Folasade Adeluola said she’s running to stop Sen. Bernie Sanders from “waging war” with the Democratic Party.

The newcomer to politics is a self-described “Obamacrat activist” and is facing Sanders in Tuesday’s the Vermont Democratic primary. She’s a single mother who is self-employed in accounting and lives in Burlington.

Adeluola, 55, is originally from Nigeria and became a U.S. citizen in the 1990s.

If he wins the primary, Sanders has said he will continue his practice of declining the nomination and running as an independent in the general election — a traditional Adeluola aims to stop.

Read more: https://vtdigger.org/2018/08/14/sanders-challenger-files-complaint-election-tactic/

After starting off as a rather genteel affair, the race for Milwaukee County sheriff is ending on an especially sour tone.

Acting Milwaukee County Sheriff Richard Schmidt is calling on his chief opponent, Earnell Lucas, to denounce a mailer from the pro-immigration Voces de la Frontera. The flyer features a well-known photoshopped picture of President Donald Trump with his arm around Schmidt's shoulder.

"I have never met nor talked to Donald Trump," Schmidt said by email.

But he was just getting warmed up.

Schmidt, who is running against Lucas and Deputy Robert Ostrowski in Tuesday's Democratic primary, called the mailer both "very wrong" and an "outright lie."

Read more: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2018/08/13/acting-sheriff-richard-schmidt-denounces-mailer-linking-him-trump/975978002/

How could the race end on a sour note when the whole piece of music was sour including Schmidt's anti-LGBT opinions?

Absentee voting ahead of Tuesday's election is outpacing early voting counts from other partisan primaries in recent years, the Wisconsin Elections Commission said Monday.

A total of 98,568 absentee ballots had been cast statewide and reported to the commission as of Monday morning, spokesman Reid Magney said.

Early votes in just two counties — Dane with 16,796 and Milwaukee with 16,109 — account for more than one-third, or 33.38 percent of the preliminary tally. Waukesha County reported 10,163 absentee ballots.

The statewide number is nearly 13.5 percent larger than the final tally of 86,862 absentee ballots cast in the 2016 partisan primary, according to the commission. A total of 65,525 absentee ballots were cast for the general election primary in 2014, and 84,830 in 2012.

Read more: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2018/08/13/absentee-voter-turnout-surges-advance-tuesdays-primary/979031002/

MADISON - GOP Gov. Scott Walker and the two Republicans running for U.S. Senate broke with President Donald Trump and said they oppose a boycott of Harley-Davidson Inc. on Monday after avoiding the issue for as long as they could before Tuesday's primaries.

For more than 24 hours, Walker would not say if he supported or opposed a boycott, but late Monday he came out against it.

"As I said yesterday, I want Harley-Davidson to prosper here in the State of WI — so of course I don’t want a boycott of Harley-Davidson," Walker tweeted. "And one of the best ways for that to happen is to do what the President has called for and that is get to no tariffs as soon as possible."

Walker took that stance hours after Senate candidate Kevin Nicholson said he disagreed with the president on a boycott while supporting his overall trade policy.

Read more: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2018/08/13/scott-walker-caught-between-donald-trump-and-harley-davidson/975730002/

While Wisconsin voters will be closely watching the gubernatorial and U.S. Senate primaries Tuesday, other primaries are disputed as well. One of them is the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor, in which voters will choose the candidate that will challenge current Republican Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch in the November general election.

Kleefisch was first elected in 2010 along with Gov. Scott Walker. She faced and won a recall election in 2012 brought on by her support for Act 10. Kleefisch was the first lieutenant governor to face a recall election.

Mandela Barnes

Mandela Barnes is a former Democratic member of the State Assembly, serving District 11 in Milwaukee from 2003 to 2017. Barnes prioritizes education, healthcare and the environment in his campaign.

Barnes's education platform includes:

* Pushing for a school funding formula that allows rural and urban schools can keep up with those in wealthier suburban districts.
* Free two-year college and debt-free four-year college.

Read more: https://madison.com/ct/news/local/govt-and-politics/a-look-at-the-democrats-running-for-lieutenant-governor/article_58f0f6c8-e9c1-5b89-b43b-6ac415eb2af5.html

With the latest round of state campaign finance reports in, backers of the private school voucher program have larded the campaign accounts of politicians willing to do their bidding with $7.5 million in campaign contributions since 2008.

Leading the pack, and hauling in more than $1 of every $4 donated, is Gov. Scott Walker, with a total take in excess of $2.165 million.

Under Walker and the GOP controlled Legislature there has been a dramatic, statewide expansion of the less accountable private school voucher program.

Vouchers take resources directly away from public schools to help pay for it even though the majority of students who enrolled in the expanded program were already attending private schools.

Read more: https://www.wisconsingazette.com/views/one-wisconsin-now-walker-s-take-from-private-school-voucher/article_45c1f424-9cb3-11e8-9d7e-af78b3247897.html

On Wednesday morning the Wisconsin race for governor will enter a new phase with Democrats finally having a single nominee to take on Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

That candidate will have relatively little money left in the bank, only a handful of campaign staff and the largest primary field in state history to unify — all with only 12 weeks to go before the general election on Nov. 6.

But thanks in part to changes Republicans made to state campaign finance law, the Democratic Party has been building critical campaign infrastructure — call it a campaign in waiting — for the eventual nominee.

Unlike in 2014, when the state party helped clear the field for businesswoman, former state Commerce secretary and Madison School Board member Mary Burke, Democratic officials have taken a hands-off approach in selecting the nominee this year.

Read more: https://madison.com/wsj/ad224338-2ccf-553a-af35-08540d1bc081.html

Harris County has reached a demographic tipping point. The combined total of black, Latino, and Asian registered voters in the county is about to overtake white registered voters. That’s if the shift hasn’t already taken place.

Hector de Leon of the Harris County Clerk’s Office examined voter registration data for July of this year and compared it to July 2014, just before the last midterm election. “About 50 percent of the registered voters in Harris County are now non-white,” de Leon said.

The data show that more Latino residents are registering to vote, while older white voters are dying off. Rice University political scientist Bob Stein said Hispanic voters are a not a uniform bloc, but, “probably anywhere between 60 to 80 percent of an Hispanic-surnamed electorate is going to be voting disproportionately Democratic.

Stein said that has ramifications for Harris County going forward, but it also helps explain why Democratic candidates swept the county in 2016.

Read more: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/2018/08/13/299668/non-whites-overtaking-whites-among-harris-county-registered-voters/

The University of Houston College of Medicine has received an anonymous $3 million gift, which will fund the full tuition for the college’s inaugural class of 30 medical students in fall 2020.

The College of Medicine aims for at least 50 percent of each graduating class to specialize in primary care, according to a news release from the University of Houston (UH) and that distinction sets the college apart from its local and national counterparts in an effort to address the vast shortage of primary care physicians in Houston and throughout Texas.

Texas ranks 47th out of 50 states in primary care physician-to-population ratio.

UH President Renu Khator noted that since student debt is the number one deterrent for students when applying to medical school, “this generous gift will allow such students an opportunity to attend and ultimately lead the future medical workforce.

Read more: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2018/07/18/296152/anonymous-gift-of-3-million-pays-tuition-for-entire-first-class-at-uh-college-of-medicine/

For the last two weeks, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller has choreographed a dizzying do-si-do with cattle ranchers, state and federal regulators and a despised, eight-legged critter.

It’s taken just 11 days for Miller to personally go to war with federal and state agencies over a pesticide spraying program, to call the agencies chicken for not showing up to a meeting, to draw the ire of powerful farm and ranch lobbying groups, and when all was said and done, to do a 180-degree turn in an attempt to save face. When the music stopped, so to speak, little had changed and nothing had been accomplished: a dance many Texas politicians know by heart.

It started last week, when Miller surprised cattle pesticide applicators in Raymondville after fielding complaints from South Texas ranchers that chemical spraying killed their cattle. Miller decided that Bayer’s Co-Ral, a chemical used to kill the disease-harboring fever tick, was being misapplied. He shut down 16 “spray boxes,” small, mobile metal chutes where cows are herded single-file and doused with poison to rid them of the fever tick. The pesticide was being applied in a confined, poorly ventilated space — a violation of the chemical’s federally approved label — and no licensed pesticide applicator was on site, Miller said.

The rebuke from the Texas agriculture industry, which stands to be decimated if the fever tick spreads from designated quarantine zones, was swift and loud. The Texas Farm Bureau said last week that Miller “has jeopardized the health of the Texas cattle herd and the viability of farmers and ranchers.” Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers called the decision “actually detrimental to cattle raisers who rely on the use of spray boxes to eradicate cattle fever ticks from their operations.”

Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/in-new-spray-box-decision-sid-miller-dances-himself-right-back-to-where-he-started/