Tiffany Campaign Raises $26.3 Million For Governor's Race; Average Waukesha Household's Budget Can Match In '1,247 Years,' Says Civics Teacher

WAUKESHA — Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany's campaign announced this week it raised $26.3 million in the most recent fundraising period, including $24.2 million transferred directly from the state Republican Party, a figure that Waukesha South civics teacher Robert Chen, 51, spent Tuesday evening converting into terms his tenth-grade government class could understand.

Chen said he arrived at the comparison after a student asked him, during a unit on campaign finance, how the number "$26.3 million" was supposed to mean anything to a teenager. Using his own household's annual discretionary budget of $20,000, excluding mortgage, groceries, and what he described as "the non-negotiable Culver's line item," Chen calculated that his family would need 1,247 years to raise an equivalent sum, a timeline he wrote on the whiteboard in red marker and left up through Thursday's class.

The Math, Shown On A Whiteboard

Chen said the 1,247-year figure assumes his household saves 100 percent of its discretionary income every year with no inflation, no emergencies, and no interruptions, a condition he told students was "frankly less realistic than anything else we've covered this semester." He said a second, "more honest" version of the calculation, factoring in his family's actual savings rate of around 4 percent, put the real timeline closer to 31,000 years, a number he declined to put on the whiteboard because he did not think the dry-erase marker would survive that many zeroes of use.

The Tiffany campaign's filing showed the $24.2 million transfer from the state GOP represented more than nine-tenths of the total haul, with the remaining roughly $2.1 million coming from individual donors. Chen's class spent part of Wednesday's period discussing what a "transfer" meant in campaign finance terms, which Chen said led to a 20-minute tangent on whether his own household could "transfer" money to itself from a savings account, a maneuver one student suggested would at least shorten the 1,247-year timeline by letting the family "count the same money twice."

"My son asked if we could sell the second car to 'make a meaningful contribution' to our own household budget. I had to explain that selling the car doesn't generate new money, it just moves existing money around, which is actually a pretty good description of half of campaign finance."

— Robert Chen, Waukesha South civics teacher

A Battleground County Takes Notice

Waukesha County has been described by political observers from both parties as a key battleground as the race between Tiffany and Democratic candidate David Crowley tightens heading into November. Councilman Gary Puchalski said he remained "cautiously optimistic" about candidate viability on both sides of the race without committing his own support to either, a position he said he intended to hold "for as long as is professionally reasonable," which he did not define further.

Chen said he did not intend the whiteboard exercise as commentary on either campaign specifically, only as a way to make an abstract number concrete for students who, in his experience, tune out any figure larger than the cost of a car. He said the exercise appeared to work, noting that three students independently brought up the 1,247-year figure at lunch, and that one asked whether the same math could be applied to the $2.1 million raised separately from individual donors, a follow-up calculation Chen said he had not yet attempted and was "not sure his whiteboard could handle."

Chen's family, for its part, voted against selling the second car. He said the vehicle, a 2017 Honda CR-V with just under 94,000 miles, remained parked in the driveway as of Thursday, its "meaningful contribution" to the household's political influence unmade.