About this site
An independent record of who lives in Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District and how the seat answers to them. Every number links to its source. Nobody pays for it but the publisher.
Who publishes it
widistrict7.com and its companion, widistrict7watch.com, are published by Thomas J. Norman. He grew up in the district, in Duluth’s shadow in Douglas County, graduated from St. Croix High School in Solon Springs, and keeps a home in Superior. He teaches management at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and splits the year between there and northern Wisconsin.
The sites are a personal project. They are owned and paid for by him alone, not by any company, university, campaign, party, or committee, and they accept no advertising or contributions. Opinions, where any appear, are his own. His university has no role in the sites and none of this work is done on its systems.
Corrections and additions are welcome at editor@widistrict7.com.
Sourcing rules
The sites follow the seat, not any one officeholder, with 2026 as the baseline year. They hold themselves to five rules.
- Every figure links to a primary source: the Census Bureau, the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s certified reports, the Clerk of the House, Congress.gov, the Federal Election Commission, and USAspending.gov.
- Unofficial election results are labeled unofficial until the canvass is certified; estimates are marked “est.” and replaced when the official count arrives.
- Votes are tagged with one shared list of fifteen issues, the same list residents choose from in the survey, so that what people say they want and how the seat voted can be compared like for like. The list is versioned; changes are dated and explained.
- The record describes votes, money, and federal dollars. It does not characterize motives.
- Mistakes are corrected in place with a dated note.
Privacy policy
The survey
The Residents survey asks for your county, your top three issues, a one-to-five rating of how well the seat represents you, and an optional comment of up to 300 characters. It does not ask for, and does not store, your name, email address, phone number, or street address. Comments are automatically screened for anything that looks like contact information before they are kept.
To count one response per person per day, the site stores a one-way hash made from your connection address, your browser’s identifying string, and the date. The address itself is not stored and the hash cannot be turned back into it. Hashes serve no other purpose.
Answers are published only in aggregate: district-wide totals, and county tables once a county has at least ten responses. Individual comments may be quoted on the site without any identifying detail.
Newsletter
If a newsletter sign-up is offered, it is separate from the survey, requires you to confirm your address, and can be left at any time with one click. The list is held by the publisher and is not sold, rented, or shared. The publisher may use it to send district civic information, including notices about public meetings, elections, and this site. Should the publisher ever seek public office, subscribers will be told plainly before the list is used for anything related to that, and will be able to leave first.
Analytics and cookies
The sites are hosted on Cloudflare, which provides aggregate traffic counts without cookies. The sites set no tracking cookies and load no advertising or social-media scripts. Fonts are served by Google Fonts, which receives your browser’s request for the font files.
Questions
Write to editor@widistrict7.com. Changes to this policy are dated at the top.