FIRST ON DAILY SIGNAL— Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany is betting Wisconsin voters’ growing opposition to data centers can help flip the governor’s mansion, and new polling suggests he may have found one of the most potent issues in the race.

After the state’s Democrat primary last week, Tiffany moved quickly to define his opponent, the Milwaukee County executive, as “Data Center David Crowley” in a new campaign ad.

Two-thirds (66%) of Wisconsin voters have an unfavorable opinion of data centers and 79% say companies that build the sprawling facilities should be required to compensate communities for lower utility bills and taxes.

The League of American Workers shared the polling data exclusively with the Daily Signal. The survey of 1,434 registered voters was conducted Aug. 14-18 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.

Tiffany and Crowley are locked in a dead heat for Wisconsin governor. The poll puts Tiffany at 41% compared to Crowley’s 43%, which falls within the margin of error. Another 5% would prefer someone else and 10% didn’t express a preference.

Tom Tiffany’s Attack Ad

In recent days, Tiffany drew national attention for his data center attack on Crowley. His campaign ad uses video of Crowley voicing his support for data centers.

“There’s an opportunity for us to really become AI and a data hub not only for the entire country, but for the entire globe,” Crowley said Democrat primary candidate forum.

Opposition to data centers is not new, but recent polling suggests it is intensifying.

Last October, a Marquette Law School Poll found that 55% of Wisconsin voters believed the costs of data centers outweighed the benefits. By February that figure had jumped to 70% and then hit 76% in July.

The League of American Workers poll shared with the Daily Signal found that only 15% of Wisconsin registered voters hold a favorable opinion of data centers compared to 66% unfavorable—a net rating of minus 51 points.

In a state as politically divided as Wisconsin, there’s agreement on data centers: 58% of Republicans, 70% of Democrats, and 71% of independents have an unfavorable view.

“The decline in support for data centers over the last year in my polling is just remarkable,” said Steve Cortes, founder and president of the League of American Workers. “This issue becomes a lightning rod and it seems to ignore most traditional partisan/demographic battle lines.”

Close Race for Governor

The findings arrive amid one of the nation’s most closely watched governor’s races.

Democrat Gov. Tony Evers is retiring, and last week’s primaries set up a contest between Tiffany, a Republican congressman who represents Wisconsin’s 7th District, and Crowley, a Democrat who has served as Milwaukee County executive for six years.

According to the poll, Tiffany is viewed favorably by 37% and unfavorably by 44%. Crowley drew a 34% favorable and 31% unfavorable rating with 35% expressing no opinion of the Democrat.

With less than three months before Election Day, Tiffany is attempting to define him.

On the question of which candidate voters would trust more to manage their money, Tiffany and Crowley tied at 37%.

“This poll, like other battleground states, shows that the macro backdrop is a challenge for Republicans,” Cortes said, “but also that these key races are totally winnable, in part because the Democrats have nominated radical extremists who turn off most voters.”

Data Center Debate

Data centers have emerged as one of the most unexpected issues of the 2026 election cycle.

Mike Allen’s influential Axios newsletter declared Thursday: “Data centers scramble midterms.”

“A populist fever is coursing through the midterms, forcing campaigns to retreat and recalibrate as they confront a groundswell of hostility toward AI data centers,” the publication wrote. “Candidates in both parties are racing to distance themselves from projects their own leaders spent years courting.”

Axios cited elections in Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and the race in Wisconsin.

Tiffany hit the airwaves with his commercial Tuesday.

“Data Center David Crowley won’t roll back tax incentives. Our lakes run dry. Family farms paved over. Why? Because Crowley’s campaign is funded by the people building them. Big Tech wins. Wisconsin pays,” a narrator says in the ad.

Crowley’s campaign quickly fired back with a critique of Tiffany’s votes in Congress. Campaign spokesman Jonathan Fera said Tiffany was lying about Crowley’s record because he “can’t defend his own extreme record of backing Trump’s cost-raising agenda.”

Tiffany has said he would end state subsidies for data center projects, give local communities final say, protect farmland, require developers to absorb costs, and prohibit nondisclosure agreements.

Crowley opposed a statewide moratorium on data centers during the Democrat primary, preferring to leave decisions up to local leaders. He has not ruled out tax incentives, though he says any should be tied to measurable returns for the state.

Several major data center projects are already under construction in Wisconsin, including a $7 billion project from Microsoft in Mount Pleasant. Vantage Data Centers, Oracle, and OpenAI are partnering on a projected $15 billion facility in Port Washington. It led to a failed recall campaign against the mayor.

Affordability Dominates in Poll

Even as data centers grab more headlines, the primary issue for Wisconsin voters remains cost of living.

Seventy-two percent of respondents said taxpayers are not getting good value for the property tax increases, which had the largest jump in 15 years under Democrats. The opinion was shared among both Trump voters (73%) and Harris voters (70%).

On education spending, 60% said the state’s K-12 tax increases were not a good bargain for taxpayers. Even among Democrats, more said no than yes, 52% to 26%.

The survey also asked about Crowley’s record in Milwaukee County. His support for a county sales tax increase was unpopular: 40% said they were less likely to support him because of it.

Interest in the November election is high. Fifty-six percent of Wisconsin voters rated their interest in the midterms a 6 or 7 on a 7-point scale.

YOU ASKED, WE BUILT IT.

Since our “One Big Beautiful Lawsuit” win, people have been joining GOA in numbers we have never seen.

So much so, that our payment processor crashed.

We understand the interest, because thanks to the ruling, GOA members are now protected from the registration requirements of the National Firearms Act for the first time in 92 years.

Many calls and emails have asked the same question, so we are acting on it.

We set up a corporate membership.

We did this so firearms dealers (FFLs) can be protected by our win as well, and get those previously regulated items to their customers who want them.

Click below for more information & to sign up!

When GOA wins an injunction, the relief usually covers our members.

Courts decide who counts as a member, and paying dues is one of the things they look at.

We have always treated Caliber Club supporters as GOA members and we will continue to do that, but the Caliber Club was never set up as a dues program for business entities.

Corporate membership fixes that.

If your business is a corporate member, its claim to coverage is a lot easier to prove.

Corporate membership will be renewed yearly. It also includes GOA membership for owners, officers, and employees of your business.

**If you are not an FFL yourself, tell your FFL.** The shop you buy from has the same questions you do, and this is built for them.

And before you go, one caution while all of this shakes out.

If you have specific questions about how the injunction applies to you or to your business, talk to a lawyer in your state.

We cannot give you legal advice about your own situation, and this is not the moment for anyone to be guessing.

We have asked the administration, ATF and DOJ for formal guidance for our members.

We have not gotten it.

We will keep pressing until we get answers, and you will hear from us the moment we do.

Are you signed up for a GOA membership?

Right now, this is one of the only ways to be protected against many of the provisions in the National Firearms Act.

GOA members will enjoy protection against the registration requirements for SBRs, SBSs, AOWs and Silencers – although keep in mind that several states have their own restrictions which are not affected by the federal court’s ruling.

If you’re already a GOA member, please consider making a donation, because we’re not going to stop fighting until the rest of the NFA is dead and gone.

But for now, secure your coverage from the registration requirements by becoming a member or donating at the link here!

On October 23, 1956, students gathered at the foot of Sandor Petofi’s statue in Budapest and read his poem “Rise, Magyar!” made famous in the democratic revolution of 1848. Workers, and even soldiers, soon joined the students. The demonstrators took over the state-run radio station and the Communist Party offices and toppled a huge statue of Stalin, dragging it through the streets. Rebellion spread throughout the country. The demonstrators—now Freedom Fighters—held Soviet occupation forces at bay for several days.

On November 1, the Hungarian Prime Minister announced that Hungary would withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. At dawn, November 4, the Soviets launched a major invasion of Hungary, in an offensive involving tens of thousands of additional troops, air and artillery assaults, and 6,000 tanks. A heroic resistance was crushed in less than a week.

The last free Hungarian radio broadcast spent its final hours repeating the Gettysburg Address in seven languages, followed by an S.O.S. Over 20,000 Hungarians were tried and sentenced for participation in the uprising, hundreds receiving the death sentence. An estimated 200,000 Hungarians—of a population of nine million—became refugees. Forty-seven thousand came to the United States. Hungary became a member of NATO on March 12, 1999.

In October 1956, my parents, my four-year-old sister, and I shared a small apartment with my father’s parents and his brother on the plaza near the eastern railroad station in Budapest. I was two months shy of my tenth birthday when the Hungarian Revolution began.

Because the revolutionaries had taken over the railroad station, the Soviets positioned several tanks in our neighborhood, and we could not leave our apartment. There was heavy fighting, and bodies were strewn everywhere; one lay just outside our window for several days. After a week and a half, the action moved elsewhere and we could once again venture outdoors—carefully. Walking around one day, I came upon a Russian personnel carrier that was stacked with skeletons. It seemed that each was covered with about two inches of black velvet. I later learned that these poor souls had been burned alive by a Molotov cocktail.

It soon became clear that though the Soviets had pulled out of our immediate area, they were winning. The Revolution was going to be defeated, and they would be back. Things were going to get more unpleasant than ever, and Hungary had not been a pleasant place for the Schramms for quite a long time.

My father, William, was born in 1922, into a politically tumultuous Hungary produced by the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I. His father, an active participant in the 1919 Communist revolution, was hounded by the Fascists then ruling Hungary. By the time my father reached his teens, the Depression hit, followed by another world war. My father was placed in the air artillery. He liked it there, he said, because they could pretend to shoot down American planes, knowing that the B-17s were flying well out of range. They couldn’t hurt the good guys, yet they did their duty. That was as good as life got in those days.

The war’s end brought little relief. When the Communists took control of the country in 1949, they “expropriated” my parents’ little textile shop (about half the size of my current living room) and everything in it. Under this new tyranny, my parents were considered part of the dangerous “bourgeoisie.” In that same year, the Communists sentenced my father’s father to ten years hard labor for having a small American flag in his possession (by that time he had been a leader of the social democrats for some years). At his “trial” he was asked why he had the flag. Was he a spy? He replied that it represented freedom better than any other symbol he knew, and that he had a right to have it. My father tried then, for the first time, to persuade my mother, Rose, to leave the country. But ties to family and friends were too strong, and she could not bear to do it. Soon, my father himself was sentenced to a year of prison for “rumor mongering” (someone claimed he had called a Communist a tyrant, which he had). When he got out, he washed windows for a while and made illegal whiskey to make ends meet as best he could.

My grandfather got an early release from the labor camp in 1956 and came back to us looking like a victim of the Holocaust. Still, the first thing he wanted to know was whether we still had the flag. Of course, we did not. It had long ago been confiscated. But my father didn’t want to break his father’s heart and had somehow managed to secure another one. We took it out of its hiding place and, at that tender age, I learned the very adult lesson of the complexity of telling the truth. Seeing that flag somehow erased much of the pain and torment of my grandfather’s years of imprisonment; it seemed to give him hope.

Now, with the revolution failing, everyone expected that the Communist boot was going to come down harder than ever. But before we had more opportunities to experience it, an odd accident set us on the path to a very different future. On one of his trips out to secure some bread, a hand grenade landed next to my father but, miraculously, did not go off. That was the last straw. He came home and announced to my mother that he was going to leave the country whether she would come or not. Mom said, “O.K., William. We will come if Peter agrees. Ask Peter.”

“But where are we going?” I asked.

“We are going to America,” he said.

“Why America?” I prodded.

“Because, son. We were born Americans, but in the wrong place.”

Read the rest here.

The post Born American, But in the Wrong Place appeared first on The American Mind.

Brandon Herrera is up six points in TX-23, but this race isn't over yet.

The post Herrera Leads TX-23 by 6 — But the Seat Is Far From Sewn Up appeared first on The Truth About Guns.

The national debt just crossed $40 trillion, months ahead of schedule. For many Americans, though, that sentence lands with a thud rather than a jolt. That’s unfortunate because the debt matters far more than people understand, and it’s already helping fuel today’s cost-of-living crisis. Things will only get worse if we ignore the problem.

Six months ago, the Congressional Budget Office figured federal borrowing would top out near $39.4 trillion this fiscal year. Washington blew through that before summer ended, and the $41.1 trillion debt limit Congress set last year now feels ominously close.

But Americans are desensitized to this news in part because, for 40 years, fiscal conservatives have warned that the debt was about to bury us—at $1 trillion, at $5 trillion, at $20 trillion. Then there was talk about debt-to-GDP ratios and points of no return.

But as the language grew more apocalyptic, the deadline kept moving, and the bomb never went off. Folks cried wolf so often that Americans stopped worrying about the debt almost entirely. This didn’t mean the debt was harmless, but rather that Americans didn’t recognize the harm when it arrived.

Since 2019, consumer prices have risen more than 30%. From the Treasury’s side of the ledger, a dollar borrowed in 2020 is repaid today in money worth about 70 cents compared to just a few years ago. The real value of everything Washington had to repay fell significantly without shaving a dime off the federal budget.

That is the oldest maneuver in public finance. When a central bank such as the Federal Reserve creates money to cover the bill for excessive government debt issuance, the value of a nation’s currency is eroded. It’s fundamentally a tax—and every American today is paying for it.

The national debt is often thought of as a bill for future generations, but inflation is a bill today.

People have wondered when the growing debt will cause not just inflation but hyperinflation or some kind of total economic collapse. What’s the magic debt-to-GDP ratio? Simply put, there isn’t one.

Japan has run gross debt above 200% of GDP for decades, and Britain carried more than that after the Napoleonic Wars. Meanwhile, Argentina has defaulted at ratios that look tame in comparison.

Furthermore, debt-to-GDP isn’t even a good metric because it compares a stock to a flow, as opposed to two stocks, like debt and assets. Household income relative to the balance owed on a mortgage isn’t a very useful metric, but household income relative to the monthly mortgage payment is.

Different countries on different continents in different centuries have all had different breaking points. It’s less a mathematical question as it is a psychological one. The crisis begins when the bond market stops extending the benefit of the doubt—when buyers demand materially more yield to compensate for the risk of repayment in devalued dollars (or the risk of no repayment at all).

That judgment is made by human actors weighing credibility, and credibility cannot be determined scientifically. It erodes slowly, then breaks suddenly. As Ernest Hemingway succinctly wrote in “The Sun Also Rises,” “‘How did you go bankrupt?’ Bill asked. ‘Two ways,’ Mike said. ‘Gradually, then suddenly.’”

But the debt didn’t just unexpectedly grow. Congress spent too much—for decades. Both parties have perfected the art of promising spending cuts that never materialize and turning every temporary emergency spending bill into an entrenched outlay that never goes away. This complete and total lack of fiscal discipline in Congress is also strangling the private sector.

Savings are finite. When the Treasury borrows $2 trillion a year, that capital is bid away from businesses that never get started and families that can’t get mortgages. The largest borrower on earth competes against every entrepreneur and homebuyer in America, and it isn’t a fair fight.

When Washington bids up the price of money, mortgage rates follow, along with business loans, auto loans, credit cards, student loans, and more. The family priced out of a starter home doesn’t blame the House Appropriations Committee, but it should.

Forty trillion dollars isn’t just a warning about the future but an explanation for the current cost-of-living crisis. It’s an invoice for the present, already embedded in your grocery bill, mortgage interest rate, and utility bills. The only real remedy is the one Congress refuses to attempt: cutting spending.

Until then, Americans will continue facing additional inflationary pressure in the economy. And as the average interest rate on the national debt continues to climb along with the total amount owed, the financing charges alone will continue exploding higher, driving the debt up faster.

If you think this isn’t a problem, just remember the last six years.