By the time Speaker of the House Paul Ryan declared in April that he would be returning home to Janesville rather than running for reelection, Wisconsin had experienced one of the largest declines of the middle class of any state in the country. Its poverty rate had climbed to a thirty-year high; the state’s roads were the second worst in the country; the University of Wisconsin–Madison had fallen, for the first time, out of the rankings of the country’s top five research schools. A study estimated that 11 percent of the state’s population was deterred from voting in the 2016 presidential election by Wisconsin’s new voter ID law, one of the strictest in the nation.
University Communications