Candidates, activists rally citizens to vote early and encourage others to vote

Rick Crosson encouraged those at a No Kings rally in City Park on Saturday to talk with others to make sure they have a plan to vote. He said people know what’s happening in the country is wrong.

“Right now, this is all about making sure that you are talking to the people who normally you have stopped talking to for whatever reason, because your ideas were not lining up with the crazy direction that they were going,” said Crosson, the Democratic candidate for Congressional District 8. “Now's the time to start having those conversations seriously.” 

Appleton hosted two “No Kings” events on Saturday, both aimed at encouraging people to plan to vote early. More than 50 such events took place around the state and 3,000 across the country. 

Fox Valley Indivisible organized the “Celebrate the Vote” event at Houdini Plaza, which drew about 150 people.  Other participating groups included ESTHER, Appleton Area NOW, League of Women Voters-Fox Valley, Veterans for Peace, AAUW-Appleton, and Singing Resistance Fox Cities. Karma’s Mailbox and the Raging Grannies and Grumpy Grandpa provided music.

About 200 people attended the “No Kings: Vote Early Rally” in City Park sponsored by a coalition of organizations: Northeast Wisconsin DSA, Peaceful Patriots, Forward Fox Valley, the Outagamie County Democratic Party, Wisconsin Resist, Citizen Action, and Fox Valley Young Democrats.   

Unlike earlier No Kings Rallies over the past two years, the two over the weekend were focused less on calling out the Trump administration’s abuses of power and more on the upcoming election, though several candidates on hand conjoined the two. 

Emily Tseffos, the chair of the Outagamie Democratic Party and a candidate for State Senate, said too many legislators have lost sight of what public service is.

“Because the job is to be a public servant, which means you are serving your community,” she said. “You are not serving your ego or a party blindly.”

Mark Becker is a former chair of the Brown County Republican Party and an Independent candidate in the hotly contested Senate District 1. Becker said he left his former party after fighting MAGA extremism for a decade. He urged people to be accepting to those who flee the MAGA fold, even after sticking with it for so long.

“I was asked to do this because they needed someone who is kind of a bridge builder,” he said. “We're all going to know someone who takes off the red hat, throws it on the ground, and says, 'I can't deal with this anymore.’ There’s two paths we can go. We can either say, ‘Well, it's your fault, you son of a bitch. Yeah, I told you so.’ Or we can say, ‘I understand. Come on over here. Let's talk.’”

Ben Niles of the Northeast Wisconsin chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and Aleister Schotz, the president of the Fox Valley Young Democrats, agreed that the times are too urgent to be passive. Schotz admitted he’d been cynical about politics, seeing it as too set in stone for regular folks to fight. Now, he said, it’s too important to believe that way. 

“I feel like we are in a place right now where we very much need to be united,” he said. “There's so much on the line right now, and we are in a place right now where we absolutely can't do anything less than our best. The world really demands it of us right now.”

Niles said it is up to the people to withstand the current attack on our democracy by demanding free and fair elections.

“Today is our commitment to vote early in numbers that are impossible for a mad king to overcome,” he said. 

Additional speakers included Katrina DeVille (2028 Senate candidate), Grace Abitz (Assembly District 56 candidate), Garnet (Gloria) De Grave (Citizen Action of Wisconsin), and Nate Wolff (Appleton Alderperson). Ben Cominos, host of the Outside the Box podcast, emceed the event.