I Have Not Voted No

On the morning of May 14 Congressman Tom Tiffany, the Republican nominee for Governor of Wisconsin, went on a podcast in the Northwoods and said this about the war with Iran: "Yeah, so that conflict continues. My position is it's time to wrap up the war." He added that "most of their ships are in the bottom of the sea" and that it was "time to wrap things up and come back home." That afternoon the House of Representatives voted on House Concurrent Resolution 75, which would have directed the President to do exactly that, and the vote was 212 to 212, and Mr. Tiffany voted no, and the Speaker broke the tie. It was his third no vote on ending the war; there would be two more, on June 3 and July 23, and on September 15, when the resolution finally passed the House with seven Republican votes, he was absent. On September 19, in Milwaukee, a reporter asked him about the five votes. "I have not voted no," he said. Three days later, asked again, he explained that he had voted no because the President already had the authority, and that "the president has final say in regards to this." At the one debate of the campaign, on October 21, the five votes came up once, in Mr. Crowley's closing, as "their endless war," and the moderators never put them to Mr. Tiffany; the fact-check of the tape afterward marked the claim "right." The paper has a rule about men who say one thing in the morning and vote the other way in the afternoon, which is that it writes about them. It has not yet had one who then denied the afternoon.

Here is the man. Tom Tiffany is 68, grew up on a fifty-cow dairy farm, ran a cruise boat on the Willow Flowage for twenty years and tended its dam for 29, which is why the Northwoods call him the dam man, and after two failed runs for the state Senate he got there in 2013, went to Congress in a 2020 special election, and has been returned three times from the Seventh District with more than sixty percent. He launched for Governor on September 23, 2025, a few days after his office scrubbed the "issues" page of his website, which had covered abortion, guns, immigration, crime and China, and replaced it with a page called "solutions." The President endorsed him on January 27, "Complete and Total," and his one primary opponent dropped out the next day. He won the August primary with 95 percent. He has said he would "love" the President to come campaign with him, and the President has not, and the Associated Press's reading in mid-October was that Mr. Tiffany "keeps his distance from Trump," which is the strategy every Republican in a state the President carried by 29,000 votes has adopted this fall, and which the paper has now watched in Nevada, in Georgia, and here. Asked on October 13 whether he approves of the President, Mr. Tiffany said: "The president is doing what he believes is best for the United States of America." The paper notes that this is also true of the paper's cat. At the debate, when Mr. Crowley kept bringing the President up, Mr. Tiffany's answer was that his opponent is "consistently focused on being against Donald Trump, I'm for Wisconsin." The President, for his part, is for Wisconsin from a distance: as of Monday neither he nor the Vice President had a stop scheduled in the state before November 3, their final week going to Iowa, Michigan and Ohio instead, and his last word on the race was an October 22 post listing Mr. Tiffany with six House candidates. The paper ran its usual test, which is to look for one time the President did something because the candidate asked him to, and this time it found two. On June 30 the President posted that he had "just spoke with Congressman Tom Tiffany" and that Wisconsin was approved for $22.6 million for the April storms, which Governor Evers had requested in May; on October 7 he posted that he had spoken with Mr. Tiffany again and would approve $17.9 million for the July 27 tornado that went through Menasha, which Governor Evers had requested on August 26 and which had sat for six weeks, until the morning after CBS put the people of Menasha on television still waiting, with the figures that the President has approved 85 percent of the disaster requests from states he won and 46 percent from states he lost. Mr. Tiffany: "When severe weather hit Wisconsin, I called the White House to help secure the federal support our state needs." Governor Evers: "Wisconsinites will believe it when we see it." So the record is this. The one thing Mr. Tiffany can get from the President is Wisconsin's own disaster money, held until the candidate could be the one to announce it.

The money is the first thing Wisconsin should know. From July through September Mr. Tiffany's campaign took in about $26.3 million, against about $10.2 million for his opponent, and $24 million of his came from the Republican Party of Wisconsin, which raised more than $28 million in the quarter, 93 percent of it from three people: Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein of Uline, who live in Illinois and gave $22 million, and Diane Hendricks of ABC Supply in Beloit, who gave $5.6 million. Wisconsin law lets a party move unlimited money to its candidate, which is why the three checks went to the party and not to him. Last December, on public television, Mr. Tiffany himself called that law the "billionaire loophole." He was right. The last report before the election, filed Tuesday for the four weeks ending October 19, has Mr. Crowley ahead for once, $15.5 million to $10.1 million, and the reason is that the Democrats have billionaires too, and the paper will name them: Reid Hoffman, $5.5 million to the state party in the period and $2.5 million after it; Michael Bloomberg, $2 million; Lynn Schusterman, $1.5 million. On the other side the party's month was one check, $13 million from Mrs. Hendricks, which brings her to $21.1 million to the state Republican Party since January and $32.9 million to Wisconsin campaigns this year. Since the August primary Mr. Tiffany and his allies have put $60.8 million into paid media against $41.8 million for the other side, with $12.3 million to $9.3 million reserved for the last two weeks, and the Wisconsin Republican Party's chairman said of the three donors' money, "These numbers are no accident. They're a signal." The paper agrees. It is a signal about who the Governor would answer the phone for, and it is the Illinois area code.

The second thing is the record in Congress, which is the President's record with a Wisconsin accent. Mr. Tiffany voted for the big bill in July 2025 and called it a "game changer," and his explanation to a listening session in Rice Lake that January was that there are "five to 10 million people in America that are able bodied" who "really shouldn't be getting" Medicaid. The bill also cut food assistance by about $187 billion over ten years; Wisconsin's health department puts the new cost to the state at about $314 million a year, for a program that feeds more than 700,000 Wisconsinites, and in April Mr. Tiffany voted again to keep the cut. On tariffs his 2025 roll-call record with the President is 99 percent; he has voted at least seven times against Democratic bills to lift the tariffs on allies, two of them on Canada this year, and in January 2025 he called them "very strategic, very targeted." In August the trade talks with Canada collapsed, the President put 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion of Canadian goods, and on September 8 Canada retaliated dollar for dollar on American dairy, farm equipment and steel; the University of Wisconsin's extension service says Wisconsin dairy faces "severe export restrictions and plunging commodity prices." Mr. Tiffany's office did not respond to the Eau Claire station that asked him about it. Marquette's poll says 65 percent of Wisconsinites believe the tariffs are hurting the state's farmers. Mr. Tiffany, in August, allowed that "there have been some people that have been hurt by the tariffs, there's no doubt about it," and that "I support them."

Then there is diesel, which in a dairy state is not an abstraction. AAA has Wisconsin diesel at $6.39 this morning, against $3.55 a year ago; Wausau, in his district, is $6.37. His answer in September, when the Kewaunee County dairyman Clark Riemer stood next to Mr. Crowley and said his farm "could come to an end after 100-some years," was that prices are beyond his control and "we'll see what happens," and a statement that "David Crowley's answer to rising costs is to take more of your hard-earned money." Fine. The paper applied the test it has applied all week. On October 9 the President announced that the diesel would come from Russia, and Treasury licensed the trade through April 2027; on October 16 the President waived the sanctions. Twenty-two members of the House wrote the administration asking it to revoke the license, five of them Republicans, and Mr. Tiffany was not one. The paper looked for a statement, a letter, a cosponsorship, a sentence on the radio from the Congressman from the Seventh District about Russian diesel, and found none. He will not say a word against the deal and he will not sign a word against the deal, and he would like Wisconsin to believe the price at the pump is weather.

The third thing is 2020, and the paper is going to be exact, because Mr. Tiffany has spent a year being inexact about it. On December 10, 2020, he signed the Texas brief asking the Supreme Court to throw out the presidential votes of four states, one of them Wisconsin; he was the only member of the Wisconsin delegation to sign a request to disenfranchise the people who had just elected him. On January 5, 2021, his office announced he would object to Wisconsin's own electors. On January 6, after the building was cleared, he objected to Arizona's and Pennsylvania's, and the next day he told WISN, "I would have voted to object, yes," because "this was the only way to be able to send a message." In May of this year he backed an FBI investigation into Wisconsin's 2020 election and would not say whether Mr. Biden had won it. In July he said "unscrupulous" officials had let "hundreds of thousands of illegal votes" be cast and counted. In August he told WISN he had no regrets. On October 7, three weeks before the election, his campaign issued a statement: "Joe Biden won." And: "In 2028, I'll certify whoever wins the most votes in Wisconsin." Ten days later, asked by the Wausau paper whether his objections had jeopardized the election, he said, "I don't know the answer to that." The paper does. At the debate he did say the second half of the press release out loud, "I will certify the election in 2028, regardless of who the winner is," and the paper records it. He did not say the first half. Asked why he had tried to throw out the 2020 result, he said, "One of the reasons that I did that is Zuckerbucks," and "I objected to Mark Zuckerberg putting $15 million in, primarily blue cities, not spreading it out throughout the state," and Mr. Crowley's reply was the right one: "He didn't say anything nefarious was going on with our elections. He just didn't like the fact of how money was being spent." The man who wants to be the Governor who certifies 2028 tried, by brief and by objection, to uncertify 2020, and his explanation, three weeks before the election, is that he was unhappy with a grant program. In May, asked about the President's plan to pay the January 6 defendants out of a $1.8 billion fund, he said, "If they were illegitimately harmed, then possibly they should," and drew the line only at "anyone that harmed a law enforcement official." The paper would like it noted that this is where the line is for the man who would command the Wisconsin National Guard.

Two smaller things, for the file. The Journal Sentinel went through the state's tax records in August and found that for the years 2006 through 2010, and again in 2019, Mr. Tiffany "had zero net state liability," meaning he owed and paid no personal state income tax, and that his cruise company paid none for seven years and his other company paid none through 2016. The paper has no evidence anything about it was illegal. It notes that the dam man's platform is to eliminate the state income tax, and that he has a head start. And his campaign ran an ad claiming that tablets issued to inmates in the Milwaukee County jail had been used to access child pornography, which the sheriff's chief of staff called "technologically impossible," and another ad claiming his opponent "supports releasing half the prison population," which Wisconsin Watch rates as simply not so; he said it again at the debate, "wants to remove half of the prison inmates here in Wisconsin," a week after the rating.

He will debate once. The Wisconsin Broadcasters Association has held a gubernatorial debate every cycle for more than thirty years, and this year it was canceled for the first time, because Mr. Tiffany declined; a second, with the Milwaukee station and the university, was canceled when he declined that too. His explanation for the first: "I had no time. There was lots of negotiations going on behind the scenes." His principle: "One debate is sufficient to be able to cover the issues that need to be covered." The one was October 21, on WISN, at the law school, with no audience, and the paper watched it. The hour produced, in order: the certification promise, above; "All you women out there, you will not have to hold your breath when I'm governor," followed by the claim that Mr. Crowley's position is "the full nine months," which Mr. Crowley did not say; a promise to make local police "coordinate with federal law enforcement" and, asked whether to require it by law, "I believe we should"; "Why would some of the wealthiest companies in the world need subsidies from the taxpayers of Wisconsin?", which is a fair question from a man whose party took $22 million from Illinois, and "I will not put my finger to the wind," from a man whose website replaced "issues" with "solutions"; and, on Mr. Crowley's kind words for his primary opponent and a question about the Democratic Socialists' platform, "That sounds like a socialist to me." Nobody asked him about the five votes, the Texas brief, the tax years or the three donors, and he did not bring them up. A man who needed a week to decide whether Joe Biden won in 2020 was never going to settle the issues of Wisconsin in an hour, and he didn't.

David Crowley, the Democrat, is 40, grew up in Milwaukee with parents who struggled with addiction, lost his home at ten and was evicted twice more before he finished high school, and became Milwaukee County Executive in 2020 at 33, the youngest and the first Black person to hold it, by 1,026 votes; he was re-elected in 2024 with 84 percent. The paper will give the reader the worst of him, since it is doing that this week for everyone. In July he dropped out of this race, endorsed the Lieutenant Governor, watched her campaign collapse nine days later, and got back in with 24 days to the primary, which he then won by 3,673 votes. It was not graceful. He signed off on the 2022 jail tablet contract and its 2025 extension that Mr. Tiffany's ad is about, and when a judge raised the question of inmates using them to contact victims, he suspended the messaging at one facility in October and not before; the paper thinks the ad's child-pornography claim is a lie and the underlying question is fair. He raised the county sales tax in 2023 from half a cent to nine-tenths, with the legislature's permission and a cake, to keep the county's pension out of the ditch, and a clip of him telling a crowd of immigrants, "I'm not just an ally, I'm an accomplice," is the centerpiece of the other side's October. He meant it the way people mean it. The October entry is his wife. Ericka Crowley went to work for Community Advocates, a Milwaukee nonprofit the county has used since 2007, in June 2020, a month after he took office; between then and May 2021 the county approved $17.85 million in federal pandemic rent money to it, without competition because of the emergency, and $79 million in rent aid has gone through it in all. He listed her job on his first disclosure form in January 2021 and wrote the county ethics board on May 7, 2021, before signing the next contract, with the county attorney's advice that it "remains proper"; the county board voted every dollar in public. Mr. Tiffany's version is "Where there's smoke is there fire?" and, asked whether he was alleging anything, "Well, I'm not alleging anything," and the Republican Governors Association's ad says "untrustworthy, unfit to be governor." The paper's version is that the disclosure should have come with the first contract in 2020 and not in the spring of 2021, that it came, and that nobody, including the man asking, has alleged a thing. And since the paper is grading ads this week: Mr. Crowley's October 20 spot says Mr. Tiffany "voted to block the release of the Epstein files," and Wisconsin Watch rates that No; the July 2025 vote was on a rule for a cryptocurrency bill, and he voted for the release in November with nearly everyone else. He runs a $1.3 billion county that has run a deficit every year but one since 2002 and signed last year's budget without a veto. The one thing the paper will say for the July business is that Mr. Crowley's stated reason, that Democrats "cannot afford to head into this general election with a nominee who lacks the experience," was a judgment about the other candidates, and the voters agreed with it by a hair.

What he is for is less exciting than what Mr. Tiffany is against, which is the usual problem. He wants to expand BadgerCare, repeal Act 10, which Mr. Tiffany voted for in 2011, legalize marijuana, and put reproductive freedom in the state constitution; he says "this is a decision between a woman and a healthcare provider, and that's what we're going to leave it at." He would leave the twenty-week law alone, and so, he says, would Mr. Tiffany, who has promised to "uphold the law that is currently in place" and who co-sponsored a six-week federal ban in 2021 and 2023. On data centers, which 74 percent of Wisconsinites tell Marquette cost more than they're worth, both men oppose a moratorium; Mr. Crowley wants local control, no gag agreements, and the developers paying for the grid; Mr. Tiffany calls them "exciting new technology" and would end the state subsidies outright, which the paper notes is to the left of the President, who says communities that refuse them will be "backwards and poor." On the three billionaires, Mr. Crowley's line is the one the paper would have written: "These billionaires know that if they buy Congressman Tom Tiffany this election, he will sell Wisconsin out to them."

The Daily Buffoon endorses David Crowley for Governor of Wisconsin. The polls have him up three to four, Marquette 49 to 46 at the end of September, a YouGov poll through October 9 at 46 to 42, an average of 47.5 to 44, with a lead among independents that fell by eleven points in September as $24 million of Uihlein money arrived, and the race is rated a toss-up by the people who rate races. Marquette's last poll of the year comes out today, after this went to press. The early vote is not waiting for it: 513,602 absentee ballots were back as of Tuesday, 251,092 of them cast in person, ahead of the same day in 2022, and the first day of in-person voting, 55,659, was two-thirds above the first day four years ago. The paper endorses him with July and the tablets on the record, because the alternative is a man who told a podcast to wrap up the war and voted to continue it the same day and then said he hadn't; who signed the brief to throw out Wisconsin's votes and needed until October 7 to say who won; who named the billionaire loophole and walked through it; and who is running to eliminate a tax he has, by the state's own records, not paid in six separate years. The next Governor of Wisconsin will veto or sign the 2028 congressional map, the Act 10 repeal, the Line 5 permit, and will certify the 2028 election. The paper would like that signature to belong to someone who has not already tried to withdraw it once.

The last week, for the record. Kamala Harris came to the Pfister on Monday for about 450 people at a Women for Crowley event and said "that phase is over" and "turn anger into action," and the room emptied for Game 3 the moment she finished; Mr. Tiffany, in Kenosha the same afternoon, said "It's a Kamala Monday in Wisconsin. That's how desperate the Crowley campaign is at this moment," and his statement said "Wisconsin rejected Kamala Harris once." The paper will take the point when his own President is on a stage in Wisconsin, and notes the President's final week is Iowa, Michigan and Ohio. That night in New Glarus, a village Harris carried with 67 percent, the closing argument was "He's gonna raise your property taxes," tolls, "Girls and only girls are going to play girls' sports," the flags on the Capitol, and "We're going to call mothers mothers in the state budget." Not a word about the war, the diesel, or the three donors; the paper did not expect one. Its forecasts, dated October 28, so that they can be checked: the President will not set foot in Wisconsin for Mr. Tiffany before the polls close. Mr. Tiffany will not say "Joe Biden won" out loud before they close, either. And no letter, bill or statement with his name on it about Russian diesel will exist on November 3, at whatever the price is that morning.

Four clowns. Mr. Tiffany is not a buffoon in the usual sense; he is a careful, quiet man from a quiet place who has learned that in Washington you can say "wrap up the war" to the people at home and "the president has final say" to the people in the building, and that nobody will put the two tapes together. The paper put them together. The fifth clown is for men who do not know what they said. He knows. "I have not voted no" is not a mistake; it is a bet that you won't check. Wisconsin's early voting opened October 20, and half a million ballots are in. Check.