Wisconsin Dems Are Fighting To Win... Not To Grift
It drives me crazy whenever I see how careerist Democrats in the party establishment fail to understand how crucial down-ballot races are. Even beyond the fact that state legislatures draw congressional boundaries and set state policies, just for the candidates up-ballot, the energy and resources of candidates fighting on a granular level is absolutely crucial. And state elections aren’t perverted with electoral colleges. Look at Georgia for a minute— 159 counties and Democrats have a tendency to do almost all their campaigning in the Atlanta metro. But in 2020, Biden won Georgia’s 16 electoral votes by just 6,479 votes out almost 5 million cast. Take the dozen reddest counties in the state: Brantley, Glascock, Banks, Echols, Pierce, Haralson, Bacon, Pike, Franklin, Murray, Heard and Dawson. Democrats ignore those counties but imagine if there were Democratic candidates running for stat legislature and county positions. They wouldn’t win but they would start the process of getting voters familiar with the party again and they would start flipping votes— even if just a few— from red to blue. 100 votes even in each of the dozen reddest counties in the state are worth exactly the same thing that 1,200 more votes in the Atlanta Metro are worth— towards those 16 electoral votes, towards electing a governor and a senator and towards electing members of Congress.
There are quite a few state Democratic parties that can’t seem to get their heads around this simple concept, though none are as bad as the Florida and Ohio parties— so bad that the parties are essentially dead and I have often wondered if the GOP managed to infiltrate paid agents into the top party leadership in those two states. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was the case.
Wisconsin’s Democratic Party, on the other hand, may not be perfect, but it’s nothing like Florida and Ohio. Ben Wikler, the state party chair, tweeted this yesterday:
I would never imagine anything like that from Nikki Fried (Florida) or Liz Walters (Ohio). They’re both establishment hacks who would never grasp in a million years the importance of Bernie Sanders' approach to politics. Superior is the county seat of Douglas County (pop- 44,264) in the far northwest corner of the state. It’s a blue county which last gave the GOP its presidential vote in 1928 (Herbert Hoover). But Trump is more popular than other Republican nominees— he took 44.3% of the vote against Biden-- instead of the usual one-third. Wikler and Bernie understand they need to compete for voters there.
Hillary was the candidate who brightened GOP prospects in Douglas Co. From JFK (60.7%) to Obama (64.9%), no Democratic presidential candidate had ever fallen below 60%— until Hillary came along. In fact, in the 2016 primary, Bernie beat her 4,510 (55.4%) to 3,574 (43.9%). Bernie also beat Trump that day, who took 3,676 votes in Douglas Co. Yesterday, reporting from Appleton, Ashwaubenon and Green Bay, Jonathan Weisman tagged along on state Senate candidate Jamie Wall’s field campaign, as the candidate knocked on doors in a working-class neighborhood in Green Bay. Even Republicans were happy to see Wall show up. “It was,” wrote Weisman of one of the encounters, “the kind of exchange Democrats are hoping for as they hit the streets of Wisconsin, rounding up votes in the first truly contested state legislative races in 13 years. An energized Democratic Party, awakened like Rip Van Winkle after perhaps the most systematic gerrymander in the country, is eyeing newly competitive local districts for a possible updraft effect— ideally benefiting both Vice President Kamala Harris and Senator Tammy Baldwin, whose seat is critical to Democrats’ hopes of keeping control of the chamber or at least holding Republicans to a narrow majority. In a state that President Biden won in 2020 by 20,682 votes, and Trump won in 2016 by 22,748, even a few thousand voters energized by the candidates at their doorstep could make a difference. Ben Wikler, the chairman of Wisconsin’s Democratic Party, said issues like abortion, school funding and Medicaid expansion— all decided by the State Legislature— would drive ‘a small but incredibly consequential group of voters to the polls.’”
Despite Wisconsin’s status as a national battleground, Republicans have controlled both of the state’s legislative chambers since 2011, aided by the voting maps that their party drew heavily in its favor. Just south of Green Bay, for example, three State Senate districts converged in a jigsaw puzzle configuration, allowing three Republican state senators to live within a half-dozen miles of one another.
Then last year, voters handily elected a liberal justice to the State Supreme Court, handing the left a majority. The campaign that elected the justice, Janet Protasiewicz, was driven in large part by a push to prevent a 19th-century abortion ban from snapping back into place with the repeal of Roe v. Wade. But voters also chafed at the draconian gerrymander that ensured that an almost evenly divided state had a Legislature with an overwhelming Republican majority.
Just after Justice Protasiewicz was sworn in, a coalition of voting-rights groups and left-leaning law firms filed a legal challenge to the districts, arguing that new maps should be drawn before the 2024 election. The new liberal majority agreed, and now those maps are in place, though the high court has yet to address similarly gerrymandered U.S. House districts.
The state’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, drew up new maps that were grudgingly accepted by the Republican Legislature— not heavily weighted to the Democrats but even: 45 Assembly seats are Democratic-leaning, 46 are Republican-leaning and eight are considered tossups, according to an analysis from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. In Wisconsin’s Senate, 14 districts out of 33 are Democratic-leaning, while 15 lean Republican.
“Very close, very tight— but it’s fair,” said Duane Shukoski, who worked at the paper giant Kimberly-Clark for 37 years and is now running as a Democrat for a tossup Assembly seat in Neenah, Wis.
The questions remain: Can Democrats pull themselves off the mat after 13 years of futility? Can Republicans reanimate after 13 years of complacency and guaranteed victories? And what impact will the new action at the bottom of the ticket really have?
Doug Reich, the chairman of the Republican Party of Brown County, which includes Green Bay, evinced little worry. The energy, he said, was at the top of the ticket, with Trump. It will flow down from there.
“Certainly, we’re trying to wake up a lot of people who aren’t aware. I’m sure a lot of people in the old red districts felt these were almost uncontested races,” he said. “But everybody is motivated by the presidential race. The average person sees that as the barometer of the entire culture and where the country is going.” [In 2020, Trump beat Biden in Brown Co, 52.7% to 45.5% but last year, Brown Co. swung left and Protasiewicz beat the MAGA candidate, Daniel Kelly 52% to 48% county-wide.]
To an extent, Democrats agree. The voters of northeast Wisconsin do not have the State Legislature top of mind, they concede. But the Wisconsin Democratic Party is contesting 97 of the 99 seats in the Assembly and all 16 State Senate seats up for election, numbers not seen since 2011, the last election before Republicans gerrymandered the Legislature out of contention. Two years ago, Democrats ran in 84 Assembly seats and 12 of the 14 Senate seats up that year.
In contrast, Republicans have given up on contesting five Democratically-held State Senate districts this year. Repeated efforts to reach legislative candidates in the party— and the state Republican Party chairman— went unanswered.
“The Republicans have to work for the first time in a lot of these seats, and they just aren’t,” said Ryan Spaude, a 30-year-old district attorney in Green Bay who only recently became a Democrat and is now contesting a newly competitive Assembly seat that he said was “as purple as a Vikings jersey.”
No question, the Democrats are trying. They have an outside chance of taking control of the Assembly, and though not enough State Senate seats are up to challenge control of that chamber, Democrats will almost certainly cut back the Republicans’ majority.
And the Democratic Party isn’t alone fight for these seats in Wisconsin. The Alliance for Black Equality, is one of the outside grassroots groups in the state. It’s mission is to reach Black voters directly with short, hard hitting video ads micro targeted on social media in key markets like Milwaukee and Atlanta, highlighting how specific Trump/Project 2025 policies will affect the Black Community: Stop and Frisk, Maternal Healthcare, anti-DEI, Black History, etc. Set up by data scientists from Northwestern University the Alliance uses real data that shows the ads are both reaching their audience and are effective! Here are a couple of the ads they have running in Milwaukee right now:
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