Category: Experts Guide

Money given directly to nonprofits can be more helpful to some charities, said Mary Beth Collins, executive director of the UW-Madison Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies, but the United Way has also shown its worth by collaborating with other local leaders to raise emergency funds at the onset of the pandemic.

Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the recount effort is clearly not actually about changing the election result given the margin. Instead, he said, Trump’s goals could be to put a cloud over the election results, raise suspicions, and to lay groundwork for the future.

According to Tino Balio, a Professor Emeritus of Communication Arts at UW-Madison and an expert on the history of American cinema, the 1918 pandemic ultimately didn’t leave a lasting impact on the industry.  “Throughout the 1920s, the film industry grew exponentially and it became well-entrenched and, during that period, there was a tremendous theater construction boom,” he says. But, Balio makes that caveat that things are different this time around.

Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor and the director of the Elections Research Center, said politicians have a role to play in how the public perceives elections. “When they raise questions about elections that are not based on fact or don’t have that kind of substantial foundation below them that actually undermines confidence,” Burden said. “A person saying publicly that they lack confidence or they have a suspicion about something going wrong, that actually fuels suspicion or lack of confidence so it becomes kind of a vicious circle.”

David Canon, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he believes a two-day head start in pre-processing absentee ballots is reasonable. Such a measure would have allowed Wisconsin to finish counting absentee ballots almost simultaneously with in-person votes, staving off now-rampant claims of voter fraud occurring in the middle of the night. “You would have been done by 8 p.m.,” Canon said. “For sure it would have taken care of the problem.”

“They would effectively be nullifying the votes of the 3 million plus Wisconsinites,” UW-Madison Law Professor Rob Yablon said. He added that is not allowed under current Wisconsin law and can’t see the Legislature trying to change it.

“The polls were clearly off again and in a surprising fashion,” said UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden. “Many of us expected the polls to be more accurate this year than they were four years ago.”

“I think that’s probably (Trump’s) biggest challenge,” said political scientist Katherine Cramer, who wrote an influential book about the shifting rural vote in Wisconsin called “The Politics of Resentment.” “Hillary Clinton was so unpopular with these voters … They just could not stand her,” said Cramer, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “(Joe) Biden is not as unpopular.”

Meeting expectations for a new chief is a “tough ask,” said Keith Findley, a UW-Madison law professor who co-chaired a resident-led ad hoc committee that studied the MPD. The panel was formed after an officer shot and killed Black teenager Tony Robinson in 2015.

“I think, unfortunately, more people are going to have to die before our policymakers accept we need laws and policies that improve the health and safety of our state” — when lawmakers are personally tied to a person who has died or has been hospitalized, said Patrick Remington, former epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s preventive medicine residency program.

Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said that colleagues who went to cottages during the summer began reporting that they’d seen towns where no one appeared to be wearing a mask.

Margaret Kerr, Assistant Professor, Human Development & Family Studies, talks about mental health for parents right now, how to relish moments of positivity and how to make the most of a challenging time.

“If these legislators were practicing medicine, they would be sued for malpractice,” Patrick Remington, a former Centers for Disease Control epidemiologist and director of the Preventive Medicine Residency Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said after reviewing the lawmakers’ statements.

University of Wisconsin-Madison Journalism Professor Mike Wagner discusses what the future will look like.

“People think a lot about how sleep is important for consolidating memory, but what they don’t think about is that sleep resets your brain for learning, meaning in order to take in information during the day, you need to have a rested brain,” said Dr. Stephanie Jones, the assistant director at the Institute for Sleep and Consciousness at UW-Madison.

Howard Schweber, a political science professor who also teaches law at UW-Madison, described how he saw the late justice interpreting the law. “Not only on issues involving women’s rights, [but] her dissenting opinions in the voting rights decision that stripped protections from minority voters in numerous jurisdictions. Her dissenting opinions in particular, rang with passion.”

Howard Schweber, UW-Madison Political Science Professor, believe’s Green Party votes could be overlooked in this election when comparing the influence the party played in Wisconsin during the 2016 election cycle.

Ankur Desai, a climate science professor at UW-Madison, said well-meaning fire prevention efforts over the last century have also contributed to the worsening of west coast wildfires.

But UW-Madison law professor Keith Findley said civilians need help accessing the PFC’s process for disciplining officers because it’s complicated and officers usually have legal counsel while residents do not.

Quoted: Richard Monette, director of the Great Lakes Indigenous Law Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, largely agreed that the messaging would not have much influence on Native people.

He doubled down on Greendeer’s statement that U.S.-tribal relations are not as bad as some make it seem, but he added the presence of these tensions opens Native groups up to these types of social media attacks.

“America has got this history of trying to separate the Native American from her land and from her wealth. That’s true, and that gets exploited by people throughout the world,” Monette said. “If we don’t want them to use this against us, then we should stop doing that.”