Wisconsin’s Investor-Owned Electric Utilities Raised Rates Twice as Fast as Public Utilities Since 2020

Last week, the Wisconsin state utility regulator approved two more years of rate hikes for two of the state’s largest for-profit electric utilities. These hikes continue a trend of large increases dating back to 2020.

No doubt the cost factors that go into rising rates are varied and complex, but Wisconsin’s mix of electricity providers offers a simple way to compare electricity costs. The state is covered by three different kinds of electric utilities. A few large investor-owned companies cover most of the state’s population, but dozens of cities operate their own municipally-owned electric utilities, and more than two-dozen member-owned cooperatives provide service to rural areas where for-profit investment was originally seen as unviable.

Map of Wisconsin electric service territories (click for full-size image)

Costs like labor inflation, commodity prices, and grid maintenance presumably affect all utilities more-or-less equally, and every kind of utility has raised rates since 2020. However, the investor-owned utilities have raised their rates by about twice as much as the municipally and cooperatively owned utilities.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) collects annual statistics from utilities across the country. For each reporting utility, the EIA-861 form includes the number of residential customers, the megawatt-hours they consumed, and the revenue collected from them. With these numbers, we can calculate the cost per kilowatt-hour (kWh) charged to residential customers by each utility.

Some small utilities aren’t required to supply EIA-861 data each year, so I’ve limited the following analysis to the 65 utilities that reported data in every year from 2001 through 2025. In 2025, this covers 2.69 million residential customers. In total, 86.6% of these residential customers bought power from an investor-owned company, 8.1% from a municipal utility, and 5.3% from a cooperative. Since I’m not including the smallest municipal and cooperative utilities in this analysis, the real statewide market share for these types of utilities is closer to 19%.[i]

For each class of ownership, I calculated the aggregate rate: total revenue divided by total electricity sold.

Residential cost per kWh by utility ownership, 2001-2025

Municipal utilities have always charged much less than cooperatives or investor-owned utilities. This reflects, I assume, the small geographic area they serve. A utility covering a single city can spread the cost of each distribution mile across more customers. Cooperatives, on the other hand, were specifically established in rural places with higher costs per customer.

Until 2020, Wisconsin’s investor-owned utilities closely matched the cost of cooperatives, but they’ve since diverged. Now, investor-owned utilities charge substantially more.

Since 2020, the cost per kWh has grown by 29% for investor-owned utilities, 15% for cooperatives, and 14% for municipally-owned utilities. As of 2025, the cost per kWh charged by investor-owned utilities was 115% the cost of cooperatives and 148% the cost charged by municipal utilities.

The average residential customer in Wisconsin bought just over 8,000 kWh in 2025. In reality, average usage varies in predictable ways between kinds of utilities. The typical member of cooperative lives in a rural area and uses more electricity than a municipal customer. But for the purposes of this analysis, we’ll compare the annual electricity bill of a hypothetical Wisconsinite who uses 8,000 kWh each year.

Using the aggregate utility rates, this customer would pay $1,513 to an investor-owned utility, $1,313 to a cooperative, and $1,025 to a municipal utility. Municipal utilities saved this customer about $488 in 2025, on average, relative to an investor-owned utility.

Take Cedarburg, for example, which operates one of southeast Wisconsin’s few municipal electricity providers. According to the EIA form, Cedarburg residents paid $0.1344/kWh in 2025. Let’s assume their neighbors in Grafton paid the average WE Energies rate of $0.2053/kWh. Over the course of a year, that difference is worth about $567 for our average customer.

Here are the statistics for the four largest investor owned utilities in the state compared with the aggregate of cooperative and municipal utilities. Assuming the average residential consumption of 8,000 kWh, the electric bill since 2020 has grown $391 for customers of We Energies, $408 for Alliant Energy, $276 for the Wisconsin Public Service Corp, and $177 for Xcel Energy. Meanwhile, the average cost has grown $169 for members of cooperatives and $128 for customers of municipal utilities.

Whatever factors have caused Wisconsin’s investor-owned utility rates to jump sharply since 2020 have not affected either small municipal utilities or rural cooperatives to the same degree.

[i] The EIA data includes aggregate estimates for the small utilities not reporting. Adding that “adjustment” record to values for municipal and cooperative utilities who did report does not change any of this article’s conclusions. The combined public utilities (cooperatives plus municipals plus adjustment) saw their rates rise by 1.82 cents per kWh (13.8%) from 2020 to 2025, versus 4.3 cents (29%) for investor owned utilities.

Continue ReadingWisconsin’s Investor-Owned Electric Utilities Raised Rates Twice as Fast as Public Utilities Since 2020

Where Wisconsin Swung Most and Least

All 99 Wisconsin assembly districts swung left in 2026, in the sense that David Crowley improved over Kamala Harris’ 2024 margin in each one. But the size of the swing varied by an order of magnitude.

The smallest swing of them all was just 2 points, and the location should be easy to guess. It came in Tom Tiffany’s district of residence, the 34th, home to Northwoods towns like Minocqua, Rhinelander, and Eagle River. Here, Trump won by 20 points in 2024 and Tiffany by 18 points in 2026.

If you’ve been following the national analysis of this election, you probably won’t be surprised by where the largest swings in a Democratic direction came, either. Two districts stand apart from any other. They are the adjacent 8th and 9th districts, both on Milwaukee’s near south side and the only two districts where Latinos make up a plurality of adult citizens. In both of these districts, Crowley improved over Trump by 26 points.

Southern Milwaukee County, generally, swung especially hard to the left. Besides the 8th and 9th districts, the next three largest swings were the 7th district also on Milwaukee’s south side (+19), the 21st in Oak Creek (+17 and a Democratic flip), and the 20th in South Milwaukee (+16).

In the City of Milwaukee, David Crowley was more popular than any other candidate for governor, president, or US Senate since at least 2000. He won 85% of the vote in the city. By comparison, Herb Kohl won 81% in 2006; Obama won 78% in 2008 and 79% in 2012.

Zooming out a bit, this map shows the size of the swing in each district of the state. Although every district moved left relative to 2024, the lightest shade shows where the shift was considerably smaller than the statewide 9-point shift. This category includes the Northwoods and also much of suburban southeastern Wisconsin.

There is a subtlety worth noting here. The Northwoods counties had previously moved pretty hard to the right, while the three major suburban WOW counties actually gave Harris more of their vote than Biden in 2020. So the relatively small leftward tilt of the suburban counties this year is at least partly a consequence of those counties having already moved to the left, even in 2024. They are colored the same way on this map, but the suburban southeastern counties and the rural Northwoods counties are moving in opposite directions when viewed on a longer timescale.

The next-lightest shade of blue shows where the swing about matched the state result, plus or minus a few points. This includes most of the Madison and Driftless area in the southwestern part of the state, along with most of the Fox Valley. The bigger swings shown in dark blue happened in districts covering some major cities—La Crosse, Eau Claire, Oshkosh, Green Bay, Kenosha, and the southern Milwaukee suburbs.

Finally, the three districts shown in green stand wholly apart from the rest. These districts, discussed above, are where Crowley improved by more than 18 points over Trump. Not coincidentally, they are home to the three most-Latino districts and they are also some of the districts where Trump in 2024 improved the most over Trump in 2020. In other words, Trump made big inroads with these voters two years ago, but they abandoned his party on Tuesday.

The Declining Premium for Assembly Republicans

Over the last quarter century, elections for state legislature have become extremely closely correlated with the race at the top of the ticket. But some ticket-splitters remain, and, more often than not, these voters with split loyalties have picked the Republicans further down the ballot. The basic problem for Democrats has been that their state legislative candidates are consistently less popular than the Democrat at the top of the ticket.

Take Donald Trump’s 3 presidential elections by way of illustration. Across all three of them, the local Republicans did between 3.5 and 4 points better, on the margin, than Trump. A meaningful number of voters were willing to vote for the local Republican but not the man at the top of the ticket. This is not just a Trump thing, either. In 2018 and 2022, assembly Republican candidates also ran ahead of their gubernatorial candidates Scott Walker and Tim Michels.

Much, but not all, of this can be attributed to incumbency advantage. In the recent past there have always been more Republican than Democratic incumbents, so even if incumbents from both parties benefit from their experience and name recognition equally, the net effect will surely benefit the GOP. However, in 2024, it wasn’t just Republican incumbents who ran ahead of Trump. In open seats, with no incumbent running, the local Republicans ran 2 points ahead of Trump across 23 races.

But this once-reliable advantage for assembly Republicans faltered in 2026 and even disappeared in a few key races. Take the three most surprising Democratic legislative wins—the 85th (Wausau), the 92nd (Menomonie), and the 30th (River Falls) districts. Each of these voted for Trump in 2024, and in each place the Republican assembly candidate performed as well or better than Trump. All three of these incumbents were seeking reelection in 2026. When I saw that they had lost their races, I assumed that Crowley’s strong performance was enough to overcome their own strength as incumbents, but in reality, each of these Republican incumbents actually ran behind Tom Tiffany.

Take the 30th district, for example. Here, a local Democratic schoolteacher named Kevin Knoke challenged the Republican incumbent Shannon Zimmerman in a seat covering Wisconsin exurbs of Minnesota’s Twin Cities. Trump won this district by 4.5 points in 2024. Meanwhile, Zimmerman nearly doubled Trump’s margin, winning his race by 8.5 points. In 2026, David Crowley squeaked out a 1-point win in the 30th district. With a top-of-the-ticket margin this close, I would normally expect Zimmerman’s track record as an incumbent to save him. Instead, Knoke beat him by 6 points.

In other words, quite a few voters in this district voted for Tom Tiffany for governor and the Democratic challenger for assembly. That’s a big deviation from the way things normally go in Wisconsin.

Similarly, in the 92nd, the Democratic challenger Jeremiah Fredrickson defeated incumbent Republican Clint Moses by 7 points in a district Crowley won by 4. In Wausau’s 85th seat, Democrat John Kroll defeated Republican incumbent Patrick Snyder by 8 points to Crowley’s 7—this after Snyder won by 6.5 points to Trump’s 1-point victory in 2024.

Here are the numbers from across every contested assembly race. In the aggregate, Republicans in open assembly races still ran better than their standard bearer, but the size of their advantage fell by 62%. The advantage to Republican incumbents fell by 73%.

You could interpret these results in a couple ways, both of which are probably true. It’s getting tougher for local candidates to differentiate themselves from the national party’s brand. Republican incumbents, as a whole, were still more popular than Tiffany, but their advantage over Tiffany was much smaller than their advantage over Trump.

In a few cases, like the 30th and 92nd districts, the local Democratic challengers were actually more popular than Crowley, and this local appeal was instrumental in helping flip those seats. Here, Democrats succeeded in recruiting uniquely popular candidates. The parties always say they are doing this, but this time it seemingly worked. We have some insight into what happened in the 92nd, thanks to reporting by Dan Shafer.

Fredrickson explained his decision to run this way: “[US Senator] Tammy [Baldwin] called me back in December and said, ‘you’re a farmer, you’re a former teacher, and you’re a small business owner — you’re like the trifecta as far as a candidate goes.’ So, her voice carries a fair amount of weight…It was that one phone call that pushed me over the edge.”

In a wave election, everything goes right. Wisconsin’s Democrats in 2026 paired an incredibly favorable national environment with high-quality candidates where it mattered most. The result is multi-seat majorities giving them at least a little bit of breathing room in the state legislature.

Here are a few files for readers who want to dig deeper into the results.

  • This is an interactive map of every assembly district. Click on a district to compare the 2026 assembly and governor results with past elections for president and governor going back to 2016.
  • This 11×17 graphic compares how the assembly margins shifted from 2024 to 2026 in each district with contested elections in both years.
  • This 11×17 graphic compares how the top-of-the-ticket margins (president to governor) shifted from 2024 to 2026 in each district.
  • This 11×17 graphic compares the governor margin with the assembly margin in each district with a contested election in 2026.
Continue ReadingWhere Wisconsin Swung Most and Least

New Research Tracks the Declining Use of Milwaukee’s Municipal Court

Over the past 20 years, the number of cases processed by Milwaukee’s Municipal Court fell dramatically. In the late 2000s, the court’s annual caseload fluctuated between 130,000 and 160,000, but during the past three years, the annual number of cases has remained well below 40,000. Cases fell by 72% for adults and 94% for children between 2006 and 2025.

a line graph showing the total annual cases at Milwaukee Municipal Court

My colleague Mike Gousha and I unpack the municipal court statistics, all of which are taken from the court’s official annual reports, in a new article for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. A fuller accounting of the court’s data is available in this report: Milwaukee Municipal Court’s Caseload, 1999 – 2025.

In Wisconsin, municipal courts hear civil matters that do not necessarily rise to the level of a criminal misdemeanor. These include offenses against municipal ordinances and almost all traffic violations. To quote the Wisconsin court system’s website, “The majority of municipal court cases involve traffic, parking, and ordinance matters, including first-time drunken driving offenses. Juvenile matters, such as truancy, underage drinking, drug offenses and curfew violations are also a significant part of municipal court caseloads.”

Unlike in circuit court, where police can recommend charges but a district attorney makes the ultimate charging decision, in municipal court, citations (or “tickets”) automatically become a municipal court case when submitted by the filing agency. Paying a ticket by mail or online is equivalent to pleading guilty or “no contest” in the case. In this way, municipal court caseloads more directly reflect decisions made by the filing agency, which is to say the local police department in most instances. (While Milwaukee’s municipal court does handle cases brought by, for instance, local health departments and building inspectors, the great majority of their case volume involves police matters).

Gousha and I connect the sharp drop in municipal court cases to the shift away from “broken windows” policing and the fallout from a series of abuse scandals involving Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) officers. It coincides with other changes in the way the department operates. In 2024, the Wisconsin Policy Forum’s Arresting Developments report noted that arrests by MPD fell from 51,000 in 2012 to 9,000 in 2023. Traffic stops fell from 150,00 in 2015 to 28,000 in 2023. And subject (pedestrian) stops  fell from 46,000 in 2015 to about 700 in 2023.

Meanwhile, the volume of charges for criminal offenses referred to circuit court by MPD has remained comparatively stable, or even increased slightly. In 2010, the department referred about 12,000 felony and 16,000 misdemeanor charges to the DA, according to agency records. In 2024, they referred 14,000 felony charges and 19,000 misdemeanors.

As Gousha and I ask in our piece, “Has the pivot away from broken windows gone too far and made some neighborhoods feel less safe? Or is reducing discretionary police-citizen interactions and focusing on more serious, reported crimes a better use of police resources?”

Opinions on these and related questions will differ, but we hope our article sheds light on an important change in how MPD approaches its job in Milwaukee.

Continue ReadingNew Research Tracks the Declining Use of Milwaukee’s Municipal Court
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