yeah.

But also by design, especially in today's society and with this administration, there is so much being thrown at us.

It's hard to stay on task and it's hard to keep the focus because it's like, look over here, look over here, but we're also doing this.

Don't look over here.

And how can you when there's all of these other things going on, right? And then...

And in my research, I was finding a lot of the so-called guardrails that are supposed to exist in our system, they exist on paper, right? But for example, like if...

If the train's going down the track and you pull the emergency brake, sure, that's great.

Would you? Would you say that there are elements that have already like it's where the frog?

Otherwise, I'll lose track, and I don't want to do that.

No, totally fine.

Yeah, so I used to have a show here at WCPT called Apolatini that I did with a friend of mine, and it kind of took a little pause, and so I'm kicking it back up.

Yay! So it's kind of like Apolatini 2.0.

Excellent.

So it's going to be one episode per week right now, which is podcast.

Yeah.

But that's, you know what I mean? But you go ahead.

Man.

Still raised a family out there.

My son still lives out there.

And, um, along the way, I didn't just work as an engineer.

I, of course, I did lots of hardware and software design.

Uh, that was fun.

But then I decided to break out of my shell a little bit and work with the salespeople, be a sales engineer, which, uh, basically put me on the road, or should I say, in the air.

True

So tell me about your reporting there on that piece, who you were hearing from and, you know, just kind of what the vibes are like surrounding Hong at this point.

Yeah, I mean, so we just saw some new polling really over the past couple hours here from State Navigate polling the Democratic field after Mandela Barnes left the race a little over a week ago.

It's the first poll since he left the race.

And it shows Hong with a commanding lead in this primary.

And she was at 44 percent.

The next closest challenger was Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley at 22 percent.

So she is the overwhelming favorite to be winning this primary next week.

So his

Has Marquette been – does – Have those numbers been solid as far as this race?

There has not been a whole lot of public polling in this race throughout.

Marquette has not polled since before our April 7th spring election, and most of that poll's focus was on the state Supreme Court race that was on the ballot statewide in that spring election.

There have been a couple polls here and there that were of interest.

There was one that came out yesterday.

There was one that I reported on a couple weeks ago.

I got my hands on an internal poll from the Sarah Rodriguez campaign that showed Francesca Hong and Mandela Barnes and Sarah Rodriguez kind of forming a top three.

And so that, how, how was that like early in your career? Uh, how did that land for you? I guess is the best way for me to ask that.

[laughs]

I do try to be prepared, even though I, you know, I wasn't able to be there last weekend.

I had concert tickets that I just decided to go to the show.

But, you know, I think, uh, one of the m- biggest takeaways that a lot of folks had coming out of that primary was about the WisPolitics straw poll.

And so they do these straw polls at every state party convention when there is, you know, kind of a, an upcoming primary.

And I think with, with this one, we saw the results unfold with Lieutenant Governor Sarah Rodriguez essentially winning that straw poll.

Fairly strong showings as well from, uh, Francesca Hong and from Kayla Royz.

And I don't know if you've been, um, hearing anything from the candidates or from pollsters, uh, or just out and about where we're thinking about how a Trump endorsement will play in these midterms.

What the frickin' frack is happening?

We're getting down to crunch time with this Democratic primary for governor in the state of Wisconsin.

Our primary is August 11th.

So we've now got less than two months to go, really about six weeks until early voting starts.

So we're getting close here.

The Democratic Party of Wisconsin's convention was this past weekend.

And so we're really starting to get down.

Right.

Yes, Dan? Do you have any updates for us so you can fill us in on including our recovering Republican on the line with us? Yeah.

I even dabbed a little bit in Newsmax today, which I don't normally do.

That was, yeah.

Yeah.

It's a healthy, well, we're all talking about this big bash that is going to be happening at the White House, which it just looks like a circus, but everybody's loving it.

And I am noticing even Fox News is becoming skeptical about this whole Iran deal, peace treaty thing.

Really? I think we're at like 39 times or 49 times we said something is going to happen really, really soon and we're going to be really, really happy about it.

true

Ooh

...

in the country.

Uh, so you wonder if just, like, somebody taking the jump from a very blue district, um, that, uh, I think more th- um, uh, like close to 90% of voters went for Joe Biden in the, in the 2024 elec- or, uh, went for Harris in the 2024 election.

Um, so you wonder if just, like, okay, somebody who's from a very blue district, who is a Democratic socialist, who, who, you know, has comments about defunding the police or, you know, of, of all sorts of variety of things that, you know, Republicans have gone after her, you know, all, on all things real and imagined, right, uh, over the past few years.

But yeah, she is kind of more of the, you know, kind of AOC, Bernie Sanders, Zoran Mamdani lane, uh, of candidate- Uh, but she has, one thing that she has going for her is that she has run a really buzzy, interesting campaign where she has a bunch of these kind of like non-traditional events, uh, and is, you know, going all over the state, putting a ton of miles on, uh, and it's a really unconventional, interesting campaign.

Yeah

... "you know, have, ha- have, uh, uh, you know, experienced damages or whatever." And it's just like, what do you need to study on this? This is just like such a blatantly corrupt, uh, you know, out, uh, just a totally out of bounds, ridiculous nonsense, and the fact that, you know, he's already in a position where he's r- essentially running in a general election but can't even bring himself to moderate on simple questions like that, you know.