Tag Archives: The Atlantic

Post-debate polling of crucial swing voters shows Kelda Roys as the best Dem to beat Tiffany

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A collage of five campaign-style headshots features candidates in the Milwaukee mayoral race, showing studio and outdoor portraits of each contender in business or business-casual attire.
Candidates for Wisconsin governor 2026: (L-R) Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong, Republican Tom Tiffany, Democrats Kelda Roys, David Crowley, and Joel Brennan. Courtesy Milwaukee Magazine. 
I’ve been searching for post-debate polling on the Democratic gubernatorial primary, and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Francesca Hong concurrently got a big polls boost, but not necessarily from the debate.
So here’s actual post-debate polling. I do like Hong, and if she could capture the governorship I’d be overjoyed. But as presidential candidate Kamala Harris learned, stuff like joy, cool as it is, won’t win an election
General elections are very different ballgames than primaries. Hong has built a sort of momentum with her big polling lead over the other contenders. But I’m still not confident she can win a general election outside of her very enthused Milwaukee-Madison strongholds (BTW, I know those places pretty well. They’re the two cities I’ve lived in during my whole 70-plus year life as a Wisconsin resident).
Sorry if you think I’m getting pragmatic, or “losing my spine,” a typical diss of those who take time to think or express concern about election dynamics. But at this urgent point we need to focus on who can beat Tiffany.
According to Wisconsin swing voters, that would appear to be Kelda Roys, an accomplished and well-defined progressive legislator. The Shepherd Express, a very left-leaning Milwaukee publication, just endorsed her along with MKE C.E. David Crowley.
So, I don’t understand reports of Roys still only getting 2% support.
I’m not a swing voter, I’m a strong liberal who almost invariably votes democratic, and occasionally “independent.”
Let’s not forget: What I’m sharing here is a survey of Wisconsin swing voters, who do typically decide an election. And especially in a state like this, which is famously one of the most purple “swing states” in the nation.
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State Sen. Kelda Roys (second from right) talks with Wisconsin constituents. Courtesy Kelda Roys campaign website.
State Sen. Kelda Roys is my personal choice as the best, most accomplished, and best prepared progressive candidate. She also seemed the best debater, which will be important later against Tiffany when people really start paying attention. Roys, an articulate feminist, also doesn’t have the baggage the other leading candidates have for Republicans to exploit. Here is her website, to get to know her and see her concrete plans, rather than rhetoric, on most of the issues voters care about: https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2026/08/05/murphys-law-crowley-is-only-one-who-could-beat-hong/
If you’re interested, Bruce Murphy, editor of Urban Milwaukee, makes a strong argument for David Crowley: https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2026/08/05/murphys-law-crowley-is-only-one-who-could-beat-hong/
The Atlantic magazine has an excellent recent feature by Russell Berman on Wisconsin as a state that’s actually receptive to extreme candidates. Think of the original progressive firebrand, Bob LaFollette, and then 1950s reactionary Commie-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy. More recently, think uber-liberal maverick Senator Russ Feingold and then oppressive conservative Governor Scott Walker.
Russ Feingold | ACS
Sen. Russ Feingold.
Plus, Michigan just had a leftist win its Democratic Senate primary. Can he win the general election?
So just maybe we’ll actually bring Fran Hong to the big dance and then give her the keys to the governor’s office!
But things are still dicey, right now.
OK, here’s a report on the swing voter poll results. Apologies for the lack of graphics. (Website link below):
‘THE SWING VOTER PROJECT ELECTABILITY INDEX WISCONSIN DEMOCRATIC GUBERNATORIAL PRIMARY
WHO IS THE STRONGEST GENERAL ELECTION CANDIDATE? Swing voters selected whether they would support each Democratic candidate in general election against Republican Tom Tiffany after viewing debate clips.
ROYS LED 57% FIELD AFTER THE DEBATE SUPPORT INCREASED AFTER THE DEBATE ROYS 27pt Increase insupport BRENNAN 20p pts Increase support BARNES 16pts Increase ent support Increase CROWLEY 12pts 12 12 Increase support HONG 10p ots Increase support support’. 
‘THE SWING VOTER PROJECT ISSUE INDEX WISCONSIN DEMOCRATIC GUBERNATORIAL PRIMARY ROYS LED SIX OF SEVEN ISSUE AREAS After each debate segment, swing voters selected the candidate they believed would do the better job on that. I POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY WINNER TAXES ON HIGH EARNERS ROYS PROPERTY TAXES ROYS SCHOOL SCHOOLVOUCHERS VOUCHERS ROYS AI DATA CENTERS ROYS ROYS CLOSING STATEMENTS …
ROYS BACKGROUND & ELECTABILITY ……………… BARNES’.  ‘THE SWING VOTER PROJECT 42% 40% 7pts Post- Post-Debate Debate Change Francesca Hong 15pts Post-Debate Post- Change David Crowley 60% 21pts Post-Debate Post-DebateChange Debate Change Post Kelda Roys 56% Opts Post- -Debate Change 52% 2pts Post- Post-Debate Change Mandela Barnes Joel Brennan’.
‘Trial heats against the Republican opponent Democratic share before and after the debate Kelda Roys Joel Brennan 73 Mandela Barnes 72 David Crowley 69 Francesca Hong 62 10 57 20 30 40 50 Weighted Democratic share (%) pre post 60 Democratic share against Tom Tiffany before and after the debate 70 70 80’.
 ‘THE SWING VOTER 2. PROJECT Net candidate favorability: Hong recorded the lowest score in the field. Hong finished at +13 net favorability. Roys finished at +55, Brennan at +50, Barnes at +47, and Crowley at +21.
Net candidate favorability: before vs. after 50 47 40 post pre 30 30 20 BM 13 21 10 12 Hong Francesca Bames Mandela Candidates ordered Crowley David Kelda Roy’s latest Marquette primary: Hong 8% Bares 16%, Crowley, Brennan %
Here’s a link to the website this poll report comes from: https://theswingvoterpilot.com/wisconsin#learnmore‘
Finally, here’s an extended quote from the aforementioned article from The Atlantic:

“But Democratic voters in Wisconsin are clearly thinking about the E-word too. As I followed Hennes on his canvassing route through Appleton, several people told him they liked Hong’s policies or were leaning toward her. But they also expressed some pause. “I like what she has to say,’ Bob Molitor, a 75-year-old retiree, said, ‘but we’ve got to get a winner.’

Wisconsin’s history suggests the concerns about Hong’s statewide appeal could be overstated. Michael Wagner, a University of Wisconsin political scientist, pointed me to research showing that voters do not punish more extreme candidates. Her chances might be better still in a midterm election when turnout is expected to be lower than a presidential year, he said. ‘An ideological extremist can absolutely win a statewide election in Wisconsin,’ Wagner said.”

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Time to save New Deal public art threatened by Trump’s wrecking ball

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The Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building was completed between the years 1939-1940, by architect Charles Z. Klauder. Architectural style is Stripped Classicism. Originally constructed as and called the Social Security Building, it was renamed in 1988 for Wilbur Joseph Cohen (1913-1987), a government official and public affairs educator. Art.

As an art major undergrad, my aesthetics were shaped by modernist values, leaning towards degrees of surrealist abstraction (read Joan Miro, Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock). But as readers of my blog know, my full inclinations (“common and uncommon culture”) are hardly exclusionary or purely abstract.

So, Judith Shulevitz’s essay in The Atlantic’s May 2026 issue struck a chord and blows against the ever-gilding empire of Donald Trump. She focusses on the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, the current home of the Social Security Board, and other already hollowed-out agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services, and
The Voice of America. The massive Art Deco and Egyptian Revival building in DC is on the administration’s “accelerated disposition” list, a euphemism for demolition. Whither Social Security? Probably nowhere but severely damaged, but God only knows.

The mural artwork still visible there — commissioned by the Franklin Roosevelt administration to help shepherd Americans out of the Great Depression — spoke in proletarian terms but hardly lumpen, nor was it nostalgic “make America great again” gloss.

It proved that artful imagery could speak to people as powerfully as any words or verbal rhetoric — it transcended the limits of literacy. One can see how new immigrants might seize the day and become workers toward citizenship. The vision was big-shouldered forward-ho, even as it showed how hard that road could be. This remained the land of individual freedom but governed society now had a big role to play. And this was no racist lily-white wash, as persons of many colors inhabit the murals by Ben Shahn, Seymour Fogel and Phillip Guston. Nor were these smiling or overly proud faces.

Shulevitz writes: “Perhaps the air of gravitas evident in all the building’s murals, and the ambivalence hinted at in Guston’s and Fogel’s, reflects the anxieties of the time. While Shahn was working (during World War II), people came up to him and said that what he was painting was what they were fighting for.”

She also notes this art drew from Soviet-style Socialist Realism but also from the more expansive imagery of “Regionalism — think Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton – which leaned toward heartland nativism.” Again, this aesthetic and value system was inherently American, suggesting how socialist programs could adapt to and enhance capitalist progress.

Socialist Milwaukee Mayor Daniel Hoan on the cover of TIME, April 6, 1936. TIME USA LLC

This also coincided with Milwaukee mayors demonstrating how their so-called “sewer socialism” could work at local metropolitan levels. Mayor Daniel Hoan made the cover of TIME magazine by 1936. The word socialism had so much more applied meaning to real life than the reflexive recoiling from it typical of so many misinformed people in this era of facile online fearmongering and contagious xenophobia.

Some derided such art as propaganda and kitsch for the masses. But, as Shahn wrote in a 1968 oral history, “Propoganda is a noble word. It means you believe something very strongly and you want other people to believe it, to propagate your faith.”

Idealistic for sure, but apt to the moment and the place. His most notable narrative murals in the Cohen building, titled “The Meaning of Social Security,” (see detail of Shahn mural at top) are two-part — one depicting the plight of people without such security, from huddled children and mothers, to thread-bare fathers and sons facing a curving railroad track into an uncertain future. The second part, post-Social Security Act of 1935, shows men constructing new skyscrapers with blazing welding guns and muscular youths leaping for a basketball.

Philip Guston’s Social Security Building mural “Reconstruction and the Well-Being of the Family,” handmadepiece.com

The chiaroscuro, textures and architecture of these works — note Guston’s triptych, “Reconstruction and the Well-Being of the Family,” evoking the Last Supper and Madonna and Child, — “has the aura of an altarpiece,” also lending a storytelling atmosphere, challenging and charging the imagination.

Perhaps this signifies something to hold sacred in the American ethos, “to remind future generations of what patriotism looked like.”

Wrecking balls, by contrast, can reduce history to rubble with a single, imperious order, for the sake of the powerful and narcissistic.

Here is Shulevitz’s essay:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/05/new-deal-art-wilbur-cohen-building-murals/686581/ 

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Elaine Pagels illuminates America’s historical moment

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Blogger’s note: When I do direct readers to other published material, I strive for that which is available to the general public. But this article is so important in my view that I urge Culture Currents patrons to read it, despite the fact that, to do so one needs to sign in as a subscriber to The Atlantic, start a free trial, or subscribe. Also, the November print edition of the magazine should be available at most public libraries. 

The article is titled “The Moral Foundation of America” by Elaine Pagels. I caught up with it recently when I returned to the remarkable November issue of The Atlantic magazine, which honors the nation’s 250th anniversary with a series of substantial essays on the topic of America. Pagels is ostensibly a historian emeritus of religion from Princeton University.

But she is widely esteemed as a historian more generally, as this essay underscores. It is quite brief and concise, but it boils down the revolutionary history of the American Experiment in Democracy, and the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights as running counter to most of the recorded history of humankind, in which kings and rulers accorded moral authority upon all whom they preside.

Historian Elaine Pagels. Courtesy radiowest.keur.org

Pagels explains Thomas Jefferson’s declaration principles of human equality and freedom as “intrinsic rights” of all and based on the Enlightenment and the Book of Genesis in the Bible, as well as the teachings of Jesus (She notes Jefferson’s own personal failure to live up to those principles as a slaveowner, something he long struggled with.).

So, you see how the Founders culled and synthesized sterling ideas of both secular and religious traditions to create something unprecedented in human history, and the beacon of guidance for democracy to the world ever since.

Her conclusion, however, is pointed — that perhaps the Founders’ greatest fear was a kind of reversion in America to monarchial rule: “power maintained by means of fear, autocracy and military force.”  That is just what we are seeing now in the current administration, she says, which seems morally unmoored from America’s fundamental values.

I don’t believe I’ve read anything since the start of the devastating second Trump administration that provides insight better into the ideals that America, with all its flaws, stands for and, thus, what is at stake.

Here is a link to the Pagels article: .https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/11/america-founding-morals-rights-life-liberty/684327/: 

 

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Elaine Pagels’ most recent book is Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus.

Culture Currents nabs a 2023 award for “best critical review” from Milwaukee Press Club

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A Culture Currents review of saxophonist Miguel Zenon and pianist Luis Perdomo (above) won a 2023 Milwaukee Press Club award for “best critical review.”

The Milwaukee Press Club is the oldest extant press club in the world, it claims, so there’s baked-in gravitas to the annual journalism awards it gives out. All judges are out-of state to maintain integrity in this state-wide cemptition.

Culture Currents won it’s third award from the press club for best critical review, after two previous first-place gold awards. This time it received a silver, which is second place.

Culture Current’s Kevernacular (Kevin Lynch) displays his 2023 silver award for “best critical review” from The Milwaukee Press Club. Photo by Ann K. Peterson

I happened to read the three finalist entries for “best critical review” and I would concur with the judges on the top prize for best review. It went to coverage of a remake of Edward Albee’s laceratingly acerbic play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” staged by the Milwaukee Chamber Theater. The review was written for Urban Milwaukee by Dominique Noth, coincidentally my editor many years ago, at the old pre-merger Milwaukee Journal. Features editor at the time, Dom was always a highly accomplished theater and film critic, and proved it once again. His review commented comparatively with his memory of seeing the play on Broadway in the early 1960s.

The bronze award for criticism went to another former colleague of mine, Rob Thomas, long-time pop music and film critic for The Cap Times in Madison, for his excellent review of Bruce Springsteen live in Milwaukee.

Culture Currents received the silver award for its review “Miguel Zenon builds a bridge from his Puerto Rican soul to the world.” The subject was a sublimely affecting and lyrical duo concert by MacArthur “Genius” Award-Winner saxophonist Miguel Zenon and his longtime mate  pianist Luis Perdomo at The Art + Lit Lab for the 2023 the Madison Jazz Festival. In a program titled “El Arte del Bolero,” they interpreted popular songs they grew up with in their native Puerto Rico and it was a pan-cultural revelation. Here’s the review:

https://kevernacular.com/?p=15647

The awards were presented at the annual Gridiron Awards Dinner at the Pfister Hotel, always a highlight of the year in Wisconsin journalism. The event always features two “newsmaker award” winners, one of whom was ex-Packer Hall of Famer Leroy Butler.

Leroy, one of the most popular and celebrated athletes in Wisconsin,  was charmingly humble and funny in his acceptance speech.

Green Bay Packer Hall of Famer Leroy Butler (right, with a local news reporter) received a “Newsmaker” award at the 2024 Milwaukee Press Club Gridiron Awards Dinner.

The event “climaxes” with a speech by a nationally known figure in journalism. In this case that was James Bennet, former editor-in-chief at The Atlantic magazine, and former Editorial Page Editor at The New York Times, when the page won two Pulitzers. He’s currently a columnist at The Economist.

Bennet was a trenchant political and journalistic commentator and impressed us by explaining he’d read a certain sampling of our entries — not anything he was requested to do — and felt heartened by the quality of our work. He even mentioned Dominique’s review of the Albee play. Such recognition is something for Wisconsin journalists to build on in an uncertain future for the profession.

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The Atlantic’s own editor-in-chief explains why it is my favorite magazine

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The cover of the print edition of the November 2022 The Atlantic. Courtesy The Atlantic

Not long ago, I said to a friend who, like most people today, does most of his reading online, that The Atlantic is the last magazine I would still subscribe to, if all others fell to the wayside by choice or circumstance.

I don’t normally tout publications per se in this blog, but The Atlantic has been my favorite for quite a long time, and now it’s editor has written a piece in the November issue that helps to explain why it is worthy of being a person’s favorite.

Much of this has to do with the publication’s storied history, having been born as an abolitionist magazine shortly before the Civil War. But current editor Jeffrey Goldberg opens his piece called “The American Idea” with an 1861 letter from Julia Ward Howe, expressing her melancholy and insecurities to the editor at the time. The editor, James T. Fields, was wise enough not to touch the copy of the poem she submitted with her letter. He gave it a title and published “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” on the first page of the February 1862 edition. “(Howe received, in return, a $5 freelance fee and immortality.)”, Goldberg adds drolly.

He goes on to point out that The Atlantic, in its 166th year of continuous publication, also published for the first time, “Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” and the first chapters of W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”, and Rachel Carson’s meditations on the oceans, and Einstein’s denunciation of atomic weapons, and so on, ad infinitum.”

Further, The Atlantic‘s founding mission statement (reproduced in Goldberg’s article) was signed by various luminaries including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who appeared in the first issue; Oliver Wendell Holmes, who came up with The Atlantic‘s name; Nathaniel Hawthorne, who would become the magazine’s Civil War correspondent; Herman Melville (Moby-Dick), and Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), America’s most popular author at the time.

Goldberg’s only expressed regret about that time is that, given that Moby-Dick is his favorite American novel, that  Melville never found a way to contribute. That would be my sentiment exactly regarding Melville, who ended up publishing short pieces for Harpers, another long-time American magazine.

I have many reasons why the current magazine is my favorite, partly for it’s intelligence, it’s allegiance to no group, party or clique, and its cultural and political range. “We always try very hard to be interesting. That is a prerequisite,” Goldberg explains.

They succeed, too, which is why, even though some stories are long “thumbsuckers,” they almost invariably hold my interest and, if I don’t finish them, it’s my failing.

Here is Goldberg’s introductory article in the latest issue in full: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/11/165th-anniversary-atlantic-magazine-founding/671523/

p.s. As for your blogger, I submitted an article once — about Wisconsin guitar innovator Les Paul, Bob Dylan and Michael Bloomfield — to The Atlantic and, though chagrined, I was honored to receive a personalized, hand-written “no thank you” note from an editor from the magazine. The article was eventually published in NoDepression.com. Here’s the note. which I valued enough to frame.

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