It is as if the Milwaukee area were in a kind of time warp.

Like the suburbanites of

the ’70s and ’80s elsewhere in the United States, the residents of the WOW

counties are full of anxiety and contempt for the place they abandoned. “We’re still

in the disco era here,” says Democratic political consultant Paul Maslin. This has

affected the politics of the state in myriad ways. The nationwide trend of exploring

alternatives to prison hasn’t reached Wisconsin—it has the highest rate of black

male incarceration of any state in the country. Sykes told me he could track the

desertion of the city through the discussions of Milwaukee public schools on his

show. “Through the 1990s we were very interested in education reform, and then it

was like a button was switched, and those were someone else’s kids,” he said.

“That’s when I realized we weren’t a Milwaukee station anymore.”