THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020 21
Brenda showed me a message he had
written to her on a breeding card that
she found in his wallet. “I love you,” it
read. “I’m concerned about your health.
I’m concerned about not getting a job.
I’m working where I can.”
Brenda bought the neighbor’s land
with money from Leon’s life-insurance
policy. We walked to the edge of the
property, which includes the shell of an
old house that she hopes to tear down.
Though friends had tried to dissuade
her from buying the land, she never
doubted her decision. “It’s what he
wanted,” she said. “Now I got to figure
out how to make this work.”
O
n a Saturday morning in February,
farmers and their supporters packed
the cafeteria of Baraboo High School
for a “farmer appreciation breakfast.” Two
dollars bought a plate of pancakes, scram-
bled eggs, and sausage served by high
schoolers from the local chapter of Fu-
ture Farmers of America. The breakfast
was a benefit for the Farmer Angel Net-
work, a support group founded by Randy
Roecker, a dairy farmer from nearby Lo-
ganville, who was a friend of Leon Statz.
As in many rural areas, suicides in Wis-
consin have increased dramatically in re-
cent years, reaching a record of nine hun-
dred and eighteen in 2017. Roecker has
had his own battles with depression. The
problems started during the 2008 reces-
sion, shortly after he borrowed three
million dollars to expand his family’s
fifty-cow barn into a three-hundred-cow
operation with a state-of-the-art milk-
ing parlor. “I’m losing thirty thousand
dollars a month, and this has been going
on for years,” Roecker said. To pay the
banks, he keeps borrowing more, draw-
ing on equity from his farm.
“I wanted to die every day,” he re-
called. “My family really watched me
close. They took all the guns out of the
house, of course, but I would get in the
truck and take off, and I’d go and drive
into the back of our fields. I was numb,
numb to everything. I would get panic
attacks so bad that I couldn’t even go
into a Walmart. I’d just sit out in the
parking lot feeling sick.” Roecker went
to see many psychiatrists, was hospi-
talized several times, and received elec-
troconvulsive therapy. “Nobody could
help me, nobody,” he said. “Finally, I had
this vision in my head of my own fu-
neral, and my family standing there, and
that’s what kind of snapped me out of
it. I couldn’t put my family through it.”
Though Roecker no longer feels sui-
cidal, he still struggles with depression.
Roecker describes himself as a “lib-
eral conservative”—in 2008, he voted
for Obama—and believes that Canadian-
style supply management should be ad-
opted in the United States. “We have a
broken system,” he said. “It’s been that
way since Earl Butz. But these bigger
farms that I know don’t want supply
management. They say it’s
not the American way—
free trade, free enterprise,
that’s the American way.”
In 2008, Roecker partic-
ipated in a trade mission to
China for the U.S. Dairy
Export Council, and he is
keenly aware of the damage
that Trump’s tariffs have
done to markets that took
years to cultivate. Still, he
views Trump as transformative. “I don’t
agree with everything he says,” Roecker
said. “But he’s the only President who
has ever tackled the trade issue.” He be-
lieves that Trump’s bellicose negotiating
style will eventually lead to better terms
for American farmers. Roecker cited the
recently renegotiated NAFTA treaty, which
includes a small increase in American
dairy exports allowed into Canada. “Ev-
erybody else has kicked the can down
the road for decades,” Roecker said.
In January, Roecker’s state repre-
sentative offered him two tickets to a
Trump rally in Milwaukee. “I was sit-
ting in the second row behind the Pres-
ident,” Roecker said. “It was unreal. I
felt more inspired than I ever have in
my life. I’m not a big patriotic, flag-wav-
ing person, but I felt very patriotic going
to that. My son, too. He’s twenty, and
he kept saying, ‘Oh, my God, Dad. Oh,
my God.’”
Roecker introduced me to his family,
who were sitting around a cafeteria table.
His mother, father, daughter, and son-
in-law all work on the farm. His parents,
both in their eighties, still wake up at
three-thirty every morning and work
until eight at night. All of them support
Trump. “He talks to us like a builder is
talking to his workers,” Roecker said. “I
don’t know what it is—I’m not brain-
washed—but this is how we feel. We feel
like he is more in touch. I know what my
wages are. We live below the poverty level
over here. Most of the farmers I know,
we’re on free health care, and a lot of
farmers I know are on food stamps.” He
looked around the table at his family. “It’s
all Trump supporters around here.”
C
onservatives have won just one of
nine statewide races in Wisconsin
since Trump became President. The most
surprising defeat came in April, in a State
Supreme Court race that turned into
a national scandal. Shortly
before Election Day, Gover-
nor Evers called for postpon-
ing it, owing to the corona-
virus pandemic. He also
asked a federal judge to ex-
tend the deadline for re-
questing and returning ab-
sentee ballots. Republicans
sued him in the State Su-
preme Court, which has a
conservative majority. The
justices, all of whom had voted absen-
tee, ruled that the election must go for-
ward. In a separate last-minute ruling,
the U.S. Supreme Court decided, 5–4,
that Evers could not extend the dead-
line for absentee ballots, even though
thousands of voters had not yet received
them because of delays in the U.S. mail
and the flood of requests sparked by the
virus. The biggest voting problems were
in Milwaukee, which had just five poll-
ing places open, out of a hundred and
eighty. Thousands of voters stood in
hours-long lines or were turned away
when polls closed. But Jill Karofsky, a
liberal circuit-court judge, took fifty-five
per cent of the vote, winning almost all
the Driftless Area counties.
Contact tracing by Wisconsin health
officials has linked seventy-one cases
of COVID-19 to in-person voting. Bill
Hogseth, the chairman of the Dunn
County Democratic Party, worried that
he would be one of them. Hogseth had
worked the polls on Election Day be-
hind a plexiglass barrier wearing a sur-
gical mask, safety glasses, and nitrile
gloves. After the election, he self-iso-
lated for fourteen days. Despite Joe
Biden’s decisive win in the Democratic
primary over Bernie Sanders, Hogseth
is concerned about the lack of enthusi-
asm for Biden. “There’s a deep desire
for structural change,” he said. “Biden’s
