Nick Garcia
Rodriguez went from political unknown to a step away from being governor in just three years.
With the elections for president and U.S. Senate exactly one year away, the Wisconsin Democratic Party dispatched its most prominent suburban mom — Lieutenant Governor Sara Rodriguez — to talk to the Wisconsin voters who will decide who wins those elections.
Over the Nov. 4-5 weekend, in small rallies in Kenosha, Ozaukee and Dane counties, Rodriguez echoed President Joe Biden’s call to “finish the job” by re-electing the president, Vice President Kamala Harris and U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin.
Democrats in Wisconsin and Washington want “safe schools,” she said, “full funding” of public schools, “sensible” gun-control laws, clean water and action to slow climate change. “Our values are Wisconsin values. We’re not creating chaos in Washington. Democrats are trying to get things done.”
Why should suburban moms, who play increasingly important roles in elections, listen to her?
As the mother of 17- and 14-year-olds (“lots of eye-rolling and door slamming in my house”) who attend a public Waukesha high school, Rodriguez says she knows what issues matter to people, regardless of party affiliation. “I have the privilege of being able to talk to people all over the political spectrum. We agree on 85-90% of things that are important to Democrats.”
In 2020, she adds, “We flipped [an Assembly] district in Waukesha County, which is not exactly a bastion of liberalism.... We can flip a district anywhere in the state.”
On weekends, the 48-year-old Rodriguez plays the role of Democratic Party messenger. On weekdays, she serves as an ambassador for Evers, either by traveling the state or working out of her first-floor Capitol office. Her schedule is dictated by aides to the governor, and she visited all 72 counties in 2023.
“They tell me where to go,” Rodriguez joked to a class of seventh graders from Waukesha County who visited her at her office in early December.
But who is Sara Rodriguez, who went from political unknown to a step away from being governor in just three years? She advises Evers on health care and other issues that the governor has prioritized. But like other lieutenant governors before her, she plays a supporting role.
“I will always be a nurse until the day I die,” says Rodriguez. “Being a nurse was the best decision I ever made in my entire life.”
After graduating from Brookfield East High School, Rodriguez earned bachelor’s degrees in nursing and neuroscience, and master’s degrees in public health and nursing.
Rodriguez was a nurse in Samoa for the Peace Corps, working as a health-care educator in villages with HIV/AIDS patients. As an epidemic intelligence officer for the Centers for Disease Control, she slept on a Navy ship while helping New Orleans recover from Hurricane Katrina. She worked for a three-county health network around Denver before she became the chronic disease director for the state of Colorado.
Then her mom called: Your dad, she told her, was “acting a little funny.”
“I could tell he was having memory issues,” Rodriguez says of her dad, a Vietnam war vet then in his 60s. “I knew my mom was going to need help.”
The nurse and her family — husband, Baltazar, a native of Mexico and an IT network engineer who she met in an Oklahoma salsa dancing class, and their two children — moved back to Waukesha County in 2011. Her parents moved in with them and together they lived with the emotional loss, chaos and pain in Alzheimer’s wake.
She feels “lucky” her father was able to live with them until he died. Her mother still lives with them.
Back in Wisconsin, Rodriguez worked for two giant companies: Honeywell, working on “remote patient monitoring,” and Aurora, as a vice president of population health. That meant working with nurses on patient care management, making sure patients “don’t come back to the emergency department.”
But nurse Rodriguez didn’t self-diagnose or take time to be tested for celiac disease, caused by an immune reaction to eating gluten. Now gluten-free, she endured its many symptoms until she was 36.
When COVID paralyzed the nation in 2020, sickening and killing millions and closing schools and businesses, Rodriguez was appalled that Wisconsin’s Republican-led Legislature “didn’t meet for eight months — didn’t meet at all.”
“It was so frustrating to me, as a clinician, as a nurse, somebody who worked in public health…. People wanted us to provide leadership, to listen to the experts and science that was out there.”
Republican legislators should have done expanded telehealth services and made sure that state and local health departments had the resources they needed to protect Wisconsin residents, she says.
She lived in the 13th Assembly District, a traditionally Republican suburban district that a Democrat came within 955 votes of winning in 2018. That Democrat wasn’t running again. Should Rodriguez run?
“I didn’t think I was ever going to run for office,” she told the seventh graders having a pizza lunch in her Capitol office. But she saw a lack of knowledge among lawmakers during the COVID crisis: “I know how health care works firsthand.”
Encouraged by veteran Democratic Rep. Evan Goyke, whose own Assembly district borders the 13th and who knocked on doors for her, Rodriguez decided to take a significant pay cut and run against Republican Rep. Rob Hutton, now a state senator.
Goyke says he had never heard of Rodriguez when Waukesha County Democrats proposed her as a potential 13th District candidate in 2020. But he was impressed when the two talked. “Sara asked: ‘What was it like to serve in the Legislature?’
“I liked that a lot,” Goyke says. “I want to work with people that do this on purpose. Sometimes, you meet candidates and they’re just excited to get their name out there. They all believe they have to be in Congress.”
A total of $1.59 million — “an obscene” amount, Rodriguez now says — was spent in that 2020 Assembly race, with her campaign and third-party groups spending $953,000 of that to elect her. She won by 733 votes, out of 37,901 votes cast.
In January 2021 she was sworn into an Assembly controlled by Republicans who don’t take advice from first-term Democrats, even those whose careers were spent in health care.
But she was helpful to her Democratic colleagues, advising them on COVID and other public health issues, says Goyke. “In our Democratic caucuses, she was almost an agenda item: ‘What’s new with COVID, Sara?’ She has incredible professional credentials — too good for the Assembly.”
Rodriguez was not naive about the political realities of a Legislature controlled by one party, but nevertheless found it frustrating that she couldn’t make a difference on COVID policy. In her current role, she is free of the constraints of the legislative process and focused on the upcoming elections. Democrats are looking to Rodriguez to fire up voters, especially on social issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights.
“Republicans in Washington want a ‘national abortion ban,’” Rodriguez warned at those November rallies. “This is a dangerous policy, and it’s not a policy that anyone in Wisconsin wants…. They’re coming for birth control next.”
Brandon Maly, chair of the Dane County Republican Party, says that Rodriguez is fear-mongering. While some abortion opponents in the Republican Party support federal legislation on abortion, “Our Senate and presidential nominees…will not be individuals that support a national abortion ban.”
“Rodriguez represents a political minority on most issues,” he adds. “She wants to take away school choice from low-income families and oppose tax cuts for the working class.”
Maly, who is also actively seeking suburban voters, says Rodriguez “would be wise to do some introspection into her own party and focus back on Wisconsin instead of nationalizing everything. Her boss is the one in many cases sowing chaos and ruling against the will of the people, using the veto as often as he does.”
But Goyke says recent events, like the Supreme Court ruling on abortion, have activated women, especially suburban women, toward the Democratic Party and Democratic ideals. And Rodriguez is the perfect messenger for communicating those ideals to voters, he adds: “Sara’s origin story, to me, is a mom, resident, random citizen — not a political person whatsoever.”
During the redistricting process in 2021, Republicans targeted Rodriguez, redrawing the 13th Assembly District and moving thousands of Wauwatosa and West Allis Democratic voters into the districts of Goyke and Democratic Rep. Daniel Riemer. The 13th district is now represented by Republican Rep. Tom Michalski.
“Sara understood; she’s smart. She could have run, and she would have lost,” Goyke recalls. “I think she ran for lieutenant governor because, in that short time, she got the bug — the political bug.”
Mandela Barnes was running for the U.S. Senate, so there was no incumbent lieutenant governor. Should she run, knowing that she was a political unknown statewide and, if Evers and she won, she’d be a heartbeat away from being governor?
“I wouldn’t have run for this office if I didn’t think I could fulfill the duties of this office, and [becoming governor if there is a vacancy] is one of them,” Rodriguez says.
Nick Garcia
No bigger-name Democrat ran for lieutenant governor in 2022, so Rodriguez easily beat a Hmong community leader, Peng Her, in the August primary. In November, the Evers-Rodriguez ticket defeated Republicans Tim Michels, for governor, and state Sen. Roger Roth, for lieutenant governor.
Veteran Wisconsin political scientist Charles Franklin, founder of the Marquette University Law School poll, says that lieutenant governors from both parties, not unlike vice presidents, are “largely at the mercy of the executive to give them things to do, or not to do. Sometimes that leaves the lieutenant governor with little role, and they try to create one on their own, which can make for tension with the governor and their staff.
“Many lieutenant governors have had very little visibility,” he adds. “On the other hand, looking ahead to 2026 and a potential Evers retirement, the lieutenant governor’s role is certainly a potential launching pad.”
Mandela Barnes used that role to lay the groundwork to run for the U.S. Senate, narrowly losing to Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, Franklin notes.
“Certainly Rodriguez has done events on policy issues and elect-Dems rallies are an example of building support with potential future Democratic office holders who might support her in the future.”
But, he adds, “The fundamental barrier is the lieutenant governor is not able to take independent action in the same way that the attorney general, for example, can. Or a member of the Legislature. The governor is always a constraint on what the lieutenant governor can do.”
If the 72-year-old Evers does not seek a third term, Rodriguez and three other Democratic leaders — Attorney General Josh Kaul, Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski and Missy Hughes, CEO of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation — are expected to consider running for governor in 2026.
What has Sara Rodriguez learned in her first year as lieutenant governor — a job one pundit described as a “low-profile, limited-responsibility office”?
Rodriguez bristles at that description. “This office is what you make of it. I can use the microphone that I have to shine a light on things that are important to people in Wisconsin.” Those include Medicaid expansion and addressing the health care workforce shortage.
She and Evers talk at least every two weeks. “The governor always makes sure that I know what’s going on, that I am involved in many of these things.” Multiple requests for comment from the governor for this story went unanswered by his communications team.
Accomplishments?
Republican legislators killed one health-care initiative that Rodriguez got Evers to include in his proposed 2023-25 budget. They also killed the goal of expanding Medicaid to 90,000 more low-income Wisconsin residents — 30,000 of whom now have no insurance, Rodriguez laments.
But she and the governor started the first in the nation apprenticeship program for nurses, a partnership between UW-Madison and Madison College. Participants “end up with no school debt, and a really good, family-supporting job,” Rodriguez says, vowing to try to expand the program.
And, yes, if it came to that, Sara Rodriguez is ready to become governor.
“I’m absolutely ready to be governor, if that happens. What I bring to the table is I have been an executive within large organizations for many years. The state of Wisconsin is a very large, complicated organization.”
What does Rodriguez do when she’s not in the Capitol, being a suburban mom, or going around the state firing up Democrats?
She loves to hike outdoors, especially on the Ice Age Trail. She played softball — pitcher and shortstop — in her youth, but now enjoys archery: “I don’t shoot at things that move.”
Her bookshelf in the Capitol might be the only one that includes a guide to tequila. Her husband is a tequila connoisseur, Rodriguez explains. And, yes, Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor drinks tequila.
Asked if she would run for governor in 2026 if Evers does not seek a third term, Rodriguez is noncommittal.
“I’m focused on working with Gov. Evers to grow our state’s workforce, protect access to healthcare, and deliver results,” she says.“If Gov. Evers runs for another term, I’ll look forward to running alongside him as lieutenant governor. I’ll always look for opportunities to serve the people of our state.”
