The Slippery Ethics of Bob Donovan

Bob Donovan at his election night party at McKiernan’s Irish Pub. Photo April 2022 by Graham Kilmer.

Call it the luck of the Irishman.

Bob Donovan has often been dogged by issues that would have defeated other candidates, yet managed to survive. In his first successful run for Milwaukee alderman in 2000, it came out that he received a 1992 citation for disorderly conduct for peeking through a hole in the partition between restroom stalls in a men’s room at UW-Milwaukee. But it was a brief item buried in a Journal Sentinel story about many candidates facing legal issues that came out just a week before the election and got little notice. So Donovan won.

Years later, in a run for Milwaukee mayor in 2016, he told reporter Dan Bice, who died this year, that the whole thing was a misunderstanding.

It would not be the first such misunderstanding. In 2002, six years into his long tenure as alderman, it was reported (in a story I did for Milwaukee Magazine) that Donovan had used his position as alderman to help get $50,000 in foundation grants to create the Milwaukee Alliance, whose initial mission was to connect community groups, churches and businesses in his district to the city. That is, by definition, what an alderman is paid to do anyway. So why was Donovan using foundation money to create this group, and why was the Alliance in turn paying for the heat and electricity for the neighborhood alderman’s office that Donovan maintained? 

More troubling questions were later raised by the Journal Sentinel’s Georgia Pabst, who reported that Donovan had pushed to get a federal grant for the Milwaukee Alliance, though he was its unpaid president and chairman, and his grown stepdaughter was a part-time employee of the Alliance for four months. Stephen Biskupic, then serving as the U.S. attorney for Milwaukee, investigated Donovan and found that the alderman’s wife Kathy Donovan had received nine checks of $300 each from the Alliance, that there was a blurring of interests between the Alliance and Donovan’s campaign fund, and that records regarding payments to his wife were falsified.

In December 2005, Donovan paid a fine under a settlement that Biskupic described as a “middle ground” agreement akin to a misdemeanor charge, while Donovan insisted the agreement proved his innocence. In fact, Donovan had agreed to a settlement with several penalties for him, but somehow his claim of innocence stuck. When Donovan ran again for mayor in 2022, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel did a story wrongly reporting the charges against Donovan were dropped by Biskupic.

Then came another controversy after Donovan won election as a Republican member of the Assembly. He had moved to a Greenfield condo he described as just “perfect for Kathy and I” and won election to the 84th Assembly District in 2023. But after redistricting, he had to run for the 61st district and won again.

But there was one problem. That perfect condo with the garage he loved was not in his new district, so Donovan rented an apartment in the 61st District. A story by Bice in July 2025 reported that Donovan’s campaign finance filings showed that, beginning a month after his election to the new district, Donovan began paying himself $850 a month from his campaign account for “staff lodging” at his old house: “In all, he paid himself $5,950 in the seven months after the election.”

Donovan did not respond to requests from Bice to comment on this, but soon tried to cover his tracks: the legislator revised his campaign finance report and deleted the reported payments to himself, except for the $850 payment in December of 2024, the story reported.

However, his attempt at a cover-up looked fishy, as the liberal group A Better Wisconsin found: After Donovan deleted the cash payments, the total cash-on-hand balance in his campaign remained the same and did not increase by the more than $5,000 in payments for staff lodging that were supposedly cancelled. Since Donovan refused to discuss this, it’s difficult to know precisely what was going on.

Drake Bentley, in writing about this controversy recently for the Milwaukee Courier, raised another question about the situation: Is Donovan actually living in the district he represents?
“According to voter records, Donovan registered to vote from the new apartment, but his wife, Kathleen, voted from the Greenfield residence outside of the district,” Bentley noted. “Donovan also used his old address for financial reports submitted to the Wisconsin Ethics Commission.”

Once again, Donovan did not respond to requests for comment.

Donovan has done very well in his runs for Assembly, as Marquette University Law School research fellow and numbers cruncher John Johnson told Urban Milwaukee. “Bob Donovan is the Assembly Democrats’ white whale,” he noted via email. “In 2022, he won his district (then the 84th), despite Tony Evers winning it by over 53%. In that year, the Democratic candidate LuAnn Bird outspent Donovan by $327,000. After the 2024 redistricting, Donovan and Bird found themselves running in a rematch in the new 61st District. This time Bird outspent Donovan by $1.14 million. Despite this, Donovan’s vote share actually increased, from 51% to 52%.”

In 2026 Donovan is once again the white whale Democrats hope to harpoon, buoyed by dreadful approval numbers for President Donald Trump. But Republicans are spending massively on Donovan, who has reserved more than $2.8 million in television advertising, as Jesse Opoien has reported.

Donovan, as his Democratic opponent Ben Brist has complained, “dodged a candidate forum hosted by the League of Women Voters of Milwaukee County on Oct. 12,” and has refused to answer questions about his residency or who is paying the rent for that apartment.

If Donovan does get around to discussing this, you can bet he will call it a misunderstanding.