Panelists include, from top left and clockwise: Moderator Mike Wagner, Julie Azari, Susan Webb Yackee, and Jeff Mandell.
Still trying to make sense of what happened in the midterm elections? Join the club! Wisconsin voters went with a Democratic governor and Republican U.S. senator, while resisting a veto-proof state Legislature.
How did we get here? And where are we headed?
Isthmus has assembled experts in politics, voting, public policy and media to help answer those questions and more in a panel discussion, streaming live Thursday night at 7 p.m. on our Facebook page.
Moderator Michael Wagner is an Isthmus board member and professor in the UW-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. His research, teaching, and service are animated by the question, “How well does democracy work?” Wagner approaches this question from a variety of perspectives, incorporating into his work the study of political communication, political parties, journalism, public opinion, political psychology, political behavior, religion and politics, the presidency, and biology.
Julia Azari is a political science professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee. Her research and teaching interests include the American presidency, American political parties, the politics of the American state, and qualitative research methods. Azari is a regular contributor to the political science blog The Mischiefs of Faction. Her work has also appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog and in Politico.
Jeff Mandell is one of Wisconsin’s leading election law litigators. He represented Gov. Tony Evers in several challenges to the validity of Wisconsin’s 2020 election and represents the city of Green Bay in relation to the Wisconsin Assembly’s broad investigation of Wisconsin elections. He previously prosecuted the complaints that kept Kanye West and Howie Hawkins off of Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential ballot, represented Disability Rights Wisconsin in defending the statutory provision that guarantees “indefinitely confined” voters access to absentee ballots, and he helped the Service Employees International Union block efforts to purge hundreds of thousands of registered voters from Wisconsin’s rolls.
Susan Webb Yackee is director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs and a Collins-Bascom Professor of Public Affairs at UW–Madison. Her research and teaching interests include the U.S. public policymaking process, public management, regulation, administrative law, and interest group politics. Yackee received the 2019 Herbert A. Simon Career Contribution Award from the Midwest Public Administration Caucus, the highest award in the field of political science for the study of bureaucracy and public administration.
