Category: Experts Guide

In the weeks since Donald Trump’s presidential victory, Wisconsin Democrats reflecting on their losses up and down the ticket have said the party needs to do a better job of conveying its message to rural voters. It’s going to take more than that, said University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Kathy Cramer on Friday.

Quoted: The average scores of companies have risen every year as companies strive each year for improvement, said Tom Eggert, executive director of the Wisconsin Sustainable Business Council.”Everybody’s continuing to push each other, and it’s really refreshing that we don’t have the same group all the time,” said Eggert, whose University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate students help coordinate the program.

Quoted: Peter Carstensen, professor of law at UW-Madison, said he wasn’t surprised policyholders approved the change, adding that for policyholders it should be business as usual.

Noted: Tom O’Guinn, professor of marketing, appeared on WPR’s Central Time to talk about companies speaking out on political issues and the impact of consumer boycotts.

Hemant Shah has served as director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism school since 2014, and has been a member of the faculty since 1990. His research focuses on the role of mass media in social change, including the construction of cultural identities and racial anxieties.

Quoted: But regulation may be difficult, admits Christine Whelan, a clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies the lucrative self-help industry and now sits on the board of SEEK Safely. “Do we regulate the physical things someone can do at one of these workshops?” Whelan says of the challenges of regulation. “Are we regulating the speech in terms of what advice people can give? And then who is the judge of what is good and bad advice?”

Christine Whelan, an expert on self-improvement from the University of Wisconsin School of Human Ecology, talks about ways to reduce holiday stress.

Quoted: “We have a program that now costs us $247 million. All at a time when the state of Wisconsin has been one of the biggest public school cutters in the United States,” said Julie Underwood, a University of Wisconsin-Madison law and education professor and voucher critic. “It concerns me that the solution would be to continue to shift resources from public to private, or to shift the bill to the public schools.”

UW-Madison’s Clifton Conrad cautions that Betsy DeVos’ track record of advocacy for charter schools for elementary and high school students may indicate that President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of education will push to privatize public higher education too.

Noted: Political scientist Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it would be extremely difficult to complete the recount on time. About twice as many votes were cast in the presidential election as the 2011 Supreme Court race.

Noted: The Republicans’ counter-argument in the case was that their maps abide by all current rules, said David Canon, the chair of UW-Madison’s political science department, on Capital City Sunday.

Noted: UW-Madison Political Science Department Chairman David Canon says Trump greatly expanded margins in counties Republican candidate Mitt Romney won in 2012, and also flipped a chunk of rural counties from the democratic column in 2012, to his column by sizable amounts.

Quoted: John Hawks, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin—Madison, human evolution expert and co-author of a study which found that 7 percent of human genes have evolved in the recent past (5,000 years), largely in response to environmental change

Noted: Markus Brauer, a UW-Madison psychology professor who studies behavior modification comment: ?”‘Prescriptive norms’ tell people what is the right thing to do. And there are many studies suggesting that people’s perceptions of prescriptive norms are heavily influenced by the leadership, in the positive and in the negative direction.”

Quoted: “They reverse lower courts sometimes so it’s not out of the ordinary that a court would do this,” said Keith Findley, co-director of the innocence project at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“It has had really an impact across the board in retail, both mom and pops as well as the large department stores and pretty much everything in between has been impacted by it,” said Dan Olszewski, Director of the Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Business.

A week after the historical presidential election last week, a Washington Post reporter and Milwaukee radio host joined two UW-Madison professors Tuesday to discuss the ramifications of Donald Trump’s shocking victory.

Galen McKinley, an associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UW-Madison, talks about the incredibly warm weather we’ve been having.

Quoted: “There are updates to the tax code all the time,” said Fabio Gaertner, an accounting professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Business who specializes in taxation.

UW Health Clinical Psychologist Dr. Shilagh Mirgain joined NBC15’s Meredith Barack to share advice on how to approach kids with serious, hard-hitting topics.

Quoted: “People between the ages of 15 and 25 tend to be high school kids or young adults in college and there is some concern about this hook-up culture. With that sort of culture there may be less openness in the relationship and willingness among the couple to discuss condoms for STD prevention,” said UW Health OBGYN, Dr. Cynthie Anderson.

Quoted: “The 7th Circuit would rule on that fairly quickly, whether it be on the substance that the court decision was wrong in some way or maybe that the court didn’t have proper authority to release Brendan at this time,” Associate UW-Madison Law Prof. Adam Stevenson said.

Noted: UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden is skeptical that Trump would work arm-in-arm with congressional Republicans in the same way that Walker was able to work with his Legislative majority in Wisconsin.

Quoted: In the end, whatever happens in San Francisco and New York tends to diffuse across the country, but as least some regulations could end up being to Airbnb’s advantage, said Hart Posen, a professor in the business school at the University of Wisconsin.“You need a certain degree of scale to manage that kind of regulations, and that’s a barrier to new companies coming into the field. Once [Airbnb] builds the software to do it, it’s usable in San Francisco and Chicago and everywhere else” he said.

University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Michael Wagner talks about the questions being raised about the Electoral College on Live at Four.

Noted: UW-Madison political science professor Ken Mayer, who is studying the effect of Wisconsin’s voter ID law on election participation, called the number of provisional ballots cast evidence of “hard disenfranchisement” and “many times greater than the number of fraudulent ballots cast through voter impersonation.”

Noted: Donna Friedsam agreed. Friedsam, a policy director at the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, said that prohibiting coverage denials while dropping the coverage mandate could “collapse the individual insurance market” in the United States.

Noted: “It is perceptions, not precise facts, that matter for opinions,” said Kathy Cramer, a UW-Madison political science professor who has studied Wisconsin’s “politics of resentment.”

Quoted: Kathy Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has studied rural America for years. In her book published earlier this year, “The Politics of Resentment,” she writes about the deep well of distrust that people in rural Wisconsin feel toward the major cities in the state. There is a belief that Madison and Milwaukee get all the attention and all the tax dollars. Rural voters feel left behind.

Noted: Some members of the Electoral College — the body that directly elects the president — can choose a candidate different from their state’s popular vote, but in Wisconsin, there is a state law prohibiting that, according to UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden.

Quoted: “Voters see the outcome and think, ‘My vote won’t matter,’” said Barry C. Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And even if the voter wants his vote to count, it’s still a hassle. You have to take another step that other voters don’t have to.”

Noted: UW-Madison professors Barry Burden, Mike Wagner weigh in.

Quoted: Justin Sydnor, a professor in the business school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, is not quite so sanguine about Obamacare’s near-term future. “Many insurers had put provisions into their contracts for offering ACA-exchange plans  that they could exit the market during the plan year if the federal government stops payments for ’cost-sharing reductions,’” he said. “Because President Trump will have the authority through executive action to end those payments, he could cause an abrupt pullout and cancellation of ACA policies even in January next year. In light of that, what I would say is that there is some real risk of those who buy ACA plans of not being able to get through 2017 without a serious disruption.”

Quoted: “It’s been a long brutal two years, excruciating,” UW-Madison communications expert Mike Flaherty said.Flaherty said the best thing to do to heal those post-election wounds is to stop venting on social media and unplug a bit.

Quoted: “We have never had polls off this substantially across the board,” says UW-Madison Police Science Department Chairman David Canon.

Noted: UW-Madison Political Science Department Chairman David Canon says Trump greatly expanded margins in counties republican candidate Mitt Romney won in 2012, and also flipped a chunk of rural counties from the democratic column in 2012, to his column by sizable amounts.

Quoted: “Trump was an appealing candidate for people who were feeling like rural Wisconsin always gets a raw deal, and people in rural Wisconsin don’t get their fair share, and people in cities don’t respect them and nobody listens to them or has a clue what is going on there,” said Kathy Cramer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and author of a book about politics and rural Wisconsin.

Quoted: Opponents, however, say these agreements are primarily ways for companies to protect themselves from the competition for workers. Keeping employees from changing jobs or launching their own ventures means companies can pay lower wages, said Martin Ganco, a University of Wisconsin-Madison business professor who specializes in noncompete contracts.

Noted: UW Journalism professor Mike Wagner appeared on 27 News at 5, while UW Political Science chair Dr. David Canon appeared on 27 News at 6. You can watch both interviews in the videos in this web story.

Quoted: UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said Clinton’s decision not to visit or invest heavily in the state proved to be a mistake.

Quoted: “There’s no evidence to suggest that making it easy to sell insurance across state lines is going to be an effective policy,” said Justin Sydnor, an associate professor of actuarial science, risk management and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business.

Noted: While that just seems like a richly developed personal philosophy, it’s actually a common pattern in decision-making, according to new psychology research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin School of Business and the University of Minnesota. The study’s authors, Evan Polman of Wisconsin and Kathleen Vohs of Minnesota, find that deciding what someone else should do is less taxing and more pleasant than doing it for ourselves.

Though the percentage of people in both cases is relatively low, the statistic could highlight underlying clashes between people on whether the voter ID law is actually beneficial to Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin political science professor Barry Burden said.

Noted: The latest Wisconsin visits by Trump and Kaine could signify that the presidential contest in Wisconsin is tightening slightly, or it could be the latest symptom of a race that has defied all traditional rules for presidential campaigns, said UW-Madison political science professor Ken Mayer.

Noted: Numbers compiled by University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Barry Burden show if Clinton doesn’t come to Wisconsin it will be the first time since 1972 that both nominees for president didn’t campaign in Wisconsin before the general election. Burden said the last time was when Richard Nixon decided not to visit the state during his re-election campaign.

Quoted: “Health insurance was expensive before the Affordable Care Act,” said Donna Friedsam, director of Health policy programs at the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. “The difference is that people who could not get coverage before can get coverage.”

Noted: Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UW-Madison: “I have found no studies that suggest anything other than the climate of ancient Greece and Rome were the same as they are now.”

Noted: “[Clinton] is not on the air much here because she doesn’t have to be,” says Mike Wagner, a UW-Madison professor of journalism and political science. “She’s winning without airing ads.”

Noted: The TPP agreement expands American access to dairy markets in several key Asian countries, including Japan, Vietnam and Malaysia, and provides new but limited access into Canada, according to Mark Stephenson, director of the Center for Dairy Profitability at UW-Madison. “In some countries where we’d have the opportunity to sell, we would also have to open our borders,” Stephenson said. “Dairy is a major focus for all the players.”

Quoted: It’s been one of agriculture’s success stories, said Dan Undersander, an agronomy professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison.“The U.S. has been growing genetically modified corn now for close to 30 years, on millions of acres, and there’s been no documented evidence of any health concerns for animals or people,” Undersander said.

Quoted: “Ashley was a bright and engaged young woman who always brought an upbeat energy to my class,” Katy Culver, assistant professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication and director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison remembered.

Student debt is on the minds of college students across Wisconsin, including those attending technical colleges, who are also seeing rising costs to attend school.

Quoted: Political Science Professor Barry Burden and journalism professor Mike Wagner said it is hard to predict what a 2022 race would look like because many current political figures will no longer be on the scene and new figures will emerg