Wisconsin Right Now

We knew it would get ugly, but this is really beyond the pale. A text message push poll went out to Wisconsin conservative voters today that is supportive of Republican Attorney General candidate Adam Jarchow and tells a stone-cold lie about his opponent, Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney in an attempt to turn voters off of Toney. Specifically, the push poll lies to voters about Toney, who is a Republican, saying: "Eric Toney prosecuted Kyle Rittenhouse for murder after Rittenhouse defended himself from attackers during rioting in Kenosha." The poll then asks people if that "fact" makes people more or less likely to vote for Toney. We've obtained a screenshot: However, Eric Toney did NOT prosecute Kyle Rittenhouse . He did not have anything to do with that prosecution at all. Toney is the District Attorney of Fond du Lac County. Rittenhouse was prosecuted by the office of Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Graveley and his assi...

The unfair attacks came from a website that Toney's primary opponent recently helped run and quoted a defense attorney tied to the man he defeated to become DA. Political attacks accusing Republican District Attorney Eric Toney, a candidate for Attorney General, of unfairly going after a pet shop owner for selling an invasive species, a form of Mexican crayfish, are unfair and leave out key information. The attacks are framed to exact maximum damage against Toney, the only Republican in the race who has ever prosecuted a criminal case. Toney, former legislator Adam Jarchow, and attorney Karen Mueller are vying to go against Democrat Josh Kaul in the fall. We started seeing the crayfish story everywhere, pushed hard by Jarchow and his allies, and on the surface of it, they made Toney sound terrible, so we decided to look into it and see what it was all about. They are trying to create a narrative against Toney, a rule-of-law style prosecutor, as an over-zealous prosecutor ru...

Why did Adam Jarchow and Mandela Barnes refuse to protect prosecutors, cops, and their families? Two of the candidates running in Wisconsin primaries for major state offices - Mandela Barnes and Adam Jarchow - voted against a state law that made it a felony to batter a prosecutor and to threaten a law enforcement officer or batter their family members. The language in Assembly Bill 347 was pretty straightforward. It was proposed by a group of Republican legislators. An analysis by the Legislative Reference Bureau reads, "Assembly Bill 347 provides that it is a Class H felony to either cause bodily harm or threaten to cause bodily harm to the person of or family of a judge, law enforcement officer, prosecutor, or public defender." Yet Jarchow and Barnes voted no . In this, they were outliers. Only 15 members of the state Assembly voted "no." The bill passed 80-15 with many Democrats joining all other Republicans to vote "yes." Mandela Barnes a...

New Attorney General candidate Adam Jarchow raised zero dollars in his first campaign finance report, deleted a childish website he created painting his Republican opponent as a marionette, said police reform is probably needed in Milwaukee, and once pushed a bill with liberal Democrats to decriminalize some possession of marijuana cases and argued to legalize the drug. We think there's an even bigger problem, though: He's never prosecuted a criminal case. There's a new Republican candidate for state Attorney General and, as with Professor Ryan Owens , Adam Jarchow has never handled a single criminal case in Wisconsin, according to a review of online court records. He's tweeted, "Running DOJ has nothing to do with courtroom experience" before scrubbing his Twitter account, and a Madison newspaper reported that he doesn't think Republicans should define the state's top law enforcement official (Attorney General) as the state's top cop. Here...