Wisconsin Democrats shifted their strategy
The Little White Schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin is where Whigs, Free Soilers and Democrats met in 1854 to form the anti-slavery Republican Party. After its recent relocation, it’s been delisted by the National Register of Historic Places. Politico’s David Siders reports that it “now sits across from a vape shop, near a car dealership, a Culver’s restaurant and a sewage treatment plant.”
Hope this next makes you laugh out loud too.
In the wake of his party’s faltering in the spring elections, Timothy Bachleitner, chair of the Fond du Lac County, Wisc. GOP commented, “It kind of looks like a circus show now,” he said. “You might as well put the world’s largest yarn ball next to it, or cheese curd.”
Politico wonders if the April election of liberal Milwaukee County judge Janet Protasiewicz over conservative former state Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly “by a whopping 11 percentage points” suggests Wisconsin’s slide to the right has halted:
In the aftermath, even Republicans here are acknowledging that the state has now shifted leftward, and abortion has a lot to do with that. The end of Roe v. Wade last year effectively reinstated Wisconsin’s 19th-century abortion ban, which is already being challenged — and those challenges will likely be decided by the state Supreme Court. That’s why Protasiewicz campaigned heavily on protecting abortion rights, and the election turned almost entirely on the issue. Turnout was staggering. In 2015, in a similar spring election, a liberal state Supreme Court justice won reelection in a contest in which about 813,000 people voted. This year, the total number of voters who cast ballots in the Supreme Court race more than doubled to top 1.8 million.
Abortion drove that turnout. But in a 2023 spring election in which abortion was the marquee issue. That won’t be as true in 2024.
Still, at a Lincoln Day Dinner in Merrillan, Wis., a couple on their way in told Siders, “the Republican Party is dead.” Recovery will take a long time. “Republicans,” Chris Faeth said, “need to solve this abortion issue.”
“We got our butts kicked,” Rohn Bishop, Bachleitner’s predecessor as chair of the Fond du Lac County GOP and, now, mayor of the small city of Waupun, told me. “What the Republican base demands and what independent voters will accept are growing further apart.”
Bishop and I were eating lunch in a bar. The only way forward for the GOP in Wisconsin, joked a man drinking Jack and Coke beside us, might be to “kill the millennials.”
Those who read “Are progressives fighting the wrong war?” from yesterday will see why the WisDems’ nimbleness jumped out at me:
Up until just weeks before the April election, the state party had been operating on a traditional, lower turnout model — focusing its outreach on the most reliable voters likely to cast ballots in an off-year election. But volunteers kept running into something unexpected when they knocked on doors: Many times, when they encountered someone who wasn’t on their list, they learned those people were planning to vote, too. As a result, the party shifted its strategy, broadening its targets to contact more than a million potential voters as opposed to hundreds of thousands of them.
By Election Day, [state Democratic Party chair Ben] Wikler said, “Hundreds of thousands of people showed up who were not in anyone’s models, who had never voted in the spring election.”
Yes, turnout was heavy in Dane County, home to the University of Wisconsin. But in suburban Milwaukee counties, Republicans turned out for Kelly, only with smaller margins, Siders notes.
When I asked Wikler what surprised him the most about the election, he said it was how lopsided the victory was, but also that abortion was so salient not only in Democratic-leaning areas of the state, but in redder, rural areas, too. He referred to an internal Democratic poll conducted after the election, shared with me later by a Democratic operative in the state, that showed abortion, while slightly more resonant an issue for voters in the Democratic-leaning media markets around Madison, Milwaukee and Eau Claire/La Crosse, was the main vote driver for Protasiewicz in every market in the state. It was an issue that wasn’t just working for Democrats in big cities, but in rural areas, too.
Abortion, Wikler said, was an issue that “blotted out the sun.” And it isn’t going anywhere.
The GOP brand is damaged, says Billie Johnson, GOP chair in Wisconsin’s 2nd Congressional District.
By the demise of Roe, yes, but by more than that. By Trumpism, by creeping fascism in Florida, by daily gun violence, and perhaps by the general lunacy of the party’s leadership.
“The myth that citizens can out-organize voter suppression is not just wrong, it is dangerous,” writes Democracy Docket’s Marc Elias. “It turns voter suppression and the fight against it into a question of campaign tactics rather than the illegal and immoral deprivation of constitutional rights.”
Constitutional point taken. But what happened in Wisconsin in April suggests that adjusting Democrats’ over-worn campaign tactics to take advantage of the moment also plays a role. Wikler is the kind of Democrat not chained to the way Democrats have always done things because they are comfortable and familiar. Climbing out of that rut is what it will take going forward, along with the court battles Elias wages so successfully, to offset the impacts of gerrymandering and voter suppression and to push back the antidemocracy reactionaries.
The game has changed. Adapt or die.