May 7, 2020 at 4:04 p.m.
Tiffany, Zunker face off Tuesday in special congressional election
On lockdowns, guns, immigration, trade - candidates are polar opposites
Tiffany, Zunker face off Tuesday in special congressional election
Tiffany is a state senator from Minocqua who sits on the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee; Zunker is president of the Wausau School Board and a Ho-Chunk Supreme Court justice.
The coronavirus pandemic changed the nature of the campaign almost certainly for the worse. While candidates continued to raise money traditionally, and campaigns maintained their messaging over the airwaves, retail politics - that person-to-person and event-to-event politicking that has been the mainstay of American campaigns - virtually vanished.
The other big change the pandemic has brought is the increase in voting by mail through absentee ballots. How that affects turnout and overall partisan advantage is anyone's guess.
In any event, as of May 5, clerks had reported receiving 101,841 requests for absentee ballots. They reported sending out 97,271 ballots, while 54,201 had been returned. That's about a quarter of the district's registered voters applying for ballots.
That's strong, but about 30 percent fewer so far than were requested for the April 7 spring election in the district. Still, clerks might not have yet reported all numbers, and voters had until May 7 to request an absentee ballot.
Whether the absentee vote changes anything is another question. Mail-in elections are thought to favor Democrats but, despite the strong mail-in voting in the counties of the seventh congressional district in April, conservative Dan Kelly won comfortably in the district while losing statewide.
Still, there was some evidence of stronger than normal Democratic vote totals in some of those counties. Normally Republican Oneida County, for instance, was a virtual tie between Kelly and liberal justice-elect Jill Karofsky.
Pandemic politics
While voters have been mostly robbed of retail interaction with the candidates, there have been a couple of debates, including a virtual one. In those debates, the candidates staked out the same basic positions they had in the primary elections, but the politics of the pandemic did open a new window through which to see the candidates' ideological viewpoints.
There was no surprise, though. Tiffany called for a safe and regional reopening of the state's economy, in line with most GOP thinking, while Zunker backed the administration's and the Democrats' general support of an extended statewide lockdown.
On Twitter, for example, Zunker criticized former Rep. Sean Duffy's call to re-open the state.
"WI-07 currently doesn't have a voice in Congress after Rep. Sean Duffy resigned, but now he's using his voice to oppose the safer at home order," Zunker tweeted. "Once I'm elected on May 12, I'm going to be a big voice for the health & safety of all Wisconsinites."
In a debate sponsored by Wisconsin Public Radio, Zunker also opposed a regional approach to reopening the state's economy that would likely allow northern Wisconsin to open sooner than the rest of the state, while Tiffany said he supported such an approach.
The issues
While the pandemic has been front and center, the two candidates have continued to clash on issues that dominated the political landscape prior to the pandemic. During the general election campaign, the two candidates have especially clashed on immigration.
Tiffany has attacked Zunker as an opponent of a wall on the southern border advocated by President Trump.
"Tom's opponent @TriciaforWI supports decriminalizing illegal immigration and thinks building a border wall is a 'load of garbage,'" Tiffany's campaign tweeted recently. "She is also the leader of a group that supports ending immigration enforcement in Wisconsin."
For her part, Zunker says she does strongly oppose spending money to build a wall at the southern border and also strongly opposes separating immigrant children from their families after crossing the border.
Throughout the general election campaign, such as it has been, neither candidate has veered from the basic campaign messages they presented in the February primaries.
For Tiffany, that has meant underscoring his alliance with President Trump, whom Tiffany says he will help drain the swamp in Washington.
Earlier this year Tiffany called Trump's impeachment "illegitimate," and he has lauded the Trump administration's record on the economy prior to the pandemic, as opposed to that of the Obama years. Trump has, in turn, endorsed Tiffany for the seat.
Tiffany also told The Times in an interview that he supported Trump's decision to kill the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal. Indeed, Tiffany said, the president has been negotiating trade deals that better benefit America, such as the NAFTA replacement (known as United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA), and a China trade pact.
Zunker, obviously, is not supportive of Trump, but in an interview with The Times earlier this year, she also said she did not support the president's tariff-based approach to achieving fair trade for the U.S.
"Yes, we do need to get tough on China, but not at the expense of our small and mid-sized farms," she said. "I have been meeting with dairy farmers. I have been meeting with ginseng farms in the district, and I see firsthand the decisions they have to make. They don't even know if they are going to be in business after this year."
The impact of trade policies must take into account those everyday hard-working families, and that is what is missing in Trump's approach, Zunker said.
"It's this idea of 'let's send a message' without really fully thinking it through," she said.
Zunker said her approach to trade would be to make sure farmers have access to competitive markets, first and foremost.
Guns and climate
Zunker is an advocate of tougher restrictions on gun rights. She says she supports the Second Amendment, but she doesn't believe it is under attack.
"I support individuals being able to defend themselves in their homes, and I support our hunters," she said in the interview with The Times.
But, Zunker said, speaking as a mom and as the school board president of one of the largest districts in the state, she sees our children having to do active shooter drills, while in her entire academic career, which she said was a pretty long one, she never had to do one. Her child is in third grade and has had to do seven.
"What are we telling our children?" she asked. "We're telling them that if someone comes in with a gun to shoot and kill you or your teacher, here's where you are going to go. It's horrible what we are doing."
So common-sense gun legislation is needed, Zunker said.
"We need universal background checks," she said. "I don't know why this is controversial. If somebody doesn't want a background check, that tells me something."
Zunker said she would support a ban on semi-automatic weapons such as the AR-15.
"I believe weapons designed for warfare have no business being in the hands of civilians," she said. "The amount of destruction, of death, of immeasurable grief isn't worth it."
Zunker also is supportive of red-flag laws.
"If there are people identified with certainty that they should not have access to a gun because they could hurt themselves or somebody else, then I do support that," she said.
In contrast, Tiffany, who has been endorsed in the election by the NRA with an A+ rating, is a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment.
"When I put my hand on the Bible, I swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the state of Wisconsin," he said in his Times interview earlier this year. "The Second Amendment is very clear. You have the right to keep and bear arms, and I will always defend that right."
Tiffany said mass shootings are indeed a pox on America, but, he said, when you look at the details of many of the shootings, confiscation of guns would not have prevented them from happening.
The Parkland shooter should have been put away before the shooting under existing laws, Tiffany said.
"Law enforcement around the country has laws on the books in which, in almost all instances, can stop these shootings," he said. "Rather than creating new laws, enforce the laws that are currently on the books."
Tiffany also said he opposed so-called red flag laws.
"All the red-flag laws that I've seen written, they view people as guilty until they prove themselves innocent," he said. "It turns our jurisprudence on its head. That cannot stand. We are innocent until we are proven guilty."
Urgency
In a campaign forum in January, Zunker called the Green New Deal proposed by some Democrats a "good idea" in search of actual legislation, and she urges urgent action on the environment.
"We have a climate emergency that needs to be addressed with the urgency it requires," she said in The Times interview. "We need to ensure clean air, clean water, and that our beautiful lands be protected from corporate greed."
The environment is especially important to her, Zunker says. The Ho-Chunk story in history is one of removal, she said, people carted away in cattle cars but always finding a way to return.
"This is our homeland, and we have a duty to protect it," she said. "So when I talk about caring for the environment, that is an issue that runs through my veins."
Specifically, she said the U.S. needs to rejoin the Paris Accords, and she said she did not take as serious arguments that claim that emission cuts required by the treaty would be too draconian for the economy.
Tiffany, though, characterizes the Green New Deal as a "wildly unrealistic plan that would devastate Wisconsin farmers and manufacturers while sending the national debt to unprecedented levels," as his staff tweeted this past week.
Instead, Tiffany says he believes we should work together to manage natural resources responsibly - taking a common sense approach to protecting the environment while ensuring that such efforts do not negatively affect those who depend on those resources.
In fact, his campaign asserts, the Green New Deal would cost the average household an average of more $75,000 annually in Wisconsin during its first year, and could cost Wisconsin's dairy industry $2.5 billion, or roughly $2,000 per cow, just to meet the plan's environmental standards.
"Tom knows we cannot force more costly regulations on our dairy farmers, small businesses, and manufacturers when they are already struggling with too much government red tape," his staff tweeted this past week.
Health care
On health care, Tiffany said in The Times interview that the issue would be a major priority of his and that, first and foremost, he is opposed to the Affordable Care Act.
"It was supposed to reduce the cost of health insurance," he said. "It did not. It was supposed to provide better access, or at least maintain access, to your provider. That has not happened."
Now, Tiffany said, the major Democratic presidential candidates are doubling down with Medicare for All.
"It's clear with the estimates that have come out, it will break Medicare," he said. "If I'm a senior citizen, I would be scared to death of the Medicare for All proposal because it would ruin Medicare. It could end Medicare for those people currently on it, or who may be on it soon."
Medicare for All would become Medicare for None, Tiffany said.
A better approach, Tiffany said, is to return control to states and local communities, and to guarantee choice through association health plans, transparency of costs, and competition in the marketplace.
Tiffany would also like to foster an environment in which direct primary care can thrive. Direct primary care is a health delivery model where, generally, consumers pay physicians directly through periodic payments for specific primary care services.
"We should not always equate health care with health insurance because there are some people who prefer to get their health care directly," he said. "It does not matter to them whether they are insured or not, they just want affordable health care."
Health care needs are all individualized, Tiffany said.
"Yours are not the same as mine," he said. "By using a cookie cutter approach at the federal level, we really tie people's hands in getting the best health care possible for their individualized needs."
Zunker, however, supports Medicare for All as a public option that does not eliminate private insurance.
"No one should die because they can't afford to go to the doctor; people should not go bankrupt because they can't afford their medication," Zunker says on her website. "We need to ensure everyone has access to quality, affordable health insurance and we must empower people to make their own health decisions. I am in favor of Medicare for All for those who want it in the form of a robust public option, and I support measures to increase healthcare coverage."
Still, she says on her website, she has met many people on the campaign trail in northern Wisconsin who want to keep their private insurance, including hard-working members of unions who fought hard for their health insurance.
"I will also fight to protect coverage for those with pre-existing conditions," she says. "We need to ensure any health care reform does not reduce their coverage and control costs. And we need to legalize medical marijuana because no one should be forced to suffer from a health condition or side effect that can be relieved through its use."
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