Tony Evers, the State Superintendent of Instruction in Wisconsin, has announced that he will run against Scott Walker for governor. Walker is a puppet of the Koch brothers who achieved national notoriety for breaking the state teachers’ union in 2011 and for advocating for charter schools and vouchers. Despite the poor performance of vouchers in Milwaukee, which adopted them in 1990–Walker expanded them.


Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s state superintendent of public instruction announced on Wednesday, August 23 that he plans to run for governor against Scott Walker. In his speech declaring his candidacy, he promised to invest in children, public schools, and the middle class, and declared that he will heal the political divide exploited by Scott Walker and Donald Trump.

“Make no mistake—Donald Trump is using the same playbook Scott Walker has been using in Wisconsin for years to create divisions and pit people against each other,” Evers said in his announcement speech to about seventy-five people at McKee Farms Kids Crossing Dream Park in Fitchburg, Wisconsin.

The setting for his announcement was symbolic of the values Evers’s candidacy represents, he said: a public park where kids of all backgrounds come to play together: “It’s democracy for little kids—I love it.”

“We must be clear: Trump and Walker are not the symptom of our divisions,” Evers added. “They are the cause.”

Evers is optimistic that voters will respond to a better, more community-minded vision if one is presented to them.

He points out that on the same day Wisconsin voted for Trump, majorities in local school districts all over the state (including in Republican areas) voted to raise property taxes on themselves to support their local public schools.

“On the morning of November 9, when you looked at the results of referendum after referendum, they told a completely different story from the election of Donald Trump,” he noted in an interview with The Progressive.

He made a similar point in his speech: “Scott Walker’s policies have forced almost a million people to raise their own taxes in the last three elections. And these are local people—Democrats, independents, and Republicans.”

That’s important because it shows, in Evers’s view, that when it comes to issues where people feel they have a direct stake in their communities—like maintaining their local public schools—voters do not support the Republican slash-and-burn agenda. As Evers puts it, “Local communities get it. Walker doesn’t get it.

Evers himself has won statewide election three times with big majorities, while fighting Walker’s budget cuts and efforts to expand school vouchers, which further drain resources from public schools. In the last election he won 70 percent of the vote and carried 70 of 72 counties.

His candidacy is all about the core issue of defending public education as an engine of democracy and equal opportunity—an issue that has been at the center of Wisconsin politics throughout the Walker era.