our democracy surviving.”
Klenz voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020 and said he will vote for him again. He thinks the Republican is better on the economy than Biden.
And true to form for people from Harmony, Klenz adds, “I’m not too concerned with how other people are voting.”
Tollefson, who has lived in Harmony since 1998, said other communities can learn from how people there deal with political differences.
“Chill out,” he said. “Deal with the cards you were dealt and be happy. We’re only here a short time. Why waste your time being miserable?”
___
Associated Press writer Michael Schneider in Orlando, Florida, contributed to this report.
Scores of camping chairs and event tents surrounded the basketball courts at Elver Park on Madison’s west side on a day in late June. The smell of carne asada rode a light breeze as basketballs arced through the air against the backdrop of thick summer clouds.
The crowd was gathered for Quiotepec en Wisconsin, a basketball tournament hosted annually for more than 10 years.
Event organizer Guillermo Martinez Melgar said while participating teams tend to be from the Midwest, some come from as far as California. The thing that connects them all, he said, is their shared roots in Oaxaca, Mexico.
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A total of 14 men’s and 6 women’s teams appeared in the tournament. Over 100 players from Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay, Arcadia, Sparta, Minneapolis and Chicago traveled to Madison to compete for cash prizes.
Representing Oaxaca in Madison
Angelica Navarro Gomez is the captain of Madison-based team Las Alebrijes, which has played together for three years.
“It started off with one of our friends, Itzel and her sister,” she said. “There were no girls playing [in the tournament], and she decided ‘Hey, how about we make a team?’”
Las Alebrijes had never played basketball before, but saw it as an opportunity to grow.
“We just never looked back,” Navarro Gomez said.
Her sister, Marisela Gomez Castellano, said Oaxaqueños are known within Mexico for their special interest in basketball.
The region hosts a decades-old tournament called La Copa Benito Juárez, named after Mexico’s first indigenous president. That tournament attracts teams from across Oaxaca and the Mexican diaspora in the United States.
“I think there is a lot of pride in representing where you are from,” she said in Spanish.
Gomez Castellano said playing basketball in Oaxaca is tied to the community’s indigenous identity.
Soccer is widely accepted as the favorite sport in Mexico. The country has hosted the World Cup more than any other nation in the tournament’s 100-year history. But in the Sierra Norte region of Mexico, basketball is the unchallenged favorite.
In the 1930s, Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas introduced basketball as a method of folding the indigenous communities that resided in the mountainous region into Mexico’s wider national identity. Basketball has smaller courts than soccer, which are easier to build in the region’s terrain. While Cárdenas’ vision did not come to fruition — most indigenous communities remain isolated — basketball became a tradition and a part of indigenous identity itself.
Indigenous identity is still represented through the sport today. Las Alebrijes named themselves after the sculptures of mythical creatures that artisans carve in Oaxaca.
Tournament continues despite fear of immigration enforcement
While the community feels pride in bringing their customs to Madison, she said this year felt different.
“Right now, it looks a little empty with everything going on with immigration,” she said in Spanish. “People didn’t want to come because they were afraid of not knowing what could happen.”
Increased enforcement by ICE across the country and in Wisconsin is driving Latinos to be more cautious about how they show up in the community. Gomez Castellano said it has driven the community to have more “underground” and “low key” gatherings.
“So [at the tournament] you see the absence of the crowd, the absence of the community,” she said in Spanish. “And though we have some people here, you don’t feel the same energy and vibe as when everyone is present.”
Despite being “a little scared,” Gomez Castellano and organizers decided to publicize the Quiotepec tournament.
“I think we’re trying to resist and we’re trying our best,” she said.
For Gomez Castellano, resisting looked like showing up and participating, in spite of what could happen.
“I think that’s also beautiful and inspiring to see that regardless of all the fear and the violence that our community is facing, they’re still showing up and being positive about it,” she said.
Guillermo Martinez Melgar, the event organizer, said he hopes that the culture he and his community built will continue to grow.
“I would like it if there were more of these events throughout the year,” he said in Spanish. “I invite anyone to step up and host more events like this.”
After being sent to the losers’ bracket, Madison’s Las Alebrijes climbed back into the regular bracket to defeat Quitotepec Minnesota and become women’s champions. Milwaukee’s Sierra Mixe took first place in the men’s bracket.
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Speaker 1
It’s time for Wisconsin life. As people across the globe tune in to cheer on their country’s soccer team in the World Cup this summer, one Wisconsin community is competing in a different kind of tournament. Members of Madison’s Mexican-American community recently came together for an annual basketball tournament that celebrates their indigenous roots. Reporter Jonas Tijerino has more.
Speaker 2
Scores of camping chairs and event tents surround the basketball courts at Elver Park on Madison’s west side. The smell of carne asado rides a light breeze as basketballs arc through the air against the backdrop of thick summer clouds. This is Kyotepec in Wisconsin. A basketball tournament hosted annually for more than 10 years. That’s Guillermo Martinez Melgar, one of the event’s organizers. He says while participating teams tend to be from the Midwest and sometimes as far as California, the thing that connects them all is their shared roots in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Speaker 3
Somos paisanos que radicamos in este bonito de Madison.
Speaker 2
Angélica Navarro Gomez is the captain of Madison-based team Las Alebrijges. They’ve been playing together for three years.
Speaker 4
Yeah, um it started off with the fr um one of our friends, Ixel, and her sister. There was no girls playing and she decided like hey how about we make a team And she made the offer and we decided, you know what, like let’s give it a shot. We never play basketball so we decided, hey, there’s Let’s just give it a give it an opportunity and see we can grow from there and we just never look back.
Speaker 2
Her sister Marisela Gomez Castellano says oaxaqueños are known within Mexico for their special interest in basketball The region hosts a decades-old tournament called La Copa Benito Juárez, named after Mexico’s first indigenous president. That tournament attracts teams from across Oaxaca and the Mexican diaspora in the United States. Gomez Castellano says playing basketball in Oaxaca is tied to the community’s indigenous identity. And while the community feels pride in bringing their customs to Madison, she says this year feels different. is driving Latinos to be more cautious about how they show up in the community.
Speaker 5
Gatherings and communities are just like going back to what it was before, like more underground, more like local, more low-key. And so yeah, it was like we did publicize the whole tournament but we also were, you know, a little scared like would this br you know attract other non people that we don’t want, you know, and so then um but yeah. But so far I think we’re trying our business and we’re doing our best.
Speaker 2
For Gomez Castellano, resisting looks like showing up and participating in communities in spite of what could happen.
Speaker 5
And I think that’s also beautiful and inspiring to see that regardless of all the fear, the Como the agr the violence that our community is facing, they’re still showing up and being positive about it and and I think that’s really inspiring.
Speaker 2
After six games, Madison’s Las Alebrijges defeated Kiotepec, Minnesota to become women’s champions. Milwaukee’s Sierra Mije took first place in the men’s bracket.
Speaker 1
Jonas Tijerino brought us that story about the Quiotepec in Wisconsin basketball tournament. Wisconsin Life is a co-production of Wisconsin Public Radio and PBS Wisconsin in partnership with Wisconsin Humanities. Additional support comes from Lowell and Mary Peterson of Appleton
“Wisconsin Life” is a co-production of Wisconsin Public Radio and PBS Wisconsin. The project celebrates what makes the state unique through the diverse stories of its people, places, history and culture.
WEST ALLIS (WLUK) — The Wisconsin State Fair unveiled dozens of new menu items coming to the fairgrounds for the 175th fair.
80 new food and drink options were unveiled Friday afternoon. Many of the items will feature Ellsworth Cooperative Creamery cheese curds, as they were declared the official cheese curds of the state fair. However, Door County cheese curds will be featured on the cheddar garlic longanisa lumpia, according to the list. It isn’t clear which Door County cheesemaker is supplying the cheese curds.
Here are all the new items coming to the fair:
- Al Pastor Pizza
- Bayou Crunch Cup
- Big Pat’s Pit Stop Punch
- Birria Flamin’ Bombs
- Biscoff Hot Fudge Cup
- Bloody Mary Mac Daddy
- Blue Ribbon Watermelon Mint Julep
- Bourbon Deep-Fried Pecan Pie
- Bugged Out Frozen Cheesecake On-a-Stick
- Bunzel’s Hungarian Sausage Sandwich
- Candied Bacon Cheese Curds
- Caramel Apple Cheese Curd Tacos
- Cevapcici – Croatian Sausage Sandwich
- Cheddar Garlic Longanisa Lumpia with Banana Ketchup
- Chicken Cordon Bleu Sausage
- Chimi-Brat-Changa
- Chocolate Covered Strawberry Sipper
- Churro Dog
- Circus Peanut Spritz
- Cold Foam Berry Blast
- Color-Changing Swamp Juice
- Cookie Butter Coffee Float
- Cosmic Funnel Cake
- Cranberry Dream Bar
- Cream City Cone
- Cuban Fries
- Deep Fried Horchata Balls
- Deep-Fried Ranch
- Deep-Fried Top The Tater
- Bloody Mary Pickles & Dill-icious Pickles
- Dill-uxe Pickle Fries
- Egg Roll A-la-Mode
- Ellsworth Fresh Cheese Curds
- Freedom Brat
- Freeze Dried Cheese Curds
- French Onion Cheese Pull
- Fruit Roll-Up Remix
- Gluten-Free Chimichurri Cheese Curds
- Guac This Way Tots
- Hawaiian Pizza Slush
- Hot Honey Bacon Corn Dog
- Hot Honey Chicken Lemonade
- Hot Honey Heatwave Fries
- Ice Cream Nachos
- Lemon-Lime Spritz
- Little Smokies Campfire Meal
- Monkey Bread
- Monster Blue Hawaiian Dirty Soda
- Nitro Cheesy Puffs
- Orange Creamsicle Lemonade
- Patriotic Punch
- Peach Beary Boba
- Peaches n’ Cream Whipped Frozen Lemonade
- Peachy Keen Cooler
- Pineapple Pop Paradise
- Pop’s Kettle Me Squeeze
- Porky Puff
- Potato Chip Sundae
- Ranch BLT Dog
- Red, White, & Berry
- Redneck Brat
- Smoked Pork Pierogi Sliders
- Soft Serve Beer
- Spam Jerky Sampler
- Star-Spangled Bomb Pop
- Sweet Lemon Berry Cheese Curds
- Tanghulu
- The Blue Moo Lagoon
- The Dirty Dog
- The Wisconsinite Slush
- Tilt-a-Spritz
- Tinga Tango Chicharrones
- Toffee Tumble
- Triple Chocolate Mini Donuts
- Tropical Tide
- Vegan Cheesesteak Eggrolls
- Waffle Cone S’mores
- Why Not Tots
- Wild Grape Dirty Soda
- Wisco Short Rid Corn Dog
- Wisconsin Chocolate Barnyard Float
- Southwestern Chorizo Pasty
In addition, a few new vendors are joining the Wisconsin State Fair. All Family Concessions will be found on the Back Forty. Dale Z’s On Tour will be on Grandstand Avenue and Second Street. Lulu Tanghulu will be in the expo center. And the Yuengling Beer House will be on Central Avenue and Benno’s Micro Alley.
The original cream puff and the chocolate cream puff will be offered at the 2026 Wisconsin State Fair. The new ‘Fair-aschino Cherry Cream Puff’ will be available while supplies last each day. Unlike the original and chocolate puffs, they won’t be available for pre-order.
Some of the new food offerings at the fair are also up for the Sporkies and Drinkies awards. The options up for the awarded are bolded in the list above.
The Wisconsin State Fair runs August 6 through August 16.
Residents can attend the July 16 meeting in Sheboygan or submit written comments by email to NOAA.
Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary has 36 shipwrecks
Discover the history, shipwrecks and impact of the Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary, established to protect maritime heritage in Lake Michigan. This video was created by the Wochit AI tool.
Wochit
SHEBOYGAN – Residents can attend or comment on an upcoming meeting of the Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary Advisory Council scheduled for July 16 in Sheboygan.
The gathering will take place from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Sheboygan County Museum, 3110 Erie Ave., according to a community announcement. Members of the public are invited to attend and observe discussions.
The agenda includes routine council business, updates from working groups, community reports and briefings from NOAA staff on sanctuary programs, research and upcoming events.
Public can provide comments during meeting
A public comment period is planned for about 7:50 p.m., giving attendees a chance to share feedback directly with council members.
Those unable to attend may submit written comments by email to jean.prevo@noaa.gov, according to the announcement.
Council shares updates on sanctuary programs
NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries will provide updates tied to the Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary, including research initiatives and community engagement efforts.
More information about the council and its activities is available online at sanctuaries.noaa.gov.
This story was created by reporter Nida Tazeen, NTazeen@usatodayco.com , with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Journalists were involved in every step of the information gathering, review, editing and publishing process. Learn more at cm.usatoday.com/ethical-conduct.
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