Mike McCabe
Husband, father and a bunch of other less important things. Farm raised but strengthening democracy has been life's work.
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Mike McCabe got his start in life milking cows and working the land with his family, first in Rock County and then in Clark County. He was born in Stoughton and lived on an 80-acre farm near Evansville in the early part of his childhood, but did most of his growing up on a 200-acre farm outside of Curtiss, a town of about 200 people.. He’s lived across the rural-urban divide with a foot in both worlds, having lived nearly half his life in the country and the rest in Wisconsin’s second largest city. Mike brings that farming background and a professional lifetime of experience in politics, journalism, nonprofit leadership and public sector management to his work. He is the author of Unscrewing America: Hints and Hopes from the Heartland. Mike previously authored Blue Jeans in High Places: The Coming Makeover of American Politics, which was named one of the best books of 2014 by The Progressive magazine and inspired the formation of the grassroots group Blue Jean Nation. That led Mike to run a spirited underdog campaign for governor of Wisconsin in 2018.
For much of his adult life, Mike worked for two of Wisconsin’s most highly respected and fiercely independent government watchdogs – the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance. In the early 1980s, he ran a statewide civic education program for the nonprofit Taxpayers Alliance, known for watching over tax collections and bird-dogging how the public’s money is spent. In 1995 Mike helped start the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan watchdog group that specializes in tracking the money in state elections and works to make people matter more than money in politics. He led the group for 15 years as its director and during that time was a leading government whistle blower and earned a reputation as one of the nation’s best political money trackers. Before the Democracy Campaign came along, the only way to see who was donating to elected officials and candidates for office was to travel to the old state Elections Board office in Madison and personally examine mountains of paper reports. The Democracy Campaign entered all of the information on those reports into an electronic database and published it online, making it vastly easier to follow the money in Wisconsin politics. For its efforts under Mike’s leadership, the Democracy Campaign was named the Citizen Openness Advocate of the Year in 2012 by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council and the state chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Mike’s heart never left the farm, and he has remained active in advocating for sustainable farming practices. His efforts were recognized in 2015 when the Wisconsin Farmers Union gave him its Friend of the Family Farmer Award. Mike also believes passionately in protecting Wisconsin’s precious natural resources, and was named Environmental Advocate of the Year in 2004 by the Clean Water Action Council. Mike is a 1978 graduate of Owen-Withee High School, which inducted him into its Alumni Hall of Fame in 2014, and a 1982 graduate of the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism, which honored him with its Distinguished Service Award in 2015.
Mike’s most recent work is his new book Unscrewing America Hints and Hope from the Heartland