UW In The News

Don’t Be Fooled By The Very Strong GDP Report

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.

Western Wisconsin helped put Trump over the top in 2016. Here’s how some voters there feel about him now

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.

As virus cases surge to new records, outbreaks in swing states could shape the election.

“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.

Wisconsin battles rapid rise in Covid cases amid partisan disputes over safety

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.

The People Who Love Trump’s Coronavirus Response

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.

Europe Aims to Emerge Smarter From Latest Lockdowns

“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.”

Election Day disinformation concerns: Premature winners, ballot claims

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.

Europe and US facing new round of shutdowns amid virus surge

“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.

U.S. Supreme Court Decision Could Disenfranchise Wisconsin Voters

“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.”

Covid-19 Live Updates: U.S. Reports 90,000 New Daily Cases, the Equivalent of More Than One Per Second

“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.

Gerrymander Power on the Line in Narrowly Divided Legislatures

“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.”

Trump and Biden teams prep for once-outlandish election standoffs

“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.

Why lockdowns have left kidney patients ‘totally and completely terrified’

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.

Fight for Senate Stays Closely Tied to White House Contest

“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.

2020 election: Michigan again a target of disinformation campaigns

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.

New polls show how Biden built a lead in the states Trump is trying hardest to win

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.

After supporting Trump by one vote in 2016, a Wisconsin community reassesses

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.

How Far Might Trump Go?

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.

In search of 326,695 unreturned ballots, Democrats plan an all-out scavenger hunt in Wisconsin.

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.

More than 1 percent of mail-in ballots may be rejected, say experts

“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.”

Cheese Makers Reel as Pandemic Sows Market Chaos

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.

David Canon on Campaign 2020 and Wisconsin

David Canon, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, talked about the 2020 presidential campaign in the battleground state of Wisconsin

COVID-19 Case Spike Stretches Medical Resources In 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.

USPS put to the test by Fox News ahead of 2020 election

“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.

What If Our Problems Feel Too Big for Therapy?

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.

Student loan debt adds to racial wealth disparities, research finds

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.

How Wisconsin’s Covid-19 pandemic became one of the worst in the US

“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.”

Wisconsin sees record number of early voters as Covid cases climb in state

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.

Biden stretches lead over Trump in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania: poll

The latest survey of likely voters in the three former “blue wall” states from the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison finds Biden nearly doubling his lead in each state compared to last month.

New Poll Shows Biden’s Lead Over Trump Grows to 9 Points in Wisconsin, Beyond the Margin of Error

The survey, which was conducted by YouGov for the University of Wisconsin-Madison from October 13 to 21, shows Biden backed by 53 percent of likely voters, while just 44 percent support the president. Notably, that’s a gain of 3 percentage points for the former vice president and a loss of 2 percentage points for Trump, compared with results from the survey when it was carried out in September.