Author

Ruth Conniff is Editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner. She formerly served as Editor-in-chief of The Progressive Magazine where she worked for many years from both Madison and Washington, DC. Shortly after Donald Trump took office she moved with her family to Oaxaca, Mexico, and covered U.S./Mexico relations, the migrant caravan, and Mexico’s efforts to grapple with Trump. Conniff is the author of "Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers" which won the 2022 Studs and Ida Terkel award from The New Press. She is a frequent guest on MSNBC and has appeared on Good Morning America, Democracy Now!, Wisconsin Public Radio, CNN, Fox News and many other radio and television outlets. She has also written for The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, among other publications. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her husband and three daughters.
Board votes not to dissolve Palmyra-Eagle School District
By: Ruth Conniff - January 10, 2020
On Thursday the School District Boundary Appeals Board voted 6-to-1 to deny a proposal to dissolve the Palmyra-Eagle Area School District. But what happens next is up in the air. The financial problems that triggered the original vote to dissolve the district have not been solved. The appeals board vote was big news for the […]
What’s going on with the voter purge?
By: Ruth Conniff - January 9, 2020
A conservative group’s lawsuit demanding that more than 200,000 voters who may have changed address be purged from the voting rolls in Wisconsin has set off a race to state and federal courts by parties on both sides of the issue. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), which brought the original lawsuit, the […]
Trump pushes Iran sanctions, Senate to vote on war powers
By: Ruth Conniff - January 8, 2020
In a live, televised address to the nation on Wednesday, President Donald Trump responded to missile attacks by Iran on U.S. military sites in Iraq by announcing tougher sanctions, vowing that Iran will never get nuclear weapons, and praising his administration’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, claiming that U.S. military power is […]
Our Wisconsin Revolution’s new director: We’ve got to create a new kind of politics
By: Ruth Conniff - January 8, 2020
Our Wisconsin Revolution, the statewide group that grew out of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, announced this week that it has hired its first executive director, Mike McCabe. The announcement comes as national attention is increasingly focused on Wisconsin, which is widely seen as a critical state in the 2020 presidential election. But McCabe is […]
Gov. Tony Evers on the legislature, the lame duck and ‘what I was elected to do’
By: Ruth Conniff - January 2, 2020
Gov. Tony Evers doesn’t wish he’d done things any differently during his first year. “No, not really,” he says when asked the question during a year-end interview with the Examiner at his Capitol office. “I suppose I could use a better choice of words from time to time.” Other than that, Evers feels he’s done […]
Dawn Crim plays a long game
By: Ruth Conniff - December 24, 2019
Dawn Crim toured Europe as a college basketball player, and served as an assistant coach at Penn State and the UW-Madison before Gov. Tony Evers chose her to lead the Department of Safety and Professional Services. That sports background has served her well in her new job, she says. “If you think about a basketball […]
A smaller, whiter, meaner Democratic debate
By: Ruth Conniff - December 20, 2019
Tom Steyer and Andrew Yang got unprecedented air time in the sixth and final, seven-person Democratic debate in Los Angeles on Thursday night. Yang lamented the fact that he was the lone remaining person of color on stage (but predicted Cory Booker would be back), and made good use of his time by talking about […]
USMCA passes on bipartisan vote, Rep. Pocan votes no
By: Ruth Conniff - December 19, 2019
The House of Representatives voted today to ratify a massive trade deal with Mexico and Canada, allowing both House Democrats and the Trump administration to declare a legislative victory on the day after the House voted to impeach the president. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) will replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which […]
Sean Duffy’s former chief of staff sells pot
By: Ruth Conniff - December 18, 2019
Chief of staff to former Wisconsin Congressman Sean Duffy is now working for a company that produces marijuana products. Pete Meachum, who worked for Duffy before the Congressman resigned in September, is now senior director for government affairs at the Cronos Group, according to a report in the insider government affairs publication Legistorm. Cronos Group, […]
Anti-sanctuary legislators warn of dangerous ‘criminal aliens’
By: Ruth Conniff - December 18, 2019
A small group of Latino Wisconsinites, some in suits and ties, some in jeans, and some wearing T-shirts with the logo of the immigrant-rights group Voces de la Frontera, filed into the State Capitol Tuesday, for a hearing on a bill that would make it illegal for cities and towns to refuse to cooperate with […]
Push to purge Wisconsin voters goes to court Friday
By: Ruth Conniff - December 13, 2019
Update: On Friday afternoon Ozaukee County Circuit Judge Paul Malloy ordered the state to purge the rolls of voters who may have moved. He also denied the League of Women Voters’ petition to intervene in the case. In issuing a writ of mandamus, the judge took the strongest action he could take, ordering the state to immediately comply […]
Report: millions wasted on Wisconsin charter schools that closed or never opened
By: Ruth Conniff - December 10, 2019
A new report by the Network for Public Education, a group founded by public-education advocate and former U.S. Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch, provides extensive, state-by-state data on waste in the federal charter schools program. In Wisconsin, 46% of charter schools that received federal start-up grants between 2006 and 2014 shut down or never opened […]