David Crowley will be the first Black governor in Wisconsin’s 178-year history. The Milwaukee County executive beat Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany on Tuesday, and he did it while being outspent 2.5 to 1.
Tiffany conceded at 9:45 p.m. Crowley spoke shortly after 10, and the Associated Press called the race at about 10:30. Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski, his running mate, was elected lieutenant governor.
Crowley is 40. He was born on Milwaukee’s north side, in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the country, to parents who struggled with substance abuse during the crack epidemic, and he has described a childhood of evictions. He was elected to the state Legislature at 30 and became county executive in 2020. “This win belongs to Milwaukee, the city that raised me,” he said in his victory speech.
The Black stake in this is specific. Wisconsin imprisons more of its Black residents than any other state: one in 36 Black adults was behind bars in 2021, according to a Wisconsin Policy Forum analysis, close to 12 times the white rate. About two in three Black Wisconsinites live in Milwaukee County, a region shaped by decades of segregation and redlining. The man who will now run the state came from that map, not from above it.
The money was lopsided. Three Wisconsin billionaires helped fund Tiffany, who had voted with President Donald Trump on every vote, according to the Associated Press. Crowley had the endorsements of Gov. Tony Evers and former President Barack Obama, and ran on lowering costs for working families: child care, health care and groceries. He also promised to expand Medicaid, fully fund public schools and overturn Act 10, the 2011 law that stripped most public workers of collective bargaining rights.
Tiffany’s explanation was about prices, not Crowley. “I mean you see $4 gasoline, high cost, stuff like that. It’s clear voters have said, ‘you’re the party in power, we’re gonna try something different.'”
Crowley pitched himself as a governor for a state that splits down the middle. “Wisconsin isn’t a red state or a blue state. We never have been,” he said. “In a state this close, nobody gets to govern alone.”
That line will be tested quickly. Democrats came into the night hoping to flip the Legislature for the first time in 16 years, and the party has not held full control of state government since 2010. A governor who wants Medicaid expansion and the end of Act 10 needs the votes to do it. Black Milwaukee voted for a first. It is owed policy: schools that are funded, a health system that covers them, and a corrections budget that stops treating the north side as its main supplier.
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