 All right, I think we can get started now. Everyone wants to grab a seat. All right, thank you everyone so much for coming today. I know there's a lot happening in the world right now, so it's very appreciated that you make time in your day to come here. I'm Kayla Blado. I'm the media relations specialist here at EPI. Unfortunately, Congresswoman Gwen Moore was unable to make it today because they changed the vote schedule, but we do have an amazing new addition to our panel, Naomi Walker, who is the director of our network, which is our state affiliate network. So thanks so much for joining on short notice. Two quick notes. If you want to tweet about this panel at all, you can use hashtag fallofwisconsin and just the title of this awesome book that you all should read. And then also make sure you grab lunch and also some Wisconsin cheese that I brought. So again, I said I'm Kayla Blado. I'm extremely honored to be moderating this panel today because we get to talk about my favorite topic in the whole world, which is Wisconsin politics. And you might be wondering why I'm moderating, but I'm a fifth generation Wisconsinite. I'm very proud of my state. I love the rich political history of this deeply divided and misunderstood state. I'm from Waukesha, Wisconsin, a suburban county adjacent to Milwaukee County. Over the years, Waukesha has been known for its healing spring water, being the birthplace of Les Paul, the inventor of the electric guitar, and most recently for being a very conservative stronghold in the state. And also Brendan Fisher, he'll be talking, is also from Waukesha County. In 2012, for example, it's estimated that Waukesha County generated more Republican votes per capita than any other county its size in the U.S. Because of its ability to basically cancel out many Democratic votes in the state and shift election results to the right, my hometown has been referred to as Crucial Waukesha County by many reporters and political wonks waiting for the election results to roll in. But when I left Waukesha to attend the University of Wisconsin, I was able to escape from the conservative, Crucial Waukesha County to the progressive People's Republic of Madison as some residents like to refer to it. Here I saw firsthand how a strong investment in the UW system had made the University of Wisconsin a world-class public university. During my junior year of college in February of 2011, it was rumored that Governor Walker was about to introduce Act 10, the legislation that would strip collective bargaining rights from its public sector workers. My undergraduate friends and I joined a protest in support of bargaining rights for our teaching assistants by delivering Valentine's to the state capital building that read, we heart UW, Governor Walker, don't break my heart. At the time, I didn't really understand the significance of what was about to happen. Madison had frequent political actions and I didn't think that this one was going to be particularly different. Boy, was I wrong. The protest grew over the next few days and weeks until it erupted to over 100,000 people in the streets of Madison protesting the Straconian law. I couldn't believe it. 100,000 people protesting in the streets of a city of around only 200,000 people in Wisconsin in the winter. It's very cold. As the protest grew, I realized how critical this moment was for my state. Through many discussions and all of the national media coverage, I learned that Wisconsin's history was essentially built on labor unions and strong labor protections. As I'm sure Dan Kauffman will mention, Wisconsin had the first public sector labor union, the nation's first workers compensation law and the nation's first unemployment insurance program. Now all of this was being stripped away from the very state that conceived these ideas. We were at a crucial moment in the state's history. Today we're going to talk about the causes of this erosion of progressive values in the state and how, as a result, working people in Wisconsin have largely suffered and how Wisconsin's conservative takeover has had consequences nationally, including in the 2016 election. First we'll hear from Dan Kauffman, whose book, Fall of Wisconsin, as I mentioned, you should all definitely read because it's a really amazing chronicle of the political history of the state. Then we'll hear from Brendan Fisher from the Campaign Legal Center, who will give us an overview of how dark money has influenced elections in Wisconsin. Then Naomi Walker will explain how public sector unions have been substantially weakened in Wisconsin due to Act 10 and also how public sector unions nationally have fared due to the recent Supreme Court decision. Finally, we'll hear from my colleague David Cooper, who will go over his recent research on how Minnesota's economy and Wisconsin's economy took divergent paths in 2010, which has resulted in Minnesota's workers far better than Wisconsin's. Then we'll have a group discussion and then we will open it up to questions from the audience. So first, I'd like to welcome Dan Kauffman. Dan is the author of The Fall of Wisconsin, the conservative conquest of a progressive bastion in the future of American politics. Kauffman has written for the New York Times Magazine and then the New Yorker. Please join me in welcoming him. Thank you. Thanks for coming, you all. I understand there's something else happening in Washington of interest, but I'm glad you guys made the time for this. And I'm also particularly grateful to be here at the Economic Policy Institute, which has been incredibly helpful and is helpful, so helpful to reporters like me who are interested in labor issues, interested in income inequality. I've been helped by Dave as well as Elise Gould, Robert Scott, Josh Bivens. So many, so much of the research that comes out of here is really essential and is woven into this book. I think I'll just begin with a little bit about myself and how this book came to be and also a little bit about the state's history, which isn't as widely known as I think it should be. I grew up in Madison. My father was a professor of urban planning at the University of Wisconsin. And I was a beneficiary of the state's remarkable, the city's remarkable public schools as well as going to the University of Wisconsin for a time. And I think we were a little bit unaware of what we had been handed, a kind of inheritance, a kind of inheritance of the public sphere, really, this belief and commitment that was embodied most visibly by the University of Wisconsin. I'm not sure if there's another state that has had such a close state government that has had such a close relationship to the University of Wisconsin. And this relationship was forged in the early 20th century. It became called the Wisconsin Idea and it was spearheaded by perhaps the most important Wisconsin politician in the state's history, Robert LeFollett, fighting Bob LeFollett. He was district attorney, congressman, governor, senator and also ran for president on a third party ticket in 1924. LeFollett came, was born in rural Wisconsin and went to the University of Wisconsin. It was deeply influenced by two people, the Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice named Edward G. Ryan, who, I'll get to him in a second. And the other person is John Bascom, the chancellor of the state. Bascom believed, the chancellor of the university, Bascom believed in a kind of, that society was an organism and if things got two out of balance, that's the whole of it suffered. So he supported labor unions, the right to strike and he was part of what's called the social gospel movement. He was a huge influence on LeFollett and basically saw government as having a role in alleviating economic suffering. He also was a champion of a woman's right to an education. He felt that it was the only way to free women from subjugation by men. He was very much promoted the idea that government can create and foster equality. The other person that was a big influence on LeFollett was Ryan, who gave a famous speech in 1873 that's quite remarkable because it speaks to this moment too. LeFollett was in attendance, he had not yet matriculated and Ryan railed against the corporate domination of the Wisconsin state legislature at the time. Essentially, the whole legislature was owned by the timber and railroad interests. They decided who ran for office and they controlled what legislation was passed. And this is one of the things that he said, it's the epigraph of the book, that stayed with LeFollett and inspired him to launch this progressive movement. He said, the question will arise and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mind, which shall rule wealth or man, which shall lead money or intellect, who shall fill public stations, educated and patriotic free men or the feudal serfs of corporate capital. And it was amazing to come across this because this is of course what was happening in 2011 when Governor Scott Walker launched a remarkable attack on the labor movement. And this attack had been sought after by some of his donors for a long time. But basically he passed a bill that became called Act 10 that's essentially stripped public employees of their collective bargaining rights and prompted these massive protests, which was also the first real significant pushback against the Tea Party. And I think what you see, the genesis of the book started there. My mother was one of the thousands of people testifying and I woke up one morning in February to a really incredibly lengthy detailed email from her about what had happened. There was this effort to bring many people to testify in order to delay the bill. So people could become aware of it. They were trying to ram it through very quickly. And out of that, I wrote a short piece for the New Yorker called Notes from the Cheddar Revolution, which is what it was called at the time. And I began just following what was happening in my home state. And the book is centered around some of the remarkable citizens. There's a lot of policy in here, but I also wanna emphasize that it's really a narrative book about these people that refuse to let go of these democratic ideals that the state embodied through the La Follette tradition. And some of them, very few of them, there's one politician, but mostly they're ordinary citizens. And I think Wisconsin had an unusually strong connection between its citizens and its government, state government that persisted. And that was one reason why the protests erupted there. And it was also one reason why it was targeted in this history, this progressive history made Wisconsin a very attractive target to national conservatives. In fact, Governor Walker boasted in his book, if we can do it here, we can do it anywhere. And in some sense, that's proven to be true. Some of the stories, a lot of the stories are about labor. One of the people that I met early on was Randy Bryce, who was, when I met him, was a very obscure labor organizer who was kind of launching a desperate sort of solo organizing effort to stop the right to work bill, which was passed in 2015. But other people are the state's Native American tribes in Northern Wisconsin who were battling a mine a few miles from their reservation that was basically the bill to permit this mine was drafted by the company. And this corrupted process was what I think maybe offended people more than anything, the idea that they were not a party to these decisions anymore, that the state's politics were basically outsourced to these corporate donors and these powerful interests. And I think that's a pretty good overview of what's in the book. Trying to think if there's anything else I wanted to talk about in the introduction. I don't think so. I think I will turn it over to Brendan. Brendan is somebody that used to work at the Center for Media and Democracy when I was reporting a lot about the dark money that was influencing Wisconsin politics. And one of the chapters of my book follows a progressive Democrat named Chris Taylor who has joined ALIC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, this group that propagates and disseminates these model bills. The Trayvon-Martin-Stanier ground bill had been adopted by ALIC, the one that basically let his killer go free and a version of it was passed in 26 states. The Wisconsin's right to work law is almost a verbatim copy of the ALIC model bill, right to work bill. So this group has a huge influence on what Wisconsin has become. This kind of cookie cutter legislation has been enacted and Brendan's group was just tremendous at uncovering this very difficult reporting work to try to find the connection between the legislature and ALIC. And so one of the chapters deals with ALIC's role and follows kind of this woman, Chris Taylor, as we go to these ALIC conferences and enter kind of, it's a little bit of a Alice in Wonderland kind of experience. So I'll leave it at that and turn it over to Brendan. Thanks. Can you hear me? Great. So show of hands, how many people have heard of ALIC? Okay, so I won't give you a lot of background. It sounds like you're already pretty familiar. So ALIC's been called a corporate bill mill. It's been called a dating service for corporations and legislators. What it does is match lawmakers, state lawmakers with corporate and special interests. It's 98% funded by corporations, by ideological entities like Americans for Prosperity. Corporate members of ALIC draft bills that benefit their interests, and then ALIC members bring those bills back to their state and introduce them in their own name, usually without giving any indication that these bills were pre-drafted by corporate interests. It was founded in 1973 by Wisconsin native, Paul Weirich. He founded the Heritage Foundation that same year. So this year, ALIC is celebrating its 45th anniversary. Anybody guess where ALIC celebrated its gala yesterday? Here in D.C. Yes. And today, U.S. Senate candidate Leah Vukmir, who used to be the ALIC national chair, is attending a fundraiser hosted by ALIC's president, Lisa Nelson. So ALIC and Wisconsin have a long history. This goes back to Tommy Thompson, for example, who was later Wisconsin's governor. He was an early ALIC member. In 1990, Wisconsin was the first state in the country to adopt a citywide school voucher program, which ALIC celebrated. Tommy Thompson's welfare reform bill was celebrated by ALIC and later adopted as an ALIC model. And in 2002, Tommy Thompson went to an ALIC meeting and said, I always love going to these ALIC meetings because I always found new ideas. Then I take them back to Wisconsin, disguise them a little bit and declare that it's mine. In 1993, a young legislator named Scott Walker was elected to represent Wauwatosa on the outskirts of, a suburb on the outskirts of Milwaukee. And he quickly joined ALIC. He carved out a, a tough on crime niche. That was his, that was his pitch. That's how he initially got elected. Wauwatosa is a majority white suburb, adjoining majority minority Milwaukee. Walker pushed a tough on crime message. And one of the top priorities when he took office was pushing ALIC's tough on crime bills like truth and sentencing. At the same time that he was pushing ALIC's tough on crime bills that put more people in prison for more time, he was pushing bills to privatize the state's prison system. He was ultimately unsuccessful, but at the time that Walker was pushing these tough on crime bills, he never disclosed that they had come from ALIC, in order to disclose that ALIC was funded by private prison companies. Later in 2002, in a NPR interview, Walker admitted that he got the idea for this bill from ALIC, and that he admitted that private prison companies did indeed play a role. So the impact, I think David will talk about some of the divergence between Wisconsin and Minnesota, but the impact of Walker's ALIC-inspired legislation has really been disastrous. The state now spends more money on prisons than it does on higher education, and it has the highest incarceration rate of African American men. Despite having very similar demographics as demographics and crime rates as Minnesota, the two states have gone in entirely different directions. So we can fast forward to 2010. Citizens United came down from the Supreme Court in January of that year, unleashed tens of millions of dollars in dark money and other big money spending, and it was a Republican wave election. New conservative majorities were elected in state legislatures around the country. ALIC alumni like Scott Walker in Wisconsin, John Kasich in Ohio were elevated to the governor's mansions, and ALIC alumni were installed in leadership positions, or ALIC members, I'm sorry, were installed in leadership positions in state legislatures. So for example, in Wisconsin, both the House and Senate majority leader were ALIC leaders. And all of a sudden, you saw very similar legislation being promoted and adopted in states around the country with very similar wording, voter ID legislation, right to work legislation, or other anti-union legislation was all being pushed at the same time, oftentimes by ALIC members, as a result of ALIC, as a result of this corporate bill mill. So after Walker entered the governor's office in 2011, he pushed many ALIC priority measures by the count of the Center for Media and Democracy. He signed 19 ALIC bills into law. This included the Act 10 anti-union legislation that we've been discussing and included voter ID restrictions, a number of tort reform measures to make it harder to hold corporations accountable in court, and bills to preempt local paid sick day laws. And I think it's important to remember when Walker was elected, he ran on this platform of creating jobs. He was a mild-mannered politician who brought a ham sandwich to work every day in a paper bag. He never talked about his plans to this legislation on the campaign trail. We later learned, as a result of a video, that he secretly boasted about these plans to one of his top donors, Diane Hendricks, who was later a top Trump financial supporter. So it's important to remember that these ALIC priorities were established by out-of-state interests. They were serving the donor class and were ultimately reversing and running against Wisconsin traditions. So one of those Wisconsin traditions is open government and Wisconsin has long traditions of keeping money out of politics, going back to Bob LaFollette in the Progressive Era. Wisconsin was one of the first states to enact a corporate contribution ban. It has strong open records laws. In the early 2000s, it established a nonpartisan elections and ethics agency called the Government Accountability Board that was widely regarded as a national model. Walker later faced a recall election. Recall was one of those progressive reforms, was one of those reforms from the Progressive Era in order to ensure democratic accountability. And these 2011 and 2012 recall elections were incredibly expensive. You saw millions and millions of dollars spent by largely out-of-state interests like the Koch brothers. And as the result of a quirk in Wisconsin law, Walker was actually allowed to raise unlimited amounts of money. But we also saw a lot of money being spent by these outside groups that didn't disclose their donors. So donors could have given as much as they wanted to Walker, their name would have been disclosed, but you also had these outside groups that were raising and spending unlimited amounts of money, but we had no idea who was funding them. These groups were supposed to be operating independently of the candidates that they were supporting, but we later learned that that was not in fact the case. So for example, Dan mentioned this mining bill, this incredibly controversial mining bill that would rewrite the state's environmental laws to pave the way for this iron ore mine in this pristine northern part of the state. After Walker won the recall election, his top priority was pushing this mining bill into law. We did not know at the time, at the time of this incredibly controversial bill that was only going to pass by the narrowest of margins that the CEO of the company that actually wrote it had given $750,000 to a dark money group working directly with Walker's campaign. Another example, in 2011 and 2012, this lead paint manufacturer was facing a class action lawsuit from the families of children who had been poisoned, who had been poisoned by lead paint. At the same time that Walker and his allies in the legislature were slipping a provision into the budget bill to halt those lawsuits, the public had no idea that that company CEO had written a $750,000 check to this dark money group working directly with Walker's campaign. And these were serious campaign finance violations and later an investigation was opened with support from the Nonpartisan Government Accountability Board and with support from both Republican and Democratic prosecutors. And just a few years earlier, political operatives had been, had faced serious punishment for committing very similar campaign finance violations. And as sort of an interesting side note, one of those individuals who had been, who had violated campaign finance laws in a very similar way was Mark Block, who at the time was then banned from Wisconsin politics for three years. And he would later emerge as Herman Cain's campaign manager. He was the guy in that weird campaign video where he was smoking and talking about how great Herman Cain was. More recently, he linked Steve Bannon and the Mercer family with Cambridge Analytica. So it seems like there's definitely a pattern of these Wisconsin actors popping up in all sorts of weird places and having pretty significant impact on national politics. So I'll close up here. So eventually, despite these campaign finance violations being very clear and explicit, Walker and his allies fought back in the court, they fought back in the press and the infrastructure that Wisconsin's Bradley Foundation had established in Wisconsin swung into full gear. And you had media outlets like the Wisconsin Reporter and media trackers pushing a particular narrative, hammering the under-resourced Wisconsin mainstream press to cover the story in a particular way. You had legal outfits like the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, funded and founded by the Bradley Foundation, fighting in the courts. And eventually, this investigation was challenged, made its way up to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. And the Wisconsin Supreme Court's majority was elected with $10 million in spending by the exact same groups under investigation. Walker was accused of coordinating with Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers in Commerce. Those were the groups that were under investigation. Those were the groups that were facing potential civil or criminal liability if the Wisconsin Supreme Court allowed this investigation to proceed. And those are the exact same groups that had spent $10 million electing the Wisconsin Supreme Court's for justice majority. In most of those elections, those groups spent more than the justices themselves did. Ultimately, and perhaps not surprisingly, the Wisconsin Supreme Court shut down the investigation. They declared many of Wisconsin's campaign finance laws unconstitutional. Shortly after that, Walker and his allies in the legislature rewrote and gutted Wisconsin's campaign finance laws. They killed the government accountability board, which had been nationally regarded as a model of good governance. And things have only gotten worse since then. I'll turn it over to Naomi. Great. Thanks. Hi. Before I get started, I just wanna say, so I spent 20 years working in the labor movement for the AFL-CIO and for AFSME. So as I talk, if I say we, when talking about the labor movement, that's what it's based on. And I was at the AFL when Act 10 got introduced and ultimately passed in Wisconsin. So I just wanted to give that caveat. You know, Act 10 was really devastating for public sector workers in Wisconsin, and I would say for the labor movement in many ways more broadly. And as I think Kayla mentions, Wisconsin was the first state in the country to give public sector workers collective bargaining rights. And so when the proposal came out to gut collective bargaining for workers, it almost took on this sort of mythical significance in the effort and emotion that people had in trying to fight back against this horrible bill, which you saw with 100,000 people in the streets taking over the state capital in Wisconsin. And the rallies and sit-ins that got organized around that garnered support from all over the country, not just from the labor movement from other people sending messages and signals of solidarity to the workers in their unions. And even from around the world, people were sending messages to solidarity. And it was a fantastic expression of worker solidarity and activism, but obviously it wasn't enough. And so I think some of the lessons that the labor movement learned from that fight are really critical. And I wanna talk about those in just a minute, but for just a second I wanna drill down a little bit more on what Act 10 did and why it has been so destructive to the public sector labor movement in Wisconsin. And we've said it essentially gutted collective bargaining. It took all sorts of topics of negotiation off the table. So it explicitly prohibited workers from negotiating and bargaining over health insurance and pensions and hours of work and safety provisions on the job, grievance procedures. And it also prohibited workers from being able to bargain over any compensation above base pay. So basically any kind of increases were limited to the cost of inflation. And so in January of 2017, wage increases for contracts that started then were limited to just 0.73% so less than a percent increase. But Act 10 also included a lot of provisions to weaken unions financially. It went after the public sector and essentially made it a right to work in the public sector and prohibited payroll dues deductions, which is another thing that we had seen popping up in other states before 2010 as just one piece of the agenda, the ALEC agenda and they've got model legislation on it. But it was like Act 10 was their wish list all rolled into one and they were able to drive it through. It also set up really expensive annual recertification elections that were rigged against unions. So every year the union would have to recertify that it represented a majority of the workers. But the trick was that when workers would vote on whether or not they wanted to still be part of the union, anybody that didn't vote was counted as a no vote, which completely stacks the deck. Like imagine that in a political environment and you can picture the impact. So it's had a really brutal impact on the structure of public sector labor within the state of Wisconsin and obviously on the workers themselves. Wages and Dave is gonna get into this. Wages for public employees have been slashed, benefits have been gutted, the public services themselves are suffering. David Madeline over at CAP did a report on what's happened to education since Act 10 was passed and teachers have seen huge declines in their median salaries and benefits. There's a ton of turnover. It's hard to attract good workers into the public service if you're not paying them, if their benefits are not up to par. And so there's a lot of turnover in the teaching profession that we didn't see before Act 10 passed. And so there's not much good that I can say about Act 10 other than there are some lessons that labor learned that from both Act 10 and some of the other fights that came after it, there were 14 other states in 2011, really led by the Alec style attacks that were suffering the same sort of attacks. And so there's a lot of opportunities to like figure out what works, what doesn't. And while labor is obviously still very, very committed to trying to use the legislative process and grassroots lobbying to impact and change policies when you have a situation like we're in now in many of the states where there are no longer moderate Republicans that can be, that are supportive of workers. They are mostly tend to be these Alec backed legislators. That avenue is the doors to the legislative arena a lot are closed and so labor has had to figure out what are we gonna do until the time in which the legislative composition switches. And so labor has really been forced to take a look internally and the attacks really forced unions to go back to the basics and recommit to organizing and doing internal organizing and just simply put internal organizing as union members, talking to other union members about sticking with the union, the importance of the union and trying to get those union workers to become more active in the union. And so we saw this sort of shift in strategy play out about a year or so ago, maybe a little over a year now with the fight in Iowa where the Republican led legislature basically took the Wisconsin playbook and introduced it and rammed it through gutted collective bargaining and labor, we rallied, we lobbied, we did all of those things. But more importantly, the shift was in doing this sort of internal organizing and asking workers to stick with the union no matter what happens from the legislature. And that approach has been largely successful, not just in Iowa, but around the country. And so we see public sector unions, AFSCME, AFT, SCIU, NEA, really digging down and emphasizing organizing and member education and mobilization much more than we did sort of pre-Wisconsin. The other thing that's helped sort of accelerate that change or that shift in strategy has been what feels like the almost continuous threat of the Supreme Court cases and bad decisions from the Supreme Court that really forced a refocusing on this internal organizing. And so post-Janice, the Janice decision which was issued at the end of June this year was really expected to have a devastating impact on labor. But what folks in labor are saying now is that they're seeing far more workers sign up to be members and they are seeing workers drop the union. And that's despite a really concerted multimillion dollar campaigns by right wing groups like the Freedom Foundation and other folks that are part of this vast right wing conspiracy. But those groups are spending millions of dollars going door-to-door to union members and saying drop the union and union members by and large are saying no. So it's a very positive bright spot. The other bright spot I would say that's coming out of this is unions are now not just doing internal organizing but doing pushing more into organizing the unorganized workers which is where we really need to go. And so the right wing attacks that started in Wisconsin and moved through Iowa and Missouri and Kentucky and all these other places have really forced public sector unions in particular to get smarter and more strategic and build a stronger base of membership and it's paying off. And I think it's one of the reasons why we're seeing union popularity at a 15 year high. And young people are beginning to see unions as the pathway into financial security and to even out the wealth gap. So with that I'll turn to Dave to talk more about the economic picture. Sure, I'm gonna go up there because I have a slide deck. Okay, so now you're gonna leave it to the numbers guy to cheer up the room. I think it's unusual, I'll give it a shot. Okay, so my part of the presentation is kind of fun. You know I wrote this paper, it was kind of fun to write because it's rare that you get a case study really where you see two states right next to each other kind of shared history, shared experience similar in a lot of ways that just took completely different policy paths. Like they diverged pretty much as sharply as possible after 2010 from a political standpoint from a policy standpoint. And it's a great example because it shows you that policy matters that the choices that are made at the state government level have a tangible impact on people's lives and we see that very clearly in the data when looking at these two states. So I'll start, you know we've heard a lot about, well first of all, okay, so this is the paper you can find at epi.org, lots of great data in there. I'm only gonna kind of scratch the surface today in the interest of time but you can check it out on your own time. So first of all we've heard all, we've heard so much about Act 10 and Wisconsin going right to work and you can see pretty clearly what the impact was when you look at the unionization rate. So this chart is showing you the dark blue line is Minnesota's share of employment that's unionized, kind of the middle blue line is Wisconsin and then the light blue one is the U.S. So since 1989 there's been a gradual decline in unionization across the country. We know this and this was happening in both Wisconsin and Minnesota, you know for a long time leading up through 2007 or excuse me 2009 but what you can see is that in 2009 the share of the workforce that was unionized in both Minnesota and Wisconsin was basically the same, it's 15.2% in Minnesota, 15.1% in Wisconsin. So essentially the same. We heard about what happened, we know what happened with Act 10 and right to work shortly thereafter and what you see is that the unionization rate in Wisconsin just fell off the table. Today it's about 8.3% as of 2017. Dan was telling me before the presentation that's the same unionization rate as Alabama. So Wisconsin, this union bastion now is like Alabama from an organizing standpoint. This chart is looking at changes in employment and I said that policy matters and when we talk about job growth governors like to take credit for job growth a lot. They all claim that everything that they've done is responsible for every single job that's ever created in their state during their tenure and then we know that macroeconomic factors play a big role but it is true that state policy can make a difference and again what happened in Minnesota and Wisconsin are a clear example of this because in Wisconsin they took the sort of the quintessential conservative playbook of policy. They gutted unions slash taxes slash business regulation and environmental regulation. Walker rejected the ACA Medicaid expansion. He rejected federal funding for high speed rail between Madison and Milwaukee. All things that would have potentially boosted job growth. In Minnesota, Governor Dayton got a $500 bonding bill for infrastructure investments, major infrastructure investments early in his term. He accepted $1.2 billion in federal money to set up a healthcare exchange and to accept the Medicaid expansion. He raised taxes on the wealthy to fund increases in spending and education, raised teacher salaries, raised the minimum wage. I mean, really sort of the big progressive playbook essentially, I mean, such a stark difference and what we see in the job numbers is that this is showing total employment relative to January 2011. So the first month of each governor's term and what you can see is that leading up to that point, the job trajectory in both Minnesota and Wisconsin was on a pretty similar path. But after January 2011, things diverged. That bottom line, the light blue line in this case is Wisconsin, much slower growth than both the U.S. average in Minnesota after January 2011. And I think that you can point to a lot of those investments in infrastructure and particular infrastructure and healthcare if you look at the sector breakdowns of employment changes from 2010 onward, there's construction growth in Minnesota was enormous. I mean, it grew, I think almost twice as fast as U.S. overall construction growth. And I think a lot of that was those infrastructure investments, large growth in the healthcare sector as well, and I think you can attribute that to accepting the Medicaid expansion and all the investments that they made in the healthcare exchanges. Let's see this. This looks like it is an old version of the slide deck, but that's okay. We talked about how the unionization rate has fallen so much, and we also saw that job growth was a lot slower. Well, these are two things that have a direct impact on wage growth. Obviously, when fewer workers are unionized, workers overall have less bargaining power to negotiate higher wages, but also when the labor market isn't as good, workers don't have leverage either because they can't go easily find another job, so they can't tell their boss, give me a raise or I'm gonna find something else. They lose that additional leverage. And so the fact that Wisconsin's job growth was so much slower than Minnesota's meant that workers in Wisconsin were sort of facing this sort of slog of a recovery, this slog of labor market improvement that workers in Wisconsin didn't have to deal with as much. And we know this because when we look at the share of the workforce that was long-term unemployed, so unemployed for greater than 26 weeks in 2017, in Minnesota, it was about one in nine workers. In Wisconsin, it was more than one in five. So you had a lot more workers in Wisconsin who were spending a lot more time looking for a job when they're out of the job market or unable to find a job for a lot longer, which meant that they lacked any bargaining power when they were trying to bid for wage increases. And so what we see in the wage trends between these two states is looking at the business cycle leading up to the recession. So from 2000 to 2007, annually, wages in Wisconsin, excuse me, in Minnesota actually weren't doing that well. They were falling in that business cycle leading up to the recession. In Wisconsin, they were doing a little bit better than the U.S. average, excuse me, 0.4% inflation adjusted growth per year. U.S. average was 0.3% at the median. In the business cycle after the recession, so from 2010 onward, or the year before Walker and Dayton took office onward, Minnesota's wage growth at the median was 0.4% per year. In Wisconsin, it was barely anything, 0.1%. So workers in Wisconsin, not only were they having a tougher time finding a job but their wages were going up far more slowly and much slower, it's lower than the U.S. average also. And you can see this really clearly also when you look at the differences in wage growth for men and women and at different points on the wage distribution. So looking just at men for right now on the left-hand side, at the 10th percentile, wage growth was better in Minnesota than it was in Wisconsin from 2010 to 2017, not a huge amount but better. At the median, so your typical male worker in Minnesota over that period has seen pretty modest wage growth but something 1.6% in inflation-adjusted terms. In Wisconsin, wages for men have actually fallen for the typical male worker in Wisconsin from 2010 to 2017. They're worse off today than they were coming out of the recession. For women, we see enormous gains at the 10th percentile in Minnesota, 9.7%. That's compared to 5.1% in Wisconsin. This, I mean, part of this is the better improvement in the labor market. Workers at the bottom just get more leverage when the labor market is improving but it's also the minimum wage increase. Minnesota chose to enact a pretty substantial increase in its minimum wage over this period and we see that reflected in the data. Women in particular benefit more for minimum wage increases than men principally because they're disproportionately low wage workers compared to men. At the median, women did a lot better in Minnesota than they did in Wisconsin as well. 5.4% growth compared to less than a percentage point of growth in Wisconsin. And I've showed data on wages. There's data in the paper on family incomes and household incomes as well. The trends are identical. Families and households in Minnesota did demonstrably better than they did in Wisconsin over this period. This chart is showing changes in insurance rates and this one I also like to show because it's again, it's another thing that you could point directly to the policy choices, the differences in policy choices between the Walker and the Dayton administration. As I mentioned, Governor Walker chose not to expand Medicaid and rejected federal money to set up a healthcare exchange. Well, the share of the population with insurance in Wisconsin did go up somewhat from 2010 to 2017 with the ACA coming online, the individual mandate. We saw a 0.9 percentage point increase in the share of Wisconsinites that had private insurance and a 1.8 percentage point increase in the share of Wisconsinites with government provided health insurance. In Minnesota, it was 2 percentage point increase of private sector insurance and 3.6% of government provided insurance. Much larger decline in the share of the population without health insurance in Minnesota and what's interesting about this is that that's true even of folks with private insurance. So if the idea of the Walker administration was I'm gonna reject expanding Medicaid because that'll force more people to get private insurance, it didn't really work out that way because more Minnesotans got private insurance than Wisconsinites or larger share. So finally, the last set of figures I wanna show you is I talk about this in my paper and I think it speaks to a lot of what Dan's book displays. There's an old saying that people tend to ultimately vote with their feet, that if they don't like the policies that are happening, they're gonna move. And what we see when we look at the population changes for these two states is that from 2010 to 2017, Wisconsin has had a net loss of about 18,000 residents. And this is with the latest data that are available from the census, including just less than 70,000, a net loss of 68,738 residents domestically. So folks leaving Wisconsin to move to a different US state. Now in Minnesota, there was also a loss in domestic net migration, but Minnesota also added a large international population. Minnesota has a large refugee population that is actually really interesting. There are studies on this by David Kallick at Fiscal Policy Institute in New York. You should check out his work too. But this bottom portion of this table is showing the most recent year that we have available from 2016 to 2017. And what you can see is that this domestic, excuse me, domestic exodus is still happening in Wisconsin that from 2016 to 2017, Wisconsin lost 2,000 more residents to other states in the US than it gained from other states in the US. Whereas in Minnesota, the trend has flipped. Minnesota is now adding more people from other US states than it's losing. So I think if you read Dan's book, it talks a lot about some of the despair but also some of the lingering hope in some of these communities where the population is fleeing and storefronts are closing. And unfortunately, the numbers don't look good in terms of how Walker's policies are encouraging folks to come to Wisconsin. So I'll stop there. All right, thanks Dave for that really cheery presentation and everyone else as well for their very cheery presentation. Also, there are copies of Dave's paper out in the lobby. We printed off a few if you wanna read more about the Wisconsin Minnesota study, it's in the lobby. So I have a question for Dan about his book. So Wisconsin was the birthplace of the Republican Party but the ideals of the early Republican Party seem vastly different from what it has evolved to right now. What do you think the goals were of the early progressives in Wisconsin and how do they differ from the goals of the current administration? Great question. The Republican Party was founded in a one-room schoolhouse in a small town called Rippon, Wisconsin in 1854. And it came out of a really kind of, the state was very fervently abolitionist and there were two really important immigrant groups that came to Wisconsin at that time. Scandinavian immigrants were flooding into Wisconsin and Minnesota as well. And they do share a similar kind of cultural heritage. And they brought with them a kind of, not all of them, of course, but they were fleeing a very harsh physical environment and a lot of them brought with them a kind of communitarian ethos. You can see this in some of their letters. The book opens with a kind of document of the first Norwegian, his journey to Wisconsin from Norway. And there were a lot of problems in Norway. Only 3% of the land is arable. They, we were not allowed to practice your trade often in your hometown. There was a lot of restrictions and they flooded into the upper Midwest and they disproportionately supported the trade union movement, disproportionately had created these agricultural cooperatives. You can see some of the expression of this in Thorsten Wieblen's work. He was a Norwegian. He spoke Norwegian until, he didn't learn English until he was five. But he grew up in one of these Norwegian communities. The other important group that was instrumental in this early progressive founding of the Republican Party were German immigrants. They were fleeing a failed revolution in 1848. And they largely settled in Milwaukee and they eventually formed a kind of reformist socialist tradition that was derided as sewer socialism by a lot of East Coast people. But anyway, they kind of coalesced around the early Republican Party which was galvanized by a very dramatic capture of a runaway slave named Joshua Glover who was living in Racine and his slave master came up from Missouri, found him and under the Fugitive Slave Act which was very contentious was going to take him back into slavery. They took him to the Milwaukee courthouse and a crowd of about 5,000 people led by a prominent abolitionist named Sherman Booth who owned a newspaper, surrounded the courthouse, broke down the doors, freed Glover, put him on the underground railroad and sent him to Canada. At the time, there was a guy in Ripon that was trying to start this new party and he was being stymied but after the Glover case, there was suddenly a majority vote in this little meeting and it was the first meeting of Republicans and this guy was named Alvin Beauvais and he was very good friends with Horace Greeley who endorsed this idea and it spread very quickly and within six years they elected Abraham Lincoln and the party was really about free labor and abolitionism and it was very progressive. People forget that Bob LaFollette was a Republican his almost his entire life. The state was only divided between progressive Republicans and more conservative, corporate kind of dominated Republicans they were called the, but it was a one-party state, a Republican until the late 40s really or even 50s but LaFollette was part of this progressive Republicanism and you saw some expression of that in Teddy Roosevelt's administration and so on and those were the ideals were, there was a really anti-corporate kind of spirit in there to and LaFollette really believed that in order for democracy to exist they required active citizenship so a lot of his reforms were related to banning corporate donations, direct primaries to get the machine out of politics and I think these were the ideals of the Republicans and you saw that persist even up until the 70s and 80s and certain, there were certain, it became more and more difficult to find but there were certain progressive Republican legislators in state government so I think those were the ideals and it really shifted and became much more of a business-oriented party, there was a lot of reaction against the New Deal and a lot of Republicans, it became dominated by these corporate interests and LaFollette himself broke away from the party and set up a third party. So this is for Dan and Brandon, you both talked about Alec and attending the conferences and Dan, you talked to Chris Taylor and actually went along to one of these Alec conventions. Can you just explain a little bit about what, I mean, you said it was kind of like an Alice in Wonderland type experience, what is it like being there and also what are the actual mechanisms by which this legislation gets passed? I'll start. Well, it's a very, I went to two conferences actually with Chris, they're very strange, there's a quasi-legislative process that exists where basically I was allowed to sit in on a portion of a Education Task Force meeting, they announced me, they brought me in midway and announced me as a reporter, it was a little bit surreal but there was, there's a group of people from these conservative think tanks like the Friedman Foundation and others devoted to education. I think, is it Americans for Children? Betsy DeVos, yeah, Federation for Children, they were there and then there's the state legislators in this case and they vote on these bills, whether to sunset this bill and most, almost all of the legislation is directed at draining public school budgets, they are often incremental, attritional, it's sometimes it sounds good on paper but really the ultimate goal is to drain public school budgets. This was articulated very clearly in 2006 when Milton Friedman gave a keynote address to Alec and said essentially that the goal is to get rid of public education but we can't say that so we use vouchers and I'm just paraphrasing but it's very close to that and he, and that is the ultimate goal and now they have these bills that are essentially universal vouchers, Wisconsin adopted one, it has a cap but that cap is being raised and by 2025 there will be no cap so it erodes through attrition the public schools. The other interesting thing about Alec is these ideas that you think are so far-fetched are presented very seriously with a kind of, two that I'll mention just briefly, one, I'm sure many of you are aware there's an effort to have a constitutional convention through the earning, the support of three quarters of the state legislatures or two thirds, it's a little known provision in the constitution where this is another mechanism where you can have a constitutional convention and that is one goal is to have a balanced budget amendment which would be disastrous to social insurance and many other things but some people wanna even take it further, there's two different groups competing, one is called convention of states and they want basically the federal government to be allowed to do almost nothing except national defense and infrastructure. Another idea that I saw a panel on, they have all these panels and there's very ambitious kind of libertarian thinkers kind of presenting new ideas, one of them is to revoke the direct election of senators the, you know, which sounds very far-fetched but a lot of their ideas over time become mainstreamed and this is, you know, I think if you looked back 30 years before Governor Thompson instituted like the first, you know, public school funding for private schools, people would have thought that was kind of ludicrous and crazy but it's that small program that was only for 300 students in Milwaukee is adopted by 13 states, you know, praised by President Clinton. I mean, it's been, you know, as we all know it's become very, very common so that's my perception of Alec. I think, you know, the meetings are supposed to be kind of fun. You know, one of the benefits, you know, you might ask why would a new legislator join Alec and in part it's because you get a free trip. You pay $50 a year as a legislator and then in exchange, not only do you get access to this library of model legislation, you often time to get a free trip and the Alec conferences are usually held in, you know, fun places, they're held in Vegas, they're held in New Orleans or another city and you get your flight paid for, you get your hotel room paid for and the way that the trips are paid for is by what they call scholarships and legislators in the state raise money from Alec corporate members to foot the bill to this trip to New Orleans and then while you're there, of course you have the meetings, but then after hours you have parties. You have the cigar party sponsored by RJ Reynolds Tobacco and you have a party sponsored by Diageo and you have free drinks and it's supposed to be a sort of a fun atmosphere and from a lobbyist's perspective, it's fantastic. You have, instead of having to lobby state legislators in all 50 states, you've got all of the legislators who are potentially gonna be amenable to pushing your agenda in one place and they're having a great time and you're building relationships and ultimately that's what lobbying is about. It's about building relationships with state lawmakers and Alec in many ways creates the environment for that relationship building between corporate interests and between state legislators and in the meetings themselves, it's important to at least as of a few years ago, the legislators and the private sector members would vote separately. So the legislators would vote on whether to adopt a particular piece of model legislation and then the corporate members would vote separately. So if the legislators wanted a bill to become an Alec model and the corporate members did not, it would not become an Alec model. The private sector and the public sector are given an equal say within these Alec meetings about what the agenda is going to be. This is for Dave and Dan. So Dave, you mentioned that Scott Walker's rejection of both the Medicaid expansion money and also the train, the high speed rail train money were two potential opportunities where Wisconsin could have created jobs and also had other benefits like providing public transportation and healthcare for its citizens, but instead they're pursuing a path of giving large tax breaks to companies. The Foxconn deal is a huge venture that's happening in Wisconsin right now. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about what their thinking is, what their reasoning is behind taking free money from federal government and instead giving away billions of dollars in state money to corporations and what kind of impacts this will have for years to come on wages and I know Dave hasn't explicitly studied Foxconn, but if this kind of brand of giving away big tax breaks actually does result in job creation? Well, to be honest, I'm not sure that their interest was in really creating jobs. It was in giving money to corporations and to shrink the public sector. I mean, the other thing too that we haven't talked about all these efforts to shrink the public sector, I mean, there's a job component there too. I mean, if you cut funding for education, not only do you have fewer teachers and those teachers are making less money but they're also school districts are spending less on erasers and pencils and whatever else and there's clear research showing that every dollar you spend in the public sector leads to dollars being spent in the private sector. I think it's like 44 cents for every dollar. So the fact that Walker was rejecting money to make investments that we know would have boosted job growth in the state is only half of it. He was also cutting spending that the state was already doing that would have supported jobs. In terms of the rationale, I really think it's all just about cutting taxes and allowing corporations and the wealthy to just to take a bigger slice of the pie. I mean, the trickle down ideology, Walker wasn't the first person to do this. I mean, the Kansas experiment is the other big example we've seen in recent years, the massive tax cuts that were supposed to lead to a huge job boom and it just hasn't happened. And we've known, economists have known that this wouldn't happen for decades. It's just we've been fighting against a machine, a corporate machine that has been telling the public otherwise. Yeah, if I can just add a little bit. I think one of the things that made Wisconsin unusual was this historically strong tradition of public investment that goes back to the LaVollet. You're particularly in the state university system and it allowed for the Wisconsin idea. I mean, the Wisconsin idea was both, the Wisconsin idea is where forging a close relationship between the university and state government and it manifested in John Commons' workers compensation bill and things like that. But it also was very practical things like sending members of the agricultural school professors to teach new farming practices to rural communities and Aldo Leopold, the famous environmentalist was on a project to stop soil erosion in a place called Coon Valley. There were a lot of practical, it was kind of a pragmatic idealism is how I think of it to make life better for the citizens as a whole. And I just wanna add that I think one of the political problems has been that unfortunately both sides have not shown a huge support for the public sphere. And I'll give you an example when Democratic governor Jim Doyle was leaving in December of 2010, he boasted to a reporter that he had cut more public employees than any governor in history. So it wasn't anywhere near what Act 10 was but it was a kind of rhetorical attack on the idea that these people are just takers or, and Walker was able to really stoke resentment that was documented very well in Kathy Kramer. She's a wonderful political scientist at University of Wisconsin. She wrote a book called The Politics of Resentment and in his inaugural address, he said, the time is over for the public employees to be the haves and the taxpayers to be the have nots. Leaving aside the absurdity that these people are also taxpayers, it was clearly showing this strategy which Brendan alluded to this. There was a private film between Walker and his most important donor, Diane Hendricks captured by this filmmaker named Brad Lichtenstein who she asked him when Wisconsin would ever become a right to work state, a completely red state. She conflated the two and he said, well, look at what we're doing with the public employees. This was a few weeks before Act 10 was announced because you use divide and conquer. And in fact, he was able to, among some union members in the private sector, gain their support and he won his recall election with a third of the votes of union households and he won in 2014. So this strategy, which was then replicated to a degree by Trump, I mean extreme degree, but with different victims and different perpetrators and maybe with worse manners, but Walker had really kind of pioneered this in recent memory, it goes back a long ways, but he really stoked resentment in a time of deep economic insecurity and you have rural places in Wisconsin where the only people with health insurance in a town may be the people that work at the school. So it's very easy if no one's offering a counter message that maybe everyone should have health insurance to stoke this kind of resentment. And I'll just add to that, Kayla, there's a great study that came out earlier this year. It's an NBER paper. The title is From the Bargaining Table to the Ballot Box and it displays empirically that when a state goes right to work, voter turnout goes down by two to three percentage points and the democratic vote share declines by 3.5 percentage points. So I think that that speaks to the motivations. If I can add one tiny comment on that, very important point that Dave made and one of the people in my book, Democratic State Senator named Tim Cullen, moderate Democrat. He was one of the 14 state senators that went to Illinois to try and delay the vote on Act 10 so public opposition could build, but he was also one of two senators that was privately negotiating with some of Walker's staff at McDonald's in Beloit and a couple of places right along the border. He was trying to win some concessions on workplace safety and other issues and he told me that the one thing that was non-negotiable was what Naomi said, which is the automatic dues checkoff, which is the funnel of money and through that, Tim concluded, obviously, that it was nothing but a political attack. You can still donate to the United Way. You could choose that as your automatic deduction, but you cannot donate automatically to your union, so. I wanted to go back to something Dan said about resentment, stoking resentment. In Wisconsin, there's a huge urban-rural divide. It's basically Milwaukee and Madison versus the rest of the state. And as Brendan mentioned, Milwaukee has a really high rate of incarceration. It's one of the most segregated cities in the country. I was just wondering how, if anyone can answer this, how you think this started in Wisconsin and how it has been stoked by various people trying to get what they want out of weakening public schools in Milwaukee, decreasing its influence, and if there are any policy solutions that you see. I guess, I think partially to go off of what Dan said, it's important to remember at the time Walker was elected in 2010, the U.S. was just coming off of a severe economic downturn and people were hurting and the state had suffered deficits because of the national economic downturn. A lot of people had lost their jobs. Wisconsin had already been going through a downturn in manufacturing jobs for many decades, but of course Walker, instead of placing the blame where it belonged on the bankers who gambled away our economy, he put the blame on public sector workers and on the teacher in your community who had healthcare when you didn't or who had job security when you didn't. And in many ways that was a recycling of a long time politics of resentment that I think Walker in particular, but many other politicians more generally had exercised. I think I mentioned earlier that Walker was elected in Wauwatosa, this majority white suburb on the outskirts of a majority minority city, and he ran in some cases on a politics of resentment and a politics of blaming people of color for your problems or blaming people who are on, who are receiving public benefits for your problems or building resentment about them, apparently getting something for free when you're working hard and paying taxes. And I think one of the innovations that Walker created in his post-2010 political strategy was to turn that resentment away from people on, people receiving social services and people of color and turn it towards public sector workers. So I think that was one of the tweaks I think that Walker, that was one of the strategies that Walker executed very successfully. It's interesting in this election, Walker is up for election this year, he doesn't quite have that same scapegoat. So it seems like they've been, he and his team have been struggling some to find out what their message is going to be. They're talking about, they're talking about Tony Evers as running his competitor, not firing a teacher who watched porn at school, which is an odd strategy. They're also of course making the national anthem and whether you're gonna stand or whether you're gonna kneel for the national anthem, a campaign issue in Wisconsin of all places. I think it's a version of that politics of resentment and that politics of othering, but it's a very odd strategy that I think does not necessarily hit as close to home as some of these other strategies that have been he been executing. I just wanna ask one more question and then we'll open it up to the audience. I think we should quickly just touch on the 2016 election. I'm sure everyone wants to talk about that. Obviously so much is going on in the state which has set it up completely to be eroded and it's not surprising after hearing all of this that Wisconsin went for Trump in the 2016 election. I mean, I would like to just hear from anyone who wants to answer if you think that this was primarily caused by voter ID, redistricting, a lack of enthusiasm for the candidates and what if anything we could have been done differently and why people decided to vote for Trump in the election. I'll just take a short stab at that. I think it was all of those factors. It was a very narrow victory. As many of you know, Hillary Clinton didn't campaign there. She also, people might not know this as much but she spent more in the final weeks on a single electoral college vote in Omaha, Nebraska's Wisconsin and Michigan combined. So there was a real negligence and assumption that it was some kind of blue wall which is a bit odd because President Obama had won handily there but prior to that, John Kerry had won very narrowly in 2004 and you had this erosion of the labor movement on top of wages and benefits. It's also a place where workers share ideas about policy and it's really the only counterweight to the rights infrastructure and if you're losing 40% of those people who play an outsized role in elections, that's very significant in a defeat of 23,000 votes. People also forget that Donald Trump campaigned heavily in Wisconsin and he twinned a message of racial and nativist resentment with a kind of defense of social security and Medicare. I went through all of his speeches as well as railing against NAFTA and China's admittance to the WTO. That had a lot of salience. I think people on the East Coast don't maybe appreciate the salience of free trade in the industrial Midwest because you can drive around with people and they will say this factory went to Mexico, this factory went to Vietnam, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, there's other factors that play automation and so on but they are a huge issue and you also had just such a disaffected democratic electorate. Trump actually got 6,000 fewer votes than Romney but Hillary Clinton got many thousands, tens of thousands fewer than Barack Obama, African-American turnout was down in Milwaukee and there was some switching but it was really, there was a union leader, the head of the UAW at Kohler Plumbing told me, he was basically turning away volunteers in 2008 and this time he was dragging people out to put up signs and he knew they would be voting for Trump so he saw the swing and a lot of people in Wisconsin that I talked to were not surprised by the outcome. Chris Taylor is in the prologue and she was canvassing in rural Wisconsin and really she was having doors slammed in her face and these were democratic lists so there was a sense of real concern but there was a real distance both in, Hillary Clinton was not present literally and then very distant from the concerns, particularly of labor and that goes back also to the Act 10 fights when President Obama didn't come to Wisconsin, didn't campaign for Walker's recall opponent Tom Barrett and there was some sentiment and some anger especially on the progressive side towards that feeling that those people were abandoned by national leaders so. You can open it up for questions. Yeah, Margaret, do you have a, oh sorry, the microphone's back there, go ahead. Oh, I'm a Jerome to answer this time. I live in Greenbelt, Maryland and I'm also a Badger, I guess I graduated from the University of Wisconsin long ago and I tremendously appreciate the presentation. I would like to point out that in my state of Maryland the governor has got jobs by 4,000 which has state jobs which has resulted in the state agencies being understaffed and not being able to do what they're supposed to do and one side effect is that there's a shortage of guards in the prison and so the prisons are not safe for either the guards or the prisoners. It's a state where they supposedly has a democratic legislature but it's mostly the social democrats but they're not economic, sorry, they're social progressives, they're not economic progressives. And so there's a lot of economic problems and I would hope that David would look a little bit at what's happening in Maryland and perhaps compare it to Virginia and Delaware because the race in Maryland for governor, to me I think is one of the crucial races this November. Margaret, oh, go ahead, just. Hi, thanks for a great presentation. So my question is, it does seem like over the past year we've seen that some of the internal contradictions of red state governance have come to light and I'm curious when or how you think that could happen in Wisconsin. So we've seen in Kansas a lot of Republicans that are turned against brown backs tax cut. We've seen some interesting primaries in I guess Kentucky and West Virginia because the teacher strikes on the Republican side. Even the opioid crisis has forced some red state Republicans, even someone like John Kasich to reconsider their views on Medicaid. So what do you think could, I guess, do you see any signs of that shift happening in Wisconsin where Republicans, regardless of how they feel about social issues or their views on unions at some point see that the Republican evisceration of the public sector is not in their own interest? You definitely see those signs. Walker, I think is very aware of it and last year he increased funding for public education by about $600 million. There's a lot of anger in rural communities in fact the elementary school, one of the elementary schools in his home district closed. They have to pass these continuing resolutions to raise property taxes. There's hundreds of them that are being passed because there's not enough funding. So there's a real frustration with that and there's a lot of legacy of Act 10 that's playing out now. There's a lot of these laws. You don't know all the effects right away but one of them is as Naomi was mentioning, there's a kind of free agency that's emerged. So the rural schools, the lower performing schools are losing teachers and there's even been some early research suggesting that test scores in math and science are down in these rural schools and it's made everything a lot more uneven in the states and if a rural school loses their physics teacher they're kind of out of luck. This teacher's just trying to find a better salary for him or herself and that's what's happening and it's kind of a really chaotic scramble and there's a lot of anger about it. The other big issue is the roads are really bad and there's especially in the rural areas where that's your kind of lifeline. They call them scotholes now, there's a anyway but it is coming back to haunt them and I think there's some awareness of it by Walker and that's why he restored the school funding. He has not budged on instituting a gas tax even though the assembly Republicans would like him to do that, they're aware of that. So. And one, I realized after I ended my opening remarks on a negative note that I didn't really need to at least on the set of issues I was talking about. There have been a few dozen ballot measures, mostly advisory ballot measures on the state or on the city and county level asking people, asking voters in these cities and counties whether they support an amendment to overturn Citizens United and these have passed overwhelmingly including in Delevin, where Scott Walker grew up, including in multiple cities in Walker Shaw County where Kayla and I are from one of the most conservative in the state and in fact, one of the most conservative in the country. So I think that despite the partisan divide in Wisconsin, there are still a number of the state's progressive traditions that do have bipartisan support when you talk to actual voters. It's just not that the people that they elect don't necessarily carry through on those values that are indeed supported by their voters. One more substantive bright light from that is Rebecca Dallett who was a Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate earlier this year and she ran in large part on a platform of getting money out of politics or she ran in a platform of opposing the direction that the Supreme Court had taken specifically on this issue of unleashing unlimited money into elections and she won and this was an upset victory. I think many court watchers had anticipated that she would lose to her much more conservative Federalist Society member opponent but she in fact won. The court still has a conservative majority but this was a surprising election and won bright light after a long series of defeats. Thank you, thank you very much for this. I have a question about political culture in Wisconsin. I'm fifth generation Waukesha. Me too. Yay. And my views on public policy are progressive but being from Waukesha, I have close friends who are on the right who I'm very close to and I love and so it strikes me that part of Walker's legacy isn't just specific policy but it's the divide and conquer and it's this spirit of the freewheeling of you know it doesn't matter whether people are talking to each other and so I'm wondering is there a history of bipartisan harmony in Wisconsin or not? I mean is this unprecedented and what are the precedents for this kind of divisiveness in Wisconsin? I think it's not unprecedented but the degree is as you point out really well it really it doesn't the midterms are one kind of point but I think this legacy will be very hard to undo. It's it really has divided the state so bitterly but you have other periods in Wisconsin history. Joe McCarthy was elected twice from there. George Wallace really got his national start in Milwaukee. There's you know resentment is an American tradition and it is it's stoked. I mean race is obviously the biggest flashpoint and Walker cleverly masked that a bit but it's a form of that and I think it is the great challenge but I do think that people my sense from reporting there I reported a recent piece about the governor's race for the New Yorker is that there is a fatigue with it. One of the interesting elections was a state Senate race in Western Wisconsin where a woman named Patty Shackner won to the surprise of many in a district that went for Trump by 18 points and right afterward she was interviewed by the Associated Press and she said you know my message has always been you know be kind be considerate and help people when they're down which is really a throwback to that old tradition and there are many Republicans that were not happy with Walker. One of them is a protagonist in my book Dale Schultz who voted against Act 10 and he basically had the old mentality of listening to his constituents. He held a big town hall. 500 people to two were against Act 10 and he just he saw it as really divisive. He did think that there should be concessions around wages and benefit but he never believed in gutting collective bargaining rights and he persisted but was marginalized and chose to retire. They did run a primary candidate against him although I think he would have won but he said something that kind of captures this mentality now which is he told me there was a caucus meeting of the Republicans and a prominent Republican lobbyist told him this is their strategy which is you know all we need is 50% of the vote plus one the lobbyist told Schultz and his colleagues if we get any more than that one vote then we didn't push the state far enough in the direction we want to push it because we had votes to spare and if we lose an election we'll win it back and then we'll start up where we left off and that was really foreign to somebody like Schultz. He was really was a consensus minded person and I think there is a hunger for a return to that and a real fatigue with this present moment. So I think we're over time so we can conclude but I think the panelists will probably stick around for a few minutes if you wanna come talk to them but thank you so much everyone for coming. Definitely read Fall of Wisconsin it's a great book. Thanks and Dan's here to sign copies.