Biden v. Trump the sequel comes to Wisconsin

Election 2024 will be a redo of Election 2020, with President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump running neck and neck in Wisconsin. | Getty Images

When Wisconsin voters go to the polls on April 2, what little drama animated the presidential primary process so far will be long over. Nikki Haley has quit the race, making Donald Trump the all but certain Republican nominee. President Joe Biden never faced a serious challenger. Whatever voters do in April, come November we’ll almost certainly be facing a Trump v. Biden rematch.

That’s a coin toss in our state, where Trump won by 20,000 votes in 2016 and then lost to Biden by almost the exact same margin in 2020.

There’s a horror movie quality to Trump’s return — rising again despite his 91 felony counts, his incitement of a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol based on the lie that victory was “stolen” from him in 2020, and his increasingly unhinged declarations that he will be a dictator on Day One, root out left-wing “vermin” and stop immigrants who are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

It’s one of those horror movies where people grow numb, unable to take action, as danger draws ever closer.

Trump voters, Republican officials and, to a certain extent, the journalists covering the presidential race, continue to act as though Trump’s threats of violence and plans to undermine democracy are just normal political talk, no more newsworthy than, say the front-page story in the New York Times this week on the Times’ own survey showing most Biden voters think Biden is too old to be president. (Could it be that relentless coverage of voters’ concerns about Biden’s age have prompted more voter concern about Biden’s age?)

There’s no doubt that numbness to the danger posed by Trump has overtaken Wisconsin.

This week we learned more about the key role played by Wisconsin’s fake electors in the scheme to try to overturn the voters’ choice of Joe Biden in the 2020 election. As part of the settlement deal reached Monday by attorneys Jim Troupis and Kenneth Cheseboro, video was released of the electors clapping and cheering as they cast their fraudulent ballots in the Wisconsin State Capitol. (So much for former Wisconsin Republican Party Chair Andrew Hitt’s assertion that he and the other fake electors were “tricked” and “intimidated” into casting those ballots.)

“This all came out of Wisconsin and expanded to other states,” Mary McCord, an attorney with Georgetown’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection who helped negotiate the settlement, told the Associated Press. “That was a significant part of the narrative that led to the violence on Jan 6.”

And yet party officials continue to brush off what happened as some sort of normal political operation, instead of the criminal plot to subvert the will of the voters that it was.

As part of the settlement, Cheseboro and Troupis, who were at the center of the 10-state fake electoral ballot scheme, agreed not to try the same thing in a future election. But they also got away without admitting any wrongdoing — even though Cheseboro has pleaded guilty to a related felony charge in Georgia.

And, incredibly, fraudulent elector Robert Spindell is still a member of  the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

There’s been no big reckoning, either in the Republican Party of Wisconsin or nationally, with the dangerously abnormal politics of Trump.

Mitch McConnell, who denounced Trump on the floor of the U.S. Senate after the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, gave him his endorsement Wednesday, just after Nikki Haley suspended her campaign. Haley, at least, didn’t endorse Trump. But she left the door open, suggesting it’s up to him to make amends with her and her supporters, despite her previous strong denunciations of the chaos his election would bring.

I’ve met many perfectly friendly Trump voters in Wisconsin who are adept at only hearing what they want to hear, and dismissing Trump’s theater of hate as nonsense talk.

That’s one kind of numbness.

The other kind is evident in blah-blah both-sides interviews featuring voters who are “not satisfied with either of their choices” and are considering sitting this election out.

On the Democratic side, there is also a rebellion brewing against Biden, led by progressives who are appalled by the civilian death toll in Gaza, where the U.S. continues to support Israel’s bombing and blockade.

The Wisconsin chapter of Our Revolution, the organization that grew out of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, is calling on Democratic primary voters to vote “uncommitted” in April as a protest against Biden.

So far, the “uncommitted” vote in other states’ primaries has been underwhelming. In Michigan, where pro-Palestinian  activists worked hard to organize a big “uncommitted” vote the total came to only 13% – compared to 11% when Obama was running in 2012 and there was no organized “uncommitted” push. Minnesota’s vote was bigger, at 19%, and Wisconsin organizers hope the pressure will continue to build on Biden to do more to end the war.

There’s no doubt that Biden, who has criticized Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombing, needs to do more to stand up against the mass death Israel is raining down on Gaza, or else risk losing a large part of his base, especially young voters who are horrified as they read the news about 30,000 dead from bombing, and lately from starvation.

I have no beef with the people who want to use their leverage as voters to try to pressure Biden into doing more  — for now.

But it’s frustrating to contemplate a backlash against Biden that helps elect Trump. This is not Biden’s war. He is being pulled along by a rightwing government in Israel led by Benjamin Nentanyahu, who has a lot in common with Trump. Trump has no sympathy whatsoever for the Palestinians, and won’t lift a finger to try to make peace.

The idea that Biden is the “lesser of two evils,” as some callers to NPR expressed the day after Super Tuesday, as I was driving home listening to the radio, is truly out of touch. Biden is a flawed candidate. But he has also been “the most pro-union president in our history” as Wisconsin AFL-CIO President Stephanie Bloomingdale told Erik Gunn

Back in 2020, when Biden swept the Super Tuesday primaries, locking up the Democratic nomination and vanquishing progressive candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, like a lot of progressive Wisconsinites, I was disappointed.

But Biden has achieved more progressive policy goals than I believe any other Democrat in that race could have managed. He has used his office to tackle inequality, child poverty, student debt and our crumbling infrastructure, to boost working people and the middle class. He has accomplished all of this — including the millions of dollars in American Rescue Plan Act grants and infrastructure projects announced in our state week after week — in the face of vicious rightwing opposition that is organizing to try to undo every aspect of civil society, from public health to unemployment insurance to health care access to public schools.

Biden has turned out to be a more effective force for progressive policies than many Democrats who talk a good game but have never built the coalitions in Congress to actually achieve their goals.

Yes, Biden is old. And he’s been in government for long enough to know how things work. He has used every lever he could find to make it work for us, regular citizens.

I remember feeling pulled to the idea that voting for the “lesser evil” keeps us from making real progress toward a better, more just society — the argument Ralph Nader made when he was entrancing huge crowds of progressives in 2000, running against George Bush and Al Gore.

Democrats who came to Wisconsin to deride Nader and told us to hurry up and settle for the establishment Democrat — or else — antagonized a lot of young, idealistic voters. And then Gore lost.

When Bernie Sanders ran in 2016, those same young, idealistic voters in Wisconsin propelled his primary victory here over Hillary Clinton. But by the general election, Sanders dropped the lesser-evil argument. He very deliberately decided to make his stand in the Democratic primary, not as a third party candidate in the general election, and he made the case to progressives that the important thing was to beat Trump.

We are in different territory now. We’re contemplating an administration that has demonstrated its willingness to destroy the institutions of our democracy, that wants to impose a national abortion ban and elevate judges who are members of a Christian nationalist cult, that has forcibly sterilized women in immigrant detention centers and deliberately separated little children from their parents, never to find them again.

The word “evil” is more than a metaphor. It’s a real, growing threat. We need to shake off our torpor and head it off.

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