When a new academic year begins in Wisconsin a few weeks from now, the only school in Darien, a small community near the Illinois border, will remain empty. In January, local school officials proposed raising property taxes to bring in three and a half million dollars. Voters rejected the idea—it would have been the second property-tax increase in three years—forcing the district to make drastic cuts to its budget. Darien Elementary School was one of those cuts. Its teachers were laid off, and its students will be sent to other schools in the area. Similar school closings have, in recent years, occurred in a number of other rural Wisconsin towns.

It has been nearly a decade since Governor Scott Walker—who grew up near Darien—and his fellow-Republicans began implementing their vision of conservative austerity and privatization in Wisconsin. The result has been a state more attractive to corporations, with a smaller middle class and deteriorating public infrastructure and institutions—from roads to the University of Wisconsin system to public schools. During this period, Republicans have maintained nearly unbroken control of the state’s government, and Walker has become a conservative hero. This year, as he seeks reëlection to a third term, he has expressed pride about his record and has been typically implacable on most issues—except, notably, education. After the state cut more than a billion dollars in spending on schools and universities between 2011—the year Walker took office—and 2017, Walker signed a budget last year that included an increase of some six hundred and forty million dollars in K-12 spending. “I’m being aggressive on this,” Walker told the Wisconsin State Journal, in June. “We’re proclaiming proudly that I’m the pro-education governor and I want to continue to be the pro-education governor.”

This is the context for Tony Evers’s victory in the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary on Tuesday. Evers, Wisconsin’s state superintendent of schools since 2009, beat out seven opponents to claim the nomination. And at sixty-six years old, with little charisma and middling name recognition, he might beat Walker in November. Until last month, no poll had ever shown Walker trailing a declared Democratic opponent by more than a few points. Then NBC/Marist released a poll showing Evers ahead of Walker by thirteen points. Another poll, by Emerson College, had Evers ahead by seven.

Tony Evers speaks to a camera crew on Election Day. Photograph by David Kasnic for The New Yorker

Evers began contemplating a run for governor last year, after winning reëlection as state superintendent with seventy per cent of the vote. Though the superintendent job is nominally nonpartisan, Evers received the Democrats’ endorsement and is one of the few liberals currently serving in statewide office in Wisconsin. “I realized that if I really wanted to make a difference for these kids in the state, I couldn’t rely on this position to do it,” he told me. “The governor is the one who sets the tone.”

Further Reading New Yorker writers on the 2018 midterm elections.

In the Democratic primary, Evers faced a field that included Mahlon Mitchell, the African-American president of the Professional Fire Fighters Association of Wisconsin, and Kelda Roys, a former member of the State Assembly, both of whom had attracted endorsements from national Democratic figures and support from progressive groups such as Our Wisconsin Revolution and the Wisconsin Working Families Party. Although she came in third on Tuesday, Roys ran a particularly spirited campaign, positioning herself as both a generational and gender contrast to Evers and Walker, and garnering attention with an ad in which she breast-fed her baby on camera. Last week, at the end of a public debate at the main branch of the Madison Public Library, a candidate named Matt Flynn called the mild-mannered Evers “Republican-lite,” citing Evers’s praise for Walker’s education-budget increase. (“Walker essentially adopted ninety per cent of the budget I submitted to him,” Evers told me.) Evers ran a low-key campaign, putting himself forward as a compassionate, temperate educator who wants to return the state to the less divisive political climate of the pre-Walker era. What some primary voters viewed as too accommodating, though, others saw as pragmatic. For many in the state’s education circles, Evers is a beloved figure, while Republicans who have interacted with him as superintendent—like Jim Steineke, the Assembly Majority Leader—have said that they know him as someone they can work with. On Tuesday, Evers won the primary with forty-two per cent of the vote, twenty-six points ahead of Mitchell.

“He may be bland, but he has ethics, he has integrity, he’s not going to go off on Twitter on you,” Chris Taylor, a Democrat in the State Assembly, told me of Evers last week. “What people want more than anything is someone that can beat Scott Walker.”

When Evers was a child, his father, Raymond, was the resident physician at Rocky Knoll, a state sanitarium for tuberculosis patients fifty miles north of Milwaukee. Rocky Knoll also treated many workers from the nearby Kohler plumbing factory who had developed silicosis, a sometimes fatal condition acquired by inhaling tiny particles of porcelain dust. Workers called it “Kohler disease.”

At his campaign headquarters last week, Evers told me how his father would testify on behalf of the sick workers, so they could receive unemployment benefits or worker compensation. “It was about social justice,” Evers said. “He was on call twenty-four hours a day; he saw every patient every single day. He could have gone into private practice, but he didn’t. He decided to be a county employee and work with people who struggled. I learned a lot from watching that.”

Tony Evers’s wife, Kathy, combs his hair. Photograph by David Kasnic for The New Yorker

Evers met his future wife, Kathy, in kindergarten; their first date was the junior prom. They have lived in Wisconsin for nearly their entire lives. Evers received a doctorate in education from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and worked as a small-town high-school science teacher and principal before climbing the administrative ladder.

In 2008, when he was the state’s deputy superintendent, Evers was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and had his esophagus and part of his stomach removed. He had to start sleeping sitting up, and he lost so much weight that he met the requirements for disability payments. Today, he is still rail thin and can’t eat acidic or spicy foods. But he is free of cancer. The year after his surgery, he won his first election as state superintendent.

In 2011, Evers attended some of the enormous protests that took place in Madison following Walker’s proposal of what became known as Act 10, a measure that stripped public employees in Wisconsin of virtually all their collective-bargaining rights. Walker saw Act 10 as a crucial step in his political project of turning Wisconsin into testing ground for conservative policies, and a platform for his national ambitions. “This is our time to change the course of history,” he said at the time.

In his current job, Evers continues to deal with the law’s consequences. “People are leaving the teaching profession and fewer people are coming in,” he said. “Those things are Act 10–related.” The loss of collective-bargaining rights has made teachers’ wages and benefits more uneven across the state. Wealthier school districts are able to offer more, inducing experienced or sought-after teachers to take jobs there, and leaving poorer districts struggling to fill openings, particularly in math and science. Since Act 10 was passed, the state’s public-high-school graduation rate has gone from being tied for second-best in the country to tied for ninth.