King of Oshkosh: Jessica King’s unlikely path to the Wisconsin State Senate

Jamie Stark
Sun, 20 Nov 2011 12:12:14 +0000
Encounter, Politics, encounter, Madison, politics, Stark

By Jamie Stark

Jessica King walks to the front door of a Winnebago County nursing home on a rainy Packer Sunday. No sign of her Senate lapel pin, she sports a green vest and tennis shoes with her auburn hair pulled back into a short ponytail. She’s driven her white 1999 Oldsmobile from her law office for a Sunday tradition — watching football with her father.

Jessica King won her seat in the State Senate in the August 2011 recall elections. She is pictured in the Wisconsin State Capitol. Photo by Evan Benner.

At 69, Richard King, a Naval veteran, quietly sits in his wheelchair as his daughter arrives to watch the game with him, something he rarely did with her as a child.

“Happy Sunday!” she chimes in long Wisconsin vowels toward two white-haired women in the entryway. She shows little exhaustion from running an upstart campaign to unseat a Wisconsin state senator. Elected in the whirlwind of summer recalls, King, along with Jennifer Shilling, joined the Wisconsin State Senate as one of its newest members in August.

Sitting in the nursing home lounge, Jessica King doesn’t look the part of new legislator or progressive leader. But Jessica King has spent a lifetime defying “typical.”

At just 36 years old, King represents Oshkosh, Fond du Lac and Rosendale, towns where she lived an unstable and uncertain youth, dependent on communities and state services for help. The daughter of two parents with mental health disorders — her mother was schizophrenic and her father, bipolar — she was making adult decisions long before she was legally able to drive.

That independence and sense of purpose carried her from factory job to college to East Coast advocacy and back to Wisconsin to care for her aging parents. Threaded through her journey is a string of responsibility.

Determined to give her neighbors the same fighting chance at success she had, King wants to give back to the communities that helped push her toward the top with social services and education.

“To thrive you really want to make sure you do have opportunities for children, you do have dignity for elderly people, that we are good stewards of our community for future generations and that people have access to a living wage,” King said.

Path to advocacy

Discussing her childhood publicly is a new thing, according to Jef Hall, a friend and Oshkosh City Councilman. When she does, she refers to her upbringing as “humble,” never a hint of complaint in her voice.

King spent time in and out of foster care beginning at age 4. She had to grow up faster than most kids. King was just 15 when she became a ward of the state. She stayed out of foster care and in her high school by moving in with a half-sister she barely knew on a farm in Rosendale.

King thrived on the farm, where she had a pet pig and learned how to use a grain sweep. She began working third shift assembling juice boxes after graduating high school at 17. Her move from factory floor to higher education began with a visit to UW-Oshkosh and a chance meeting with Professor Ken Grieb.

“She came to the university I think not exactly sure where she was heading,” Grieb said. “It was during her university years that she grew and blossomed.”

At UW-Oshkosh, King earned three majors and began a life of leadership in extra-curricular activities. She worked for the U.N. in New York City and studied medieval history in Cambridge, England, on scholarship.

To a woman who had spent her young life bouncing around her future Senate district, college offered snapshots of how people lived outside Wisconsin. King found that “people need an advocate,” a mantra that became her guiding career and political vision.

After law school, King set off to Washington, D.C., to represent patients who had been denied coverage by insurance companies, working as a voice for disadvantaged communities that needed leaders. But she always kept her roots as she moved. “I think people really saw me as an ambassador from Wisconsin.”

Return to her roots

In 2004, King made the decision to move back to Wisconsin — her mother had developed breast cancer and her father had entered the early stages of kidney failure. The transition home gave her new opportunities to lead.

“In Wisconsin, average people really get the opportunity to play a role in their government,” King said.

On paper, she’s a campaign manager’s dream — she has a Wisconsin twang, humble upbringing, experience with government services and grew up in her Senate district.

So after moving home, King pivoted to politics. In 2007 she began advocating for her community vision, winning a seat on the Oshkosh City Council. In 2008 she won the Eleanor Roosevelt award from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, given to a rising female elected official. In 2010 she became deputy mayor of Oshkosh.

“She took the party politics out of it,” Steve Herman, a former Oshkosh city councilman, said of King. “She understands that citizens need to be involved in the process.”

In 2007, King announced her first bid for the state Senate, seeking votes in a district then tilting decidedly Republican. With nearly 84,000 voters, she lost the general election in 2008 to small-business owner Randy Hopper by just 163 votes.

Recall fever struck before Hopper could finish his first term. King ran to unseat her senator after he supported Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial budget repair bill, and in August 2011 she won by 1,250 votes in a slew of recalls that garnered national media attention.

“It’s hard to get a nice person angry,” King said of the thousands of Wisconsinites who worked on recalls. In her eyes, the special elections were the people’s voice saying, “We want to reclaim our stake in government.”

Susan Hoffman, a teacher from Oshkosh, was one of those angry Wisconsinites after the budget bill made changes to collective bargaining rights. During the recall she began volunteering for her neighbor, Jessica King.

Hoffman remembers one particular day of door knocking when King looked exhausted. “It was the one-year anniversary of her mother’s death,” Hoffman said. “But there’s Jess out in the morning, bright and early with everyone, with a big smile on her face because she knew this was important.”

“She was right out there in her tennis shoes,” Hoffman said. “I thought ‘God, I don’t think I could do that.’”