Brief Stop in US’s Only Muslim City Before 9-Week Election Sprint
Please fill out our quick 6-question survey (click here or scroll to the bottom) and forward it to any candidate you know who is running for office. This was initially written for legislative candidates — and we encourage you to forward it to any candidate you know — but we also encourage all voters no matter where they live to take a minute to answer these six questions that are coming up all over the country:
Today’s update includes:
- The nine-week election sprint begins after a quick break in Detroit and Dearborn.
- Wisconsin Focus: Assembly, CD 3, Governor, Attorney General and State Senate
- Massachusetts moves toward abortion until birth as Virginia voters prepare to decide on a constitutional amendment to decide the same in November.
- Our new six-question WIFFC Guidance Survey asks candidates and voters where they stand on churches, women’s sports, ActBlue, the WI AG proposing stripping a tax exempt status, data centers and abortion.
During our final three-hour break before the nine-week wind sprint to Election Day, we left town to listen to Anika Nilles pound out Rush songs (https://youtu.be/G1xFNCMuf2g?si=7bLAsYMfBMddBdXP) we were singing as teenage conservatives, and this week we are back in Alabama.
They played “Anthem” only at the first of the two Detroit shows, including the line written just six years after the liberal music culmination of Woodstock:
“Begging hands and bleeding hearts / Will only cry for more.”
Granted, Geddy was more of an agnostic than a faith-based guy, and those lines were written by the late, great drummer Neil Peart, but he did say he read the Bible many, many times.
WISCONSIN: One Election Could Determine the State’s Direction for Years
In Wisconsin, there are so many important races at so many levels that it is difficult to know where to start.
First is control of the Assembly. If Republicans lose the Assembly, there is a good chance that means they have also lost the governor’s race, attorney general’s race and State Senate. With the Wisconsin Supreme Court already liberal, that combination could basically make Wisconsin another Illinois or Minnesota for years to come..
Second is Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District, where Republican Derrick Van Orden faces Democrat Rebecca Cooke. If control of Congress comes down to only a seat or two, WI-3 — along with Alabama’s 2nd District — could conceivably determine which party controls the U.S. House.
Third, Wisconsin remains one of the relatively few states with genuinely competitive races for both governor and attorney general. The latest Marquette poll actually has the governor’s race tied 44%-44% among registered voters, while Crowley leads 49%-44% among likely voters. By comparison, some other gubernatorial races have opened into double-digit contests — Democrats currently hold double-digit polling leads in some surveys in Arizona, Minnesota and Massachusetts.
That makes Wisconsin one of the places where the final nine weeks could matter most.
The attorney general’s race may be even more important than usual because of Attorney General Josh Kaul’s response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous Catholic Charities ruling. Rather than simply ending what the Court ruled was unconstitutional discrimination in denying the religious exemption, Kaul proposed going in the other direction by eliminating the exemption completely for Catholic Charities – which of course begs the question on if he may try to take away tax-exempt status for other Christian groups..
Do you agree with that approach?
That is one of the six questions in our new survey below or here https://wisconsinffc.com/guidance-survey/.
Michigan, Dearborn and the Nine-Week Sprint
Michigan certainly wasn’t flyover country Friday night.
Rush was finishing the second of two shows at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, while just a few blocks away at Comerica Park, Tarik Skubal — winner of the last two American League Cy Young Awards — was pitching against his longtime Tigers team for the first time since being traded to the Dodgers. He received a warm ovation from the Detroit crowd before throwing six strong innings in a 2-1 Dodgers win.
I return from the quick trip to see the team with the best record in baseball, our Milwaukee Brewers, tonight with my wife on what will likely be the last break before the nine-week sprint to canvass hundreds of thousands of doors by Election Day.
We spent Friday in Dearborn, Michigan, which will soon be the first major U.S. city with a Muslim majority. Tiny Hamtramck, Michigan, a few miles away, is currently the only majority-Muslim U.S. city.
Michigan could also elect America’s first Muslim U.S. Senator — Abdul El-Sayed.
Shops close briefly for Friday, as the three religions that believe in the God of Abraham — Islam, Judaism and Christianity — have successive holy days on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. After the coming election, our Board Chair Pastor Paul Hoover and our team hope to attend the 22nd Annual WallBuilders Pro-Family Legislative Conference with legislators from across the country. The conference will also give us an opportunity to get a better understanding of the Quran and Islam in America with leaders like Glenn Beck, and a leader we hosted near Green Bay last year – David Barton.
Being in Dearborn brought back memories of two weeks before Election Night 2024, when I received a call from a high-level political contact thanking WIFFC for turning out so many conservatives in Wisconsin but telling me Trump would still fall short there. We were happy to prove that prediction wrong.
However, he then correctly told me they had pulled ahead in Dearborn and believed that meant Michigan — and ultimately the six other battleground states — would go Republican.
Two years later, the bellwether for the midterms across the U.S. could once again be focused on both sides of Lake Michigan.
Michigan features the U.S. Senate race between Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers. Across the lake, Wisconsin has one of the nation’s only currently close races for governor between Democrat David Crowley and Republican Tom Tiffany, as well as the attorney general’s race between Democratic incumbent Josh Kaul and Republican Eric Toney.
Control of both chambers of the Wisconsin Legislature is also at stake, in addition to one of the congressional races we are watching most closely. If control of Congress is close, WI-3 and AL-2 could be among the deciding districts.
Massachusetts To Start Allowing Abortion Until Birth
Massachusetts currently permits abortion after 24 weeks, just two weeks later than Wisconsin’s current law.
That changes November 8.
Under the newly enacted law, as long as the abortionist who stands to charge $15,000+ for an abortion in the last few weeks of a pregnancy can simply state that abortion is in the health interests of the mother, the procedure can be performed until birth. And as any parent knows, every pregnancy causes at least some distress that could impact the health of a mother enough to check that box.
The issue is not limited to Massachusetts. Virginia voters will consider a constitutional amendment this November addressing abortion, and one of our donors put the stakes — and the connection to another rapidly emerging issue — this way:
“Despite the flowery and misleading ballot language, to me, this is about politicians trying to change the Virginia Constitution to prohibit doctors or anyone from placing any restrictions on a woman aborting a nine-month-old living human baby, while those same politicians continue to give tax breaks and place no limits on new data centers across Virginia. If Virginians agree with me that we need more life and fewer data centers, they should vote NO on November 3.”
Whether talking about late-term abortion or the enormous energy and water demands of data centers, both issues raise a basic question that voters increasingly want their elected officials to answer: What kind of growth and what kind of life are our laws designed to protect?
Until 2022, almost half of Americans supported a law stopping most abortions — something like stopping 2,970 abortions a day while allowing the 30 that resulted from rape or incest.
When pushes were made in 2022 in places like Kansas to pass laws without those exceptions, views shifted enormously — so that now only one-third of Americans would stop at least those 2,970 abortions a day, while one-third in “the new middle” would support laws only to stop late-term abortions, and one-third on the left want no restrictions — like the new Massachusetts law.
If the one-third on the left wins the referendum on the ballot in Virginia in November, it would be a huge blow to pro-life efforts everywhere.
Those developments helped shape two of the questions in our new Wisconsin Faith & Freedom Coalition Guidance Survey: one on the rapidly expanding data center issue and another on whether Wisconsin should follow Massachusetts’ new approach to late-term abortion.
