November 1, 2022 in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
HARTLAND – Mike Van Someren stood on his porch one afternoon in mid-October and gave the pitch for his longshot bid for Wisconsin’s 5th Congressional District to a small group of canvassers.
He’s running to support a struggling middle class, he said, and that can only be done by electing “people that actually want to work to help regular folks.”
“We don’t have that right now,” Van Someren, a Democrat, told the group here in the Republican stronghold of Waukesha County west of Milwaukee. “I’m running against Scott Fitzgerald, the man that is never in the district. I have seen him twice, I think, in the last year.”
The criticism of Fitzgerald, the former state Senate majority leader, comes at the end of the Juneau Republican’s first term in Congress. Fitzgerald took over the solidly Republican seat from Jim Sensenbrenner, whose 42 years in Congress made him the longest-serving member in the state’s history before his retirement two years ago.
It also comes as Wisconsin’s redrawn congressional map pushed the district that former President Donald Trump won by more than 15 points in 2016 and 2020 deeper red. The latest round of redistricting makes Wisconsin’s 5th district the strongest Republican seat in the state and out of the reach of anything more than a symbolic Democratic challenge.
Republicans in 2020 cleared the field for Fitzgerald, who launched his bid for the seat two weeks after Sensenbrenner’s retirement announcement. He handily won the general election by a 20-point margin, and he’s expected to easily win reelection on Nov. 8.
Sensenbrenner was a mainstay in Washington. He chaired two committees, including the influential Judiciary Committee for six years, and played a key role in the passage of the Patriot Act following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, as well as the Voting Rights Act, among other prominent roles.
And he was also known for his consistent, face-to-face engagement with his constituents back home. Near the end of his final term, he boasted that he had “held over 100 town hall meetings each year.”
Robyn Vining, a Democratic state representative from Wauwatosa, co-hosted two town halls with Sensenbrenner in her district. She claimed she has not seen Fitzgerald around the community or communicated with his office.
“I think if you take over for somebody like that, it’s a fair expectation that you would maybe introduce yourself to, I would say, your colleagues,” Vining said. “I don’t know that we’ve heard anything from him. It has just been silence.”
Others have made similar claims on social media.
Fitzgerald declined interview requests from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. But his office said the first-term representative has held 11 public meetings and five telephone town halls in his two years in office. Those meetings, the office claimed, attracted “more than 50,000 participants.”
Fitzgerald also sends mailers that largely focus on inflation to residents in the district, with some encouraging people to “make your voice heard” by filling out printed surveys. Some of those mailers were the subject of a September ethics complaint from his opponent, who argued a number of the official mailers came off as campaign-related material.
His campaign Facebook page in late October showed Fitzgerald visiting county Republican Party offices and events in Muskego and Menomonee Falls.
From majority leader to ‘a very small fish’
In an interview with the Journal Sentinel, Sensenbrenner pointed out that Fitzgerald went from being “a very big fish in a very small pond” — majority leader in a state Senate with a significant Republican majority — to being “a very small fish in a 435-member House of Representatives, and in the minority.”
Fitzgerald served as the state Senate’s GOP leader since 2007 and won accolades for his ability to hold together a caucus that included members with often diverging views.
“His style of leadership is, you know, he treats you like you are an equal,” said Republican state Sen. Van Wanggaard, mentioning Fitzgerald’s work with the Republican caucus during Act 10. “And he values the input from the people that are there to work with him.”
“He’s one of those individuals who kind of creates a group process and brings people in and is willing to have a conversation,” Wanggaard added in an interview.
Sensenbrenner called Fitzgerald “very wise” for grabbing a seat on the Small Business Committee — the exurban communities of the 5th Congressional District have a notable number of family-owned small businesses.
As state Senate majority leader during the first year of the pandemic, Fitzgerald pushed back on Wisconsin’s stay-at-home order that designated only certain businesses essential.
In Congress, Sensenbrenner noted Fitzgerald used his role on the Small Business Committee to “twist the arm” of the Small Business Administration to “end up giving the small businesses material help when they needed it.”
Fitzgerald also sits on the Judiciary Committee and the Committee on Education and Labor.
But Sensenbrenner, who hasn’t spoken to his successor since Fitzgerald’s election victory, said he would “strongly urge” him to seek committee assignments with “more substantive legislative and budget authorization jurisdiction” should Republicans take control of the House, as expected.
When asked about the disparity in town halls, Sensenbrenner replied: “I guess people have to shout at the TV.”
While Fitzgerald largely operates in-line with the rest of the state’s GOP delegation, he was notably the only Republican in Wisconsin to request earmarks directing federal spending toward local projects in his district. That request included $400,000 for new lab equipment for the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin in Wauwatosa and $530,000 to help pay for a new storage tank for the Waukesha Water Utility.
Still, Van Someren, Fitzgerald’s Democratic challenger, has railed against the incumbent for his votes against bills like the CHIPS and Science Act and has attempted to paint him as absent.
“I didn’t have to agree with Sensenbrenner’s policies,” Van Someren told the Journal Sentinel. “But he came back and talked to the people here. He always had meetings.”
Others have pointed to Fitzgerald’s votes against certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory following the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — one of his first acts in Congress — as reasons they don’t support him.
“He took the same oath I did when I was in the service,” Roger Kunz, a 72-year-old Vietnam veteran and Neosho resident, said of Fitzgerald, who served in the U.S. Army Reserve for 27 years. “And I just can’t understand why he took an oath and now he’s basically going against it.”
Kunz said he attended a number of Sensenbrenner town halls in the town of Rubicon but said he hadn’t heard of any scheduled by Fitzgerald, blaming the COVID pandemic.
One early Friday afternoon just over three weeks before Election Day, the blinds to Fitzgerald’s Brookfield office were shut, and only one staff member was inside. The staffer told a reporter he could not give out Fitzgerald’s public schedule.
A day later, outside Van Someren’s house in Hartland, the small group of canvassers included some who had driven up from Chicago. When asked about Fitzgerald, one canvasser was unaware of who he was.
The scenes contrast sharply with the fever-pitch campaigns of the highly contested races for U.S. Senate and governor in the state.
The 5th congressional district race also hasn’t received attention like that of the western Wisconsin contest to replace retiring Democratic U.S. Rep. Ron Kind — largely because the district’s lines have given Democrats little motivation to invest in the seat.
The suburban seat has been one of the safest Republican districts over the decades. Under a redrawn congressional map approved this year, the district picked up the Republican suburbs of southern Waukesha County — pushing it from a plus-20 Republican advantage to about plus-27.
In Fitzgerald’s hometown of Juneau, white “Scott Fitzgerald For Congress” signs slightly outnumbered the blue campaign signs for Van Someren, though there were few lawns touting either campaign.
Mike Zillmer, who has lived in the town for 26 years and knows of the Fitzgerald family, indicated he considers the upcoming election a referendum on Democrats.
He spoke of the Senate and governors races, lamenting that there were negative “mudslinging advertisements” from both Republicans and Democrats instead of talk about issues.
When asked why he’s supporting Fitzgerald’s reelection campaign, Zillmer kept things simple.
“I just think he does a good job,” he said.
Lawrence Andrea 