West Allis, Wis. — Abandoning the coffee collectivists I encountered a couple of days ago to their roadside vigil, I pushed west to the Milwaukee County GOP offices, where I hoped to chat with the volunteers and talk over what life was like in a district that skews so far to the left. After parking in the lot between a bar and a hair parlor, I walked in to find a single volunteer, “Dorothy,” who was skittish about talking to media (who can blame her, as we’re scurrilous cads at our best) but happy to tell me about the various candidates’ attributes and strong conservative characters. She pressed literature on me, and one of the leaflets stood out, presenting a long-shot opponent of Gwen Moore, a decades-tenured congresswoman who is served by Wisconsin’s fourth district — Milwaukee proper.
That long shot, Tim Rogers (who goes by “Mr. Rogers”), is a product of Milwaukee’s North Division high school, which, coincidentally, is the very school at which Barack Obama and Gwen Moore spoke only a few days ago. Rogers has run against Moore twice in the past, losing badly both times (by about 50 percentage points) but gaining about 10,000 more votes in 2020 than in 2018. Rogers was available to meet and chat, so he came by the headquarters and gave me his story.
An entrepreneur, college grad, and convicted drug trafficker, Rogers is truly unique. He wishes to abolish income and property taxes, as well as institute a nationalized energy-profit-sharing scheme that would attach a savings account to kids when they’re born and then pay energy dividends into their accounts to the age of 18. As an African-American man and native of the city, he reckons that such generational wealth will undo many of the adverse incentives that cause Milwaukee to be one of the worst places for a child to grow up.
Rogers spent three years upstate at a penitentiary for moving drugs — he says that he didn’t think them to be drugs — for friends who ratted him out because of their own legal issues; an episode from 20 years ago he’s happy to be done with. As the son of a cop dad and jail-instructor mom, I know how quickly a man might find himself on the wrong end of the law, so I don’t share these details to disparage the man but because I think it commendable that Wisconsin allows felons to vote and hold office once their sentence has been served. He’s hardly the first politician to be found in possession of coke, though the others are usually transporting it toward their adenoids.
I asked why he was running a race that one can only lose. Rogers was adamant that one day he could win. He runs a fruit-basket delivery business that he uses to meet new people and talk to them about what could better benefit them from the realm of politics. Having lost by a vote of 230,000 to 70,000 in 2020, Rogers hopes to cut that difference in half this year, with his eyes on eventual victory in 2024.
While his efforts may seem like a fool’s errand, it is certain that Republicans cannot win such a seat if no man is willing to run. So I commend Mr. Rogers for his affable optimism despite the odds. Milwaukee deserves better, and, between you and me, I’d like to see what the man would do in Congress.