“Fruits are treated differently in Asian culture and in Japanese society especially,” Soyeon Shim, dean of the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told CNN in 2019. “Fruit purchase and consumption are tied to social and cultural practices.
Nancy Wong, a professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it’s because stockpiling items, like we had seen earlier in the pandemic, serves as a security blanket.
“People feel assured and soothed by something that is concrete,” she said.
Neuroscientist Richard Davidson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds, has helped create a series of meditative soundtracks to cope with the anxiety of the election.
Broad-based shutdowns in March and April brought economic worries to places such as the rural upper midwest long before the virus was widespread there. Political scientist Kathy Cramer, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said this was certainly the case in Wisconsin, where an edge-of-your-seat finish is now playing out.
“There is no doubt that, in general, people were experiencing economic effects more than the health effects of the pandemic,” especially in the spring and summer, said Cramer. Cramer is also author of the Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.
Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said earlier on Wednesday that Trump appeared to be trailing Biden by about 22,000 to 23,000 votes in the state, which would amount to less than one percentage point.
UW Political Science Professor Howard Schweber, who is an expert in constitutional law, judicial law, democratic theory and American politics, said the current political climate and election are complicated, and political parties are less sure than they thought they were with the election numbers and results.
“I wouldn’t want to speculate on how the Court would rule, but the argument that voters relied on the rules in place on and before Election Day – and should therefore have their votes counted – is very strong,” said Dan Tokaji, dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School.
“In case after case and time after time, allegations of material numbers of people intentionally committing vote fraud, they just don’t withstand any scrutiny,” said Kenneth Mayer, professor of American politics at the University of Wisconsin.
The fear created by threats and violence has a chilling effect on the nation’s political process, said Katherine Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Quoted: Mike Wagner, a political expert from UW-Madison, says President Trump will rely on rural counties as a path to winning the Badger State.“If he is able to get back to his 2016 numbers, he could very well win Wisconsin and win the election,” said Wagner.
“The almost daily increases in cases, deaths, and hospitalizations in Wisconsin keep voters’ attention on the pandemic and that attention does not help Donald Trump,” said Barry C. Burden, the director of the Election Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Steve Deller, a regional economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, agreed that data using online job postings leaves out an important component of hiring for many businesses: word of mouth.
Quoted: “I would think you would want to intensify the testing beyond just the antigen testing and you would want to include PCR testing,” says UW-Madison Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine David O’Connor. O’Connor stresses he does not speak for his department or the university and has not consulted with the UW Athletic Department.
By the end of the century Wisconsin’s climate could be similar to St. Louis, according to models developed by scientists with the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impact. That’s roughly analogous to the warming the Earth experienced coming out of the last ice age between 19,000 and 8,000 year ago, said Jack Williams, a UW-Madison geologist and geographer who uses fossil records to study how species respond to climate change.
Aaron Sojourner at the University of Minnesota and Menzie Chinn at the University of Wisconsin have constructed the graph below which projects the size of the economy based on various September quarter growth rates vs. the December 2019 quarter.
And while many of Wisconsin’s small towns and cities in its southwestern corner drove up Mr. Trump’s margins, most had not voted for Republicans in decades, says Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Things are really running rampant, so there is a lot of discontent,” said Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
To answer Hanson’s question, WPR’s “Central Time” reached out to Daniel Einstein, the historic and cultural resources manager for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Einstein is in charge of campus structures and landscapes; archeology, including effigy mound sites; public art, like university commemorative objects and statues; and the campus art collection.
As a result, public safety measures have been largely left up to municipalities and individuals, said Patrick Remington, former epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Other wrinkles of our current political moment could further explain why so many Trump supporters approve of the president’s pandemic response. Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says the most consistent theme on the right-wing talk-radio shows she’s been listening to is a desire to trust people to make their own decisions, rather than trusting the government to make decisions for people.
“The question is not so much what policy needs to be enacted, but what are people willing to embrace?” said Ajay Sethi, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “A policy is only as effective as people will follow it.”
Some researchers will focus more on what happens after the election. University of Wisconsin, Madison Professor Young Mie Kim studied Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and continues to monitor for Russian-linked accounts in 2020. She leads research called Project DATA, or Digital Ad Tracking and Analysis. It tracks digital political ads to learn how parties, organizations and candidates target potential voters.
“I don’t see it as being a cure, but I do believe it will end up being a very good medicine though,” said Dr. William Hartman, an assistant professor of anesthesiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
“It is absolutely exhausting right now,” said Dr. Jeff Pothof, chief quality officer at UW Health, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s hospital and medical arm. Nearly a third of its COVID-19 patients are in intensive care, filling all three wings of the ICU, he said. Some require one-on-one care around the clock.
UW-Madison journalism professor Robert Drechsel, an expert on media law and access to information, said federal privacy laws prevent the release of medical information about specific, named inmates, but do not cover broader statistical information that would not reveal a prisoner’s identity.
“It is impossible to think that anything that could happen in a school could happen without echoes in the larger community,” UW-Madison pathology professor David O’Connor said. “The question is: how large are those echoes?”
“Unless there’s a Great Depression, like the worst in the nation’s history, an impeachment of a president or a terrorist attack on the country, you’re going to see the president’s party losing seats in the midterm in the House,” said UW-Madison political science professor David Canon.
“There does appear to be a divide between a rising cohort of political activists and more established figures in local politics, in terms of both style and substance,” UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said. “People who have been in the mix for a while tend to be more trusting that the political system will operate as it should. The younger generation is motivated to become active precisely because they see the system and its leaders as ineffective and maybe even malicious.”
Quoted: “This is the big question mark hanging over election day, ‘Who’s going to show up on Election Day, in the middle of a pandemic?’” Eleanor Neff Powell, UW-Madison Booth Fowler Assoc. Professor Political Science said.
Their numbers also are sure to drop in the western Great Lakes area, as happened previously when federal controls were lifted, said Adrian Treves, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin. Hunting seasons took their toll and research showed that poachers were emboldened by the absence of federal enforcement, he said.
“Those ballots would not have been counted,” Mayer told FRONTLINE. “And now, no ballots that arrive after elections will be counted, and it is a certainty that there will be some.”
“Things are really running rampant, so there is a lot of discontent,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Ajay Sethi is an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He said small social gatherings are likely contributing to spread of the coronavirus in Wisconsin just as much as large gatherings.
“It’s going to be volatile control of Congress in the near term,” said University of Wisconsin Professor Barry Burden. To keep or gain an edge, partisans “want states like Wisconsin where one party seems to have really baked in its power in the legislature, but it’s still a purple state.”
“In Wisconsin, there may be a reverse coattail effect: people who are unhappy with the Republican-dominated state legislature’s refusal to support strict health measures may be moved to turn against Trump, as the legislature has brought his rhetoric home as actual policies on the ground,” Howard Schweber, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told The Daily Beast.
“If they aren’t confident that they believe the result, some legislatures will be tempted to take the authority and appoint electors directly,” said Barry Burden, founding director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Kidney disease is often hidden but quite pervasive. According to 2019 data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than one in seven Americans—37 million adults—have some chronic form of the condition. This means these vital organs aren’t filtering toxins and waste out of the blood as well as they should, but they haven’t completely failed. Although simple blood tests can identify kidney deficiencies, explains Fahad Aziz, a nephrologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, these cases rarely develop symptoms.
“There’s almost no daylight anymore between what happens in the presidential race and what happens in the Senate race,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin and the author of a book on ticket-splitting.
Young Mie Kim studied Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and continues to monitor for Russian-linked accounts during the 2020 presidential election cycle. Kim is a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she is part of a research project called Project DATA, or Digital Ad Tracking and Analysis. The project focuses on the 2020 election and tracks digital political ads to learn how parties, organizations and candidates target and speak to potential voters.
Throughout the year, the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been surveying the same Midwestern battleground state voters. These surveys show President Trump was in trouble early.
The latest UW poll found Biden holding a 9-point lead over Trump, a margin Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center, called “statistically significant.” What’s more, the UW poll found that while Trump has the edge among respondents who have yet to vote, the margin does not appear large enough to compensate for Biden’s advantage among early and absentee voters.
Katherine Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said many voters are probably holding their noses as they cast ballots.
“There are many Republicans in that part of the state who are telling themselves, ‘I am not voting for Trump, I am voting for Supreme Court seats, the unborn, the Second Amendment,’ that kind of thing,” said Cramer, who wrote a 2016 book on rural Wisconsin titled, “The Politics of Resentment.
Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, shared Hasen’s worries, outlining in an email what he views as “the most likely scenario”:President Trump falsely condemns the election as fraudulent and illegal. He will build on his allegations that millions of noncitizens voted illegally in 2016 to claim that millions of absentee ballots were submitted in duplicate or by foreign governments, neither of which will be true. He will intensify his rants against the supposed fraud as Biden’s lead in the popular vote grows in the days following the election.
Even so, Barry C. Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the number of otherwise legitimate votes that will not be counted as a result of the ruling was difficult to predict. “We don’t know what the number will be, but it won’t be zero,” he said.
“It’s a sad situation when a ballot is rejected,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s a real risk voters take. I don’t think most voters would like their odds if they knew them.”
Restaurants nervous about ordering cheese they can’t use are buying products just one month in advance versus their typical approach of booking purchases up to a year early, said Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The thing I’m seeing this cycle is that the candidates are employing an ‘all of the above approach,’” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies campaign advertising. “They are advertising on every outlet and platform they can get access to, (but) there is a continuation of earlier trends where candidates look beyond TV outlets.”
It’s not clear if the ruling will benefit one side or the other in Wisconsin, which President Donald Trump won by fewer than 23,000 votes in 2016, said Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor and the director of the Elections Research Project.
“If there’s a silver lining in these unusual times, it’s the opportunity for an online event to bring ideas, new technology and networking to every PC, and every conference room and training room in the dairy industry,” said John Lucey, director of the Center for Dairy Research at UW-Madison, which conducts the CheeseExpo with the WCMA.
UW-Madison journalism professor Mike Wagner said since there’s little room for turnout to grow in Dane County, Democrats need to ensure they shore up support in Milwaukee to be successful. “Democrats can almost win the state with huge turnout in Madison and Milwaukee and nothing else, but almost is not the same as doing it,” he noted.
In short, this means that traditional sources of energy are much less economically attractive. In fact, in the United States, it has become cheaper to build and operate an entirely new wind or solar plant than it is to continue operating an existing coal one, according to Gregory Nemet, a University of Wisconsin at Madison professor and author of “How Solar Energy Became Cheap.” Upfront capital-equipment costs have fallen, and once the equipment is installed, wind and sunshine are essentially free; by contrast, coal plants still have to pay for the coal and the people to operate the plants.
David Canon, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, talked about the 2020 presidential campaign in the battleground state of Wisconsin
NPR’s David Greene talks to Dr. Jeffrey Pothof, an emergency room doctor in Madison and chief quality officer at the University of Wisconsin Health, about the surge in COVID-19 cases in the state.
“Some estimates are that there might be one hundred and fifty million people voting for president this year,” Barry Burden, director of Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Fox News.
Bolstering the National School Lunch Program is central to Andrés’ vision. In the 2019 book The Labor of Lunch, Jennifer Gaddis, a professor of civil society and community studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, traces the modern-day school lunch program to WPA-era efforts to feed hungry kids and boost family incomes by hiring women to cook school lunches. By 1941, Gaddis writes, the WPA employed more than 64,000 workers who churned out 6 million school lunches a day, feeding one in four schoolkids.
Bruce Wampold, an emeritus professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, has studied the impact and efficacy of psychotherapy throughout his career and wants to emphasize that, generally speaking, psychotherapy works. “For most mental disorders, psychotherapy is as effective as antidepressants or anti-anxiety medications, and it’s longer lasting — there’s less relapse when it’s over than with medication and fewer additional episodes over the life course,” he says.
Fenaba Addo is a professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and has researched this student debt gap. The following is an edited transcript of her interview with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio.
“It’s a combination of a lot of things that have occurred at the same time,” Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin Madison, told me. “It was a perfect storm.”
But some experts say it won’t hinder most voters. “This year it looks likely that the majority of votes in Wisconsin could be submitted before election day – that’s a huge change and it’s significant,” said Barry Burden, political science professor at University of Wisconsin – Madison and director of the Elections Research Center.
Burden attributes the trends to a response to the pandemic, with voters wanting to avoid exposure to Covid-19 while waiting in line to vote, but also to an unprecedented enthusiasm for early voting.
Air pollution has been on the decline for decades since the inception of the Clean Air Act, said Tracey Holloway, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. While emissions of many pollutants have been going down, Holloway noted carbon dioxide emissions have been on the rise.
