The congresswoman from the 4th District is Gwen Moore, a Democrat elected in 2004 and Wisconsin’s first African-American member of Congress. Moore was born in Racine, the eighth of nine children, and raised on the north side of Milwaukee. As an 18-year-old college freshman, she became a single mother who relied on welfare to help support her daughter. She graduated from Marquette University and worked as a housing and urban development specialist. Moore said she got active in politics when a rent-to-own center repossessed her washer and dryer even though she had paid three times their value in exorbitant interest rates. She led an effort to establish a community credit union. She was elected to the state Assembly in 1988 and to the state Senate in 1992, making her the state’s first black woman senator. In winning re-election in 1990, she beat Republican Scott Walker, who later became Wisconsin’s governor. Read More

The congresswoman from the 4th District is Gwen Moore, a Democrat elected in 2004 and Wisconsin’s first African-American member of Congress. Moore was born in Racine, the eighth of nine children, and raised on the north side of Milwaukee. As an 18-year-old college freshman, she became a single mother who relied on welfare to help support her daughter. She graduated from Marquette University and worked as a housing and urban development specialist. Moore said she got active in politics when a rent-to-own center repossessed her washer and dryer even though she had paid three times their value in exorbitant interest rates. She led an effort to establish a community credit union. She was elected to the state Assembly in 1988 and to the state Senate in 1992, making her the state’s first black woman senator. In winning re-election in 1990, she beat Republican Scott Walker, who later became Wisconsin’s governor.

In 2003, when 4th District Democrat Gerald Kleczka announced that he was retiring after 20 years, Moore was the front-runner, but she had serious competition in the September 2004 Democratic primary from two political veterans, state Sen. Tim Carpenter and former state party Chairman Matt Flynn, both white. The candidates agreed on most issues: All three supported abortion rights, focused on jobs and economic concerns, and called for eliminating the Bush administration’s tax cuts for people with incomes exceeding $200,000 a year. In the absence of significant ideological clashes, the fallout from Milwaukee’s mayoral primary earlier that year played a role. The nonpartisan election had pitted former Rep. Tom Barrett, who is white, against acting Mayor Marvin Pratt, vying to become the city’s first black elected mayor. Barrett won, but the vote was split along racial lines and caused hard feelings in the black community.

Moore took advantage of the energized black voter base, and she leveraged financial support from national women’s organizations, teachers’ unions and other liberal groups. Flynn was endorsed by Kleczka, and boasted that he had backed Pratt for mayor. But he was damaged politically by his work as general counsel for the local Roman Catholic archdiocese in a priest sex abuse scandal. Carpenter was the only openly gay member of the Senate and had the support of national gay rights groups. Moore won 64% of the vote to 25% for Flynn and 10% for Carpenter. Flynn won the five aldermanic districts and 49% of the vote on the south side, but Moore won about 80% of the vote north of Interstate 94. In the general election, Republican Gerald Boyle tried to win over Democrats disaffected with Moore. But he got no support from the national party and Moore won easily, 70%-28%.

Moore has a solidly liberal voting record and often is passionate in her criticism of Republicans. At a 2010 campaign rally, she poured what she said represented “lies” from a Thermos into a glass of “poison tea” marked with a skull, and invoked the 1978 Jonestown mass suicide in condemning tea party activism. “Remember the Kool-Aid? This tea is just as lethal,” she said, according to the Wisconsin State Journal. When her onetime political opponent, Walker, reportedly considered turning down federal education funding in February 2011, Moore accused him of “channeling Sarah Palin.” And when House Republicans sought that month to de-fund Planned Parenthood during the fiscal 2011 budget debate, Moore drew on her own unwelcome experience of an unplanned pregnancy at age 18. “I just want to tell you a little bit about what it’s like to not have Planned Parenthood,” she said on the House floor. “You have to add water to the (baby) formula to make it stretch. You have to give your kids Ramen noodles at the end of the month to fill up their little bellies so they won’t cry. You have to give them mayonnaise sandwiches.”

Much of the legislation she has introduced has dealt with helping the poor through expanding school lunch funding, cracking down on foreclosure fraud and providing grants to crime-ravaged communities. In 2005, the House incorporated provisions of her SHIELD Act into the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act that would protect the identity of domestic-violence victims who receive homeless assistance.

Moore has developed an interest in foreign relations and defense. She was one of only five House members to vote against a resolution expressing congressional support for Israel during its 2008 military actions in the Gaza Strip. She called Israel a “strong ally,” but expressed concern about civilian Palestinian deaths and called for renewed diplomatic efforts in the region. She has been an ardent supporter of Liberia, the African nation founded by freed slaves, and added a provision to a spending bill in 2007 to speed up delivery of foreign aid to the country.

Moore, who said she is learning Spanish to help her reach out to the Hispanic population on Milwaukee’s south side, is well-established in her district and was re-elected with 69% of the vote in 2010.