Running again, during the collapse
"We're going to rebuild together, even if it takes a generation." Contributor Emily Tseffos ran in an "unwinnable" race in the State Assembly in 2024. She's running again in 2026. Here's why.
The Recombobulation Area is a 19-time Milwaukee Press Club award-winning opinion column and online publication founded by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. The Recombobulation Area is now part of Civic Media.
The sky feels lower this time.
It’s a chilly, fog-soaked morning in Wisconsin. Frost etches the edges of fields, the air is sharp enough to sting your lungs, clouds pressing down so close they blanket the land, enveloping it in a muffled grey. That’s what this moment feels like. The haze is everywhere physically and metaphorically – we witness it via the destruction of institutions meant to serve the American people, indictments of political adversaries, disappearances of mothers and fathers. Neighbors and workers taken from the street by masked men. It’s a weight we all carry now, lingering just beneath the surface. You can feel it across the state: a quiet exhaustion laced with anger. And the scaffolding of ordinary life keeps twisting and bending under the strain.
Schools and hospitals can already feel a storm coming. They are running triage trying to stop the bleeding. Only the injuries are everywhere.
School administrators are bracing for impact after the Trump administration’s 2025 budget slashed federal education and healthcare programs under the banner of “efficiency.” Locally, 277 districts across the state are expecting to receive less general aid in 2025-2026 than they did the year before. Special education reimbursement still sits at an abysmal 42% reimbursement rate – and now they’ve done away with the oversight that had existed at the federal level. Districts that once relied on federal nutrition programs are rationing milk and skipping fresh produce altogether after the U.S. Department of Agriculture canceled the $660 million Local Food for Schools grant that kept fresh fruits and vegetables in cafeterias.
Hospitals in Wisconsin are already sounding the alarm. Several rural facilities — Holy Family Memorial in Manitowoc, Mayo Clinic Health System-Oakridge in Osseo, and Aspirus Stanley Hospital in Stanley — have been flagged as at risk of closure or service reduction due to collapsing Medicaid reimbursements and federal policy shifts. The Wisconsin Hospital Association reports that nearly one-third of hospitals in the state were operating in the red last year, receiving only about 63 cents on the dollar for care provided to Medicaid patients. And that’s before the federal cuts.
If you zoom out you can see the pattern. The quiet dismantling playing out in our hospitals and community schools is taking place across nearly every institution meant to serve the public good.
National media outlets are being forced to sign loyalty pledges to gain access to Department of Defense briefings; those who refuse are simply denied entry. Federal agencies are being purged and repopulated with loyalists. Governors in places like Texas, Florida, and even Iowa are fast-tracking new restrictions on voting, rolling back child-labor laws, and gutting environmental oversight under the guise of “state sovereignty.”
Wisconsin’s own far-right legislators are watching closely, ready to replicate those same policies the minute they can. Families here at home are just trying to hold everything together as it crumbles away. We’re all clutching armfuls of sand.
And still, here we are here pushing back against it all, as evidenced by the millions of Americans who took to the streets peacefully last week.
And here I am, deciding to run in another unwinnable district, again.
I ran for the Wisconsin State Assembly in 2024 in a district people said was too Republican to bother with. They were right about the numbers – and I ran anyway. And the challenge facing me in 2026 is the same: a vast stretch of farmland and factory towns, small communities, populated waterways, and long, lonely roads. It’s a tough race, and running here is not for the faint of heart. But it’s built on the same foundation as before: we show up, we tell the truth, and we refuse to write off the people others already have.
Because even in a collapse, someone has to keep showing up.
Campaigning in this moment feels like running through a debris field. Each step must be careful and deliberate, trying not to stumble on the wreckage left by people who will never live with the consequences of their own power while simultaneously plucking the salvageable parts and piecing what we can back together alongside those living in the rubble.
Since January 2025, the Trump administration has accelerated what the first term began. We’ve seen mass deportations and raids that have torn families apart; the reinstatement of industry-written environmental rollbacks that poisoned wells in places like Waushara County; the suspension of worker-safety rules that left dairy and factory workers at risk; and a new wave of tariffs that punished our farmers while rewarding global corporations.
While the wealthy receive yet another round of tax breaks, our local governments are being encouraged to tighten their belts – even as bridges crack and emergency services shutter their doors in rural communities. When federal oversight disappears, rural hospitals and nursing homes fold under pressure. And when dissenting journalists are banned from press briefings, communities lose another lifeline of truth.
“For me it’s about standing in those ruins with these people and saying: We’re here. We’re going to rebuild together, even if it takes a generation.”
In Madison, the same cruelty echoes. Republicans chronically starve our public schools, block BadgerCare expansion, and gut local control in the name of “freedom.” The result is a slow, grinding collapse most people live with but can’t name: a school referendum every other spring, an emergency room on the brink, a teacher working two jobs, a farmer selling off land that’s been in the family for generations.
What we need people to understand is that this isn’t a random misfortune. It’s the direct result of policy decisions. It’s neglect dressed up as ideology. And it’s rooted in a simple truth: the majority of the people in power right now genuinely don’t give a damn about the people they’re supposed to represent.
Some folks ask why I keep talking about federal issues when I’m running for a state seat. The answer is simple: there’s no separation anymore.
Every decision in Washington ripples through our classrooms, clinics, and county budgets. You can’t talk about the cost of groceries without talking about corporate monopolies and trade policy. You can’t talk about teacher shortages without tracing decades of disinvestment that began with federal cuts and Act 10 and trickled down to local taxes. You can’t talk about closed hospitals or unpaid EMTs without talking about the refusal to expand Medicaid.
Our job now is to tell our neighbors that the hurt they are feeling is the direct result of leaders who, again and again, decided that the comfort of the few was worth more than the dignity of the many.
When I ran in 2024, I learned that most people don’t need convincing of that. They needed to be seen.
In Appleton and New London, teachers were paying for extra supplies to use for kids who needed additional classroom supports themselves. In Dale, two moms with young kids and full-time jobs opened a childcare center after one of the only ones in town closed abruptly because we don’t invest in working families. In Shiocton, a neighbor told me about a friend who had a heart attack and waited forty-five minutes for an ambulance that never came – until a helicopter arrived, already too late to prevent permanent damage.
None of these people asked for slogans from politicians, and the ones in power are betting they’re too tired to pay close enough attention. On each front step I found that what they really wanted was someone to listen and name what they already knew: they’re doing everything right and still can’t get ahead. They’re exhausted, not apathetic. They care deeply about their neighbors, even if they’ve stopped believing anyone in Madison does.
And that, my friends, is the space where rebuilding starts.
Running here isn’t about ego or optimism — choosing to do this again requires a whole lot of humility, in fact. But this is about our collective wellbeing. It’s about repair.
For me it’s about standing in those ruins with these people and saying: We’re here. We’re going to rebuild together, even if it takes a generation. It’s about connecting the dots between the national collapse and the local heartbreak – between Trump-era greed and the school nurse now covering three buildings in the district, between a government shutdown in Washington and a well that’s too toxic to drink from.
This is slow work. You do it one driveway, one barstool, one church fish fry at a time. You knock even when there’s no election, just to ask how things are holding up. Democracy isn’t a season – it’s relationships we must maintain month after month, year after year.
The collapse we’re living through isn’t the end. Because in that destruction, we see a clearing. Open ground where something new can take root.
If campaigning in an unwinnable district in Wisconsin teaches you anything, it’s that hope here isn’t naïve. It’s earned. It lives in calloused hands and stubborn hearts – in the neighbor who fixes your fence before you ask, the teacher with granola bars in her desk, the volunteers who shovel the sidewalk in front of church before dawn. It’s in the good, hardworking folks I’ve met, and the ones I’ll talk to this time around.
That’s where I see hope. That’s why I’m running again.
Because even in a debris field, people are still building. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.
Learn more about Emily Tseffos’ campaign here.
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Thank you, Emily. Your essay made me cry, while inspiring me. I've worked with the Democrats for 15 years. It is hard and never-ending work. Yet, I know it is MY work. I'm glad to be on this path with people like you who understand that we must always stand with those who aren't heard often enough, those who need help the most. If we don't do it, who will?