White begins campaign tour for state Senate run in southwestern Wisconsin

BOSCOBEL, Wis. (WMDX) – Campaign season is underway for one candidate for a state Senate seat in southwestern Wisconsin.

Democrat Lisa White, one of three candidates for Senate District 17, held a campaign tour kick-off event in Boscobel on Monday.

White, Assembly Rep. Jenna Jacobson, and Corinne Hendrickson are all vying for the Democratic nomination to challenge incumbent Republican Howard Marklein. Marklein is the co-chair of the Joint Committee on Finance and has served in the state Senate since 2014.

The 17th Senate District includes all of Grant, Crawford, Iowa, Lafayette, and Green counties, and also includes part of Dane County. In addition, small parts of Vernon and Rock counties are part of the district due to municipalities that are split by county lines.

White said she believed the state legislature needs to do more to support public education, a major reason for why she is pursuing the office.

“Under decades of Republican leadership, we’ve seen a decline in our public schools, rural hospitals, and services that hold our communities together,” White said to a crowd of a few dozen attendees at Timber Lane Coffee in Boscobel, the first of several stops on her campaign scheduled this week. “Our public schools are being gutted, losing millions to a voucher system that privatizes education.”

White cited the record number of school referendums in the state, particularly from rural districts, and the need to preserve education in those parts of the state.

“In communities like ours, the public school isn’t just a building,” White, a Potosi native, said. “It’s the heartbeat of the town. You take that away, and everything begins to fade.”

White said that her candidacy is different than her two Democratic opponents, who reside in the greater Madison area. She spoke about being the only candidate from the western part of the 17th Senate District, and that she is running a grassroots campaign without any PAC funding.

“Money doesn’t vote, people do,” White said. “My campaign is going to be homemade and grassroots, built by people, not by big money.”

She pitched her vision as a ‘grassroots grandma’ and asked for volunteers and support in getting the word out about her campaign.

“I’m taking it to the streets and the dirt roads, if you will,” White said. ” I know I need to thousands of hands and talk to people face-to-face, being authentically who I am representing them.”

A particularly pointed moment in the campaign stop involved White’s father, Garland White, who was seven years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Garland talked to the crowd about the rise of fascism when he was young and how he sees the same things happening now. He lamented that the difference now is that he doesn’t see as much of a resistance to it.

Most of the conversation centered on public education, but White also spoke about the rise in data center projects, with one such project rumored to be coming to far southwestern Wisconsin.

“One of the problems has been a very covert influx of data centers, and what we need to do is raise the ability for local people to know what’s coming their way and make valid decisions instead of being steamrolled when it’s already a done deal before they get a voice,” White said.

White also spoke on topics involving health care, small businesses, and the environment during her stop in Boscobel.

On what she likes most about southwestern Wisconsin, where White said she has lived her entire life, she compared living in the Driftless Area to living in a gigantic state park because of the bluffs, valleys, rivers, and forests.

White said that she wants southwestern Wisconsin’s voice to be heard in Madison, something she repeated during her remarks and again following her campaign stop with assembled media.

“My campaign is going to be incredibly homemade,” White said. “I am grassroots, I’m not going to have big money, and I want anyone to know if they really want to be a part of flipping how we get elected away from big money and really want to have their voices heard, to contact me and I will talk to them personally because I’m tired of us being invisible. We deserve to be heard.”

White’s campaign has already scheduled several recurring and special events in the coming months, which can be found on her campaign website.

In the last state Senate election under the old boundaries for the 17th District in 2022, Marklein easily defeated Democrat Pat Skogen with 60.1% of the vote, a victory margin of more than 20 percentage points. In 2018, Marklein won by 8.2 percentage points, and in his first Senate term in 2014, Marklein had a 10.2 percentage point win.

The 2026 General Election is on November 3, 2026. The Democratic primary will be held on August 11, 2026. You can learn more about elections on the Wisconsin Elections Commission website.

To find out where to vote, how to register to vote, or to see upcoming election information, you can visit MyVote.wi.gov.

MORE SD 17 COVERAGE: Lisa White appears on The Maggie Daun Show (July 30, 2025)

MORE SD 17 COVERAGE: Hendrickson takes on Wisconsin’s 17th Senate District (Matenaer On Air – September 24, 2025)

MORE SD 17 COVERAGE: Jacobson announces state Senate run

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Eds. Note: A previous version of this article listed Todd Larson instead of Corinne Hendrickson as being one of the three Democratic candidates for Senate District 17. Larson exited the race in 2025. Hendrickson entered the field in September. You can find information on Hendrickson’s campaign here, and an additional SD 17 link has been added with Hendrickson’s appearance on Civic Media shortly after her announcement.