Photo via Sara Rodriguez - Facebook
Sara Rodriquez - Meeting
Sara Rodriquez meets with constituents on the campaign trail (2025)
Across Wisconsin, the conversations tend to follow a familiar pattern. In community rooms and coffee shops, at union halls and school gyms, people pull Lieutenant Governor Sara Rodriguez aside and start with the same categories of unease: the prescription they now stretch longer than intended, the childcare bill that exceeds the rent, the insurance premium that jumped again without explanation. Rodriguez listens the way a former emergency room nurse does; not dramatically, but attentively, with steady eye contact and careful follow-up questions, with a nurse's instinct to make a person feel heard.
Sara has visited all 72 Wisconsin counties three times as lieutenant governor, hearing versions of the same story repeated with local variations: families working hard, doing everything they were told was responsible, and still feeling crushed by systems that no longer worked for them.
Rodriguez said, “We've normalized things that should never be normal. People paying more for health insurance than they do for their mortgage. Families working full time and often having to choose between childcare and rent. Parents choosing between filling a prescription and buying their kids' back-to-school supplies. Young people wondering if they'll ever stop living paycheck to paycheck. We must do better than this.”
Touching Lives
Wisconsin, she argues, does not simply need a manager of existing systems. We need to understand how those systems touch people's lives and who is willing to take on the structural forces driving costs upward. Her résumé reflects a career spent navigating those systems: emergency room nurse, Center for Disease Control epidemic intelligence officer, health care executive, state legislator, lieutenant governor.
Rodriguez started on the overnight shift in an emergency room, where she learned the rhythm of crisis medicine and the consequences of delayed care. At the CDC, she later coordinated public health responses during emergencies, operating inside of government when lives were at stake. As a health care executive, she watched how staffing shortages, reimbursement formulas and budget decisions reverberated all the way down to the bedside.
“Most politicians talk about health care like it's an abstract policy issue,” she said. “I talk about it like a place I've worked. I've held patients' hands, told families bad news, and watched people argue with insurance companies while sitting in a hospital bed. That changes how you understand the stakes.”
|
|
Sara’s signature policy proposal, BadgerChoice, would establish a Wisconsin-governed public health insurance option for residents who cannot access—or cannot afford—private coverage. It is the kind of structural reform, Rodriguez argues, that becomes possible with unified Democratic control of the governor's office and the Legislature.
Wisconsin Can Lead
“We don't need to wait for Washington D.C. to save us,” she said. “Wisconsin can lead. BadgerChoice is a Wisconsin solution to a Wisconsin problem.”
From Superior to Janesville and everywhere in between, as lieutenant governor, Rodriguez makes her case in person and then stays put long enough to hear the response. This is her most natural posture: listening first, connecting policy to lived experience. The questions she returns to are remarkably consistent: What is working here? What isn't? What keeps you up at night? What is one thing government could do to make your life easier?
While health care remains her defining credential, affordability extends to all areas including housing, groceries and childcare and serves as the connective tissue of her broader argument.
“When health care costs go up, your rent becomes harder to pay,” she said. “When childcare costs as much as a second mortgage, your job choices shrink. When insurance premiums explode, people skip the doctor and get sicker. When small businesses can't afford to offer coverage, they stop expanding. It's all connected.”
She describes health care, housing, childcare, prescription drugs, student debt and utility bills not as discrete policy buckets but as overlapping financial pressures that compound one another. In rural Wisconsin, she says she hears about hour-long drives to emergency rooms. In
Milwaukee, it’s childcare shortages and escalating rents. In college towns, mental health access. In manufacturing corridors, wages swallowed by insurance costs.
Historic Investments
As lieutenant governor her broader policy agenda includes vigorously supporting quality K-12 public education while at the same time substantially reducing school property taxes, restoring collective bargaining, expanding childcare access, rebuilding the nursing and health care workforce and making historic investments in affordable housing. Rodriguez is also unusually candid about the political conditions required to enact those ideas. Many of them, she acknowledges, are possible only with Democratic control of the legislature.
“For the first time in over a decade, Wisconsin has a real shot at a trifecta,” she said. “Voters are tired of promises without results. If we get the chance to govern, we have to prove it matters.”
Born in Milwaukee and raised in Waukesha County, Sara is the daughter of a union teaching assistant and a Vietnam veteran. She worked her way through school and built a public health career, juggling school drop-offs, last-minute childcare logistics and policy briefings in the same 24 hours. She spent years caring for her father with Alzheimer's, balancing caregiving with a full-time career and the chaos of parenting two young children with the help of her husband. That experience, she says, gave her "a very personal understanding of how fragile the support systems for families really are."
When asked what she believes the next governor's job is, she answers without pause. “Making people's lives easier,” she said. “Making it so paying a health insurance premium doesn't mean risking foreclosure. Making it so parents don't have to choose between a paycheck and childcare. Making it so kids like mine can afford to buy a home and raise a family here. Being able to take a vacation once a year. That's the job.”
