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Wisconsin Watch is previewing legislative races in toss-up districts forward of the Nov. 5 election by specializing in key points for voters and what candidates say they are going to do to deal with them.
Housing and little one care affordability, abortion rights and public college funding are key points within the race for the 61st Meeting District — a toss-up district encompassing parts of southwestern Milwaukee in addition to Greendale, Hales Corners and elements of Greenfield.
The race is a rematch from 2022, pitting incumbent Rep. Bob Donovan, R-Greenfield, a longtime GOP office-holder within the Milwaukee space, in opposition to Democrat LuAnn Fowl, a former government director of the League of Girls Voters of Wisconsin. Donavan received the 2022 contest by simply 525 votes.
The partisan make-up of the district is an virtually similar cut up between Republicans and Democrats, in response to a Wisconsin Watch evaluation of latest voting patterns.
The district is one in every of 15 that Democrats are focusing on this cycle, with hopes of flipping management of the Meeting for the primary time in additional than a decade after the Wisconsin Supreme Court docket final 12 months threw out the state’s Republican-gerrymandered maps.
Right here’s the place each candidates stand on necessary points within the district.
Housing and little one care affordability
Fowl mentioned a prime precedence to deal with burdensome prices going through Wisconsin households is to make little one care extra inexpensive.
“It doesn’t make sense when it’s a must to spend half your wage on little one care,” Fowl mentioned in an interview. She mentioned she helps Gov. Tony Evers’ Youngster Care Counts program, which supplies funds to little one care suppliers frequently to assist preserve their doorways open. This system is credited with protecting 1000’s of kid care amenities open in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
In October 2023, Evers prolonged this system via June 2025 utilizing $170 million in federal funds. He has beforehand sought to incorporate $340 million within the state price range to assist this system, however that plan was scrapped by Republican lawmakers.
Fowl mentioned she would assist an extension of this system. “If we wish to strengthen our economic system, we’ve bought to make it inexpensive to go to work for everyone,” she mentioned.
Fowl additionally expressed assist for tossing a state regulation that stops native governments from implementing hire management applications.
“We may let native governments have extra management over their communities,” she mentioned. Giving native officers extra management may assist tackle hire hikes which were seen in lots of Wisconsin communities, she mentioned.
Donovan supported a package deal of Republican-authored little one care payments throughout the latest legislative session. In the course of the flooring session, Democrats hooked up extending Youngster Care Counts as amendments to one of many payments. Donovan voted in opposition to the extension.
Donovan didn’t reply to interview requests for this story.
The GOP-backed package deal included payments that will have allowed mother and father to contribute $10,000 in pre-tax cash to an account to pay for little one care, created a $15 million mortgage program to assist little one care facilities pay for renovations, established a new class of kid care facilities that would serve between 4 and 12 youngsters, and elevated the child-to-child-care-worker ratio allowed in some little one care facilities. Not one of the proposals grew to become regulation.
Abortion rights
Fowl and Donovan supply starkly completely different views on what Wisconsin’s abortion legal guidelines ought to appear to be.
“The federal government shouldn’t have any say within the determination,” Fowl informed Wisconsin Watch. “Girls ought to be capable to make their selections with out authorities interference.”
She criticized most of the state’s current legal guidelines that make accessing the process extra cumbersome, comparable to requiring ladies to attend 24 hours after an preliminary appointment and requiring physicians to carry out an ultrasound earlier than having an abortion.
The ready interval, specifically, disproportionately impacts low-income ladies, Fowl mentioned, on condition that they doubtless must take day off of labor to entry abortion care.
“Girls ought to be capable to select if and when and methods to begin a household,” she added. “No politician can know what’s happening in a girl’s life who’s in that scenario.”
Donovan joined all 62 of his Republican colleagues within the Meeting in June 2023 in voting in opposition to repealing Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban. Democrats hooked up the repeal provision to the state price range, forcing GOP lawmakers to vote on the problem. The 1849 regulation, which had been unenforceable due to Roe vs. Wade, was believed on the time to outlaw most abortions within the state. The Nineteenth-century statute accommodates a vaguely outlined exception for an abortion that’s decided to be medically mandatory to save lots of the mom’s life, however doesn’t make exceptions for instances of rape, incest or the mom’s well being.
In January 2024, Donovan voted in favor of laws that narrowly handed that sought to ban abortions — apart from these for medical emergencies — after 14 weeks of being pregnant. Beneath present regulation abortion is prohibited after 20 weeks. That invoice included a provision that will have required the 14-week ban to be authorized through referendum earlier than it took impact.
“I struggled with this laws right here earlier than us at this time,” Donovan mentioned throughout debate on the Meeting flooring. “However I’m supporting it as a result of I consider, if enacted, it should assist scale back the lack of life.”
“I’m pro-life and I’m Catholic,” he added. “And I consider that abortion is the taking of a human being.”
“There are goal truths on this life. And a type of goal truths is any abortion is the taking of a human life,” he mentioned.
Public college funding
Fowl mentioned “completely the state ought to be doing extra for public schooling.”
“I feel the state ought to consider ensuring that our faculties, the general public faculties, are properly funded and producing the form of schooling that we wish,” Fowl mentioned in an interview. She additionally expressed considerations about lawmakers directing extra funds towards non-public voucher faculties, as they did in the latest price range, after they tied $1 billion in public Ok-12 college funding to an extra $280 million in voucher college funding.
Fowl, who has served on two college boards in Wisconsin, mentioned she would carry her understanding of how public college funding works to the Legislature and be a “champion for what we have to do for public schooling.”
Donovan voted in favor of the deal that boosted funding for each public faculties and voucher applications.
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