Incumbent Spaude trying to overcome billionaires' money, negative ads to hold crucial seat

Even as eager as Republicans are this election cycle to tarnish Democrats with the “socialist” label, they opted not to when it came to Rep. Ryan Spaude.

“My Republican opponent knows better than to try it, and my constituents know better than to believe it,” says Spaude, who is defending his Assembly seat in the 89th District in November.

That’s not to say his opponent’s campaign isn’t using some of its more than $3 million to try to tarnish him in other ways that Spaude thinks savvy voters will also see as spurious and unserious.

For Republicans, Spaude is the top targeted Democratic incumbent in the State Assembly and a critical hold if Democrats are to wrest back control of the legislature from Republicans after 16 years.

“The joke is that I’m at the top of RACC’s (Republican Assembly Campaign Committee) offensive list. No. I am their entire offensive list,” Spaude says, laughing. “I am the only Assembly Democrat they are targeting with any significant amount of money. 

“Honestly, it’s a badge of honor.”

Still, being the primary target of billionaires Rich and Liz Uihlein and Diane Hendricks, who are pouring money into Republican coffers to try to stave off what feels more and more like a blue wave and a potential Democratic flip of the entire state government next month, can be daunting. The negative ads against him have been up for a while, attempting to portray Spaude, a moderate Democrat and former Republican, as being opposed to virtually all things that might help the state of Wisconsin.

They are basing that claim on the fact that Spaude voted against the state budget in 2025, something 48 other Democrats and five Republicans did. He did so, he says, not because he’s against those things but because he deemed them to be insufficiently funded.

“It underfunded our public schools and is forcing the Green Bay Area Public School District and the Ashwaubenon School District to go back to referendum,” he says, laughing again at how unserious he considers the Republicans’ claims. “I called my two superintendents up and we crunched the numbers. The state budget was not good for this part of the state. Green Bay and Ashwaubenon got the shaft. It is causing our property taxes to continue to skyrocket. So I voted no on the state budget.”

He voted against the budget, he says, not because he’s opposed to schools and health care and support for homeless veterans.

“I voted no because there wasn't enough funding for schools, health care, and our homeless veterans,” he says.

Leaving the GOP

Spaude won the open seat in the 89th two years ago by less than a 1,000 votes, or by about two percentage points. The district, which is trending more and more blue, covers most of the west side of Green Bay and the City of Ashwaubenon. Though when he filed to run in January 2024 he was in the 4th District, the new maps implemented a month later pushed him into AD89, the very district – albeit, now relocated from a mostly rural to mostly urban area – he’d grown up in. He even interned one summer in the district for Rep. John Nygren.

“I went from working for the guy to being the guy,” he says. “The universe has a sense of humor.”

During the recall efforts following the passing of Act 10 in 2011, Spaude, then a Republican too young to vote, went door to door to try to save Sen. Rob Coles’ job. Through being politically active from such an early age, Spaude says he’s been knocking doors in the Green Bay area for much of the past 15 years. It’s one of the reasons Republicans won’t attempt to taint him with the socialism charge; people know who he is and he knows them.

“Yep, I've knocked doors for various candidates and causes, including my own,” he says. “So when I put my name forward, when people saw my name on the ballot, I think a lot of folks underestimated me. I've only been in office for two years, but I think, respectfully, I know this district better than any other person on the face of the planet.”

Spaude grew up in Suamico to Kennedy and union Democratic grandparents, an independent father and a mother who tended Republican. He got his undergraduate degree from Princeton and his law degree from UW-Madison before becoming a criminal prosecutor in Green Bay in the early 2020s. His party switch came about from a confluence of events.

“Donald Trump happened and I came out openly as gay,” he says. “If I had to put my finger on a date I was definitely done being a Republican and calling myself a Democrat it was Jan. 6, 2021 (the day of the Capital riots).”

Ending vouchers

Spaude is a moderate Democrat, both by temperament and by the prescriptions and practicalities of the purple 89th. He points to his yes vote for Gov. Evers’ so-called budget surplus compromise with Republicans at the end of the last legislative session. It was a unicorn piece of legislation in that it drew criticism and support from both sides. The deal, which failed, would have used much of the $2 billion state surplus to provide a dollar-for-dollar cut to property tax and increase in school funding, including for special education. While Spaude considered the legislation far from perfect and would have preferred more money for public education, the school districts in his district desperately needed it. He was one of only 10 Democrats in the entire state legislature to support the compromise.

“I am happy to tell everyone when I'm knocking their door that I'm a middle-of-the-road Democrat,” he says. “I’ve got the receipts.”

As for that surplus still sitting in the Madison coffers, he says unless the legislature spends it on something worthwhile, it’s the taxpayers’ money and should be given back. Among the worthwhile things he thinks it could be used for is shoring up public schools. Over the past 33 years, the funding formula has not changed. Over the past 17 years there has been no additional money even to offset inflation. The cost for maintaining schools ultimately falls on local taxpayers when the state opts not to. And Spaude doesn’t pull punches when it comes to voucher schools, which a report by the Wisconsin Examiner estimates cost taxpayers $700 million in the last school year.

“I want to sunset the state voucher program,” Spaude declares. “ We should not have public money going to private, often religious schools. Our tax dollars should not be going out the door every year to institutions that aren't held to the same standards. You have students who aren't required to take the same tests. You have teachers that don't have the same licensure requirements. There's not the same degree of transparency in terms of the school board or the superintendent. They can discriminate against kids with disabilities. We should take the money out of the voucher program and put it back in our Green Bay and Ashwaubenon schools

“We need to fund our public schools,” he continues. “We need to end this vicious cycle of referendums and property tax hikes, to the extent that 2 billion won't, in the long term, suffice.”

People aren’t believing the ads

Spaude’s opponent, Bobby Lindsey, is a former Milwaukee law enforcement officer who, understandably, is making crime a top issue. Though he says he disagrees with Lindsey on practically all other issues, Spaude says he believes they both care deeply about public safety and tackling crime.`

To hear one of Lindsey’s attack ads, though, that feeling is not mutual. In it he claims Spaude’s vote against the biennial budget, which funded additional prosecutors, suggests he is soft on crime. Yet, again, Spaude insists his no vote was based on what he claims was insufficient funding, including the failure to include additional judges and public defenders.

“I'm not going to vote for a half-baked measure that doesn't tackle the issue of crime and public safety,” he argues. “So that was another deficiency (in the budget). I support the additional positions for prosecutors, but I am not happy that the Joint Committee on Finance ditched the additional positions for judges and public defenders.”

Spaude says he did fully support Republican David Steffen’s Justice for All Act, which would have made up for the budget bill’s deficiencies by including more judges and public defenders. The Senate never took up the bill. 

“People aren't buying the BS,” says Spaude, who has been knocking sometimes 100 doors a day since the legislature adjourned in February. “Depending on the door, sometimes I will go into the state budget and describe everything, but I usually just tell folks, ‘Hey, you know me. I know you. Do you really believe that? Do you believe this parade of horribles (they’re saying about me)?’ Voters, I think, can see through the lies.” 

Making roads safer

Among the other issues Spaude considers paramount in the next session is closing loopholes in OWI legislation that he says will enhance public safety. That issue is near to him after focusing on drunk driving prosecutions during his time as a prosecutor. He already put together a bill that never got a hearing last session (fewer than 4 percent of Democratic-sponsored legislation got a committee hearing) that would begin to criminalize second OWI offenses. As it stands now, a second OWI that comes more than 10 years after the first is treated the same as the first one – as a mere civil action.

“This arrangement doesn't benefit anyone,” he maintains. “There aren't enhanced penalties. Our roads are less safe. People aren't getting the help they need (like they do) after a criminal penalty has been imposed. This is one of those bizarre loopholes that there's bipartisan support to close.”

As for data centers, Spaude scoffs at the five-page bill Republicans hastily threw together during the last session, which was the same length, he says, as their bill on Bingo and which the Public Service Commission denounced as unworkable. 

Instead, he points to his bill which he says builds on a previous Democratic bill and which would have the protection of taxpayers as one of its central planks. The issues around data centers are constantly evolving, he says, so whatever Democrats would come up with should they regain control would have to evolve with them.

“Ultimately, I think we want to make sure that data centers aren't being built in communities that don't want them,” he says. “And if there is a community that does want a data center, we need to make sure that we are protecting the environment, workers, and ratepayers.”

‘Billionaires are bankrolling my opponent’s campaign’

Spaude says that, despite being outspent nearly two to one, he feels good about the state of the race. He thinks being a moderate Democrat who has cultivated good relationships across the aisle and his familiarity among voters will carry the day, even against ads that he says caricature him. He says he sees ways in which cross-party cooperation around regional issues could help constituents of representatives of both parties.

“I think we should play politics between the 40-yard lines here in Wisconsin,” he says. “I discovered that the best way to get Democrats and Republicans together is find a proposal that everyone in the county supports, and, boom, bring those people together.”

More generally, he says, the culture in Madison needs to change. Though he acknowledges Democrats are rightly angry over being locked out of the state government over the past 16 years of Republican dominance, unable to get even committee hearings on their bills, revenge can’t be the guiding principle should the Democrats earn a trifecta on Nov. 3.

“I would hope that we have a culture where committee chairs are able to wield their gavels with a healthy dose of independence,” he says. “I would like to see more bills given a hearing in committees. You would certainly hear more bills offered by the minority party. 

“It's a democracy. I wouldn't have cried if my bills got more no votes than yes votes. They didn't even get a vote, though.”

Spaude said his closing argument to the voters is that three Republican billionaires are trying to buy the state government, billionaires who expect something in return. 

"Folks know the federal government broke it, and now the state government needs to step in, fill the gap, and fix the problem that DC created,” he says. “My opponent is on the same team as the people who created this problem, clear as day. We have tariffs, we have another reckless war in the Middle East, and we have higher gas prices. The billionaires who are causing us significant pain in Wisconsin, are the same billionaires who are now bankrolling my opponent's campaign.”

. Incumbent Spaude trying to overcome billionaires' money, negative ads to hold crucial seat © 2026 by Kelly Fenton is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0