How this 'red' county picked up election wins with a little 'blue' research help

[RandySF]

State and national elections get a lot of negative attention, but at least voters have a better chance of knowing what the Democratic and Republican candidates stand for — unlike the spring nonpartisan races where you have to do some homework on candidates to vote your values. But that might change as group in Waukesha County shows the value of having that research.

Kristin Hansen told UpNorthNews she started Blue Sky Waukesha County after years of frustration over not knowing much about the candidates for school boards, county boards, and municipal governments like city councils, village boards, and town boards.

“I spent a lot of time digging around,” Hansen said, “reading these people’s websites, reading interviews, doing some research on them. So I started just telling people: ‘Here’s who I’m going to vote for. Here’s why.’ And in 2019, I thought this could be a community service.”

Hansen’s work caught on, and now she says a team of volunteers will sift through information on dozens of local candidates in order to make recommendations to blue-ish voters in an area not necessarily known as a hotbed of progressive politics.


https://upnorthnewswi.com/2026/02/24/how-this-red-county-picked-up-election-wins-with-a-little-blue-research-help/

[moniss]

1. Just for geographical context Waukesha County

borders on the western edge of Milwaukee County. During the Civil Rights marches, open housing marches etc. during the '60's this was one of the counties surrounding Milwaukee County that saw a huge population increase due to "white flight". That problem was exacerbated in Waukesha County by the big shots of the whole metro area moving businesses to Waukesha and also new business being actively discouraged from locating in Milwaukee County.

So the bottom line is it grew because of racial tensions and politically became dominated by "law and order" types in the GQP under Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush etc. To show that the racial component was strong throughout one only needs to know that Waukesha County fought against all metro area mass transit proposals for a very long time and they would openly cite not having an "increased crime problem" as their reason. We know the code words. The lack of availability of comprehensive mass transit for workers from neighborhoods in Milwaukee to factory jobs in Waukesha County has been a major negative impact for Milwaukee County residents.

Residents in the poorer neighborhoods in Milwaukee County face major obstacles with respect to owning and insuring vehicles to drive out to the jobs in Waukesha County. Lower incomes mean fewer people qualifying for financing and even if they do they find that their insurance rates are often more than triple what it would be for someone living in Waukesha County.

Moving to and living in Waukesha County is also unrealistic for a great many of the poorer residents of Milwaukee neighborhoods as the housing prices are much higher and tactics are employed to limit minority accessibility to housing etc. So basically white flight happened and was supported by the power structure, businesses moved and "red-lining" by zip codes was aggressively employed for insurance, credit applications and policing.

Along with this was a deterioration in the public schools in Milwaukee County because of historically uneven funding and supply of resources. City of Milwaukee public schools were often using very old textbooks compared to Waukesha County schools and the MPS students were often "sharing" a textbook among 3 or more classmates when Waukesha County students each had their own much newer/up to date textbook to have to take home and use to study when they needed to.

Milwaukee County remains one of the most segregated counties in the nation to this day.