The political tide turns in Wisconsin

Hundreds of people came to the Capitol on Thursday, Oct. 28 2021 to testify against the new voting maps drawn by Republican legislative leaders which advocates characterized as 'gerrymandering 2.0' | Wisconsin Examiner photo

The big news out of Wisconsin’s primary Tuesday was the defeat of two ballot measures crafted by Republican legislators that would have hamstrung the governor’s ability to hand out federal emergency aid.

Farmers, small business owners and child care providers who were rescued from bankruptcy by millions of dollars in federal relief funds distributed by Gov. Tony Evers during the pandemic, and by his predecessors during various natural disasters, were alarmed.

Voters turned out in record numbers to reject the proposals which were made, as Erik Gunn reported , by a Legislature that failed to meet for an entire year during the pandemic, and that is blocking the distribution of state funds to communities afflicted by PFAS contamination as well as millions of dollars budgeted to help towns in Western Wisconsin deal with the loss of emergency health care services.

Ever since Evers first took office in 2018, the Republican-dominated Legislature has been hell-bent on taking away executive powers and assigning them to itself. That they failed so dramatically this time is a sign of a profound shift. Constitutional amendments, presented to voters in ambiguously worded ballot questions like those they rejected Tuesday, often pass. Republicans calculated that a low-turnout August primary would be a perfect opportunity to shove through an expansion of their powers. What they didn’t know when they made their plans, however, was that Wisconsin’s gerrymandered voting maps, which have given them outsized majorities in both houses of the Legislature for a decade and a half, would be suddenly gone. Instead of the usual dispiriting fall primary in which one party doesn’t even bother to field candidates, Tuesday marked the first election under the new maps reflecting Wisconsin’s actual, 50-50 partisan split, and in which a new crop of candidates competed in newly competitive districts all over the state.

Jeff Mandell of Law Forward characterized the amendment effort as the “last gasp of that gerrymandered Legislature trying to change the way our government works and trying to arrogate more power to itself.”

Now is “a really profound moment to step back and think about this hopeful primary election,” Mandell added, even before the results were in, during a Tuesday panel discussion with other pro-democracy advocates.

U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, speaking the day after the primary, pointed to Tuesday’s 60-year record voter turnout as a very good sign for small-d democracy, and for Democrats.

“There is no question that the Democratic Party versus the Republican Party in Wisconsin is infinitely more organized,” Pocan said.

He credited Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Ben Wikler with opening 47 field offices and recruiting candidates all over the state to compete under the new maps. “I think you’re going to see really high turnout in November,” Pocan said. “I think it’s going to come out of a lot of different areas that are very blue, and that’s going to help us tremendously, especially with the enthusiasm of a Harris-Walz ticket.”

Without a doubt, the change at the top of the ticket, with the newly energized campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has put Republicans in this swing state on their heels. Instead of the lackluster Biden campaign, which drew a few hundred attendees to an invitation-only rally in my kids’ middle school gym last month, the new Democratic ticket rocked a crowd of 12,000 in Eau Claire last week, as Henry Redman reported , featuring uber-hip Eau Claire native Justin Vernon of the band Bon Iver and a whole bunch of excited young voters, the likes of whom were not visible at Biden events.

Both the polls and the latest fundraising figures show former President Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, losing ground. But a losing Trump is not a defeated Trump, as we learned on Jan 6 when Republicans in Wisconsin and MAGA rioters in Washington D.C. nearly succeeded in overturning the results of the 2020 election. On the campaign trail, Trump is already preparing his followers to view his loss in November as another stolen election.

Wisconsin is at the epicenter of the battle for democracy. This is where the fake electors scheme got its start, without which the Jan. 6 insurrection would never have happened, Law Forward’s Mandell explained during a panel discussion hosted by the Defend Democracy Project Tuesday. Panelists, including Nick Ramos of Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, Olivia Troye, homeland security adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence, and Sue Riseling, former UW-Madison police chief, gathered on Election Day to discuss the ongoing threats to democracy that started in Wisconsin in the lead-up to Jan. 6, 2021 and that continue in 2024.

“In 2020 we had a record turnout in Wisconsin, so nearly 3.3 million Wisconsinites voted,” said Mandell. “And you’ve got 10 fake electors and maybe a handful or two of other people behind the scenes who decided that, no, they knew better, and they were going to disregard those 3.3 million votes, and they were going to go ahead and do what they wanted.”

Law Forward was founded to defend democracy in Wisconsin, Mandell said. The group brought the first civil action in the country against the fraudulent electors who cast phony Electoral College ballots for Trump after Biden won the state. As part of the settlement deal reached in that lawsuit, the fake electors admitted that they tried to subvert the legitimate results of the election, and promised not to do so again. They also released thousands of pages of documents that showed the scheme began in Wisconsin and then “metastasized around the country,” as Mandell put it.

Even as the members of the panel talked about the terrifying assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, the need to pursue accountability for Trump in his still-ongoing criminal trial for his role supporting the insurrection, the dark prospect of rising authoritarianism, and the warning by Wisconsin Democracy Campaign’s Ramos that “we’ve become numb” to these threats, the big shift evident in Wisconsin on Tuesday reflected a much lighter mood.

There are so many contested races on both sides of the aisle in Wisconsin, Mandell noted, “because we finally are free of the nation’s most extreme partisan gerrymander that was strangling democracy in Wisconsin for a decade and a half. … No longer does it feel like the game is rigged or that it’s a foregone conclusion. That is what democracy looks like in action.”

Pro-democracy activists and voters in Wisconsin are riding a sudden wave of optimism — a lighthearted approach to politics embodied by Harris’ running mate Walz.

Pocan, who got to know Walz in Congress, approves.

“Enthusiasm is definitely up,” he said. “And, you know, I don’t think Tim Walz hurts one little bit in Wisconsin … we’re a lot like Minnesotans in many ways. We sound alike a little bit. We have similar upper Midwestern values. And I think having him on the ticket certainly helps.”

As for the shift in tone from dark warnings about the death of democracy to deriding authoritarian impulses as “weird,” Pocan said, “I like the shift.”

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