Wisconsin state Sen. Kelda Roys says she’s ready to “fight for our democracy” and stand up to President Donald Trump as she campaigns for governor on lowering costs, protecting public schools, and expanding health care access.
With Gov. Tony Evers stepping aside after his term ends, state Sen. Kelda Roys is making her case to lead Wisconsin—promising to lower costs for families and push back against President Donald Trump’s agenda.
“In this critical moment of great danger for our country and our democracy, we must have strong governors leading important swing states like Wisconsin that are willing to stand up to this Republican regime to protect Wisconsin families,” Roys said in an interview with UpNorthNews.
Roys, the senator representing Wisconsin’s 26th District—that’s much of Madison and its surrounding cities—is campaigning hard to convince Wisconsinites that she’s their best choice for the governor’s nomination and to take on the Republican candidate in the 2026 race for governor.
Roys, a mom and small-business owner, faces a crowded Democratic field of candidates vying to follow in the footsteps of the current two-term Democratic governor.
With seven months to go until the Democratic primary Aug. 11, Roys told UpNorthNews that she is ready to go to the mat for Wisconsinites—“fight for our values, for our communities, for our democracy”—and to make life more affordable.
She said many Wisconsinites took a chance in the 2024 election and voted for Trump because “he promised to address the affordability crisis. But then the minute he got power, he did the exact opposite,” she said.
Who is Wisconsin state Sen. Kelda Roys?
Roys grew up in rural Taylor County. Her mom was a social worker, and her dad worked in law enforcement.
Today, the 46-year-old is a mom of three young kids, a stepmom to two adult daughters in their 20s, and she describes her husband, Dan, as “a very patient man.” She’s also a lawyer and has been a small-business owner for 13 years, running a real estate brokerage firm.
Roys has long been a champion of women’s reproductive rights and, for four years, was executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Wisconsin (today known as Reproductive Freedom for All).
She calls this a once-in-a-generation opportunity to solve problems
After 13 years of legislative maps that had been gerrymandered to give Republicans guaranteed control of the state Legislature, Roys said Wisconsinites have a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to elect the representatives they most feel will “actually get things done.”
“We’re going to have a Democratic state Senate and an Assembly that’s very close, one way or the other. We can get a lot done if we have strong leadership from the governor’s office.”
She won’t run Wisconsin for billionaires
“When I tell people about what Trump has done, all the billionaires in his Cabinet and the ways that he has enriched himself and his family members and his political allies at our expense, it’s shocking to people, because we never thought we would see this kind of corruption here in the United States,” Roys said.
“We’ve never experienced anything like it, and I think it’s really appalling to people when they look at what taxpayer dollars are being used to fund. The way his presidency is for his own benefit, and then all the rest of us are struggling.”
“He keeps saying that he doesn’t want to hear about affordability. Really?” Roys said. “Then you must not want to hear from any Americans, because when I talk to Americans, every single one of them is concerned about affordability.”
“Go to the grocery store, and voters think, gosh, I don’t know if I can buy protein this week because prices are so high as a result of tariffs.”
Voters tell Roys they’re furious
“I’m horrified that President Trump has started another illegal war to distract Americans from the harm he’s visiting on us,” Roys said, referring to the US-Israeli air war on Iran that Trump launched on Feb. 28, for which the president did not get authorization from Congress, and which appear to violate the UN Charter’s ban on using force except in self-defense or with Security Council approval. “And unfortunately, we’re seeing American service members and civilians paying the price.”
“Constituents are telling me that this is going to distract from the very real challenges that people are facing, which are still all about affordability and the economy. Grocery prices, housing, health care—these are all huge problems all over Wisconsin.”
“Trump is unwilling to do the one thing to help people that he was elected to do—lower the costs of living. Instead, he’s getting us into another horrible quagmire in the Middle East while Wisconsinites are struggling to put food on the table and are going to lose health care.”
Roys plans to lower health care costs
Wisconsinites are very aware that their health care costs have gone up with the expiration of the Affordable Care Act subsidies (which Trump and Republicans refused to renew), Roys said.
“I met a man called Bill in Ladysmith who has gotten his health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, and he is probably losing his health insurance because there is no way he can afford the premium increases,” Roys said.
“There are people like Bill all over this state. What’s going to happen when they have to choose between ‘Do I keep my house or apartment, or do I keep my health care?’ They’re probably going to choose housing.”
How she’ll replace BadgerCare with a public option
“For years, I fought to expand Wisconsin’s BadgerCare program, but now that the federal budget has changed, that’s not an option for our state anymore.”
“I want to open up the state health insurance plan to any Wisconsinite or any Wisconsin business or nonprofit that wants to buy into it. Right now, I, as a state senator, enjoy it, and all state employees have access to it.”
“The state health insurance plan is high quality, and it’s a nonprofit. Because it’s a nonprofit, they’re not trying to make money off the health care system, so it can spend more money on actually providing care for people.”
If elected governor, Roys said she’ll open up the state health insurance plan so “anybody, as an individual or an employer, could decide, ‘I’m going to buy into it,’ which is a true, robust public option, and it doesn’t cost taxpayers anything.”
Roys will bring a ‘responsible end’ to school vouchers, if elected
“Every single student in Wisconsin, no matter who you are or where you’re from, deserves a great, high-quality public education. Every community deserves a great public school to be at its heart, at its center,” she said.
“Republican cuts over many decades are starving our public schools of the ability to do that and putting kids, whose parents can’t afford to live in a fancy ZIP code, at a real disadvantage.
I’m a proud graduate of public schools, both for K-12 and the University of Wisconsin Law School. I’ve got a daughter in public middle school, one in elementary, and my son is in daycare.
“Vouchers are the brainchild of right-wingers who do not believe in public education, and they thought this was a sneaky way that they could undermine public schools, to suck funding out,” she said.
“It’s really important for people to understand that the voucher experiment failed and it is now a scheme that is being used to suck up billions of dollars from our local school districts and put them into private, unaccountable schools, where the teachers do not have to meet the same basic standards that educators in public schools have to meet.”
“Private schools can kick a student out after a couple of weeks and keep the money that came along with that student, so these voucher institutions are not meeting the same standards, and we shouldn’t be funding them with taxpayer dollars.”
“Billions of dollars over the last couple of years have come right out of our local public school districts’ budgets.”
Wisconsinites want ICE out of the Badger State
“Trump’s ICE is already operating here, and they are not compatible with a free society and should be abolished,” Roys said. “What they are doing is un-American and unacceptable. They are making every one of us less safe and less free.”
“I believe we should enforce our immigration law. I’m a lawyer. I believe in the rule of law. I know that we can secure our borders and enforce our laws fairly and legally. ICE is not doing that.”
“Everyone agrees we want to get violent criminals off the streets and out of our country if they don’t have permission to be here. The immigration issue has gone from being Trump’s most popular issue to one of his least popular because ICE is so violent and brutal.”
“My constituents are scared. A lot of people are carrying their passports and papers with them because they are of Latino background or African American or Indigenous people, and they are afraid they will be targeted.”
Roys is a sponsor of the No Secret Police Act, which bans law enforcement officers from concealing their identities and from refusing to identify themselves. As of the time of publication, the act has been introduced in the 2025-2026 legislative session as AB 441/SB 444, but has not been passed in the Legislature.
“In our most recent floor session in the Senate, Democrats forced a vote on the bill to unmask ICE. Every single Republican voted against it. It tells you everything you need to know—they are with Donald Trump and his violent regime, hook, line, and sinker,” Roys said.
“And by the way, there’s also nothing on the Senate calendar (controlled by Republicans) that has anything to do with affordability.”
She will fight for universally available and affordable child care for all families
Roys said another goal is to ensure that Wisconsin families don’t spend more than 7% of their income on childcare. She aims to open up enough slots for children in high-quality, affordable daycare.
“To increase the number of childcare slots, we need to increase the number of providers. To increase the number of childcare providers, it starts with paying childcare workers and early childhood educators what they’re worth, so they can actually live.”
“I recently introduced a minimum wage bill for $15 an hour (from the current $7.25 an hour). I had all these trolls saying nobody makes less than $15 an hour, and I said, go to any childcare center in the state. I’ll guarantee you that there are people in that childcare center doing some of the most important and difficult work, and they are not making $15 an hour.”
Roys said that, as governor, she would invest in the Child Care Counts state program, which subsidizes childcare providers.
She promises moms and dads that she’ll maintain access to all vaccines
“As a mom, I’m really concerned about whether or not we’re going to be able to access the immunizations that keep our kids and our community healthy. My dad is immunocompromised, and he wants to be able to see his grandkids. If we can’t be vaccinated, we can’t see him. This matters a lot to my family and families like mine,” Roys said.
“Governors, especially Democratic governors, have a really important role to play in maintaining access to not just vaccines, but we can band together and use our purchasing power to lower the cost of prescription drugs.”
“I’ve already talked with other Democratic governors and gubernatorial candidates across the country about how we can collaborate to protect really vitally important health information, such as vaccine schedules (under HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., who has removed much of it from the CDC website).”
A bill to ban Trump from using ‘killer robots’ against Wisconsinites
Roys recently co-sponsored the NAW DAWG Act—the No Autonomous Weapons Deployed Against We, the Governed, Act, prohibiting the use of fully autonomous weapons, also known as “killer robots,” against civilians or within civilian jurisdictions.
“This Republican regime has used AI with weapons to attack Iran and, given what we’ve seen with ICE and their brutality and lawlessness, we cannot have any drones or autonomous weapons that are deployed without human control and complete oversight happening domestically,” Roys said.
But would Trump use AI weapons against Americans? Roys said there’s nothing holding him back.
“I have seen no evidence that he thinks there are any limits or guardrails that he’s not willing to bust through. This is a man who has seen Americans executed on the street by federal agents, and he’s basically told (the agents), ‘You are immune, do whatever you want.’”
“I think he’d like to normalize violence in this country to terrorize and silence his political opponents.”
“It’s not working, of course, because people in Minnesota and around the country are brave and we’re going to keep showing up and protesting and we’re going to be holding ICE accountable for their crimes.”
