Round Two in Assembly District 90

Amaad Rivera-Wagner and Jessica Henderson are doing this again. Two years after Rivera-Wagner beat Henderson by 1,224 votes to win Wisconsin's 90th Assembly District, the two are back on the same ballot for the Nov. 3 general election.¹ Assembly District 90, which covers central Green Bay, has voted Democratic by comfortable margins across most of the past decade. Although there was significant redistricting, the margin in 2024 came in tighter than that history, which is worth a look before the two campaigns run it back.

Amaad Rivera-Wagner

Central Count

Rivera-Wagner's path to the Capitol runs through Green Bay City Hall. Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1981, he worked as a policy advisor to U.S. Sen. Ed Markey before landing in Wisconsin on Mayor Eric Genrich's staff.³ He was still fairly new to City Hall in November 2020 when he found himself in the middle of the most contested local election story in the country that year.

Rivera-Wagner helped coordinate logistics at Green Bay's central count, the single site where the city processed its absentee ballots, an operation that ballooned that year because of pandemic-driven mail voting.⁴ Organizing poll worker shifts usually make anyone famous. But this was November 2020, and Green Bay's central count became one of the handful of sites Trump allies pointed to as evidence the election had been stolen. Rivera-Wagner, the city Chief of Staff, with a visible role that night, became a specific target. He's said publicly that what followed included doxxing, stalking and death threats serious enough that his family needed police protection, and that people confronted his husband at work because they didn't believe he was real.⁵

City Attorney Vanessa Chavez spent months investigating what actually happened at central count, interviewing 22 city employees along with outside witnesses. Her 19-page memo, released in April 2021, found what nearly every serious inquiry into 2020 election claims in Wisconsin has found: nothing. "No issues affecting the integrity of the election have been found," she wrote.⁴ That should have settled it. It didn't.

Five years later, the same story is still trailing Rivera-Wagner into an election year, just from a different direction. In early June, Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany went on Milwaukee's WTMJ radio and ran through the old claims almost point for point: the outside grant money, an out-of-state operative who ended up holding keys to the ballot-counting room, an elected city clerk pushed to the side.⁶ It's the same narrative a 2021 Assembly hearing chased and the same one a state-funded investigation led by former Justice Michael Gableman spent months and millions of taxpayer dollars pursuing, before Gableman was fired and later disbarred without ever finding fraud.

Mayor Genrich fired back on social media, telling Tiffany to "keep our city's name out of your mouth" and to call Gableman for pointers, since "he can't charge by the hour anymore." Rivera-Wagner, by then a sitting state representative, was blunter in comments to the news outlet The Recombobulation Area. "It's bullshit," he said, "and it led to real people's lives being threatened, harassed. Millions of taxpayer dollars wasted." In a follow-up statement, he put a specific figure on it, $2.3 million in taxpayer costs tied to the various investigations.⁶

Amaad's Legislative Record

Set against that, his actual legislative record is fairly modest, which is normal for a freshman in the legislative minority. He's credited with two bipartisan bills signed into law during his first term: AB454, which set up low-interest financing to help working families close the gap to homeownership, and a measure letting DACA recipients obtain professional licenses in fields like health care and education.⁷ He sits on the Assembly's Local Government and Consumer Protection committees, introduced a package of election-worker-protection bills last September after years of harassment aimed at Green Bay clerk's office staff by self-appointed "observers,"⁸ and says he's hosted more than 30 town halls in the district since taking office.⁷ He announced his reelection bid on April 27 with a kickoff at the Meyer Theatre, campaigning on housing costs, a higher minimum wage and holding health insurers accountable for how often they deny claims.⁷

Jessica Henderson

Personal Life

Henderson entered politics for the first time in 2024 as a private citizen with a day job, which makes her the more interesting unknown in this race. She describes herself on her campaign site as a case manager focused on housing insecurity and mental health access for "minority and vulnerable communities," says her family's roots in the Green Bay area go back to the 1700s, and says she earned dual bachelor's and two associate's degrees from Wichita State University in 2010, studying restorative justice and mental health.⁹ The one externally documented piece of her work history, according to a nonpartisan candidate database, is a stint as a mental health associate at a Green Bay treatment center from 2015 to 2016.¹⁰ Those education and career details come from Henderson's own campaign and haven't been independently verified beyond what she's published herself.

The Policies

On the actual issues, Henderson has said more than her low public profile might suggest, once someone asks her directly. When Wisconsin Public Radio pressed both AD 90 candidates in October 2024 on child care costs, a top concern for voters at a Green Bay listening event WPR held that fall, Henderson wouldn't commit either way on using state money to fund Child Care Counts, the pandemic-era subsidy program Madison Republicans and Gov. Evers have fought over for years. "We're all supposed to be good stewards of the funding that we receive and how it's spent," she told WPR, before adding that she wouldn't object to helping families afford care, drawing on her own experience as a young mother facing the same cost pressures. Instead, she floated a narrower idea of her own: a state program that would repay tuition for people studying early childhood development once they've worked in the field a few years, aimed at recruiting and keeping good staff.¹¹

She's taken a clearer position on criminal justice. When the Wisconsin Examiner surveyed Assembly candidates that same September, Henderson was one of the only Republicans in the region who responded at all. She told the paper she'd support closing both Green Bay Correctional and Waupun "as long as it does not mean releasing violent offenders into the community," and argued, drawing on her professional background, that expanding mental health care access does more to bring down incarceration than keeping old prisons running.¹²

She's also broken from Republican orthodoxy on at least one issue. In October 2024, Henderson signed American Promise's candidate pledge backing a constitutional amendment that would let states and Congress set limits on campaign spending, a position aimed at overturning Citizens United that's more often associated with Democratic candidates than Republican ones.¹³ It's a small data point next to everything else, but it's one of the few places where Henderson's record actually breaks from her party rather than just not engaging with an issue.

Campaign Finances

None of that has translated into much of a public campaign. Wisconsin Watch's 2024 voter guide summed up her presence bluntly: she "has a social media page, but it includes no information about her campaign."¹⁶ That was true in the fall of 2024, and it's largely still true now. On money, the gap between the two campaigns is stark. Rivera-Wagner's committee raised $50,622 in the 2024 cycle, according to Ballotpedia's tally of his state filings.¹⁷ A separate district-level count Ballotpedia pulls from the Follow the Money database puts the two campaigns' combined 2024 fundraising at $55,177, which would leave Henderson's entire operation that year at somewhere around $4,500, a fraction of what her opponent spent.¹ Heading into this cycle, the pattern hasn't budged. Rivera-Wagner's committee reported $12,175 raised through late July, per the state's most recent pre-primary filing.² Henderson's committee doesn't show up in that filing with any recorded activity, which under Wisconsin law usually means a campaign has claimed an exemption for staying under $2,500 in total receipts and spending, or simply hasn't filed yet.

Agreement

The one substantive issue both candidates staked out positions on in 2024, the fate of Green Bay Correctional Institution, has mostly stopped being a partisan fight at all. Rivera-Wagner talked about bail reform and marijuana legalization alongside closing GBCI. Henderson wanted assurances about violent offenders before she'd sign off. Two years later, both of those hedges look almost beside the point, because closing GBCI has become official, bipartisan state policy.

Gov. Tony Evers has made shutting down the aging, overcrowded prison a top priority before he leaves office, and the State Building Commission released $15 million in October 2025 to begin planning the transition.¹⁸ Republican state Rep. David Steffen of Howard, whose district borders Rivera-Wagner's, has called the closure "a top priority" for the whole Legislature, and Democratic state Sen. Jamie Wall of Green Bay has been working the same file from the other side of the aisle.¹⁹ Nobody's locked in a firm date beyond "by 2029," and the fights over what replaces GBCI and where its roughly 1,100 displaced men end up are far from settled. But the basic premise, that the facility needs to close, isn't something Rivera-Wagner and Henderson actually disagree about. In a Legislature that agrees on very little these days, that counts for something.