Profile: Wisconsin's Eighth Congressional District

Wisconsin’s Eighth Congressional District is a growing suburban area north of Milwaukee and a quintessential Midwest battleground. This case study begins with an overview of the region and its major industries. We examine the demographics of the Eighth District and compare them to Wisconsin’s most Democratic (WI-04) and most Republican (WI-05) districts—revealing how different the swing district looks from the safe red and blue ones. We then turn to a political snapshot, where it becomes evident why the Eighth is a swing district—President Obama won there in 2008 but Mitt Romney won there in 2012 and a Republican has represented the Eighth in Congress for several years. Finally, we focus on two aspects of an issue with local saliency: K-12 education and higher education. While education has become an ideological football in recent years in Wisconsin, the debates in the Eighth reveal the complexities at the local level as citizens struggle with the complicated questions it raises. By examining this prototypical Midwestern battleground district in greater depth, we can get a fuller picture of what life is really like in Purple America.

District Overview

Wisconsin’s Eighth Congressional District covers the heart of Wisconsin’s “New North” region,¹ namely the area around Lake Michigan’s Green Bay and the more inland Fox Valley. The heart of the Eighth District is Brown County (population 254,600), where the city of Green Bay is located, and Outagamie County (population 177,000) to its west, home to Appleton.

The region is doing relatively well economically, housing a growing population and half of Wisconsin’s largest companies.² People still “make things” in the Eighth District, with a robust manufacturing sector in the region employing over 82,000 people, or 22.5% of the 364,000 person workforce.³ The second largest industry in the Eighth is the “educational services, health care, and social assistance” super-sector, employing 75,000 individuals as of 2014, or 20.5% of the overall workforce.

Demographically, the district has a sizable American Indian population (more than 17,500 of the 722,755 residents),⁴ as the district encompasses both the Menominee Indian Tribe reservation and the Oneida Tribe of Indians of Wisconsin—just adjacent to the city of Green Bay. Appleton and Green Bay also have a sizable Hmong population, an ethnic group that had many of its members resettled after they fought alongside the U.S. in the Vietnam War.⁵ Lastly, the district has a growing Hispanic population. Green Bay’s Hispanic population has increased fourteen fold since 1990, to around 14,000, and the city is now more than 13% Hispanic.⁶

The Eighth Congressional District is home to several colleges and universities. The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay is a medium-sized public college that offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and the UW system also has a two-year campus in the district in Marinette. There are two small private liberal arts colleges—Lawrence University in Appleton and St. Norbert College in De Pere. The state runs two large technical colleges with multiple locations in the district, the Fox Valley Technical College in the Appleton area and the Northeast Wisconsin Technical College in Green Bay and the wider region. ITT Technical Institute (now defunct), Rasmussen College, and Globe University are all for-profit colleges with campuses in the district, and Bellin College runs a small nursing school. Lastly, the College of Menominee Nation (a small, tribal college) has locations in Keshena and Green Bay.

Demographic Snapshot

To understand why the Eighth is competitive, it is helpful to compare the demographics of the district with a safe blue district and a safe red district in the same state. Wisconsin’s Fourth Congressional District is comprised mostly of the city of Milwaukee and is safely in Democratic hands, with a partisan score of D+23. Wisconsin’s Fifth Congressional District includes the western suburbs of Milwaukee and votes consistently Republican, with a partisan score of R+5. The purple Eighth district is less urban than the blue district and less suburban than the red one. Both the purple Eighth and the red Fifth are overwhelmingly white, while the blue Fourth is one-third black and 16% Hispanic. Median household earnings are $13,927 more in the purple Eighth than in the blue Fourth but below the red Fifth by $10,496. Perhaps unsurprisingly, poverty is much lower in the purple Eighth (11%) than in the blue Fourth (26%), and looks much more on that measure like the red Fifth (8.7%). There is not much variation in educational attainment between these blue, red, and purple districts.

A full demographic comparison is available in the Appendix.

Politics & Elections

This year, Wisconsin’s Eighth District has an open Congressional election. It’s current Representative, Reid Ribble, was swept into office during the 2010 Republican wave, and he announced in January that he was stepping down after three terms—sooner than his original pledge not to serve past 2019.⁷ Republicans chose their candidate to succeed Ribble in their August 9th primary election, selecting retired U.S. Marine intelligence officer and former foreign affairs advisor to Gov. Scott Walker’s presidential campaign, Mike Gallagher. Gallagher was the presumed favorite and was endorsed by Ribble, which may explain why he won with well over twice as many votes as the other candidates combined.⁸

On the other side, Democrats selected Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson, who had previously served as the State Assembly Majority Leader and was a Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor.⁹ The district is listed as a “Toss Up” by the Cook Political Report, though Ribble has won with significant margins in recent years.¹⁰ The Badger State is also home to a major Senate fight between first-term Republican incumbent Ron Johnson, and the man he beat in 2010, former Senator Russ Feingold.¹¹

At the presidential level, Wisconsin has voted for Democrats since the late 1980’s, but George W. Bush came within a few tenths of one percent statewide both times he ran, so it is fair to consider it a battleground state.¹² In the Eighth District, President Obama won handily in 2008, but Mitt Romney prevailed by three points in 2012. Ted Cruz won the primary this year in the district, as did Sen. Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side.

Election Results under Current District Lines

Issue Analysis

A review of local news coverage in the Eighth District reveals an intense conversation about education unfolding on the ground. In January of this year we began tracking six topics in five local newspapers prevalent in the local media market, generating 231 results for analysis. The topics were K-12 education, health care, higher education, immigration, manufacturing and racial issues (including issues pertaining to members of the Native American, Hispanic, and Hmong communities). Every week, we archived relevant articles, editorials, op-eds, and letters-to-the-editor from the Green Bay Press-Gazette, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Oconto Times Herald, Post-Crescent, and Shawano Leader. The goal was to focus on local salience, and national wire stories were excluded. This analysis highlights issues surrounding K-12 and higher education, two topics that received a lot of attention.

After Republican Gov. Scott Walker was elected in 2010, one of his first and most controversial moves was Act 10. Also known as the Budget Repair Bill, it ended collective bargaining for most public employees, cut education funding, and restructured the University of Wisconsin System. While nationally this played out as a struggle between Labor on the left and Tea Partiers on the right, Wisconsin’s residents at the local level were the ones left to grapple with the fallout. Indeed, Act 10 coupled with other changes in education policy have created instability and concern about the affordability and quality of elementary and high schools as well as higher education institutions in the Eighth.

Elementary and Secondary Education:

Education has become a partisan flashpoint during Gov. Scott Walker’s tenure, owing to measures aimed to curtail the impact of teachers unions and cuts to state education funding. This has played itself out in struggles over student testing and funding in the elementary and secondary school system. Wisconsin has had a statewide student testing system in place since 1996, though the test has evolved over time, including to comply with the requirements of No Child Left Behind.

A new Common-Core-aligned test, Badger Test, was introduced in 2015 to replace the older statewide test. But there were significant problems with Badger Test, including a high price tag, an inability to adjust questions based on student skill, and mis-alignment with political views of the Republican governor and legislature, who said they rejected Common Core and wanted a “Wisconsin-centered” test.¹³ A new statewide test, Wisconsin Forward Exam (which is still Common-Core-aligned), was adopted, but it has also met with criticism. As one teacher noted in the local media:

"For example, the questions were so confusing that one of my students struggled for 15 minutes even though he answered a question on the same concept in five seconds just last week. The bottom line is that the test fails at one of the most basic tenets of education: it does not accurately assess what the students know… If Susie gets a question wrong on this test, I will not know if she does not know it or if she just did not know how to drag and drop."¹⁴

Concerns about the quality of data received and the usefulness of such measures are not confined to Wisconsin’s Eighth district. But while state and local politicians may see this as an ideological battle, teachers and parents on the ground are struggling to place the results they see in context. And given the recent shifts in which test is used, longitudinal comparisons are difficult (at best). As a result, it is difficult to measure success or improvement over time, and voters in the district feel they have few indications of whether their schools are headed in the right direction.¹⁵

Another political battle has added to this tumult. The state of Wisconsin began issuing “Report Cards” comparing schools in 2012. This, too, has been controversial, especially among those who attend schools that have been labeled as “failing.” Earlier this year, a graduate from Green Bay’s East High School, one of these schools, noted that her experience there was transformational:

"East gave me a perspective that so many people who live in these "bubbles" of selective, private, upper-middle class schools never gain. I had the challenge, and the privilege, of attending a school where I was in the minority, being Caucasian, and where 70 percent of students' families' incomes qualified them for free or reduced-price school lunches."

She now attends Notre Dame.¹⁶

At least partially in response to those who criticize the report cards as skewed toward those schools with more resources, the state is moving to include “the educational challenges of poverty and limited English-language skills” into its school rating system. The aim is to refocus on improvement and growth rather than simply pass or fail scores—a move encouraged by the recent overhaul of the No Child Left Behind law at the federal level. Like in most regions of the country, in the Eighth District’s Brown County, the ten lowest performing schools were all in the city of Green Bay, where 87% of students were from families at poverty or below poverty levels, 75% of students were Hispanic or nonwhite, and nearly half spoke limited English. By contrast, the ten highest performing schools in the Eight were in the Green Bay suburbs with low poverty rates (23%) and mostly white students (87%).¹⁷

In spite of these challenges, local media coverage also reveals success stories in the district of communities working to innovate and improve the quality of students’ education. In fact, on balance there were more stories published of educational successes than of failures. Schools in Gillett and Suring have won statewide recognition as “High-Progress” and “High-Achieving” schools for success in educating students from low-income families.¹⁸ One local high school received an Innovative Educator Grant for their stream-monitoring project.¹⁹ Others participate in a public-private apprenticeship program that allows students to gain real-world experience in STEM fields for course credit, including high-tech manufacturing and health care.²⁰ Even in a challenging environment, our media analysis demonstrates that local communities and schools are working together to evolve in order to meet the needs of their students.

School funding has become another major local issue of controversy, partially owing to a series of state legislative moves. Gov. Walker signed into law changes that reduced the amount of property tax revenue that can be used to fund education while simultaneously cutting $792 million in state aid elementary and secondary education funding. Cuts to education funding were driven by state budget concerns but also Gov. Walker’s pledge to reduce property taxes. In order to increase per-pupil funding and replace budget cuts, school districts are increasingly relying on referenda, which had previously been reserved for one-time (e.g., construction) costs.²¹ The Gillett School Board in the Eighth District sought increases simply to maintain their current programming and curriculum in one of 72 referendums across the state in the spring elections.²² The issue dominated the local papers for months leading to the April vote. One public school board member grappled publicly with the increasing reliance on such stopgap mechanisms, undoubtedly speaking for many other people in the district:

"[W]hat accounts for the growing number of districts conducting and district residents passing referenda to exceed levy limits to maintain current educational programming; and districts suffering unsuccessful referenda forced to drastically curtail their programs?"²³

Battles over performance and education funding may amount to talking points on the campaign trail. But residents of Wisconsin’s Eighth are struggling with the implications in real time. And without state support and with limited local authority, many school districts feel pinched while trying to improve outcomes and the quality of student education.

Higher Education:

As with elementary and high school education, the public university system in Wisconsin has faced numerous challenges. In 2011, as part of Act 10, Gov. Walker and the Republican-legislature cut union collective bargaining rights for professors and ended faculty tenure. There have also been cuts to university funding. The subsequent years have required adjusting to this new reality.

In the 2015–2017 biennial budget, state lawmakers cut $250 million from the University of Wisconsin System budget, an 11% cut in state funding. Administrative cuts have occurred throughout college campuses to deal with the shortfall, along with reductions in the number of teaching faculty, academic advisers, and public safety employees. There have also been reductions in course offerings and larger class sizes.²⁴

Particular programs upon which citizens of the Eighth have relied have also been hard hit. The University of Wisconsin Extension provides programs and resources for Wisconsin residents and businesses throughout the state, particularly serving rural and agricultural needs. As a result of recent budget cuts, their budget will be cut by $3.6 million, an 8.3% cut in state funding. To make these cuts, UW-Extension is reorganizing, closing rural offices, relying more heavily on technology, and requiring counties to financially contribute to run UW-Extension services. People in the Eighth were not happy with this decision from the capital. As one county board supervisor noted, “The services provided in this county by UW-Extension is huge…All I can see is services going away.” Residents of the Eighth expressed concerns at community meetings, with the local UW-Extension chairman noting, “We want this to slow down, and we want the counties to have a bigger stake in the conversation.”²⁵

Many view the state education cuts as directly related to rising concerns about student debt. As one local woman noted:

"We need to invest into our education system, not drain it. Our students deserve better for the challenges of a new world that they face, a world where only a college degree can get you in the door. It is pathetic that the average Wisconsin student has a loan debt of $28,810 upon graduation. How are they ever going to succeed in life if they start almost $30,000 in the hole? Our state has always valued education, making us some of the leaders of this great country, but this reputation has faded as our education has been repeatedly slashed."²⁶

Yet even amidst budget cuts, shrinking services, and concerns about student debt, there are signs that folks in the Eighth worry about the impact drastic proposals like “free college” might have long term. As one resident noted:

"In the likelihood of free college tuition for everyone beginning next year, may these students enjoy their four years of study. For their next 55 to 60 years, may they also “enjoy: the tax burden that will surely follow them."²⁷

Takeaways

Education may not be driving our national political conversation, but in Wisconsin’s Eighth District, it is a major issue. In fact of the 231 articles from Wisconsin's Eighth District, more than half—120—focused on education.After his election in 2010, Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican legislature enacted a series of changes many on the right had been advocating for years—undercutting the power of unions and cutting state spending and taxes. The result has been years of turmoil and fighting to implement those abrupt changes. The gaze from residents of the Eighth District allows us to see how these ideas play out on the local level. Debates rage about how to pay for necessary educational services and have resulted in a raft of local referenda. Testing and accountability systems remain controversial and their constant evolution contributes to a sense of unsteadiness at the local level. In higher education, budget cuts are altering course offerings and programs, and district residents directly feel the result of those reductions. While many worry about student debt, skepticism remains strong of proposals to make college free—driven by deep concerns about how to pay for it.

Conclusion

As our prototypical Midwestern battleground, Wisconsin’s Eighth District sheds light on how swing districts differ from reliable Republican and die-hard Democratic areas of the country. While manufacturing still exists, the Eighth is a district in transition, with education and health care as top fields of employment. Demographically, the Eighth is changing, still overwhelmingly white, but with an increasing Hispanic population. Citizens here still engage in split ticket voting, electing President Obama in 2008 and supporting Mitt Romney in 2012 while being represented by a Tea Party Republican in Congress. Issues such as education funding and testing have become political footballs, but residents here are struggling to understand and adapt to change and find ways to best serve their communities. In an era of political tribalism, the Eighth bucks that trend and illuminates the lived realities of Americans adapting to an evolving world.

Appendix