"It turns out voters really, really care about their nursing homes"

Saving local nursing homes is a winning issue with voters in rural Wisconsin

Seniors across Wisconsin have been organizing to protect their local nursing homes from being sold to for profit companies.

Over the last year and some change, I’ve been talking to and writing with Wisconsin seniors who have been organizing to protect their local nursing homes. A few weeks ago in their local elections, they showed that their cause is a winning issue with voters.

You see, in rural Wisconsin, there are these treasures that are increasingly rare: Publicly owned nursing homes. Shoot, publicly-owned anything seems rare in a time when so much of our government is being dismantled and sold for parts. Being from the South, I had no idea anything like this even existed.

These taxpayer-funded homes are not only beloved, but they are time-tested (many have been around for generations) and proven. Most are rated much better than their for-profit counterparts. However, the nursing homes are under threat as local governments put them up for sale to private buyers.

In recent years, corporations seeking to expand their profits and control in healthcare have taken advantage of political forces that aim to privatize public institutions, focusing on Wisconsin’s 28 county-owned nursing homes.

“It’s all about ideology,” Eileen Guthrie of Lincoln County, Wisconsin, told me when I visited her hometown of Merrill last fall. Her local board had argued that they had to sell their county nursing home because it was in the red. But Eileen, a retired bookkeeper, did the math: Not only was Pinecrest breaking even, but it was also actually making money. Lincoln County sold it nonetheless.

Other counties, however, have been able to protect their homes from pending sales, and the issue showed up at the ballot box. In successive local elections (2024 and 2026), supporting local, high-quality, affordable public nursing homes proved to be a winning issue with voters, and being on the wrong side of the issue proved costly to candidates

In Sauk County, Citizens for Sauk County Health Care Center has been circulating petitions, showing up at board meetings, and most recently has sued the county over trying to sell the public nursing home. In the recent election, Sauk County candidates who supported keeping the nursing home county-owned won 8 of 9 contested elections for county board supervisor. This election flipped the majority of the board from being pro-privatization to being pro-county-owned, changing the math for the future of the campaign.

In Portage County, where seniors with the Save the Portage County Health Care Center campaign have been taking out billboards and showing up at public comment periods against the sale, also saw positive results in their local election. The newly elected county executive (arguably the most powerful elected position in the county) is a vocal opponent to nursing home privatization, and he beat a former county supervisor who voted to sell the county’s nursing home by almost a 2-1 margin. The pro-sale former Portage County board chair who was ousted in the last election, also failed to win his re-election bid, losing by a larger margin than he did in 2024.

And even back in Lincoln County, where Pinecrest was sold last year, a gentleman named Scott Doerr was so mad about the conduct of local officials in selling the facility that he ran for office himself. Scott won his seat, replacing the outgoing board member who voted in favor of selling the county nursing home.

What’s happening in Wisconsin is fascinating…. You can read more about the work in these counties at the links below. These seniors have proven that good organizing around this deeply felt, very local issue can and will show up in local elections. It’s organizing well worth watching– even for those of us who had no idea there were public nursing homes– and learning from.

ICYMI: Here are some good stories about the senior citizens doing this work!