Sometimes, the personal stories of public officials can be self-serving and just plain not interesting. But sometimes they can be insightful and compelling, saying important things about the individuals, the work they do, and life more broadly.
Two recent “Get to Know” programs at Marquette Law School, hosted by Derek Mosley, director of the Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education, were definitely in the latter category. Each spotlighted a person who holds an important job. But the biography of each – and their life stories are very different — says a lot about the character of Milwaukee and the challenges the city faces.
Aaron Lipski, chief of the Milwaukee Fire Department, spoke with Mosley on Oct. 9, 2025. He has been in the news often in recent times, including for his strong advocacy of putting sprinklers in older apartment buildings in the light of fatal fires and for his call for the Milwaukee city budget to sharply increase spending on new trucks and equipment for the fire department.
Wisconsin is taking steps to legalize sports betting on your phone, joining 32 states who have already done so. In November, a bipartisan bill to legalize mobile sports betting advanced out of committee in both houses of the Wisconsin legislature, before being pulled from the agenda shortly before a scheduled vote in the Assembly. Opponents to the bill include those who oppose mobile sports betting on the merits, as well the trade organization for DraftKings and Fanduel, who oppose the bill for their own, very different reasons.According to reporting by WPR, the bill’s sponsor intends to reintroduce it in early 2026.
Over the past couple of years, economists have undertaken a number of interesting studies measuring the consequences of legalized sports betting on consumers. This post summarizes some of their major findings.
Sports betting—mobile or otherwise—was limited to just a handful of locations in the country prior to 2018, when the US Supreme Court struck down the federal law banning most forms of sports gambling.
Since then, states legalized gambling at different paces and in different forms, sometimes limited to physical sportsbook locations, sometimes through the internet. Wisconsin legalized tribal sportsbooks in 2021, but they are limited to brick-and-mortar locations, of which there are currently 27.
The rollout of legal sports betting at different times in different places creates a sort of natural experiment, allowing researchers to quantify legal gambling’s consequences.
Researchers have studied questions like: how much do gamblers spend on gambling? What did they spend this money on before sports betting became easily available? How many bettors become “problem” gamblers?
We can imagine more or less troubling answers to each of these questions. Maybe sports bettors are just wagering money they would’ve otherwise spent on other kinds of entertainment. On the other hand, maybe they are gambling money they can’t afford to lose.
A 2024 paper by Scott Baker et al. tackled these questions using a transaction-level dataset of household spending. The dataset was assembled by a private firm from bank, credit card, and financial technology records. Using this data, the authors could measure all kinds of spending by households, before and after online betting legalization, including spending on sportsbooks like DraftKings and Fanduel as well as traditional investments like Vanguard or Fidelity.
In their study, about 14% of households in legalized states engaged in mobile sports betting. The average household bet $102 per quarter, but there was a lot of variation. The lowest third of bettors only deposited an average of $1.39 per quarter, while the highest third of bettors deposited $299 per quarter with an online sportsbook. Among those who ever bet, 20% deposited money only once, 70% did so at least three times, and 40% made 10 or more deposits.
Sports betting is a financial loser for most participants, so the money has to come from somewhere else. Baker and his coauthors found “that increases in sports betting do not coincide with decreases in participation in lotteries or other online gambling outlets like poker sites.” Instead, “betting activity crowds out financial investments, leading to a reduction in net deposits to brokerage accounts.” They estimate, “that the causal effect of $1 of online sports deposits is a reduction in net investment of just under $1.”
A 2025 paper by Brett Hollenbeck et al. used a representative panel of credit rating agency data to measure what happens in states after they legalize sports betting. This study is particularly relevant to Wisconsin because it compares states with only physical sportsbooks (“general access”) with those same states after they legalize mobile sportsbooks (“online access”).
They found that average credit scores declined by three times as much in states with online access to sportsbooks as in states with only physical ones.
They estimated a “roughly 10% increase” in bankruptcies in states with online sportsbooks. “[T]his increase leads to. . . roughly 30,000 more bankruptcies a year.”
States with online sportsbooks also saw statistically significant increases in debt collection balances.
The authors of this study can’t tell which people in their credit data panel are bettors, so these estimates are for the entire population of states which have legalized mobile betting. The declines in credit scores and increases in bankruptcies and debts going to collection are all surely much higher among the minority of the population who is placing bets. “Assuming that sports betting does not impact financial outcomes for the non-betting population, it implies that the average effect on actual bettors is 5-10 times larger than our estimates.”
All studies seem to agree that a great deal of gambling volume is driven by a small group of problem gamblers. A 2025 paper by Wayne J. Taylor et al. used individual-level financial records to estimate that the rate of people gambling more than 1% of their income each month grew from 0.2% to 0.9% of the population following the legalization of online sports betting. “Legalization also generated spillover effects, including a 20% increase in mass-market alcohol consumption and a 75% increase in calls to gambling helplines. State tax revenues were lifted by $0.78 per capita monthly. . . due to legalization.”
Another way of measuring problem gambling is by tracking internet searches for terms related to gambling addiction. A 2025 article in JAMA Internal Medicine did this, finding a 35% increase in such searches in Illinois and a 37% increase in Michigan following the legalization of sportsbooks.
The literature shows that legalizing mobile sportsbooks increases the number of people betting. This results in worse financial health—less saving, more debt, and more bankruptcies—for a subset of problem gamblers. All these problems are exacerbated by mobile sports betting, as opposed to physical sportsbooks.
In our latest poll, we asked respondents to tell us how they learn about the news and which social media platforms they use. Those results are shown in the table below for the entire sample, as well as broken down by party ID.
Here are a few highlights:
Local TV news is still king. Just over half of adults watch it. The local TV audience leans just slightly Republican, but is overall politically mixed.
About half of adults get news from social media, evenly-balanced between Democrats and Republicans.
Fox News is the largest single network, by far. Just about one third of adults reported watching it, including half of Republicans, 24% of independents, and 14% of Democrats.
The traditional Big Three networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) and CNN all draw similar audience shares, 19% to 24% of adults. All of their audiences skew left, drawing 24% to 29% of Democrats versus 16% to 22% of Republicans.
Local newspapers drew 22% of adults, including 22% of Republicans, 13% of independents, and 26% of Democrats.
While local newspapers show only a small partisan gap in readership, Democrats are far more likely to read a national newspaper, listen to NPR, or watch PBS. Among Democrats, 28% used public radio/TV and 22% read a national newspaper. Among Republicans, 13% used public radio/TV and 10% read a national newspaper.
MSNBC draws only 11% of adults, including 17% of Democrats and 7% of Republicans.
Only 9% of adults said they got news from a podcast, but news podcasts were more popular with Republicans (13%) than Democrats (8%). Scarcely any Independents (2%) listened to a news podcast.
The two far-right competitors to Fox News, Newsmax and OAN, drew 11% and 3% of Republicans, respectively (compared to 50% for Fox).
The use of social media networks is far less politically polarized than news sources.
Nothing comes close to Facebook and Youtube in terms of social media usage. Over 70% of adults reported using them in the last week.
Facebook is a bit more popular with Republicans (78%) than Democrats (67%), but there is no significant partisan gap among Youtube users.
Instagram and TikTok are both more popular with Democrats and independents than Republicans. TikTok, in particular, draws strongly from independents.
Reddit and X (Twitter) are more evenly split between partisans. Reddit draws 3 percentage points more of Democrats than Republicans and X draws the reverse.
Elsewhere in the poll, we invited each respondent to write whatever they wanted in response to these three questions.
What do you like about Donald Trump?
What do you dislike about Donald Trump?
What is your biggest concern about the country these days?
You can read the answers verbatim (in randomized order), along with each respondent’s news sources, social media habits, and basic demographic data using this web tool. The tool also allows you to filter for certain news or social media choices. For example, here’s a screenshot showing respondents who get their news from podcasts.
